[500 Kingdoms 04] - The Snow Queen

by Mercedes Lackey

  Once again she gathered the magic of her Palace around her, and with it, her will.

  She stared fixedly into the mirror, while in her mind she summoned every memory of what it had felt like, as well as what it had looked like, when last she was a Swan. How her chest had thrust forward, her hips behind, and yet she had not felt overbalanced. The odd clumsiness of the webbed feet and the relatively short, bowed legs. How her neck had a kind of life of its own, her vision had been spread to either side rather than being focused in front, the feeling of having her nose and mouth merged into one and made hard, her tongue shrunk, and her sense of taste and smell dulled to almost nothing. She concentrated on all of these things, on what she saw before her and what she wanted to see. She held herself, poised like a diver, winding it all tighter and tighter, until it felt as if she must let it all go or explode.

  She let it go.

  There was a soundless burst of light just as Rosemary entered from the staircase, bundled in a warm fur coat and hat, harness in one hand. The Brownie shielded her eyes with her hands and exclaimed with indignation.

  When they could both see again, it was not Aleksia that looked back at herself from the mirror, but an enormous Swan.

  “You might have warned me,” Rosemary said crossly, hands on her hips. “You really might have.” She strode forward with the harness in her hands, and with a few brisk motions had buckled it on over Aleksia’s feathers. Stretching her neck to limber it, Aleksia gave herself an enormous shake to settle the feathers and her harness. The white harness blended into the feathers—no one would see it unless they were closer than Aleksia would like. She swiveled her head on the long neck to check the lay of the equipment-pouch; it sat perfectly square.

  Well that is one advantage of this form. I can see my own back.

  She nodded at the doors. Rosemary walked toward them, unlatched them and flung them open. A wave of frigid air engulfed both of them. Insulated by some of the warmest feathers in the world, Aleksia scarcely noticed, but Rosemary shivered.

  “Off you go then!” she exclaimed, then hesitated. Aleksia tilted her head to the side, waiting.

  “Good luck and godspeed, Godmother,” the Brownie said softly.

  Aleksia bowed her head in thanks for the wish. Then she went to the very edge of the opening, spread her wings to their fullest, stretched out her neck and called to the wind to fill her pinions. And when she felt the strength of the wind in them, felt as light as one of her own feathers, she pushed off the tiniest bit—and lifted to the sky.

  The Swan did not need a compass or a map to know where she was going. She felt direction in her bones; she read it in the sky, in the pattern of the land. Wings beating strong and sure against the cold air, blood pumping in her veins, listening to her instinct, she arrowed across the sky, watching the land unroll beneath her. The snow that had threatened in her mirror was far from here; with luck, by the time she reached its present location, it would be gone. For her now was the sky graced only by wispy tails too far above her to be worth noting, and the sun on her back.

  Down from the mountains she came, out of the grip of always-Winter, down into the valleys where the first snows lay lightly on the firs and the meadows, down to the half-frozen lakes and the calls of the last geese that had not yet made up their minds to travel south. Go! she warned them with her mind, and they went, lifting off the lakes in skeins, heading into the south, to where warm waters lay, and grass still green, where there would be longer days and warmer sun, and goose-gossip and eventually, mate-choosing. All that she could feel in her bones, feel the Swan-instincts demand that she follow them and leave this place.

  But the Swan was weak in her at the moment, and she had lost nothing of herself yet. As the geese fled south, she flew on. She stopped at sunset, landing on a half-frozen lake, filled her belly with watercress and sharp-edged sedge and the bitter, frost-seared grasses at the edge of the lake. When the moon rose, she beat her way across the lake, half-running, and half-flying, legs and wings pumping, until the wind filled her feathers again and she was up and away.

