by S T Gibson
"Look!" Gerda said.
Two dark figures had arisen over the horizon of one of the hills that blocked their way back to Rávdná’s camp. Gerda stepped in front of Nils and Pettr, shielding them with her body as best she could.
"Who is that?" Helvig asked, squinting against the sun.
"No more thralls I hope, or spirits. I’ve had my fill of that."
"Looks like people to me," Kai said.
A third figure climbed over the horizon, and then a fourth and a fifth. One of them rode a stocky black horse, and another led a reindeer laden with packs and pouches.
"Oh no," Helvig said.
Gerda took a few steps forward, shielding her eyes from the glare.
"Is that...your father?"
"I’m going to get the scolding of my life."
Berthold plodded along on the black mount with two of his men following on foot and Rávdná leading the deer behind. Rasmus trudged in the snow beside her father, his hands bound and tied to Berthold’s saddle. Had he dragged Rasmus like that the whole way?
"Rasmus!" She shouted. The was no need to worry about not being spied by the rescue party, as it was probably difficult to miss six children standing in a clump near an abandoned fort. She mostly just needed to shout, out or relief or anger or fear or any of the other emotions that had been swirling around inside her all day.
"Sorry, Helvig!" Rasmus shouted back across the plain. He skittered down the snowy slope and jogged to keep pace with the horse. Helvig resolved to make this up to him with an all-expenses paid trip to the pub and maybe a new jacket with shining buttons.
It took a few nerve-wracking minutes for the two parties to cross the plain to one another. Helvig wondered how she could possibly explain running off to her father, or if there was any way she could clear Rasmus of further culpability.
Explanations of dire need and defenses of rash actions flickered through her head, presenting themselves like faces on a die.
But when Helvig finally stopped in front of her father’s huge horse, shivering and holding up the weight of a strange child, she found she didn’t have anything to say.
The Robber Kind swung off his horse, his mouth set into a ferocious scowl.
"I’m sorry, papa," Helvig said, meek for once in her life. Tears stung her eyes.
Berthold crushed his daughter into a bear hug. Helvig, to her embarrassment, cried into her father’s chest in front of Rasmus and Gerda and everyone else. She buried her face in his coat and breathed in his familiar scent of leather and pipe smoke and cried until she was dry.
"I’m so cross with you," Berthold said, his own voice thick with emotion. "But I’m so glad you’re alive. Rasmus said you had gone to see your godaunt and I didn’t know if you would make it, in this weather."
Rávdná gave Helvig a look that said I know better than you and I'm not sorry about it. Helvig couldn't be upset with her, though. Rávdná was a businesswoman before anything else and it would have been terrible for trade if she harbored a regular customer's fugitive daughter and sent her off into the wilderness without aid.
Helvig tried on one of her cocky smiles, even though her face was still wet.
"You should have trusted your own raising. We were fine, papa, really."
Berthold smoothed his daughter’s hair with his massive hands. He always touched her like diamond set into delicate filigree, or purse that needed extra light handling to filch.
"For God’s sake, what are you doing out here at some abandoned old fort? Rávdná said you were looking for ghosts." He nodded to the child clinging to Helvig's neck. "And who are these children?"
Helvig pressed her cheek against the little girl’s and gave her father the same smile that had won her Bae so many years ago.
"We found them. They have no one. We had to take them with us; they would have died out here alone."
Gerda stepped forward, one arm slung around her little brother to keep him warm. She bobbed a cursty, elegant despite the number of near-death experiences she had gone through over the last few days.
"Your Majesty, I would like to present my brother, Kai, long a prisoner of the Snow Queen."
Berthold blinked at the siblings and then shook his head. He took one of Gerda’s thin shoulders in his hands and pointed a finger into her face. Not to threaten, merely to emphasize.
"I don’t know what you really are, little witch, but this is madness. It's simply too much." He waved at his men to gather the stolen horse. Helvig allowed it, but loitered territorially near Bae. "Come on, all of you. Let’s get away from this eerie place and get a fire going and then you’ll all be telling your tales, one by one in an orderly fashion. I can't believe you've got some kind of fairy tale circus going on out here in the middle of nowhere, Helvig."
