“The bowhead says that you have a future munaqsri inside you,” the mermaid said. She swam faster. Bubbles cycloned around Cassie.
Cassie pressed her hands to her curved stomach. It was only a fetus right now. “It’s not even born yet, and it might not want to be a munaqsri. But Bear’s alive now. Please, help me. If not for me, then for the polar bears.”
“Land creatures,” said the mermaid dismissively. She kept swimming, tail flicking through the water.
Cassie tried to watch the mermaid, but the mermaid swam in a blur now, still circling her. “They’re almost sea mammals,” Cassie said. It was a controversial theory, but her father had done a paper on it. Maybe the caretaker of the sea would like the theory. “Blubber. Water-resistant fur. Streamlined ears. Webbing between their toes. They’re evolving into the sea.” Please, let her believe!
The mermaid laughed, and the bubbles spun in waves. “I am helping you,” she said. “You have not drowned.”
The mermaid swam even faster. Cassie felt dizzy. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the vertigo stayed. She opened her eyes. “But I need to find Bear!” she shouted. Bubbles cycloned faster and faster. She was surrounded, as if in a net. Cassie swam at the bubbles. She was thrown back into the center. She could not see through the bubbles. “Wait!” The mermaid blurred into silver and green.
The cyclone lengthened. Cassie saw it stretch like a Slinky through the sea. “Hush, child,” Sedna said. “Trust the munaqsri. We want what is best for our world, as all creatures do.”
“Not the trolls,” Cassie called through the bubbles. “The trolls don’t want ‘what’s best.’ They want the polar bears extinct!”
“No one knows what the trolls want,” the mermaid said. “You must go to Father Forest. He knows best how to help you.”
“Who is he?” she asked eagerly. “How do I find him?”
The cyclone collapsed around her. Bubbles hit Cassie’s skin. She kicked, yelling, and the bubbles squeezed. Cassie flew. Like paint squirting from a tube, she shot down the cyclone through the water. The roar of the water drowned her screaming as she sped through a tunnel of bubbles. Just when she thought the ride would never end, she felt the sea undulate beneath her and the cyclone of bubbles thrust her into the air. She broke out of the water. Sun hit her eyes. “Whoa!” she yelled as she rushed to meet the shore.
TWENTY-ONE
Latitude 68° 32’ 12” N
Longitude 89° 49’ 33” W
Altitude 2 ft.
CASSIE SKIDDED ON HER TAILBONE. “Ow, ow!” Shielding her face, she slammed into a dune of snow. For an instant, she lay there, limbs tangled. She was alive. She had dived into the Arctic Ocean and lived.
Closing her eyes, Cassie inhaled. The air tasted wonderful, like salt and sun and earth. Opening her eyes, she turned her head. Her pack lay beside her. The nylon had ripped in three spots, and the frame had warped into an S, but it was dry and whole.
Gingerly, she untangled herself and tested her joints—no broken bones. Just a lot of bruises. She pushed herself up to sitting and looked around. Glacier-scoured rocks stretched for miles, patches of snow alternating with windswept expanses. She was on the tundra.
A brown blur scooted over her mukluks. She jerked her feet under her.
“I am here,” a voice said.
“Where? Who said that?” she asked. She looked around at the rocks, the waves, the sky.
The brown blur shot past her, darting from rock to rock. Suddenly, it stopped, and she saw a roly-poly brown rodent, like a furry toy football perched on a rock—a lemming. Cassie grinned. Sedna had said she’d help. Cassie just hadn’t expected that help to take the shape of a magical rodent. She pictured herself telling Bear about this. He was going to laugh for days.
“Come on,” the lemming said. “Pick me up. We must be off. I have responsibilities to tend to, you know.”
With the lemming cradled in her hands, Cassie sped across the tundra at munaqsri speed. The world sped by like a film on fast-forward. She saw clips and heard snippets of the landscape as it changed around her. Geese flew overhead, and unseen birds called across the grasses. In hollows, purple saxifrages and arctic white heather flourished. Poppies bloomed in snow patches. She was heading south (quickly), and summer was heading north.
Late in the sunlit night, they halted. “I feel a call,” the lemming said. “Camp here. I will return for you.” Before she could protest, the rodent was gone.
Her one link to Bear, gone.
