[500 Kingdoms 04] - The Snow Queen

by Mercedes Lackey

  She looked back at the mirror to see shadows slipping through the tree trunks. Ah. There they are. It took two to make this dance, and Kay’s little friend Gerda, the girl who loved him with all her heart, who was currently trudging toward the next episode in her own little drama, was the coconspirator in The Traditional Path that ended in a Clockwork Artificer. Her nature was as sweet as her face, her will as pliant as a grass-stem and her devotion to Kay unswerving, no matter how often he neglected her. She needed redemption almost as much as Kay did. Such women married their coldhearted beloveds, made every excuse for them, smoothed their paths to perdition, turned a blind eye to horrors and even, sometimes, participated in the horrors themselves on the assumption that the Beloved One knew best. Gerda required a spine, in short, and an outlook rather less myopic than the one she currently possessed. And this little quest she was on was about to give her one.

  This had all been very carefully orchestrated, because if a Godmother didn’t manipulate the participants in these dramas, The Tradition most certainly would. Everything had been planned to a nicety. Aleksia had called up a magical snowstorm in a very limited area around Kay’s house. She had done so at an hour when she knew that Gerda would be in her little bedroom, probably looking out of her window, sighing at Kay’s. When the snow began, Aleksia caused a gust of wind to drive a few hard snow pellets against Gerda’s window to ensure that if she had not been looking out it before, she most certainly would be when Aleksia’s flying sleigh came swooping out of the sky. It all worked, of course. As Kay studied the unseasonable snowflakes, Gerda was in place, watching from the window in plenty of time to see the sleigh land. Gerda saw Aleksia speaking to a dumbfounded Kay, saw her offer him her hand, saw her settle him in beside her, bundled in white furs, and saw the sleigh rocket off again.

  Nor was that all. No Godmother worth her wand would leave things so half done. Aleksia had contacted one of the village Witches and made sure Gerda knew who had taken Kay, and in general, where he was.

  Poor Gerda! Screwing up her courage to visit the Witch in the first place was only the beginning of her ordeal. She would never have believed it if she had been told the truth, that her childhood sweetheart was turning into a remote and arrogant elitist all by himself, so she had been told that the Snow Queen had done something to him as a child, made him coldhearted, so that she could whisk him off now. Gerda had also been told that she, and she alone, could melt Kay’s heart and save him with her love—and being a young maiden of romantic nature, and wanting it to be true, she absolutely believed what she had been told.

  Up until she had entered the forest, things had been relatively easy for her. Her sweet nature made people like her and want to help her. She had actually done very little walking up to this point; farmers had given her rides in carts, horsemen had taken her up behind them, peddlers had offered her space in their wagons. The trek into this forest, however, had been made without meeting anyone who could help, and at this point, she was footsore and very weary. Now she was about to find out that the quest was going to have a lot more hardship involved in it than a few blisters.

  The shadows flitting through the woods, having ascertained that the girl was all alone, had surrounded her. Now they pounced—because they were robbers, and she was very tasty-looking prey.

  The robbers materialized from among the tree trunks, crowing with glee at having caught such a pretty little prize. Gerda froze in abject fear; her mouth opened in a silent scream of terror and her face went as white as frost.

  There. Nicely managed.

  Aleksia dismissed the vision in the mirror with a thought and a simple wave of her hand, then turned to Kay. She schooled her face into an expressionless mask. She must seem as remote as a snow statue now. Mostly she was feeling a mixture of amusement and annoyance. Amusement, because Kay had no idea he was not unique, that he was treading a path already worn down by countless others. Annoyance, because, well, Kay was Kay.

  “It is lonely here, because that is what you asked for,” she said, crisply, thinking that she was going to be only too glad to have this over and done with. He was intelligent enough, or so she hoped, that she would not have to go through this speech more than once. “Or do you fail to remember?”