Gerda chattered her part of the story as they began their chilly trek towards safer ground. The king listened with rapt incredulity, sometimes shaking his head despite the evidence strolling beside him in the form of a very confused Danish boy.
Helvig drifted over to Rasmus and began to untangle the knots around his wrists with her fingers and teeth. It was awkward work with a child clinging to her, but Rasmus helped the best he could.
"I’m sorry about this," Helvig said. A month ago, apologizing to one of her men would have hurt like pulling teeth. Now, culpability came easy. "You shouldn't have gotten in trouble for me. I’ll tell him so."
Rasmus massaged the blood back into his wrists. There were dark circles around his eyes from a sleepless night on the road, but he didn’t look much worse for wear otherwise. "It’s alright. Happens to the best of us sometimes."
"He wallop you?"
"Not badly. He knows I can't take much."
"Old man's going soft," Helvig scoffed, but she couldn't help putting an arm around Rasmus' shoulder and pulling him in tightly.
In the past she would have never wanted to give him the idea that they were so familiar, that perhaps underneath her tough exterior she felt some genuine affection for him. Now the bravado seemed stupid, and she was just grateful to have someone who knew her at her worst and still wanted to play cards with her, or go out foraging together, or listen to her ramble on about whatever was eating her up inside.
"Looks like you are too," Rasmus ribbed, but he put both arms around her and tucked his face into her neck in a proper hug. "You owe me."
Helvig squeezed the back of his neck to show that she understood, and that she swore on thieves' honor to pay him full recompense.
Rasmus straightened and sniffed, hunching his shoulders forward as though embarrassed.
"Not so bad, getting out of camp," he said, all bluster again. "Nice scenery. Fine clear air. And I saw a real bear, too. Walked right up to me. I touched its coal-black nose."
"Course you did. Did it hop on its hind legs and dance for you too?"
Rasmus deftly changed the subject by jutting his chin out at the child on Helvig's hip. It seemed like he wanted to reach out and touch it but wasn't quite sure how.
"You found…. A baby?"
Helvig fell into step behind him as they started their long walk back up the hillside and towards the safety of the Sami camp.
"She's in fine health, too. Won't Wilhelm be thrilled? Finally, he'll have a little thing to catechize and teach German to, and he'll leave us alone about it."
"I'll praise God for that. How'd you come into possession of such a gem?"
Helvig glanced back at Gerda. The witch had somehow charmed Berthold so much that he was allowing her to walk with one arm threaded through his elbow and another one threaded through Kai's. Probably by asking nicely.
"It’s a very long story, but I’ll tell it if you feel like listening. In the meantime, how do you feel about a new sister?"
SIXTEEN
Despite her embarrassment about being hunted down like a lost sheep, Helvig was grateful for her father’s presence. He had more experience warding off cold than she did, and he showed them all how to slowly warm the blood so as
to preserve their own body heat and prevent shock.
The children recovered quickly despite being kept under a spell for so long. Soon the girl Helvig had rescued regained her powers of babbling speech, and the pair of boys put away more of the venison and biscuits that Rávdná had brought than Helvig thought their stomachs could hold. They talked tirelessly between bites, telling stories of their parents and their schoolmates and how they had been tempted away into the forest one evening by a beautiful woman who offered them candied fruits and chocolates. Gerda supplied what answers she could, huddled next to Kai close to the fire, and Rávdná interjected with certain sightings that suggested the Snow Queen was more than a fable.
Once they were stable enough to keep moving, the King ordered them to pack up camp and press on for the Sami village, where they would pass a night safe and among friends. By this time, he had forgiven Rasmus for failing to guard the horses and for helping Helvig run away, and he gave the boy a light load to carry on the walk. Once again the only two people of their age in the band who were not otherwise diverted with long-lost relatives, Helvig and Rasmus walked in time together, telling tall tales to keep themselves warm.