Cassie swallowed hard. He’ll return, she told herself. He said he’d return. And Sedna had said to trust. Ordering herself to stop worrying, she looked around. She was beyond the shrub tundra now, deep in tussock tundra.
Stretching out her legs, Cassie threaded between headsize clumps of grass. Filled with stagnant water, the tussocks would burst if she stepped on them. To walk through the minefield, she had to lift her knees high like a stork. She imagined how she’d retell this to Bear: She’d march around the banquet hall as if she were walking through tussocks, and he’d laugh in his low rumble. He’d serve that chicken in white wine sauce, and she’d tell him how she’d picked lichen from rocks for her dinner on the tundra. She’d say how much she’d missed him, and he’d say he loved her and had never meant to hurt her. . . .
But all the apologies in the world wouldn’t undo anything that had happened. Cassie laid her hands on her stomach. Even if she found Bear . . . everything would be different. She swallowed hard. She didn’t just want Bear back; she wanted the life they’d had.
She camped between tussocks. Overhead, the northern lights chased each other in pale ribbons as the sun continued its low roll along the horizon. She dreamed about Bear, and she woke expecting him to be beside her like he used to be. She nearly cried when she realized he wasn’t.
To her relief, the lemming returned shortly after she woke, and again they raced across the tundra. The next time they stopped, she was surrounded by cottongrass. Thousands of flowers that looked like gone-to-seed dandelions covered the tundra in a fine white mist. She took out her GPS. After a dip in the Arctic Ocean, it shouldn’t still have worked, but the numbers flickered. She tilted it until she could read it. Latitude 66° 58’ 08", longitude 110° 02’ 13". Whoa. She’d come hundreds of miles in less than two days. At this rate, she’d be in the boreal forest before she knew it. “Thank you,” she said to the lemming. She’d never imagined it would be a rodent who would be her savior.
“The owl will hunt for you,” the lemming said. “She enjoys it.”
“What owl?” Cassie scanned the skies. She didn’t see . . . Wait, she saw a white splotch to the north. Silent, the snowy owl drifted over the tundra. Her feathers were like a cloud against the sky. Cassie saw her dive—right toward the lemming. “Watch out!” Cassie yelled as the owl’s talons wrapped around him.
The lemming did not flinch, and the owl released him and glided a few feet away before settling in the cottongrass. “You invite me to play,” the owl said, “And you do not even run. Where is the sportsmanship in that?”
Cassie exhaled. It was the owl munaqsri, and they obviously knew each other. Cassie wasn’t going to lose her transportation.
“I did not invite you to hunt me,” the lemming said in his piping voice. “I invited you to hunt for her. She travels to Father Forest. She is the wife of the polar bear.”
The owl swiveled her head a hundred eighty degrees. “I see. And the child is his?”
Cassie threw her arms around her stomach. The sun was warm, and she had shed her parka and wool. Her curved stomach strained her flannel. More than four months now. “I need to find Bear,” she said, her voice rising. “Father Forest has to help me.”
The owl studied her for another moment. “Of course he will help you,” the owl said. “You may rely on him to do what is best. What do you wish to eat?”
Cassie’s knees wobbled in relief. The owl wasn’t going to argue, and she was going to get her dinner. Food! She wanted chocolate cake
and stacks of hamburgers and Dad’s beans and Max’s sausage omelettes, but she tried to think of what lived in sedge meadows. Dad used to refer to lemmings as “wild fast food.” Cassie glanced at the lemming munaqsri. “Rabbits?” she suggested.
In a few minutes, the owl returned, soaring low. Her feathers brushed flowers. Petals flew like confetti. Cassie saw the grass sway in front of the owl. Cassie stood on top of a hummock for a better view. With wings spread a full five feet wide, the owl herded rabbits. Lots of rabbits. Politely, the owl called to her, “Would you like to kill one, or may I?”
She felt a twinge of pity for the hares being hunted by a superowl. The owl, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying herself. “Please, be my guest,” Cassie said.
Cassie set her stove as the owl neatly killed a hare.
Seconds later, a live hare appeared beside the corpse. He hopped from paw to paw. “Filthy predator!” the new hare shouted. “Return the soul you stole immediately.”
