A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

“I am going to approach it,” she told Ilmari. She expected him to object, but instead, he nodded.

  “I will go with you,” he said instead. It didn’t sound like a request, but at this point her nerves were feeling so rattled she decided that not going alone was a very good idea. “Don’t worry, I won’t attack unless we are attacked first. But I would rather you did not go alone, Aleksia. It took all four of us the last time to defeat it. I would rather you had someone to guard your back.”

  She nodded. And felt oddly touched. Because he had not blustered that she was merely a woman and could not face this thing—he had given her the courtesy of assuming she was his equal.

  The two of them approached the strange deer, their feet making crunching sounds on the snow as they broke through the ice-crust atop it. Tonight there was just enough moonlight to be able to see the Icehart clearly.

  It seemed to Aleksia that there was something odd going on with the Icehart’s face. The eyes…. around the eyes…there was movement.

  Then as the Icehart looked away from her for a moment and at Ilmari instead, she realized what it was. She saw shining bits of ice dropping from its cheeks. She had seen that before—when Kaari had wept for the forest-spirits.

  “It’s weeping,” she said, so shocked that she was not sure she was really seeing what she thought she was. “Why would this thing be weeping?”

  There was a silence from Ilmari, then the Wondersmith sighed. “You may think me mad,” he said, slowly, “but I believe that it is weeping because it has a broken heart.”

  She shook her head. None of this was making any sense. First the thing attacked them. Now it followed them, crying. It was clearly intelligent, yet it was not telling them what, if anything, it wanted.

  She knew it was responsible, in part at least, for the deaths of dozens of people, and yet her heart went out to it.

  “How can a spirit have a broken heart?” she asked, falteringly.

  Ilmari sighed. “I do not know,” he replied, as the Icehart slowly stalked away, leaving them with nothing but questions. “Perhaps it, too, is a victim of the Snow Witch. Perhaps it has lost all it ever cared about to her. All that I know is that not even a Wonder-smith can mend a heart when it is broken.”

  CHAPTER 16

  THE VILLAGE WAS NAMED KURJALA, AND ALEKSIA SUSPECTED this was an attempt at sarcasm, since the word meant “misery.” Certainly it lived up to—or down to—the name. The area seemed to be under a perpetual overcast. The houses were dark, and poorly repaired, and the people in them shabby and unsocial. Even the ice and snow in the streets was filthy. When they first approached the place, she had not at all been sure there was anyone living there. Only when they actually entered it did they see the occasional surly or furtive figure crossing a street ahead of or behind them, although doors were always firmly closed by the time they reached the spot where the figure had been seen.

  Only after they came to what passed for a village market did they find anyone willing to speak to them. Once they showed their coin, though, people did come out. Money, it seemed, overcame just about every other consideration.

  The barrier across the Palace gate that Aleksia had seen in her mirror visions had become a barrier around the entire Palace. There was literally no way to get past it.

  The group was now camped outside the wall around the Palace, a good distance from the village at the front gate. They had originally thought to stay within the village, rather than camping, but a quick look through the place had convinced all five of the humans that this was absolutely the last thing they wanted to do. Urho, who must have had some way of telling what lay ahead of them here, had already been convinced that they should not chance the village.

  It was full of the most repellant individuals that Aleksia had ever seen.

  She remembered the fragment of conversation that she had heard in her mirror-visions. She had assumed that the speakers had meant that the people of this place were being killed by the Snow Witch if they showed any sign of human feeling.

  The truth was far worse.

  Once they were outside Kurjala and safe from observation, Aleksia took out her hand-mirror and did a touch of scrying. What she saw behind those closed doors shocked and dismayed her, and finally made her put the mirror away, feeling sick. There was no hope here, no love—no kind of human feeling or kindness at all. Even the children were heartless, competing grimly with siblings, if need be, and parents used them as virtual slave labor. But how was that surprising for children born to mothers who gave their bodies to men out of desperation, men who took them with no thought for anything past the fleeting pleasure of the night? There were no marriages here, only temporary alliances for purely material reasons. No real market, no inn, no places of worship or gathering; no beauty, no music, nothing that was not strictly utilitarian. There was, literally, nothing to lift the heart, or even touch it.