  All night long she flew, until the moon began to descend, until she saw below her the trees that hid the forest spirits, and knew she had caught up with the two women. She passed over the forest in the last of the moonlight, and before it became too dark to see, followed the harsh scent of smoke to Ilmari’s village and set down in a poultry yard, where a surprised little girl, sleepy-eyed, with a bucket full of grain to feed to her chickens, found her. Carefully, the child poured a tribute of the grain in front of Aleksia, who bowed her head in thanks, and nibbled it all up, hungrily. The child ran off and returned with her mother, who brought more grain, and a slice of bread warm from the baking. They whispered to each other as she ate, and she caught some of the conversation in their accented Sammi tongue, as they noted the harness, the little pack on her back, and recognized her for something out of the ordinary. Well, this was Ilmari’s village. They should be used to wonders, or at least used to recognizing them when they saw them.

  When she was done eating, she closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, feeling magic moving in her blood and bones. She needed to find a way to thank them and “pay” for the gift of food, otherwise that would throw off the balance of things.

  They were looking for something lost; every person always has something of value that has been lost and is looking for it. Finding such things took only a little, little magic, too small for her enemy to feel. It was what Annukka did back in her own village, what Ilmari had done without a doubt when he was still here.

  She felt the thing they were looking for as a bright warm spot to her left. She opened her eyes and followed the pull of it, out of the yard, to the garden, and the dug-up area where turnips had probably been planted. She began to peck at the clods, loosening them and turning them over with her beak until a glint of metal told her she had found what she was looking for. She pecked at the clod with all the force of her long neck and stepped back, fanning her wings in triumph as it split open.

  With an exclamation, the mother darted forward and pulled her silver ring out of the dirt. As she turned to Aleksia, tears of gratitude in her eyes, Aleksia bowed her head once, then turned away and set off again into the sky.

  It was, as she had hoped, a cloudless sky. The storm she had seen threatening had passed, leaving trees laden with new snow and the ground softened and blanketed in white. But this was not a good thing. This snow was too early for this part of the Sammi country. Below her, she saw herdsmen struggling to bring the reindeer across the snow into safe pastures, saw birds caught unawares on lakes that should still have been open and now had rims of ice. The birds, she warned to leave. The herdsmen she could do nothing for. All she could do was to speed on, but the Swan felt the wrongness of it in her bones, and was outraged. Winter had come too early. The false Snow Queen stretched her hand out with cold greed.

  By midday, she had reached the first of the stricken villages, and she descended to see what she could make of it.

  It was quiet. Far too quiet. No dogs barked, no roosters crowed and nothing moved between the handful of houses and outbuildings.

  She waddled ponderously through the snow to peer into the open doorways. Someone, possibly Ilmari, his brother Lemminkal, and young Veikko, had gathered the bodies of the dead humans and taken them away somewhere. Possibly they had been stored in one of the closed buildings until Spring and the thaw when they could be buried—possibly they had been burned on a common pyre. Aleksia debated transforming back to herself to investigate, but on reflection, decided against it. There was nothing she could do that had not been done, and she needed to be on her way.

  But this village was a quiet horror in and of itself. It was utterly empty, without a sign of anything living at all. But dead? Oh, yes. A sled dog frozen at his tether, pigeons stiff and white in the eaves—she knew if she looked around she would find more such victims, chickens dead in the roost, deer in the paddocks, goats in the barn.
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  With a wrench, she launched herself back up into the clean sky.

  Nightfall found her halfway between the first village and the second, and when she found herself tiring, found it becoming too dark to fly, she had to drop down again to skid across the surface of a frozen lake, scuttling into hiding in the shelter of frozen bushes. There she sat, eating grasses that were still green, though frozen stiff, until the moon came up. She was glad there was no one to see her as she slipped and slid clumsily across the ice until she could get herself airborne.

  She passed over the second village without stopping, flying on through the night. Whatever was there, she could not help it now. And there would be no clues here as to what had happened to the missing men. When dawn broke, she reached the third village and set down in the midst of it.

