The Princess and the Snowbird

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  “With what?” asked Karl.

  The younger guard opened his mouth, then closed it.

  Karl reached out his hand. “Give it here,” he said.

  The younger guard put his hand into his pocket and handed the jeweled half circlet to Karl.

  “Pretty. Where would a boy from the forest like you get something like this?” he asked. “Stolen, no doubt, from some old merchant or a wealthy man with ancient heritage.” He motioned for the two guards to hold Jens.

  “I didn’t steal it,” Jens said, spitting out blood.

  “No? I think you did. Somewhere in the forest where you live, eh? And I am sure the Hunter will wish to talk to you about it, since he fancies himself the ruler of the north. If there are any who think they have a claim to royalty, he will want to know.”

  “I will tell you where there are more just like it, buried in the forest,” Jens said, thinking quickly. “If you let the girl go.”

  “The girl? The one I caught this morning who turned out to have the aur-magic? You are a friend of hers? Oh-ho!”

  “No,” said Jens, with a sinking feeling. “Please. I only want to help the girl.”

  It was no use. Karl called for rope, and Jens was soon bound with his hands behind his back and his feet tied together.

  Jens told himself to be calm as they dragged him away from the jail, toward the ocean. He might still do something for Liva. If he could talk to the Hunter, convince him of—something. He would not give up.

  By dark, Jens was tied to a post and left alone. The smell of salt and death was all around him, and he could hear the lap of water near him. Soon he could also hear squeaking and scratching.

  Rats.

  He could not see them, but he could feel them coming closer. And then he remembered that rats were wild animals, with aur-magic.

  Jens held himself absolutely still, trying not to breathe any more than he had to, keeping his legs from twitching no matter how much they hurt.

  And the rats stopped.

  They moved around him. He could hear their scurrying little feet, could even hear them dragging meat back with them—and the smell of it, always rank. The remains of a fish that had been left out for several days. Or a dead cat or dog, Jens suspected. But the rats did not sense him. As in the forest, if he made no sound, they did not notice him, because he lacked all magic, and magic was the way they sensed the world around them.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Liva

  WHEN LIVA AWOKE, it was to a terrible pain in her head and a deadening feeling around her throat. The only light came from the cracks in the roof and in the doorway. It was not much, but it was enough to see that the boy was still there with her, in the corner far from the door.

  “Hello?” she said, the human language strange in her ears.

  The boy did not answer.

  Liva struggled with the stone necklace, trying to turn her head this way and that to get it to fall off. But that did not work. At last she forced herself to touch it. It burned, but she threw it off with a supreme effort of will. She did not think that anyone who had less magic than she could have thought of how to fight against it. But at the sound of it dropping to the floor, she breathed relief. Then she moved away from it and slowly toward the boy.

  He pulled himself upright, flattening his back against the wall.

  “I have magic,” she said. She tried to give some to him, but what did not seep out of his wounds, he pressed back at her, as if afraid to take it in.

  “Can you speak?” she asked.

  He began to breathe more quickly, as though the very sound of another human voice frightened him.

  Probing the boy’s magic, Liva found it was cut in several places: on one leg, across a wrist, and in dots over his chest. But he would live.

  “Do you have a name?” Liva asked, as a beginning. “I am Liva.” When he looked up at her, she said her own name again, and pointed to her chest.

  The boy looked away again a moment later, but then he moved an inch closer to her.

  “Tern,” he whispered.

  “Tern,” Liva echoed.

  Beckoning her closer, he used his magic to change his hand from a sturgeon’s fin to a tern’s wing to a lynx’s paw, and then back to a human hand again.

  Liva put out her own hand and did the same simple sequences of changes.

  Tern did the sequence over and over again. At last, Liva realized he was doing it to show her what was wrong with him, not what was right. Whatever had damaged him had made it so that he could not change his whole body, only his left hand and part of his forearm.

  “I understand,” said Liva.

  He kept doing it.

  Liva thought he must have learned the sequence from his mother or father. Now they were gone, and this was all he had left of them.

  There was a scraping at the lock of the door.

  Liva scrambled with her hands to reach for the stone necklace again. She hated how weak it made her feel, but she did not want her captors to know she could remove it, so she put it back around her neck.

  Tern made a soft sound of distress. He curled up in himself, and put his head to his chest, as though that would make him disappear.

  Liva turned to face the person at the door, the necklace swinging around her neck to land on her chest with a burning sensation. A flash of light blinded her for a moment, but she blinked and saw a man, tall and strong, with keenly intelligent eyes and a cruel look. His hair was gray and tied neatly back, his clothes finely cut, and his nails were carefully clipped and clean.

  Liva felt her legs spasm, as if they were trying to run away. She knew him from her dream, but in person he was worse.

  There was something dangerous about him. Not wild, but fierce and unpredictable.

  He looked over Liva and the boy, and gave a chilling, wide smile as he closed the door. Only cracks of light from the wood now showed where he stood.

  “Ah, my young friends have done their work today. They will be well rewarded indeed,” said the man.