  In villages this far north, villages that got so few visitors, newcomers were often greeted with enthusiasm and welcome and, if there was no inn, offered a bed with some prominent person of the village.

  But here—that was, to put it mildly, not the case. One and all, the villagers turned the travelers away coldly, until Lemminkal offered them money from the bandit store, but even that only bought them fodder for the deer, supplies for themselves and permission to camp outside the wall, not house-room.

  They huddled around their fire, looking at the dim lights of the village houses, feeling a depression of spirits so great that it was hard to muster the energy to do anything more than make camp, fix a meal and stare at the fire or into the night.

  “Is this us?” Kaari asked, suddenly. “Or is it this place?”

  That aroused Lemminkal. “It is the place,” the soft-spoken warrior said, with difficulty. “Which must be the work of the Snow Witch…”

  “It’s what she wants,” Aleksia managed. “The more misery, the better.”

  They had not seen the Icehart since camping here, and Aleksia was not at all surprised. If the creature wept because it had a broken heart now, setting foot in this place would drive it to fling itself off a cliff. She was not all that far from doing the same thing herself. “Whatever made them like this is foul,” she said, finally. “Just foul. These folk are worse off than animals. Even animals have joy.”

  “It is the ice in their hearts,” Lemminkal said, unexpectedly.

  “What?” Aleksia turned to face him. She could have sworn she had said nothing about how Veikko had been changed.

  “I…feel it,” the big man said, scratching his head in puzzlement. “It is a part of my magic to feel things. It lets me know what my foe is going to do, and it lets me know what his heart is like. There is ice in their hearts, a tiny grain of it, and it is the ice that has frozen them and made them cold and cruel.” He shook his head, showing his grief. “I cannot help them.”

  “Only defeating the Snow Witch will help them,” Annukka responded, lifting her head as if it felt very heavy. Then she patted Lemminkal’s hand comfortingly, and the big man put one of his massive paws over hers and held it as if it sustained him. “But how are we to do that if we cannot even get inside?”

  Aleksia racked her brains. “We cannot fight her, we cannot force our way in—we have to trick her.” She went over the scenes of the Snow Witch in her mind, trying to think of a way to get past the barrier, past the snow-servants and into the Palace. “We have to get her to let us inside, or at least to let us get to Veikko. One of us at any rate.”

  “You know, she’s not an idiot,” Ilmari said crossly. “She knows we’re here now, if she didn’t before. She has probably figured out that we are here for Veikko. Just what do you propose to do about this? Make her forget all that and invite us in for a welcome feast?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he flushed. “Forgive me. You did not deserve that. It is this place…”

  She had felt a flash of anger, but suppressed it, because he was right. It was this place. “No…” Aleksia said, slowly. �
�But I think I have an idea. What we need to do is make her think that we are weaker than we actually are. Contemptible. She will want to laugh at us, taunt us, and that will bring her to the gate. But we also need something to bargain with. Turn out your packs!” she demanded. “We need the sort of pretty things that women crave! She likes beautiful, rare things that no one else has. She collects them, as she collects beautiful, rare boys.”

  They all went through their belongings, though in the end they had only two things that Aleksia thought would pass muster; a mother-of-pearl comb that was in Annukka’s pack, a beautiful thing carved with seaweed and waves, and a nearly finished kantele, inlaid with so many tiny bits of metal and wire that scarcely anything of the wood could be seen, that had been among Ilmari’s things.

  “This is stunning,” Aleksia said, touching the silk-smooth mosaic with a wondering finger. “I have never seen the like. You are an artist, Ilmari.”

  “I work on this in my spare time,” the Wonder-smith said sheepishly, looking pleased. “I started it for myself, but I never liked it—I thought one day I could give it to someone I wanted to impress.” He looked up at her for a moment, and she was flattered to see frank admiration in his eyes. “Perhaps one day I can make one for you.”