  “Remember?” Kay’s handsome brow furled. And he was a handsome young fellow, as blond and blue-eyed as Gerda. If his chiseled features habitually wore an expression as cold and forbidding as that on the marble bust of a religious fanatic—when he wasn’t pouting like a spoiled child told there was no candy forthcoming—that didn’t make the arrangement of his features less pleasing. If his natural complexion was too fair to wear black well, he was certainly handsome enough in other colors. And on the rare occasion that he smiled, his face was quite transformed, and showed exactly why Gerda had fallen in love. There was a heart in there. It just needed waking up. And if anyone could wake it, it would be Aleksia. This was not the first such guest she’d had in the Palace of Ever-Winter, and he would not be the last.

  “Yes. Remember.” Aleksia looked down at him from the lofty height of her “ice” throne—carved crystal made to look like spires and shards of ice that was cunningly provided with a spell that made it warm as a living thing when she sat on it, but as cold as what it looked like if anyone else dared set derriere to seat.

  Kay had, of course, made the attempt, and been discomfited before he got much of a chance to make himself at home. She had watched, invisible, as he had given up after not too very long.

  He was always cold, here. The very food was cold, or lukewarm at best. His bed was cold at night and did not warm up until his shivering body warmed it. The temperature in the rooms he roamed was always chill. His clothing was, unlike hers, just a trifle…thin; the fur trim did nothing but look soft, and the velvet was not thick enough to keep the chill away. Hers, when she must share the same space as he did, was warm and sometimes fur-lined; even her hands were kept warm—with a tiny touch of magic.

  He, who had always thought that Winter brought perfection, who preferred Winter because it brought snowflakes, glass-smooth ponds and all ugliness covered with pure white, now was coming to find that he did not desire the cold nearly as much as he had thought.

  He looked baffled; she sighed with feigned impatience. “The night when you and Gerda saw the falling star,” she elaborated. “You both made wishes. You wished that you could go somewhere far from people, where you would not be bothered anymore, and where you could have time for your studies and inventions.” She waved a hand at the implied expanse of the Palace beyond the throne room. “You wished that it would always be Winter, so that perfection could be preserved. You desired that you should be served invisibly, imperceptibly, so that nothing could intrude on your thoughts. Here you have all that. I fail to see why you are less than content.” She made a shooing motion. “Go. Study. I brought you here so that you could create wonders. Leave me in peace until you have something to show me.”

  Long habit made it possible for her to repress her smile as Kay slouched out of the room. His shoulders were hunched, his hands balled into fists at his sides. He was angry but at the moment, he was not sure who to be angry with. Himself? He had gotten what he asked for. Her? She had given him what he asked for. As yet, he did not look any deeper than that. She hoped that he would, that he would see the fundamental wrongness of what he wanted, and why. Otherwise—well, something else would have to be done about him.

  Any urge to smile faded once he was gone; she did not want to have to think about what would happen if she could not salvage him. She failed very rarely, but when she did fail, it meant she must act as an evil magician would—drain him of the magic building around him and place him somewhere that it could not build again. With some primitive tribe perhaps, but certainly in a land where he did not know the language and could not ever become a Clockwork Artificer. This would effectively ruin two lives, his and the girl’s.

  She shook her head to clear it of the melancholy thought. She had not
lost yet. She was not even close to that point.

  She surveyed her surroundings with a sigh. Other than the benches around the walls, the only two pieces of furniture were the clear crystal throne and the clear ice mirror. She would have used crystal there, too—except that she was the Ice Fairy. The Tradition made it so much easier to enchant things if they were made of ice.

  Dear gods, she was tired to death of ice.

  She left the throne room, moving silently as the kiss of snow through the long white corridors of her Palace. She, of course, could see the servants polishing, cleaning, making sure nothing marred the pristine white surfaces. The walls alternated smooth panels with carved ones, bas-reliefs of mountains, snow-covered forests, iced-over lakes, ice-caves. No humans appeared in these carvings, only the birds and animals of Winter. White Bears, foxes, deer, white Gyrfalcons, white Peregrines, snow-hares. She paused at the carving of her very own mountain and put her hand to the peak. The magic recognized her, and the entire panel slid aside. Scented warmth billowed out to embrace her as she stepped into her suite of rooms.

