Snow Queen fhk-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  In fact, he lingered, books piled in his arms, until he was sure she had settled herself next to the fire in her sitting room.

  Once safely there, she picked up her hand-mirror and waited for Godmother Elena to answer her call — which was almost instantly.

  “If you must know, I am keeping track of you,” Elena told her with a wry smile. “You worry me right now.”

  Aleksia felt her eyes widening. “Why?” she asked, astonished.

  Elena sighed. “Because you have never personally had an adventure,” the other Godmother said reluctantly.

  “Excuse me?” That didn't precisely make sense. “I think I have had an adventurous enough life! After all, how many girls become Godmothers?”

  “But you, personally, have never had an adventure,” Elena repeated. “Think about this. Yes, you and your sister had adventures happen around you before you became a Godmother, and, yes, you almost became a jealous sister, and, yes, you were whisked off by Veroushka to become a Godmother, but you, personally, have never done anything that would risk your own life. You go out and make other peoples' lives adventurous, but what do you do? You rarely leave your Palace, and then it is generally to go only to a gathering of other Godmothers rather than to thwart someone evil. Now, well, I sense that you are about to leave your shelter and go and do things that will put you in personal danger.”

  Aleksia felt a surge of resentment. “You had adventures!”

  Elena nodded vigorously. “Yes, I did, and I think I am all the better for it! But the one thing I did that was very, very stupid was that I did not keep the other Godmothers apprised of what I was doing. Of course, I was not aware that I could do that at the time, but you are. And I was just a little worried that in the excitement of being able to go and do things, you might forget — ”

  After listening to that astonishing speech, all Aleksia could do was laugh. Elena looked relieved.

  “Prickly, I might be, Elena, but I also prize honesty. And I am very touched that you are worried about me. However — ” she wiggled an admonishing finger at the the mirror “ — you, of all people, should know me better than that. I am going nowhere without a mirror. And I am not too proud to ask for help if I need it. Now, this is what I have found out, and this is what I plan to do….”

  She slowly outlined her ideas to Elena, who agreed that it seemed to be the best course of action. “And you can leave from your own Palace?”

  “So it seems. Tuonela can be reached from anywhere. As they say ,Death is universal'. There seems no great difficulty in getting in.” The Brownie bustled up at that moment with a tray with a bowl of thick soup and a small loaf of bread, broken open and buttered already, still steaming from the oven. Aleksia's stomach growled, and she hoped Elena had not heard it.

  “No indeed,” Elena replied. “Traditionally, there never is. It is always leaving that is the difficult part. But you do have a sound strategy. Good luck, Aleksia.”

  “Thank you, Godmother Elena,” Aleksia replied. She had, very carefully, avoided the undeniable fact that if she did get in over her head, it was unlikely that anyone could reach her in time to be of any use.

  Then again, so had Elena, who probably was just as aware of that as Aleksia was.

  The way to almost every Underworld was through a cave, and there was a cave in the cellars of the Palace of Ever-Winter for just that purpose, at least, according to the notes of Godmother Riga, who had been the fourth back from Aleksia. All one had to do to enter a particular Underworld was to set up a spell that invoked that culture.

  As familiar as Aleksia was with the Sammi, it was the work of no more than a half an hour to establish the cave-mouth in her cellar as sacred to the Sammi, to invoke a variant of the All Paths Are One Path spell, and to add the twist that linked this cave with the actual entrance to Tuonela, wherever that was.

  She took a very deep breath before she entered the final fragments of the spell that would open the way. Carefully, she took inventory of herself. Her shroudlike, enveloping white gown should pass muster. She had spent hours whitening her skin and hair in a way that would not obviously be due to magic. Her hair was encircled with a wreath of dead flowers, and if anyone was to touch her, her skin would feel icy.

  She was as ready as she was ever likely to be.

  She stood before the cave, and sighed the last words of her carefully fashioned spell.

  Passing from the world of men, shadow-bound, then back again.

  The ground trembled, and the cave-mouth glowed with blue light. She stepped into it.

  She paused for a moment to take stock of her surroundings on the other side. This was a strange land, in perpetual shadow, with no discernable horizon. The air smelled of chill and damp, with a faint hint of mildew. The land was flat and unremarkable, covered with brittle, dead grass and leafless bushes. A pall of gray covered the sky, and there was neither sun nor moon.

  Ahead of her was the river of Tuoni, and in the distance, something shimmering and white approached her. She took slow, very hesitant steps down toward the water, then stood on the shore with the cold water lapping at her bare feet. She pretended that she did not feel it, did not even notice it. This was the first test of her disguise, for this was one of the guardians of Tuonela, and on that river, in fact, heading toward her, was the most beautiful Swan that she had ever seen.