  This was the Hunter. Whatever had been done to the boy, he had had a part in it. And since it was very similar to what had been done to her father, Liva felt queasily that perhaps she had also found the man she had wanted vengeance against. But here she was, in jail, with no way of striking at him, her aur-magic damped by the stone necklace, and with responsibility to the boy foremost in her mind.

  She had to save him first.

  The Hunter stepped forward, and the boy began to sob.

  Liva moved between them.

  The Hunter reached for her arm and pulled her to him. “Tell me where you are from and how many others like you are there,” he said, twisting her arm until she was afraid that he would wrench it out of its socket entirely.

  Liva held her lips tightly together and began counting to ten in every animal language she could think of. Anything to keep her mind occupied with something other than fear.

  Then she saw the Hunter take a stone knife out of his belt.

  Her mind went on, counting in the language of the dovekie, but she could feel the tremors beginning in her eyes and moving to her lips, her cheek, her neck, and downward.

  Without a word, the Hunter lunged toward her and sliced with the knife at Liva’s stomach. A shallow cut, but Liva gasped and began to weep. The stone knife had left a hole in her magic. What had been there once was now gone. Suddenly she knew for certain: This was what had been done to her father, a thousand times over.

  The emptiness left behind was worse than pain. Liva wished the Hunter had cut off her arm instead, or taken one of her eyes. She was sick at the thought of how her father must have felt as all sense of magic was taken from him. Liva would always remember what the Hunter’s knife had taken from her.

  It was the language of an owl, including the mating call she had always loved.

  “And now.” The Hunter held out the knife toward the boy.

  Even without being touched by it, Tern fell forward, his whole body s
hivering, his hands behind his back as if they were being held there.

  The Hunter seemed to be enjoying the moment. Certainly he was in no hurry.

  He moved forward slowly.

  Liva took a breath, gathered her strength, and threw herself against his back. There was a satisfying sound of his exhalation of air.

  Then she fell to the side, rolled, and hit the wall.

  She moved gingerly away.

  The Hunter got up, brushing himself off. “Well. You’ve come after him, have you? One of the aur-magic family, eh? A younger cousin, poor, helpless, weak. And you put yourself in danger to save him. Foolish girl. You are hardly older than he is. And you have no defenses against me.”

  He lifted the knife again and moved toward Liva.

  “Take my aur-magic then,” she said. “But let him go.” She nodded to Tern. “You have no use for him now.”

  “Ah, not true. He has aur-magic still,” said the Hunter.

  “He is no threat to you or anyone in this town. He can’t use his aur-magic now for anything that matters,” she said.

  “Anything that matters to you, perhaps. But it is aur-magic for all that, and it is wrong.”

  “What is wrong with having aur-magic, then?” asked Liva.

  “The aur-magic is the way that we are bound to animals and to their world. We will never rise above that beginning so long as we still have aur-magic to remind us of that baser side of ourselves.” He made a fist and slammed it into the open palm of his other hand. “Humans are not animals!”

  Liva stared at him, aware that at that moment he looked more like an animal than any human she had ever seen before, and in the worst possible way. A snarling wolf, in fact, long starved from winter, and eager to attack the first creature it found, no matter what its chances of survival.

  The Hunter grimaced and seemed to consciously make a decision to drop his hands to his sides. He spoke softly. “If we are to grow past what we once were, we must destroy what belongs in the past and move on to the future.”

  “I do not believe I want your future,” said Liva steadily.

  “That is only because you are still caught so much in the past,” said the Hunter. “You have spent all your life as an animal in your aur-magic. But now it is time for you to be human, and this knife will help you become like I am.”

  “As you have helped him?” asked Liva, staring at Tern.

  “Indeed, as I have helped him. Though burning would perhaps help both of you more.” Then the Hunter knocked on the door, and there was a sound of jingling keys.

  “Just as a warning,” said the Hunter casually, not even turning to speak to her directly, “if you escape from this place, I will not only see the boy burned, but I will make sure that he suffers terribly first. I will take the rest of his aur-magic slowly and cruelly. And he will call for you to help him, so that you will feel his death on your heart for the rest of your days.”

  For all her attempts at disguising herself, Liva knew she had shown too much strength, even with the necklace around her. No doubt anyone else wearing it would have been unable to resist in any way, and she had done so at every possible turn. She had not thought of the price she would pay for it. Perhaps the Hunter was right. She was used to dealing with animals, and in a battle with an animal, there was no subterfuge. It was only a matter of which was larger and faster and fiercer.

  But animals did not take hostages, either.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jens

  JENS’S HANDS WERE ragged and bleeding from pulling on the ropes, and his feet were numb with pressure when he heard a group of men coming toward him. His blindfold was torn off, and Jens had time to register that it was still dark, but then he found himself looking into the face of the Hunter.

  “Karl told me that you tried to help the girl in the jail escape. You bribed the guards with a very valuable item.” The Hunter held up the jeweled half circlet and tossed it back and forth from hand to hand as if it were no more than an ordinary seashell. “Tell me about her and I will give this back,” he offered.