  She was starving; the frozen grasses had not been enough to sustain her, and since this village, like the others, had been destroyed without warning in the night, there was no way that she, in Swan form, could get at grain that had been locked up in homes and barns. But there was something she could do.

  Reaching around with her beak, she picked open the single buckle that held her harness together, and carefully began working her way out of it. Once it was on a heap on the ground, she hunched herself down on the ground to preserve heat, tucked her head under her wing and began to concentrate.

  The Bear form was easier; she had, over the years, spent some little time in it with the Bear, who enjoyed a bit of company now and again. It took a great deal less time to remember what being a Bear felt like, the weight of the limbs, the way the head hung low on the shoulders, the roll of the walk and the vividness of scents. This time, she was acutely circumspect; she cast all around herself for any hint of another magician before she hunted for magic power to augment her own.

  She was not at all surprised to find Traditional magic swirling around her in little eddies and whirls. After all, she was part of this story now, and as such, she was going to attract it. The magic seemed—well—confused, however. As if it couldn’t quite understand what she was doing here, nor why.

  Good. That at least meant that, for a while, she wasn’t going to get any pressure to conform to a particular story-path.

  She gathered up all the rags and tags of the magic she could find, wove it into her own power, and again, concentrated on the new form she wanted until it felt as if she was going to snap under the burden. Then she let it go.

  The Bear uncoiled herself from the sleeping position she had been in, stretched forequarters, then hindquarters, then gave herself a good shake. Raising her nose to the faint breeze, she went hunting for food.

  She didn’t have to hunt far; her nose told her that a nearby building was a chicken-roost, and a single blow of her powerful forepaw destroyed the door. Under any other circumstance, she would have felt guilty about such destruction of property, but there wasn’t anyone left here alive to use those buildings anymore, and probably no one anywhere near to inherit them, either. This village was dead now. When Winter passed, people would be afraid to live here, afraid of ghosts, or that there might be a lingering curse on the place. The buildings would be destroyed, the frozen animals eaten, if not by herself, then by real Bears and other predators, and by wind and weather. There was nothing to feel guilt over.

  Her heavy jaws made short work even of chickens frozen hard, and feathers were an irrelevant gustatory detail to a Bear. She ate them, feathers, beaks and scrawny legs, and all.

  Appetite sated, she prowled the village, looking for signs that the men had been here. Signs there were, in plenty; the most notable was that the houses were open and lying empty, just as at the first village, all but one. That one, the stoutest in the village, was locked, barred, and the door sealed. She could smell nothing, which meant no other predator could, either. She guessed that the men had gathered up the bodies of all the villagers and sealed them in here, presumably as they had in the first village.

  She paused for a moment to consider whether she should take her human form, and finally decided against it. If there was anything spying on her right now, nothing she had done so far was out of character for a real Bear. But she could do some things as the Bear that would make it easier for her in Swan form, and still look and act like a normal Bear while doing them.

  She hunted through the village until she found the paddocks for the reindeer, and broke into the barn building, and then into the bins that held their Winter grain. There were only a few dead deer in the paddock; most of them had been out with the village herder. Probably this was who had brought the news of the Icehart out to Ilmari and Lemminkal. And naturally, he would not want to stay anywhere near; he must have taken the herds far, far south by now. If she had been in his place, that is what she would have done. With the herds of the whole village—even if it was a small one—he would be welcome wherever he chose to settle.

  Poor herder! He would likely have nightmares for the rest of his life. And guilt, for having survived when his village did not.

  Of course, other wildlife would be at the grain as soon as fear was overcome by hunger. She didn’t begrudge sharing the grain with the creatures of woods and fields. With this unnatural Winter holding the countryside fast, life was going to be hard on the wild things.

  With that accomplished, she stood in the middle of the building, swaying on her feet in a kind of daze until she came to herself and realized that she was exhausted. With a shake of her massive head, she considered her surroundings, decided that it was as good a place to den up as any, and lumbered over to a straw-filled corner to curl up for a nap.