  Here, at last, in her quarters, where no one was allowed to come but her Brownie servants, there was not one speck of white. It was all fire colors, the warmest of scarlets and browns and golds, like the red, beating heart of the Palace. The sweet scent of applewood wreathed around her. There was a huge hearth where there was always a fire burning, and standing beside windows that looked out over the trackless snow around her home were delicately nurtured plants in terracotta pots. She had, in effect, her own garden, complete with trees that reached to the lofty ceiling and gave the lie to the name Ever-Winter.

  If she had not had that, she would have gone mad. Doubtless, nearly every other Ice Fairy had felt the same, since the trees and the warm private rooms had been here when she was first apprenticed—and it took a long time to grow potted trees that tall. Aleksia had changed very little except the color scheme; Veroushkha, the previous Godmother, had favored deep rose-pinks rather than scarlet and brown.

  Aleksia moved forward into the embrace of her rooms, then waited while one of the maidservant Brownies unlaced her gown and slid it from her shoulders where it pooled around her feet. She shook her hair free of the crystal-topped pins, and the Brownie wrapped her in a soft, quilted-silk robe. She stood before her fire for a moment, then settled into a nest of cushions, to reflect on the odd turns of her life that had brought her here.

  Aleksia was unique among the Godmothers; most of them were involved with reprimands and rewards in equal measure. Like all of them, she had been beset by a plague of magic when she had been apprenticed by Veroushka. In her case, had all the surrounding circumstances matched up, she would have been a Snow White. She had everything that was needed: she was pale as a Snow Maiden; her hair was as white as the moon; she had a sister as rosy as a flower in Summer. Their mother died in their infancy; their father remarried a Witch.

  However, their new stepmother was as kind as anyone could have asked. When her own child died in infancy, she did not turn vile to the little girls. Instead, she cherished them the more. As they grew, she tried to find husbands for them that they would like—and both understood that, as they were princesses, the needs of the Kingdom came before their own. Both were prepared to wed dutifully.

  But their Kingdom had a very good Godmother, who made sure to intervene at all the right times. She counseled Aleksia’s stepmother when the baby died, spending long hours with her that Aleksia only now understood. She spent equally long hours with the nannies and governesses, so that Aleksia and Katya grew up as decent human beings rather than spoiled, pampered brats.

  And it all paid off, although at first it certainly had not seemed that way when Katya was stricken with a terrible wasting illness. Everyone had despaired. Until a strange fellow appeared, claiming to be a doctor—and cured her.

  She could still remember how she had been so suspicious of this fellow, who had looked nothing like any doctor she had ever seen. He had looked like a cross between a gentleman fallen on hard times and an utter vagabond. She had been sure he was a fraud.

  He was nothing of the sort, of course. He was another of that massive tribe of wandering Princes, who scoured the Five Hundred Kingdoms hoping that something would happen to give them their own happy ending. He had, in the proper fashion, befriended a Salmon, who had advised him to undergo a quest to this very Palace, the Palace of Ever-Winter, and beg for one of the fruits of the trees of what was then Veroushka’s chamber. Which he did. And, of course, the fruit was the magical cure for Katya’s wasting disease.

  The Prince, having no Kingdom of his own, was overjoyed to settle in theirs and become a son to their father and stepmother. Katya adored him. Prince Kobe was kind, clever, and if not handsome, was certainly not bad to look on. He loved music and books, preferring them to hunting and hawking, although he certainly knew one end of a blade from the other, and could fight very well if he needed to.

  The trouble was, the music and books he adored were the same ones Aleksia loved. They both excelled at chess and games of strategy, while Katya found pleasure only in watching. Kobe went out of his way to be kind to Aleksia, and Aleksia found herself, all unwilling, watching her sister’s happiness bitterly. She grew thin, and wretched, fighting the impetus to hate her sister and desire Prince Kobe. And everything was in place for Aleksia to become the despised jealous sister who murders her sibling and steals her husband.