  “Why do you want to know about her?” Jens asked. “Are you afraid of her power?” He did everything he could not to sound frightened. Liva was still alive, and that was good. But he did not want to give any information to the Hunter that might harm her. He certainly did not believe that the Hunter would give him the half circlet, or anything else he promised.

  The Hunter put away the half circlet and took out his stone knife. “She has a good measure of the aur-magic, I will admit. But I have this stone knife to cut into her. I will cut into her again and again, if necessary. And if that stone breaks on her, I will get another. And another. I assure you, she will not escape me. No, I am not afraid of her power. I am merely curious about how she has eluded me for so long. And I think you may have some answers.”

  Jens thought of the bear and the hound and how they had protected their daughter, taking her so far to the north, making sure she had no contact with humans. He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about her,” he lied.

  With a shrug, the Hunter took the knife and put the point of it at the base of Jens’s left eye. “Tell me her name,” he said. “Only her name. That is all I ask. It is such a small thing, to save your eye, is it not?”

  “Whose name?” asked Jens, and he kept his voice steady. He kept his body proudly steady, too, though the knife cut into his face and the blood dripped down his chin. But the Hunter leaned closer to him and stared at the wound.

  Jens realized in that moment that he should have pretended that magic was pouring out of him. The Hunter expected it from everyone else.

  “The rats did not touch you. The knife cuts only your body. You have no magic at all,” the Hunter said, his voice half in awe. “I have been waiting to find another born like myself—”

  He leaned in closer to Jens and touched lightly on Jens’s naked chest. Jens felt as if there were tiny pinpricks in a pattern around his heart. “No, not born this way, after all,” he said. He paused a long moment, and Jens pressed himself to silence, despite his curiosity. Then the Hunter shook a finger.

  “We met once, years ago,” he said. “You may not remember me, but I remember you. I was impatient with waiting to find others without magic. I knew that they must be born somewhere, but perhaps too far from here. And so I began to make others without magic on my own, so that I could see how they grew.

  “Many times I have wondered if I would come across you again. I should have known the first moment I touched you. I remember it all so very clearly.” The Hunter let out a breath slowly, and his face looked as if he was in ecstasy.

  The hairs on the back of Jens’s neck rose.

  “You look like her, you know, especially around the lips. She had such beautiful, pale, pouting lips. Has anyone ever told you that about your mother?”

  Jens went cold. It was not possible that the Hunter had known his mother. She had died so long ago.

  But the Hunter went on speaking. “Would you like to hear of her death? I suppose you must have heard some tale or other as you were growing up, but your father would have withheld the whole truth from you. He likely did not want to remember it himself. But the other villagers, they knew some of it. Did they treat you badly as a child? Did they make sure you knew you were damaged? Your mother had the aur-magic, though her village did not know of it. That is why I must constantly patrol all villages too close to forests, because those within them are far more likely to have the worst of the magics.”

  Jens did not answer. He would not give any sign that he believed the Hunter, not one.

  “She had hair as pale as yours, though cleaner and better kept. She always wore it in braids circled above her head. She was tall and lean, her hands rough with work. She did not even try to hide her aur-magic. She seemed to love doves above all other animals. She would make little figures of doves, with absurdly wide white wings, and set them to fly around the village.

  “Your father found her aur-ma
gic attractive. He loved her too much—enough even to let her bear a son who would have the same aur-magic that his mother did.”

  What? Jens had never had magic.

  “I came to the town and saw that she was near birth. I waited until the time had come upon her. Your father had gone out hunting, you see, to make sure he had meat when she needed to rebuild her strength. And the other women in the village went to get water for her. But when they saw me, they did not stop me. They kept away as I approached her hut.”

  No, Jens’s mind screamed.

  “I came to the door and had only to put my knife against it before it parted for me. She lay on the floor, wrapped in wool blankets, and next to her was a small, squalling red face. There were still streaks of salty sweat lining her face from the effort of birth. Her husband was not with her, and she would have done anything to draw me from her child. She thought to save you from my stone knife, to protect you and your aur-magic, and to make sure that the world still had the gift of her ancestors.”

  All Jens’s life, the villagers had told of how his mother had died because of him, and how he had lain with her body for three days until his father returned from a hunting trip and found them both.

  And all this time, Jens had felt guilty for his mother’s death. But it had nothing to do with him. She had not died because of him. She might never have died—if not for the Hunter.

  “She saw me and she got to her feet with great effort,” the Hunter went on, his eyes distant. “I think she believed her aur-magic would disguise you.

  “She stood in front of you. ‘And so you have come for me,’ she said.

  “‘You must consider it a compliment, for I do not bother with those who are unimportant,’ I said to her.

  “She did not answer me, but tried to push aur-magic at me to throw me off balance, or perhaps even to kill me. I think she was not so stupid, though, as to think it would work.

  “I held up the knife, and it cut to pieces the aur-magic she tried to press toward me. Then I took the blade to her flesh. The magic dripped out of her, but she did not cry out in terror or pain. Instead she looked at me with pity.