  The Swan was taller than a man, and as it came closer, she could hear it singing. To the dead, this was but the background of their existence here, but it could be deadly to the living. A living person that listened too long to that beautiful, mournful dirge would be lost in it, forgetting everything else, forgetting all about life on Earth, desiring nothing more than to listen to that music forever. He would be trapped beside the river, lost in a dream of forgetfulness, until he died of hunger and thirst, or followed the Swan out into the middle of the river and drowned.

  Aleksia had taken the precaution of stopping up her ears with wax. The song came to her muffled and imperfect, as the Swan approached, looking almost like a carving, gliding on the water with no sign that it was paddling itself along. Only when it neared her, did it deign to move its head to look at her, briefly. It saw nothing amiss — a spirit would not have stood there watching it; spirits did not hear the song the way that the still-living did; to them, it was lovely, but not enthralling.

  Which was the point, really. No need to ensnare the dead. They could not leave.

  After the Swan had passed, a faint splashing in the distance told Aleksia that the moment she was waiting for had arrived. Behind the Swan, a small, black boat glimmered out of the mist shrouding the river, poled by someone who looked very like Aleksia…perhaps younger, and not quite so corpselike.

  She was very beautiful, in a kind of empty-eyed way, was the Tuonin pikka, Death's Maiden. Like Aleksia, she wore a white, shroudlike gown of material far too flimsy to keep an ordinary mortal girl warm in this place. As she was a maiden, she wore her golden, floor-length hair unbound except for a silver-studded headband of white ribbon. Her blue eyes were curiously vacant, as if not only her thoughts, but her very soul was elsewhere.

  She poled the boat with a mechanical grace; her vacant eyes were fixed on Aleksia. For her part, Aleksia remained where she was, maintaining a passive posture. She was supposed to be dead, her own ghost wandering for thirty days to get this far. And the dead were…

  Boring.

  Tuonela was the most boring form of the afterlife that she had ever heard of. The dead did nothing, wanted nothing, cared for nothing and carried out a shadow play of their previous lives, but without the passion, becoming more and more divorced even from that, until at last they moved into a state very like sleep. She wondered why any spirit would want to stay here. Well, it was better than the alternative of oblivion, she supposed.

  When the Tuonin pikka's boat bumped upon the gravel of the bank, the girl waited passively for Aleksia to step aboard. After a moment, she did so. The maiden waited until she had seated herself on t
he single bench seat in the middle of the boat, then pushed off from the bank, heading for the farther shore.

  Halfway across, in a colorless voice, the maiden finally spoke.

  “Who are you?”

  In an equally colorless voice, Aleksia replied, “I don't know.” After all, what intelligent person truly knows who they are? She concentrated on that fact, that the wisest of men will freely admit that he does not truly know himself.

  “Why are you here?”

  She had to be very careful not to lie here. A direct lie would definitely be something that would set the maiden off. But a shading of the truth…

  “I am looking for something.” That was close enough.

  “What do you seek?”

  “Wisdom.” That was safe enough. And true, entirely true.

  To her intense relief, the maiden said nothing else, presumably satisfied with what she had been told. She continued to the farther bank, and the island of Tuoni itself.

  Fog and mist gathered over the surface, hiding everything that was more than a few feet from the boat. The surface of the water was glass-smooth and utterly still. The only sound was that of the pole, rhythmically splashing. It was even colder out here on the river than it had been on the bank. The damp chill, now smelling a bit of waterweed, penetrated every fiber of Aleksia's gown. Her bare feet felt like little lumps of ice. And she was not yet anywhere near the end of her journey.

  Finally, the keel of the boat grated against rock; the maiden expertly poled the boat parallel to the bank. Moving slowly and deliberately, as if she had all the time in the world, Aleksia stepped out of the boat, into ankle-deep, cold water. She did not even flinch. She did not pick up the skirt of her gown. She simply waded ashore as if this were all of no consequence. And she thought that out in the fog, she'd caught a flicker of movement of something very big, and very black. She thought she'd detected a hint of a fishy odor. But there was no way to tell for certain, and the maiden poled the boat away to the other side, to wait for her next passenger. She suppressed a shiver; she knew what that large black thing might well be — the giant pike-fish that was said to eat those that did not belong here. You could spend eternity in the belly of the fish if you could not convince the maiden that you, too, were a spirit.

  Without seeming to look around, Aleksia meandered up the bank. At least the vegetation wasn't dead here, although it certainly was lifeless-looking. As she had been led to believe, Tuoni was essentially a duplicate of life on the living earth, an endless series of identical villages going deeper and deeper into the fog. Those who had died the most recently were nearest the river, and the marks of what they had died of were still visible on their bodies. It could have been gruesome, had their wounds not been bloodless and their bodies as pale and chill as the maiden's. It was said, by the sources that Aleksia had studied, that the longer a spirit remained her, the more of its death it forgot. Signs of wounds and injuries and illness vanished, severed limbs reattached and the spirit looked more and more as it remembered itself, in its prime of life. It would move away from the bank and deeper into the island, finding a home for itself, beginning a kind of passionless second life that was a mirror of its first. It would push the memories of that first life into the depths of its mind, unless it was asked. But then, if it was questioned too closely, or in the wrong way, all those memories would come rushing back, and with them, all the remembered pain and pleasure of living.

