A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  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 humans—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 thoug
ht 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.

  She had inherited Jalmari, along with the Great Mirror and the rest of the Palace. Veroushka had made much more use of the mirror-servant than Aleksia had, but rather than allow him to think she didn’t need him, when she had nothing specific for him to do, she had given him the rather open-ended task of “keeping an eye on matters in Kingdoms with no Godmother and report back on trouble to Godmother Elena.” Elena had never complained, so it seemed to suit everyone.

  Now, whether he had always been self-reliant and able to act autonomously, or whether this had given him those abilities or strengthened the ones he already had, she had noted that increasingly he had been able to do mirror-magic all on his own. So now she was able to rely on him to do what she did not dare. The magical signature, if any, would be coming from the Palace of Ever-Winter, not from a cave in the frozen Northlands.

  “So far as I can tell,” Jalmari said, “this imposter does not use mirror-magic, and I do not believe she is aware that you do.” He winked at her. He seemed terribly pleased with himself for his detection work.

  Aleksia stared at him in disbelief. “How can she be a copy of me and not know mirror-magic?”

  Jalmari pursed his lips. “Perhaps because she is not a copy of you. I have done a bit of spying on her, and other than the Palace, there is not much resemblance. She does have power over ice and snow, to a greater extent than you do, actually. Perhaps she got a name for being the Snow Queen and grew to like it while being unaware that there was another using that same title. Take that as a given, it is inevitable that when she came to build her Palace, The Tradition forced the design of your Palace into her mind.”

  Well, not knowing mirror-magic meant that Aleksia could be as bold as she pleased about ferreting out information. “That makes sense. What kind of a Sorceress is she? Is she cautious, or reckless? Do you know how easily she can tell when there is other magic about?”

  “I do not think she is careless…but I think she has grown accustomed to never encountering any sort of opposition,” he told her. “I know that I could slip in and around her Palace despite its barriers—for they are barriers to physical things and to attack, not to someone merely looking about.”

  “Then I should like to see what I can, if you will.” Trying not to crow with glee, she asked Jalmari to find her a vantage point within the Palace itself.

  The mirror clouded, then cleared, showing a room. The view shocked her. First, the interior of this place was…unfinished, as if it had been tunneled out of ice and snow, as if the exterior of the Palace had been created perfectly, but the inside left solid and the rooms cut in anyhow. And there was nothing warm or welcoming about this place; it looked better suited to hanging meat for storage than living in.

  Then there were the servants. She had not expected to see Brownies running about, but she had expected to see human servants. Instead…

  “What are those things?” she asked in a whisper. Jalmari’s voice floated out of the mirror in much more normal tones. She stared. They looked like snowmen…well, snowmen made by a reasonable amateur artist. There was a human look about them, but like the walls, they also looked unfinished. No fingers, only shovel-like bits at the ends of their arms, with thumbs. Faces left mostly blank except for sketched-in features.

  “Animated statues,” the mirror-servant replied. “They are made of snow and ice.” Aleksia watched the crude things wandering about with a sense of astonishment at how much magical energy it must take to keep them all going.

  “Why use those instead of human servants?” she wondered aloud.

  “Ah, that I have an answer for,” Jalmari replied. “She hates people. Truly hates them. She won’t have them near if she can help it. Those villages? She cleared them out because she decided that since she couldn’t control them, she wanted them destroyed. At least, that is what things I have heard have led me to believe.”

  “But what about—” Aleksia began.

  “I’ll show you,” Jalmari said, interrupting her. She nodded, and the view changed. This time the viewpoint was from somewhere near the top of the walls, looking down.

  And there she was. The false Snow Queen. Sitting on a throne that looked to be carved from the same crystal as her own, this woman did not, however, look much like Aleksia. She had pale hair, rather washed out, done up in a very tight and severe style. Her gown was equally severe, and her eyes were a pale blue that was almost white. The throne looked nothing like Aleksia’s, either; this one was extremely angular, more like slabs of ice stacked atop one another. The throne room looked like the interior of a glacier: rough walls, slick floor and no place to sit. Not that she needed any place to sit, since there was only one other person here, and that one was seated at her feet. Aleksia shuddered in sympathy; it looked as if he was sitting on ice.