The owl ruffled her feathers. “You did not come to claim the soul. It was free for me to take. You would not have wanted it to be lost, would you? It is better for it to become an owl than for it to be lost.”
“I am here now!” the hare munaqsri cried. “Return it immediately.”
“As you wish,” the owl said. She opened her beak. Mist, the soul, drifted across the grasses. The hare chased after it. It melted into him.
The owl dropped the carcass beside the stove. “Thank you,” Cassie said. “Sorry for causing problems.”
The owl shrugged, an interesting feat with wings. “The hare has no sense of humor,” she said.
The hare munaqsri returned. “Disgusting predators.” The irate rabbit fixed its eyes on Cassie. “You are an omnivore. Why must you eat my hares?”
“Find me some wild tofu, and I’ll eat that,” Cassie offered.
The owl chuckled. Sputtering, the hare disappeared into the grasses.
Cassie smiled. How strange that she could now joke with talking birds and rodents. Months ago, Bear had said he could show her a new world with wonders she didn’t know existed. She certainly had never imagined she’d be out on the tundra with a magic lemming, owl, and hare.
“Are we close?” Cassie asked.
“I will bring you to the end of my region,” the lemming said, “and the owl will arrange for a guide to bring you into the forest. You will be with Father Forest by tomorrow afternoon.”
Cassie felt her heart leap. She could see Bear tomorrow! Finally, after the ice and the sea and the tundra . . . Cassie ran her fingers through her hair, and her fingers snagged a few inches from her scalp. She hoped he didn’t mind that she smelled. Cassie laughed out loud and shook her head. Her hair flew around her in a red cloud of tangles. “I’m coming, Bear!” she said. She’d bring him home. She touched her stomach. And then? She didn’t know.
TWENTY-TWO
Latitude 64° 04’ 50” N
Longitude 124° 56’ 02” W
Altitude 1281 ft.
SHE’D BE MET BY A GUIDE, the lemming had said before he’d left her, but Cassie didn’t see anything that looked like a guide. She was alone at the foot of a hill. Spruces studded the low rise, and an aspen grove blocked her view over the top. The air crackled with birds and tasted faintly of evergreen. “Hello?” she called. She wondered what kind of creature she was supposed to meet. Rodent? Bird? Mosquito?
One of the aspen trees halfway up the hill began to shiver. Aspens, northern aspens, quiver in a breath of wind. She remembered one of Dad’s lessons: Populus tremuloides, they were called. Quivering aspens. But this was the only tree in the grove that was moving. She walked up to it. Its trunk was as thick as her arm, with bark a peeling pale green. Thin branches jutted out at uneven intervals.
It jiggled harder, as if it were doing a belly dance.
And then suddenly it laughed. Or, more accurately, a girl perched in the branches laughed. Cassie squinted—the sun was directly behind the tree and, oddly, made the girl appear greenish.
“Hellooo!” The girl waved. She swung out of the branches and landed lightly on the ground. “I am the aspen.”
Cassie blinked at her. She was green. Her skin looked like layered leaves, and her hair looked like twigs. “You’re the aspen munaqsri?”
“Yes,” the girl said. Her voice was high, whistlelike, and cheerful.
“You’re a tree,” Cassie said.
Again, the green girl laughed. “Yes!”
Cassie decided that she’d seen stranger things than this. Or maybe she hadn’t. She tried to imagine describing this creature to Owen and Max. They’d never believe her. Gail might. If Cassie went back to the station now, maybe she and her mother would have something to talk about.
Following the aspen, Cassie climbed to the top of the hill, and the view banished all other thoughts. All Cassie could do was stare. “Wow,” she whispered. It was gorgeous. Far in the distance, she could see mountains, the Mackenzies. Dark purple with streaks of glacial white, the mountains crowned the horizon. Max had always wanted to fly his Twin Otter in the Mackenzies. Now she could understand why. Rivers cut through the foothills. She saw enormous rock faces. And the green . . . oh, the green. Spruces, thick and tall, dominated the landscape for the hundreds of miles between her and those foothills. Pale green tamarack and the slender spines of aspens stood out like lights against the rich spruce green.
“Father Forest is within the boreal forest,” the tree-girl said. “We will ride there.”
“Ride what?” Cassie asked.