  Then it would turn on the questioner — and that could be fatal. Eventually, the spirit would come to a place where it would just lie down and sleep. It could be awakened, but if it was not, that was how it stayed — in a state of endless slumber.

  Fortunately, questions were more common, here on the shore. The spirits wandered, looking for loved ones, looking for answers, looking for a purpose. She wandered among them, also looking. In her case, she was looking for the victims of the Icehart. They should be obvious enough; an entire village worth of people that had all died at once should stand out.

  There was a strange feeling to this place. It was not despair; it was too dull for that. Apathy, perhaps. It seemed to permeate everything, lying over Aleksia's spirit like a gray pall.

  It made it hard to move and hard to think. She had armored herself as best as possible against this very thing, and still the all-pervasive melancholy made it hard to move and think. And this was the second trap, this terrible lack of anything but ennui, this leaden weight on the soul that made it tempting, so tempting, just to lie right down and never move again. This place did not need monsters to keep it free of the living. And it did not need guards to make it deadly. Not all traps were violent, or needed to be. This was why the spirits of the dead stopped moving, stopped thinking, and went to sleep.

  Aleksia kept moving, staring at the faces of the dead, until she became inured to what she saw there, and to some of the terrible things they had died of. What was perhaps the most disturbing about them was how they went about perfectly ordinary tasks with the signs of terrible deaths on them, or wrapped in shrouds instead of clothing. They moved slowly, dreamlike, in and around the ghostly houses and buildings that were only half there, chopping wood, cooking, washing and yet, not really accomplishing anything.

  And then, finally, she saw what she was looking for, the signs that these people had been victims of the Icehart. An entire village full of people, many of them, men, women, children and even infants in the arms of some of the women. All of them with ice-rimed faces and hair, skin frost-covered, and wearing, not shrouds, but ordinary clothing that was also ice-coated.

  She drifted closer to them, letting the eddies of the crowds carry her toward them. Finally she was in among them, and paused, then stood completely still, her eyes on her feet. It was very cold among these people, as if they still exhaled the freezing breath of the thing that had killed them.

  One of the men finally noticed her. He sat knotting a net, or seeming to anyway, although the net never got any bigger. Of course it didn't. Nothing ever changed here. Nothing ever would.

  “Do I know you?” he asked, with a vague frown.

  She took care not to show any interest. That would point her out as being different, and that would be bad. “Do you?” she replied dully. “I do not remember…” Not remembering was a safe answer.

  “Are you from my village?” He looked around at the others like him. “We all seem to be here. I think something happened, although…” Now it was his turn to trail off his words as uncertainty washed over him.

  Hmm, he might not even remember dying. “What village is that?” she asked as if she really did not care.

  “Inari,” he said promptly. “This is Inari. Although…it does not look like Inari.” He faltered. “I do not remember Inari having this much fog.”

  “I am not from Inari,” she replied quickly. “I do not think you could know me.” She sidled away from him before he could ask many more questions, leaving him staring at the half-finished net in his hands.

  She moved farther along, down something like a path, to the next village. The people here displayed similar signs of death by freezing. With luck, this was the second village that had been the Icehart's victim. This time, her quarry was a woman doing laundry, washing out shirts that showed no sign of dirt, spreading them to dry on gray-leaved bushes, Once again, she waited until the woman herself asked, “Do I know you?” It seemed this village had been named Purmo. Again, the villagers had no idea what had killed them, or even that they were dead. It was enough to make anyone weep with the pathos of it, but Aleksia did not dare show any such signs of emotion.

  The third time, although the village was obviously the third victim of the Icehart's power, it took several tries before she could find anyone to talk to her. These villagers were already forgetting who and what they had been; most of them ignored her as if she was a buzzing fly. Finally, one of the children spoke to her; its little face contorted into a mask of concentration as it tried to remember just where it was supposed to be. T
his was the village of Kolho, or rather, this was what the villagers thought should be Kolho.

  Now she had the names of all three villages. Unfortunately, no one had seen what it was that had killed them. For that matter, most of them were not yet aware that they were dead.

  She made her way back to the riverbank, slipping around the villages, avoiding the spirits as much as she could. Now was the time to run, and swiftly, before she was unmasked; she had gotten what she came for, but this was the hardest part of the quest.

  Getting back. Because the things guarding Tuonela were not to keep things out, they

  were meant to keep things from escaping. Why should the guardians here be concerned about

  anything getting in? Whoever tried would only end up dead and remain here anyway.

  Not always true…but true enough. Some of the great Heroes of Sammi legends had