  He would have been exceedingly handsome, if his face had held any expression at all. Blond, like most Sammi, with brilliant blue eyes, chiseled features and a warrior’s physique, he should have filled the room with vibrant warmth.

  But instead, he looked no more animated than one of the snow-statue servants.

  And she knew him. Veikko.

  And being what she was, Aleksia knew exactly what had happened to him. While the legends about her often claimed that she put some sort of enchanted shards of ice in the hearts and souls of her victims to make them emotionless, it was quite clear to Aleksia that this was precisely what the false Snow Queen was doing in truth. It wouldn’t be all that difficult for a reasonably adept Mage. And The Tradition would make it easy for her; that sort of thing was in stories all the time.

  She was absently petting his hair as she sat there, her face very still, her brows knitted in thought. It seemed she must be planning something. Perhaps the retrieval of Ilmari and Lemminkal.

  Aleksia shook her head. “This is bad,” she said out loud.

  “Without a doubt,” Jalmari agreed. “My assessment is that the spell she put on this young man is literally killing him a bit at a time. Possibly the only thing that is saving him so far is that he is a Mage as well, and has some resistance to the magic.”

  Aleksia shivered, then considered her options. She needed to know about this Sorceress, everything she possibly could. And she didn’t think it likely that the woman was going to simply babble what Aleksia needed to know. That sort of thing happened only in badly written stories.

  That only left one option. Looking into the past.

  “Jalmari,” she said aloud, “I want to—”

  “You want to mirror-scry into the past and find out what happened,” Jalmari said smoothly. “Which means you want me to do it while you observe. Actually I agree with you entirely, Godmother. We need to find ou
t what made her what she is, if we are going to find the key to taking her down again. If ever there was a situation with ‘went to the bad’ rather than ‘born bad’ written all over it, it is this one.”

  “What was your clue?” Aleksia asked, eager to hear more of what the mirror-servant had to say.

  “The boy. If she was born bad, he would have been sucked dry by now.” Jalmari’s head bobbed, semitransparent, in front of the scene in the mirror. “That she keeps him alive tells me that she is trying to get some sort of comfort out of him, and if she needs comfort, something terrible happened to change her.”

  Aleksia sighed. “I also thought the rather unfinished state of her servants also indicated she didn’t feel comfortable with cold and perfect simulacra of humanity. And that, too, tells me she wasn’t born bad.”

  “Well, Godmother, you transform to the Bear, why don’t you?” Jalmari suggested. “You look cold, and the Bear form will be more comfortable. You don’t need to be human to stare into the mirror.”

  She felt rather foolish for not thinking of that. “Good notion, Jalmari,” she said, and allowed herself, gratefully, to fall back into the warm furred form that did not find the pebble-strewn sand of the cave floor uncomfortable. She flopped herself down with the mirror between her paws and waited.

  Brief scenes began to blink across the face of the mirror as Jalmari flicked through moments of the past that had been caught in reflective surfaces. Back they went. And back. And back. Until Aleksia finally realized that this false Snow Queen was a great deal older than she looked.

  Much, much older, it seemed.

  “Ha!” said Jalmari suddenly, and a scene formed and steadied. “This looks promising.”

  The scene steadied, and settled on a small stone tower situated near a village; the village was reasonably sized, and looked vaguely Sammi. A man and a woman were walking in the gardens around it—these were practical gardens, full of herbs rather than flowers. Aleksia identified them without hesitation as the gardens of a Witch or a Sorceress. He was perhaps in his midthirties, and dressed for travel, in sturdy boots, brown leather trews and a high necked tunic of sober dark brown wool. She was somewhat younger, and dressed rather carelessly, in a yellow skirt and a green and black tunic, as if she did not particularly care what garments she threw on so long as they kept her covered and warm. Her pale yellow hair showed the same disregard for her own appearance; it was bundled rather untidily into a net. Since Aleksia herself had, from time to time, looked exactly like that, she was in sympathy with the woman. There were times when she was so preoccupied that she just pulled on whatever was lying about. Sometimes there were things that were so important to take care of that even eating and drinking became somewhat secondary. It was a good thing she had the Brownies to keep track of her at times like that; they generally marched her back to her suite and dealt with the situation.