Helvig collapsed as soon as she was back to the lavvu and slept more soundly than she had for weeks, close to Gerda and Kai with her newest little friend asleep on her stomach. She supposed the girl had gone under the ice before she had learned how to speak, and so Helvig took it upon herself to give her a name. Never the poet, she settled on January, for the month in which she had been found.
"Such big eyes," Kai had commented drowsily as they settled in to sleep. "She just keeps staring at everything."
Helvig chuckled, winding a finger around one of January's black ringlets. The babe was gazing at Kai with her thumb lodged in her rosebud mouth.
"S'pose there's a lot to look at after behind under ice for years and years," Helvig said. A dull ache still throbbed through her shoulder where Gerda had tightly wrapped it. She had assured Helvig that nothing has been permanently damaged or knocked out of place so badly it needed re-alignment.
"That's for sure." Kai nestled down next to his sister, who had lovingly spread out blankets and furs for him the way she would for a small child. "Fresh air, warmth; I can't get enough of any of it. I feel like I could walk the world over and not get tired of seeing grass again, or horses, or clouds. I wouldn't mind seeing our old house again, either, or those little flowerboxes hung outside out bedroom window"
Gerda smoothed her brother's hair away from his face even though it wasn't mussed. She leapt at every opportunity to touch him, to remind herself he was real.
"I'll take you wherever you want to go. I promise you, we'll see Copenhagen again. Everyone will be overjoyed to see you back in the city, and they'll eat their words for thinking you dead."
Helvig let them reminisce until drowsiness demanded they put out the light. January's warm weight lulled Helvig into a stupor, but anxiety pricked at her mind while she drifted off the sleep. Though Gerda was close enough to touch, she felt miles out of reach, and like she was getting further away with every passing hour. Nothing felt fixed. Everything was transient, shifting like marsh grass that could swallow a traveler up if they weren't careful.
In the morning, they all began their trek back to the encampment where the King had left his men with strict orders not to kill anyone while he was gone. He had left a second-in-command in charge, and the brigands generally wanted to avoid outright civil war and so behaved when left alone for short periods of time, but Berthold was eager to reassert his presence as their leader. Rávdná sent Helvig off with kisses and a new knife set into a reindeer antler handle, and she gifted Gerda bright blue ribbons for her beautiful hair. She promised that the next time they three saw each other, it would be under happier circumstances. Helvig ached with the knowledge that in all probability, Gerda would not be returning to Rávdná’s with her in the spring to do trade.
Gerda and Kai were inseparable, hardly ever letting each other go much less drifting out of reach. Helvig had never seen Gerda look so open to her own happiness, and every one of her radiant smiles brought a smile to Helvig's own lips while piercing her heart. All good things ended eventually, she reminded herself. Even if you could manage to keep someone at your side your whole life long, death would eventually part you. She should know better than to be upset.
Late into their journey home, when the snowy ground had become mottled with scrub and the horizon promised the secure embrace of evergreens, Gerda slipped away from Kai. She left him with Rasmus, who was telling one of his braggart’s tale to wonderstruck Pettr, and fell into step alongside Helvig.
They were trying to spare the horse and Bae by letting them walk unburdened for a while, and so Gerda was able to slip her arm through Helvig’s as they strolled.
"I can’t thank you enough for coming with me," the witch said. She was wearing her hair pulled back from her face with one of her blue Sami ribbons. "If I had gone up there alone and seen Kai like that...I thought I was ready to find his body, but I wasn’t."
"I didn’t feel very useful at the time, but you’re welcome all the same."
They moved slowly over snow and grass, Gerda running her thumb in circles over Helvig's arm. Helvig tried to memorize the curve of her face, the bow of her lips, and the precise color of her hair so she could cherish these vestiges of Gerda when she was gone.
"You still blame yourself for what happened with Astrid?" The witch asked, in her unprompted, probing way.
Helvig sighed heavily. This close to the forest, she could smell the sharpness of birch and fir welcoming her home.
