[500 Kingdoms 04] - The Snow Queen

by Mercedes Lackey

  Chiurp!

  The loud and cheerful sound, the first thing she had heard in this forest besides herself, would have been more than enough to make her jump with surprise and shock. Add to that the fact that it came from right below her nose, and was followed by a veritable explosion of brown feathers heading into the sky—well, that was enough to make her rear up, overbalance, and fall over sideways with the crash of shattering ice as she smashed into the ice-covered underbrush.

  She lurched to her feet again; the bird was already gone. But there was no mistake about it—it had been that tiny frozen sparrow in the snow just below her nose.

  She had thawed it by breathing on it. And it was still alive. If the bird was still alive—then this was an entirely different sort of spell than the one that had killed the villagers. Ilmari and Lemminkal were not dead! She could free them!

  Heedless now, she reared up on her hindquarters and pivoted, crashing back to the campsite where she had left the two men. She skidded to a clumsy halt beside them, then closed her eyes and listened to them.

  And to her shock, she heard what she had missed before.

  Heartbeats. Very, very slow, but heartbeats all the same.

  They were still alive! This wasn’t merely ice, this was magical ice, magical cold, that preserved the victims rather than killing them.

  She sat down on her haunches again, this time with a thud, and stared at the ice-bound figures.

  They were alive.

  So—now what should she do?

  12

  COULD ALEKSIA THAW THE MEN? THAT WAS THE MAIN question. She might not be able to do it alone. For that matter, she wasn’t entirely sure how she had done it in the first place.

  All right, she told herself. Be calm. Think about this. They are safe enough as they are; this is clearly a special sort of spell that won’t harm them for now. If you thaw them, they might attack you. They will certainly want to know where Veikko is, and you cannot answer that. Nor can you prove that you are not the one that did this to them. The answer, I think, is to leave them be for the moment.

  By way of experiment, however, she tried thawing other creatures, with mixed success. Sparrows and other small birds took some time, but she could release them simply by breathing on them. Slightly larger birds took more time. Rabbits, however, required that she curl up around them and breathe on them. This suggested that she was going to need to use magic to thaw the men, and if she did that—well, certainly, if she was wary and watching, the false Snow Queen would know what she was about and put a stop to it.

  Caution was definitely the order of the day.

  So was getting out of the birch forest.

  Now that she knew the animals were still alive under their coats of ice, she felt terribly squeamish about eating them. It made no sense, of course, but…well, that was just how it was. And she was getting hungry again. Time for another transformation, and then to hunt for a place where she could safely become human.

  The transition to bird—a Gyrfalcon this time—was much smoother and quicker, now that she had spent some time as the Swan. She wriggled back into the harness so that her little pack was safely on her back, and then forgot about it. Vision was so much keener than a human’s it was almost painful. It was easier to get into the air as a Gyrfalcon, too; the body was smaller and a lot lighter than the Swan, and the wings were proportionally longer.

  Of all the forms she knew how to take, the Falcon was one of her favorites; light, swift, incredibly maneuverable; the sheer flying ability had something to do with that. But there was one thing that appealed to her that she really rather would not have had anyone else know about…

  A bird of prey was almost all hunting instinct. It had no conscience, no pity, and when hunting, was interested only in what it could catch and how fast it could catch and eat it. There was a certain freedom in such simplemindedness. And in order to hunt quickly and efficiently, she had to surrender to that simplemindedness.

  After pumping her way up into the sky, Aleksia gave free rein to the bird. Immediately it began looking for prey, scanning the earth below for tiny hints of movement, for things that were not white, knowing instantly, long before the human mind would have puzzled it out, rock, shadow, tree stump. Duck!

  Below her, an unwary duck was swimming as best it could in the small remaining bit of unfrozen pond. It had stayed too long. Now it would never leave.

  The Falcon did a wingover, what in a human would have been something like a cartwheel; she folded her wings tight to her body, the protective membranes closing over her eyes, and plunged down toward the unwary duck, using the sun to mask her approach. Too late, the duck spotted her. It flapped hard, running across the water, and then across the ice, trying to gain height, or failing that, to gain the safety of cover.

  Aleksia’s heart sang with elation and bloodlust. The Bird was supreme and was doing what she did best. She was hunting. And she was about to kill.

  Talons fisted, she plunged down toward the duck; she could see it laboring, see its chest heaving, see the desperate look in its eye as it glanced up and saw her too near, too near. Falcon instinct judged speed and height off the ground and made a split-second decision. Strike or bind?

  Bind.

  Her feet swung forward, talons extended, as she hit the duck where the neck met the back.

  They tumbled out of the air together, the duck flapping desperately, flailing at her with its wings, as Aleksia beat her own wings hard to slow their descent. She was the bird of the foot, as the falconers said, and her feet were her weapons. A talon found the heart and pierced it. The duck shuddered, made one final spasm, and was still. They landed in the snow, duck beneath her, cushioning the last of her fall.

  She did not hesitate. Half-mad with bloodlust now, she began ripping the feathers from her prize. In a moment, her beak would plunge into the bird’s sweet breast meat, she would drink blood that was still hot and full of the taste of fear and desperation, and then she would settle down to feed.