  When she woke, the sun shining at an angle in through the wrecked door; it was late afternoon. She made a good meal on a frozen goat, and lumbered out to the edge of the village. She ate snow to clear her nose and mouth and cleanse them of any other scent, then stood very, very still, breathing slow, deep breaths with her eyes closed.

  There. Human. But fresher scent than the rest. She opened her eyes to discover her head had swung to the right. Still taking the scent in, she followed it until she found what she was looking for.

  A human would never have seen it, not unless he was an expert tracker. Beneath the cover of new-fallen snow, the faintest of depressions. Footprints. She snuffled, and concluded with satisfaction that there were three different scents there. It could only be the men that she hunted.

  She went back to where she had left her harness and pouch, and pawed and wriggled until she got the harness around her head and over her shoulders. Then she returned to where she had found the scent. With her head down, she began to track it.

  She was, of course, not as good as a dog would be. But a Bear was not at all bad at following scent, and this was a Bear’s nose with a human mind behind it.

  She followed the trail, shuffling along with the Bear’s clumsy, and deceptively slow-looking gait, past sunset, past moonrise and on into the night. She felt good—well-rested, with a full belly—and there was absolutely no reason to stop now. A Bear’s eyes were not very good, so traveling at night was not exactly the problem it would have been for a creature that depended more upon sight. And as for the danger of attackers—there wasn’t much that would be foolhardy enough to attack something as large and powerful as she was, not this early in the Winter. Later, perhaps, when wildlife began to starve, she would have been in danger from wolf packs. But not now, and not as long as there were frozen dead things back in that village. The only danger she was in would be from human hunters, and the only human hunters there would have been out here were all back in that village—dead.

  Well, there was the possible danger from this Icehart, whatever it was…but so far, its chosen victims all seemed to be humans; the animals it had slain were simply the unfortunate creatures that shared space with its intended victims.

  Or the intended victims of the Witch. Although it didn’t make any sense—would the Witch have wiped out three full villages for no apparent reason?

  It was a shame t
hat the wretched North Wind had so poor a sense of direction, otherwise she could have gotten the location of the Witch’s stronghold from him. But the Winds didn’t really understand human concepts like maps. After all, the Winds went where they chose, and there wasn’t much that could stop them, so what did they need with maps or directions?

  On she lumbered. The scents got stronger under tree-canopy, but only because the trail wasn’t hidden under snow. Whatever had happened to the missing men, they hadn’t come back this way.

  By the time the sun rose, even the Bear form’s strength was beginning to flag. The scent actually was stronger, though, so at least it was more recent. She was tracking them across the side of a forest ridge now, and considered stopping and curling up for a nap, then decided to press on at least as far as the ridge ahead of her. So far she hadn’t seen a good place to curl up anyway; there might be better cover ahead.

  And then, just as the full sun hit the valley below, she crested the ridge—and stopped dead in her tracks.

  Below her was a sight that was both stunningly beautiful and utterly horrible.

  For as far as the eye could see, the sun reflected blindingly off the branches of a forest of trees of ice.

  11

  ANNUKKA STOOD WITH ONE ARM AROUND KAARI, COMFORTINGLY, as they stared at the wilderness ahead of them. Behind them was the village where Veikko had found his mentor, the Warrior-Mage Lemminkal; it was from here that he, Ilmari, and Ilmari’s brother Lemminkal had departed. The villagers all agreed that they had gone to track down something called the Icehart, which was some sort of monstrous creature that had killed everyone in three separate villages. They had learned of this Icehart from a reindeer herdsman who had returned to his village to find everyone dead, frozen—and from all appearances, it had happened in a single moment in the middle of the night. He claimed that he had seen it, at a distance, moving away from a second village, to which he had gone for help. He had called it the Icehart because it looked like an enormous, ghostly stag, and wherever it went, it killed with cold.