Seeming to ignore her, the aspen pointed. “I like that one,” she said. She was pointing at a nearby caribou, a young buck. His back was to them. He had shed most of his winter coat, but remnants hung like rags on his broad neck and back. He lowered his head into a thicket and thrashed his antlers against the branches. It sounded like a dozen snare drums; it drowned the chirps of birds. Finishing, he lifted his head. His antlers were tinted red. Cassie could hear larks and thrushes again. The tree-girl sprinted to his side, as fast as a blur.
Grinning, Cassie followed her. This was even better than traveling by lemming. The aspen-girl sprang onto his back and beckoned to Cassie. Grasping the caribou’s mane, Cassie pulled herself onto his back. The length of her pack forced her to lean toward his neck. His vertebrae stuck into her legs.
“Run!” the aspen commanded.
He broke into a gallop, and the other caribou scattered. His tendons clicked with the unique caribou sound, like rubber bands snapping. Cassie bounced on his bony back as he accelerated to munaqsri speed under the aspen’s power.
She knew the moment they left the taiga and entered the boreal forest: The light changed. Shadows surrounded them as conifers blocked the sun. The caribou ran over needles that crunched, and he leaped over fallen trees. Spruces were swathes of dark green punctuated by the white flash of an aspen. Finally, she was almost to Father Forest!
The aspen shouted a command, and the caribou stopped. Cassie was tossed into his neck. “Ow!” Her stomach squished. She scooted back behind his prominent shoulder blades. “Why did . . . ,” she began to ask, and then she stopped.
Ahead was a picturesque cottage nestled in spruces. It looked as if it were part of the spruces. The bark of the trees bled into the wood of the walls. The roof was made of mossy stones. Cassie smiled—the cottage defined “quaint.” Wild roses curled appealingly around the door and windows. The air smelled of rosemary and mint. Smoke curled invitingly from the chimney. Ferns covered the tiny yard, and wide slate stones made a path to the door. Cassie slid off the back of the caribou, and the caribou trotted away.
Opening a wooden gate, Cassie stepped on the first stone. She heard a chime like a chorus of birds. Passing her, the tree-girl skipped, laughing, down the path. Each stone sang out under her feet. It sounded like a bird-call xylophone. Cassie tested another stone. It chimed for her. Grinning, she went down the path toward the cottage door. She could smell bread baking. She inhaled deeply.
&n
bsp; The tree-girl flung the door open. Cassie stooped in the doorway. She squinted, her pupils expanding. Inside, the cottage was as dark, snug, and comfortable as a bear den. It took a second for her eyes to adjust before she saw the cottage’s occupant.
The old man was as bent and gnarled as a black spruce tree. Broom in hand, he scuttled around the tiny home sweeping dirt from the corners and the ceilings. Dust hung in the air like morning haze. He muttered to himself. The tree-girl threw her arms around him. He patted her absently on the shoulder. “Yes, yes, dear,” he said. “But everything must be perfect for our guest.”
Father Forest. She wanted to shout or sing. Bear seemed so close she could almost feel his fur under her fingers and smell his seal-tinged breath. Cassie cleared her throat.
He clapped his hands together. “Our guest!” All his wrinkles seemed to smile. “Please, come in, come.” He fussed around her as she ducked inside.
The cottage kitchen was full of cabinets and drawers, all carved with pictures of rabbits and squirrels. Shelves were stacked with wooden plates, bowls, and pitchers. The sink even had a wooden faucet. The only metal was a wroughtiron stove with an old-fashioned teakettle. Corners of the kitchen receded into shadows. She saw a small, cozy living room through an open doorway, and through one of three other doorways, she glimpsed a bedroom. It was nothing like Bear’s castle with the open ballroom, the buttressed halls, the spiral staircase, but she liked it. It felt warm and safe and a welcome change from ice and tundra. “You are Father Forest?”
The old man bobbed his head. “Do you like it?”
He must mean the forest, she guessed. “It’s beautiful.”
He beamed. “You must see the Aberdeen Lake area. Beautiful white spruces. And the Peacock Hills. Some of my finest work. Yes, you must have a tour! You should see my aspen groves. And the riverbanks with the balsam poplars. The rivers are not my region, of course, but, ah . . . the riverbanks!”
Ice Page 14