  She passed her hand over her eyes for a moment, still feeling the ache of that terrible jealousy. She had been poised equally between killing her sister and killing herself.

  Until Veroushka showed up with another plan entirely, for now there was more than enough magic building up around Aleksia to fuel her spells for three or four times her own lifetime, what with not one, but two Traditional paths twined around her.

  Veroushka proposed to apprentice Aleksia. Desperate for anything that would remove her from this intolerable situation—though she herself had not yet understood that she was being forced into it—Aleksia quickly agreed to go with her.

  And it was here, in this Palace, that Aleksia learned what really steered the lives and fortunes of the people of the Five Hundred Kingdoms.

  The Tradition, that implacable, faceless magical force that attempted to turn the lives of the people of the Five Hundred Kingdoms into timeworn paths dictated by myths and legends, tales and fables, was a force that the Godmothers in their turn did their best to manipulate and sometimes thwart. Take the well-known tale of the Cinder Girl. Not every girl with a vile stepmother and two equally repugnant stepsisters had an available Prince to rescue her from her life of drudgery, and not every available Prince was…. suitable. Some were children, some were dotards, some were rakes and roués, some were…well, they would have preferred to save a beleaguered stepson from a wicked stepmother. And yet, The Tradition would place incredible magical pressure on those whose lives outwardly conformed to a familiar story.

  It was a Godmother’s task to identify these poor souls, and somehow give them a life free of the further regard of The Tradition. Aleksia’s own Godmother had managed to save her and her sister from attempted murder, by turning their tale from that of Snow White and Rose Red into that of the Wasting Princess. And once it became clear that Aleksia was going the way of the Jealous Sister, Veroushka came to the rescue, as Godmothers had to do when they could.

  Because if they did not…sometimes things could go horribly, horribly wrong. Not only were there Traditional, tragic tales, there were also other dangers. With so much magic building up around the ones whose tales were thwarted by circumstance, they became prey for evil magicians and sorcerers, who would take them and drain the magic for their own use, thus not only killing the hapless victim, but giving themselves more fuel for further vile deeds. And sometimes the object of The Tradition’s regard went to the bad. Or, as in what almost happened to Aleksia, The Tradition forced them into terrible deeds.

  Not every tale has a happy end
ing, after all. Aleksia knew that only too well. She had been witness to some of the terrible endings, having come too late to be of any service. There were few Godmothers up here, and a great deal of territory to cover. She could not be everywhere. And there were places, dark places, even now, where the best she could do was confine the damage.

  And so, most of the Godmothers had the pleasant task of rewarding and helping the deserving, or at least the innocent, as well as administering The Traditional rebukes and punishments to the Villains and preventing as many unhappy endings as they could. There were, of course, no end of Traditional tales about the unworthy getting their comeuppance, and no end of ways some of those people could be redeemed through trials. Or, if they could be caught in time, a few could be recruited into the ranks of the Wizards and Godmothers themselves.

  Magic and the long, long study of tales and lore were the provenance of the Godmothers. They were aided in this by the wide ranks of the Witches and Wizards, the sorcerers and enchantresses, who served as their eyes and ears, and sometimes hands. Veroushka taught Aleksia much, gave her the tools to learn the rest and then—left.

  And Aleksia, feeling as unready as any other who took up the mantle of Fairy Godmother, became the Ice Fairy of the Palace of Ever-Winter.

  But of all of the Godmothers that Aleksia knew, only she was the Fairy Godmother in charge of—for lack of a better term—“Be careful what you wish for.”

  Maybe it was the remoteness of her location. The Palace of Ever-Winter was located high in the mountains, where the snow never melted, which made transportation a bit difficult and visits by those in need of Godmotherly help as much of a trial as the tribulations themselves. But there had been an Ice Fairy—sometimes called the Snow Queen—here at this place for as long as there had been Godmothers, and when Aleksia had been groomed for the position, it had not really seemed such an onerous one. In fact, since she had a rather solitary and slightly aloof nature, it had seemed ideal.