  When the Falcon was sated, Aleksia transformed back to the Bear and made short work of what was left of the duck. When even the last bit of bloodstained snow was licked up, she looked around, as best she could, and took long, deep sniffs of air.

  And she scented what she had hoped to detect. Damp, chill—but not the chill and damp of snow and ice. This was cave-damp. A good place for her to become a human, and a good place for the Bear to sleep. She wished the last village was nearer, but it was not, and this was the best possible option for protection, from the elements, from wild creatures, and from the false Snow Queen and whatever she was using as her spies.

  The Bear lumbered off, following its nose.

  By a little past nightfall, it had found the cave. There was plenty of deadfall nearby and the Bear dragged in several large pieces, much larger than Aleksia could have handled. This was a good cave; it went back far enough that the bitter cold of Winter was held at bay, and the ceiling was high enough that smoke would pool up at the top. She could build her fire at the center of it.

  The floor was littered with dead leaves, the bones of small animals and rocks. The musky scent told the Bear that a fox had used it for a den, and recently. Well, if it came back it was going to get a surprise; it wouldn’t like the Bear or a human, but Annukka was inclined to leave it alone if it chose to just try and shelter here peacefully. As the Bear, she broke up the wood into fire-sized pieces; a simple enough trick for something of her weight and strength. The leaves and twigs that had blown in here would would supply plenty of tinder; there would be a good fire going here in no time.

  But right now, she needed to be a human again in order to do that.

  This form was, of course, the easiest of all, so long as she and not animal instinct, was in charge of her body. A moment of concentration, and there she was, gown and all—and she was quickly chilled and shivering without the Bear’s thick coat. Hurriedly, she built herself a fire, and used the fire-starter rather than magic to get it ablaze.


  Finally the fire was going well enough that she started to thaw; she held her hands to the dancing flames and basked in the warmth.

  It occurred to her rather ruefully that she could have made a better clothing selection for this excursion before she had left. Breeches and boots, a warm knitted sweater and a tunic all under a heavy cloak would have been just as easy to transform to feathers as her gown.

  But she was unused to wearing such things, and it might have been tricky to transform them back again.

  Oh, bah. She fumbled out the hand-mirror. The first thing to do would be to see if there was anyone who had already magically caught “sight” of her presence and was spying on her.

  None can hide who clear can see. I spy you as you spy me, she murmured in her mind, passing her hand over the surface of the glass. It clouded over a moment, and then cleared and showed—nothing. Nothing but her own reflection. She breathed a sigh of relief. So. She had gotten this far without being detected.

  She passed her hand over the mirror again, and let a tiny trickle of magic tell the mirror-servant Jalmari back at the Palace of Ever-Winter that she was ready to talk. She would speak through him now, and let him—or whoever Elena found to replace her—be the ones using all the magic.

  It was dangerous enough using the transformation magic. Anything more than that was adding another layer of hazard. She could not, dared not, do that. Not now. Not yet.

  The face of her servant appeared briefly. “All is well, Godmother. What is it that you need?”

  “I think I may be close enough for this mirror to see where the false Godmother is, if she is being incautious about her own magic use,” Aleksia told him. “Do you think—”

  Jalmari laughed. “To borrow a phrase from the Djinn, ‘your wish is my command, Godmother.’ If you will be patient a moment, I will see if there is anything to be seen.”

  The mirror clouded for a moment; she knew what he was doing, he was looking for currents of various sorts of magic, then seeing if they came from a single source. If there was one creature as good at mirror-magic as she was, it was her servant. And long before she might have gotten impatient, his face reappeared.

  “This is truly remarkable!” Jalmari said without preamble. “If I had not seen this with my own—ah—well, since I don’t precisely have eyes—”

  “What did you see?” she asked, anxiously.

  “Look for yourself, Godmother—” The mirror clouded again, and showed—

  The Palace of Ever-Winter.

  She frowned. “Is this a joke?” she asked. “If so, I find it rather—”

  The view in the mirror receded, to reveal that at the end of the grounds, where the snow-garden ceased, there was a wall. A wall of huge bricks carved of ice, with a gate in it made not of iron or wood or even more ice, but of a shimmering curtain of power. And on the other side of that wall, was a village where the glacier should have been.

  “That, Godmother,” said the mirror-servant gravely, “is where your rival is.”

  It had taken the better part of a day, as well as most of her energy, for Annukka to put the spell on the sledge, but it had been worth every moment and every bit of strength to do so. When she and Kaari left the village, she attached a third and fourth very thin rein to each front corner of the sledge and attached those to the reindeer’s halter. When the sledge was going the right way, both reins were slack. The farther off course the sledge got, the more it tried to turn, and the more it tugged on the deer’s halter, steering it. All she and Kaari had to do was to ride next to the sledge and make sure that the reindeer didn’t stop to browse. Usually a smart tap with a long willow-switch took care of that.