  She felt herself blushing, and quickly went back to the subject. “Can you work some kind of spell on them, so that they become unique as well as beautiful?” Aleksia asked anxiously.

  Ilmari looked at both pieces. “Well, this is easy,” he said, finally, pointing at his kantele. “I simply work a bit of magic into it so that it plays itself. But this—” He held the comb in his hand for a moment, muttering over it. “I cannot think what one could do with a comb—”

  “What if it were to comb hair by itself, and magically untangle all knots?” Aleksia asked, thinking back to hours of misery as a child as her nurses would, none too gently, pull and tug on her hair and her sister to get them both presentable. The Snow Witch had only the crudest of servants, and surely they were about as gentle as Aleksia’s nursemaids had been. Perhaps when the Witch had young men, they would do the office, but she did not always have them.

  Ilmari turned the comb over and over in his hands, considering it. “Yes,” he said, finally. “I can do that. Should I do so tonight?”

  “Please. I do not want to linger here any longer than we have to.” Aleksia looked at the village and shivered. “I think their heartlessness may be catching.”

  “All right then, I will prepare my forge,” the Wonder-smith said, and then smiled a little. “And do not be alarmed at what I do. I shall not harm these things, though you would not know it to watch me at work.”

  Indeed, they shook off some of their own low spirits as they watched him prepare the tiny forge. He built it painstakingly from flat rocks culled from the rubble at the base of the wall. When it was done, he shoveled coals from the fire into it, and began to alternately blow on it and chant over it. Aleksia could not hear what he was chanting, and truth to tell, she did not even really try. Every Mage had his or her secrets, and deserved to be able to keep them.

  As he chanted and blew, the coals glowed, brighter and hotter, until at last they were white-hot. That was when he took a small pair of tongs from his pack, the forge hammer from his belt, picked up the comb in the tongs and placed it in the fire.

  It should have crumbled, or burned up, or otherwise gone to bits. It did nothing of the sort. It, too, began to glow, until it was as white as the coals. He pulled the comb out with the tongs, placed it in a flat rock, and began to hammer on it, chanting in time to his blows.

  It was not just random hammer strokes, either. A tap here, a tap there, a heavy overhanded blow, all in time to the chanting—there was a pattern there, but Aleksia could not discern it.

  It all blended into a rhythmical whole, though, not unlike Annukka’s singing.

  “Annukka—do you know any songs that talk of the beauty of a girl’s hair?” Lemminkal asked quietly. “If you could sing them to the beat of the hammer—”

  Annukka nodded, and blended her own music with that of the forge-song.

  Ilmari raised an eyebrow at her and caught her eye. He nodded and Aleksia felt the two songs blend into one, with an unspoken communication between the two Sammi. The spell-singing built to a crescendo, and both ended on the same note, as Ilmari seized the white-hot comb and thrust it into the snow.

  Steam rose in clouds around it, filling the camp for a moment, and silence rang hollowly in the absence of the spell-song.

  When steam stopped rising in billow from the snowdrift, Ilmari reached gingerly into it and came out with the comb. It would not be fair to say that it was untouched—somehow, it had become more sensual to look at, shining like the light of the moon in his hand. He gave it to Kaari, who, as a maiden, wore her hair unbound—and at the moment, it was rather tangled and tousled from travel.

  “Let’s see if I’m still good at improvising.” The Wonder-smith chuckled. “Try it, Kaari.”

  Kaari pulled off her hat and headband, and gingerly touched the comb to her hair.

  The thing leapt from her hand as if some invisible servant had taken it, and began gliding through the knots and tangles, leaving Kaari’s tresses clean, smooth and shining, like a golden waterfall. And when she put her hand up to it, it obligingly left her hair, and lay quietly in her hand.

  “Well, there is our first wonder,” Ilmari said, with a significant look at Aleksia. “From the look of you, lady, you have a cunning plan.”

  “I do, and if it works, we won’t need a third wonder,” the Godmother replied, looking around the fire at her companions. “Nor do I intend to keep you in the dark on this. I want you to think out your parts as you go to sleep. And here they are.