"I don't know. Every time I think about it, I remember it differently. I think...I don't know. I hope I was doing her a mercy, in the end."
Gerda's eyes skimmed the horizon as she nodded sagely.
"I think that's wise of you. Still, no matter how we feel about how it came to us, death is a thing to carry. I don't want you to feel like you have to carry it alone."
Helvig shrugged. She had carried Astrid's first death inside her for three years before Gerda had appeared to ease the weight. She would manage the weight of the second after Gerda had moved on.
"People die. It's just the way of things."
Gerda rested her chin on Helvig’s shoulder.
"I’m so ready for this to be over. I’m so tired, Helvig. I feel like I haven’t slept in years."
Helvig tried to smile, but it felt thin and brittle.
"Well soon you can be on your way with your brother, together at last. I’m sure your parents will be missing you."
Gerda’s eyes were injured. "Oh. I didn’t realize you wanted us to go so soon."
"No, no!" Helvig fumbled, nearly stopping in her tracks. The last thing she wanted was to push Gerda away any faster. "Of course I don’t want you to, it’s just...You can’t very well expect Kai to be happy to stay out here in the dirt with a bunch of criminals. And you..." Helvig caught her breath and reminded herself that they had already had this conversation ten times in her head. There was nothing to be afraid of, just a duty to perform. "I’ve held you here long enough. It was selfish of me, to try and stop you from getting your brother back."
"I thought I was your prize and your spoil," Gerda teased. "I was just starting to like being hoarded like crown jewels.
Helvig squeezed Gerda's hand and swallowed the last of her nerves. There was nothing left to lose now at the end of their journey, so she had better just come out and say it.
"I love you, Gerda. Ferociously and terribly, so much that it scares me. All you have to do is lift a finger and I would follow you to the end of the earth. But I cannot do to you what Astrid did to me, and if I force you to stay, I’ll be just as bad as her. Loving something doesn’t meant that you own it."
Gerda hummed thoughtfully, and the two of them continued in silence for some time. Behind them, the horse snorted and clopped while Berthold filled Kai in on what sort of wars Sweden had been embroiled in sinc
e he went under the ice, and how Denmark had fared in recent negotiations. The King loved to illuminate the ways of the world to an eager pupil, and Kai had been voraciously absorbing Berthold's lectures since returning to himself. Helvig could see how much he took after his sister in keen intelligence. January rode hoisted on the Robber King's back like a travel pack, screeching with incomprehensible delight at Bae, or the clouds, or a rock.
"Kai will need time to get re-acclimated to the world," Gerda said. "And he grew up on a steady diet of books about pirates, so I think he’ll be more thrilled than you know to find himself in a den of thieves." She stopped to take a shaky breath and cast a wistful glance to her brother. "I’m not sure if there are parents to go home to, Helvig, or if they would know the people we’ve become after all these years. At any rate, we don’t need to leave tomorrow, and maybe, when we go, we won’t have to travel alone."
Helvig stopped and turned to examine Gerda's face. There was no falsehood in her, just pragmatism and an untested tenderness.
"What are you saying?"
Gerda wrung her hands. Nerves. "I won’t ask you to go with us, it wouldn’t be fair. You have responsibilities here, and a father who loves you, and men who need you. But after spending so much time in this world alone I’m afraid I’ve grown accustomed to having you at my side. More than that, you give me peace, and you make me think...You make me hope that perhaps I could fix whatever's broken inside me and learn to be more trusting, more warm..."
"Gerda, Gerda..." Helvig pressed the witch's hands between her own. "No, you're wonderful, there's nothing broken about you."
"There is no one I would rather walk the roads of this earth with, is all that I'm saying. You don’t have to decide now, of course."
Hope, which Helvig was sure had laid down and died over the last two days, stirred inside her chest.
"And what if people talk about us? Call us improper?"
"I’ve never cared about being proper, and you and I both know there are things in this world more powerful and terrible than people’s opinions. Your father doesn’t seem to care, or your friends. Who else matters?"