  And now that they had guidance, Kaari was less anxious. Annukka, however, was seriously concerned. She had taken the loving-cup from Kaari and would not let her look at it anymore, having caught her taking it out and staring at it a dozen times a day. But there was no improvement in the situation there; the main body of the cup was just as black as ever, and there was still only a rim of bright silver remaining. Annukka only wished she could tell for certain whether or not there was any diminishing of the remaining silver.

  But the going was slow, even with guidance. Travel on the road, even when it was scarcely more than a footpath, had been much easier. Annukka had never cared much for driving sledges, which was why she had put so much effort into breeding and training deer to ride. There were always hidden obstacles under the snow that the heavy sledge would get stuck on, or that would threaten to turn it over.

  In fact, it seemed to her that by the time the sun was setting, they had made discouragingly little progress. From Kaari’s long face as they set up camp, she felt the same.

  “We haven’t even reached the first stricken village yet,” Kaari said quietly, as both of them stared into their little fire. “At this rate, it will be Spring before we get there.”

  Perhaps the sledge hadn’t been as good an idea as she had thought, but what else were they to do? Whatever they were going to need had to be brought with them. The villages they were going to look at were all tiny in comparison to their home, and there was no way of knowing how much, if any, provisions were intact in the houses after animals got in. Which they would, it was inevitable. In general, this far to the North, so both of them learned, a village could be no more than four or five houses, and earned the name only because most of the people living there were not related to one another. Even if they actually encountered a village with people in it, though they were hospitable, most people in a village that small could not spare much for the traveler. Ilmari’s village had not been much larger than that, and with the early onset of Winter, they were looking at their stores with a worried eye. Coin did you little good if there was no food to buy with it. The deer could not carry all the supplies that they would need; the sledge could.

  And there was the undisputed fact that the sledge was guiding them to the missing men. So the sledge was necessary, but it was slowing them down—and it might well be that time was running out for Veikko.

  Help. Well, that was what they needed, wasn’t it? With a sigh, Annukka got out her kantele.

  She didn’t want to worry Kaari more than she already was, so she opted for subtle magic rather than obvious. She didn’t so much pick a tune as just let her fingers play something familiar. And rather than thinking the words to concentrate a spell, she simply held in the front of her mind the fact that they needed help. And all the while, to Kaari, she made it look as if she was strumming idly at the instrument. Kaari was busy mending the heavier clothing she had gotten at the village, and reinforcing seams; the wind was finding every single place it could leak in to chill them. Up until now, they had been sharing Annukka’s clothing, but it was getting cold enough they would soon have to layer on every stitch they could. And even Annukka’s spells of warmth woven into the cloaks wouldn’t be enough to keep them comfortable.

  Something coughed outside the circle of firelight.

  Both of them froze. Was that just some animal? Annukka knew she hadn’t heard anything creeping up on them. She peered into the darkness, but could make out nothing there.

  It coughed again, whatever it was. And then what Annukka had thought was a huge snowdrift just at the very edge of visibility—moved. She felt as if someone had just dumped a barrel of icy water down her back. She wanted to scream, but nothing would come out. Kaari squeaked, and then was still.

  Slowly, ponderously, the giant white Bear moved into the firelight, its head swinging a little from side to side as it walked.

  Annukka’s throat and mouth dried and her heart pounded so hard she thought it was going to break her ribs. She stared at the enormous creature, at the tiny black eyes, the wicked long claws on its forepaws. This Bear could disembowel a person with a single swat of that enormous paw and not even think twice about it. The White Bears of the North were known to be deadly and unpredictable, except in one thing. They never let anything get between them and food. And two lone h
umans—surprised—without weapons, probably looked a lot like food to it.

  They were going to die….

  “Mother Annukka?” Kaari said in a small, strangled voice. “It’s wearing a pack.”

  The Bear nodded, and Annukka realized that what she had taken for shadow was the harness of the pack on his back.

  Who put a pack on a Bear’s back?

  “You don’t think there is anyone with it—him—do you?” Annukka whispered.

  The Bear swung his head toward her, and slowly shook it.

  She blinked. “You understand me?” she asked, in a slightly louder voice.

  It nodded. She paused, and thought about what she had just done. Was it possible that her song-spell had had an effect so soon?

  “Are—you here to help us?” she asked the Bear incredulously.

  The Bear nodded. Then, with a sigh, it flopped down next to the fire and closed its eyes.

  Annukka and Kaari stared at each other across the great bulk of the Bear, both their eyes wide with astonishment.

  “How are we going to feed him?” Kaari whispered.

  Annukka had to shrug. “I don’t know,” she replied, and shook her head “He’s one of the White Bears. I suppose he can feed himself.”

  But all she could think of at this point was the cautionary that she should have kept in mind when she began the spell in the first place. Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

  Aleksia huddled close to the fire and cupped her hand-mirror close to her face. In the depths of the mirror, a disembodied blue head with a curiously cheerful expression hovered in what appeared to otherwise be a void. For all that she was an expert in mirror-magic, even she had no idea where the mirror-servants and mirror-slaves were, how they could look through so many mirrors simultaneously, where that void was, or if it was even a void to them. She also had no idea if the disembodied heads had bodies, or if their appearance was some sort of joke.