  “Kaari,” she said, turning to the girl, “yours will be the hardest. My plan is that the three of you who know and love Veikko are to try to get him to recognize you, to crack the shell of magic the Witch has cast about him and get him awakened so that he had fight from within as we fight from without. I intend to use you last of all, but that means that tomorrow, and perhaps the next day, you must stay here in camp and do nothing more than to concentrate with all your heart on Veikko. You must not come down to the gate, and you must not stop thinking about him and how he used to be until we come and tell you otherwise. You remember how Ilmari told you that love has a magic all its own. Can you do that?”

  Slowly, Kaari nodded.

  “Let me explain this. I will use the three people with whom Veikko has the strongest bonds to try to win him free. First, you, Annukka, his mother. If you fail, on the morrow, Lemminkal will take your place with the kantele—his bond being that not only of mentor and master, but of trusted friend.” She smiled as Lemminkal flushed with pleasure. She had not mistaken it, then. She would not further embarrass the old warrior with “father-figure,” but she was certain that Lemminkal also filled that role.

  “Once again, Kaari, I will ask you to remain here and bend your mind on Veikko.” She paused and pursed her lips, thinking. “Now, listen to me carefully. Even if this appears not to work, I swear to you, you will be eroding some of those walls about his heart and mind. As a tree’s root slowly cracks a stone, the result might not be visible until it shatters. Do you understand me?”

  Kaari nodded.

  Aleksia could feel magic, Traditional and otherwise, slowly gathering about them. Even though she did not have a tale to follow, all this had the same sure and right feeling that came when a Traditional tale was coming to an end. The trouble was, being inside it, rather than outside it, she could not tell for sure if the ending was going to be a happy one.

  “Now you, Kaari, we will save for the third day.” She nodded, as the young woman’s cheeks flushed. “The Witch will probably think us fools by then. She will underestimate you. She does not know the strength that lies in the heart of a woman that truly loves and is loved.”

  Like the strength in Gerda’s heart, as she held to Kay through all his
transformations, or the strength in Annukka’s, who has raised her son all alone for the sake of the man who made her his wife. Urho’s thoughts rumbled through them all, and Annukka flushed, and her eyes grew very bright. The Bear’s words rang true for all of them, even though only Aleksia knew who Kay and Gerda were.

  “So, you will be our most potent weapon, Kaari. We will use you when she underestimates us most. It is a good combination.” Again she looked around the fire and was pleased to see both men nod in agreement.

  “But what will we use for a wonder?” Kaari asked.

  At that, Aleksia frowned. “I am not sure yet,” she admitted. “But I will think of something. The four of us are skilled workers in many crafts, and Ilmari could probably forge an enchanting brooch from an old buckle and a bit of glass. Now, do we all know our parts?”

  All of them nodded.

  “Very well, then,” she said. “Sleep and rest, and strengthen yourself for tomorrow.”

  She went immediately to her bedroll to set a good example, although she secretly thought there was a strong likelihood that she would stare at the inside of her eyes for a very long time. To her surprise, as Urho took up his usual position to warm all of them, she felt herself drifting off.

  And drifted straight into a dream.

  A dream in which the Icehart came, and stood at the barricaded gate, and wept and wept and wept.

  * * *

  Kaari did not try to sleep. Instead, she filled her mind with every memory of Veikko she had—how as a child he had not brought her gifts as the others did, he brought her to things—taught her not to fear, by showing her that the things she feared, like climbing trees and learning to swim, were challenges, not obstacles. How he had patiently waited while the other young men made their pleas to her and were rejected, and had never failed to be kind, not only to her, but to the other young men. How she had somehow known that if she had fallen in love with one of them, he would have accepted it although his own heart would have been broken, because it was what she wanted. How even when they quarreled, it was because they both wanted what was right, and they just hadn’t worked out what that right thing was. How his eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed, which was often. How he never laughed at someone, only with the other. How his hand felt, holding hers, strong and sure.