[500 Kingdoms 04] - The Snow Queen

by Mercedes Lackey

  No one dared to molest the young woman after that; the robber girl had been schooled in violence since she could crawl and had no compunction about enforcing her demands with whatever weapon came to hand. In particular, she was masterful with knives, and every man in her father’s band knew she could beat him to a pulp, then slice him up into ribbons if she chose. They already looked to her as her father’s heir, and while it was barely possible that one of them might challenge her, it was more likely that such a man would be beaten and become her right hand and partner.

  Aleksia had plans for her in good time, but she was not quite old enough yet. It amused her, though, to think of this wild girl righting all the wrongs of her father’s band and more as a Champion—yes, and turning the entire band from robbers into freedom fighters. There was a tyrant ruling over the Kingdom of Svenska—one of those things that Aleksia had not been able to prevent; it was not yet time for him to be deposed, but that time was coming soon, and Valeri the Robber Girl would be just the woman to do the job.

  That was at least three years away. First, Valeri had to do a bit of traveling and discover the truth for herself. Then it would be a matter of waiting until her father came to the end of all Robber Chiefs and she was called home. Yes, three years away, at the least. Perhaps as much as five.

  So now the Robber Girl was acting as she always had: deep down, fundamentally kind, but selfish, helping herself to what she wanted. At the moment she was wearing Gerda’s fine clothing; Gerda had been carelessly given some of the Robber Girl’s leathers and furs—which were actually going to stand her in much better stead on the road ahead than her original clothing would have. Gerda needed to win Valeri’s sympathy and to harden a little more under privation. In another week or so, it would be time for the next step.

  So Gerda was sorted. As for Kay…

  She passed her hand over the mirror and looked for him. He was not in his workshop, nor the library. Finally, she found him at the window in his bedroom, staring out at the snow, an expression of bleak loneliness on his face. On the windowseat beside him was a half-finished drawing, not of some clockwork mechanism, but of a girl’s face. It wasn’t very well done in comparison to his clockwork plans; in fact it was hardly recognizable. But the hair gave it away as Gerda.

  Well, things were coming along nicely there, as well.

  Time to look over the rest of her charges.

  This took a bit more effort. Concentrating hard, she called up the image of the energies of The Tradition, silently telling her mirror to overlay them on a map. It looked rather like a many-colored fog-bank over the landscape rendered in extreme miniature, and she saw a problem almost immediately.

  And just in time; a huge surge of Traditional power showed her where the trouble spot was, and she followed the train into the deep forest outside the tiny village of Gottsbergen in the Kingdom of Svenska. She made the mirror backtrack in time a little—it could look into the past, but unfortunately not move forward into the future. She watched as a cruel woman in Svenska sent her stepchildren out into the forest after nuts—it was, of course, just a little too early for nuts, but they didn’t know that. They were already far too deep into the woods to be anything but lost. This could go badly very quickly. With that much Traditional power building so quickly around them, they were a far-too-tempting target for the Tyrant, or to be more precise, the Tyrant’s pet magician. He would not even have to do anything, just allow them to die…or be killed. They could last for several days in the woods, getting hungrier, colder, with the power building all around them.

  She firmed her jaw, feeling a flush, not quite of anger, but of something close to it. This was why she had become a Godmother. Not for the sulky Kays. For innocents like these. And she put everything else out of her mind but the need to save them.

  Using her second mirror, while she kept an eye on the children in the first, Aleksia searched for someone who could help. A Witch, a Sorceress, one of the creatures of the Faean, like a Giant or a Unicorn, even a Wise Beast—

  But the woods were singularly empty. Blast it. Blast the Tyrant and his pet magician all to perdition! Between his purely mortal evil and his magician’s ability to track rivals for the pleasure of eliminating them and to hunt out the arcane beasties and other races for pleasure and profit, if there was anyone about, he, she or it was in hiding. For all practical purposes, there was no one nearby. She would have to work some magic at a distance. She could use the very magic boiling about these children to fuel it. But first—first, she made sure there was nothing about that could harm them in the time it would take her to search for a way to get them help. She set an “aversion” spell about them, that would make anything carnivorous avoid them. Crude, but effective.

  Sure now that they were safe for the short term, she set about finding a solution that would make The Tradition “happy.” In the second mirror, she searched for what she needed, and after a moment, found it in the Kingdom of Daneland. Just over the border was another, quieter eddy of Traditional power building up, where a lonely cottage stood, owned by a woodcutter and his wife. As the babes searched the underbrush fruitlessly for hazelnuts, she siphoned off some of the magic around them and cast the All Paths Are One Path spell directly ahead of them, putting the terminus in Daneland, just at the gate of that little cottage. She made sure the magical route would bring them there just at sunset. Then she waited, watching, holding both ends of the All Paths spell in her mind, keeping it balanced and ready; if someone else stumbled on that path at either end, it could make things very complicated indeed. They were already complicated enough. She was juggling two spells at a great distance, and one of them was potentially dangerous.

  When both of the children had finally put their feet on the magic path, she dismissed the aversion spell, then let go of the terminus at Svenska—with a sigh of relief, for more reasons than one. Among other things, now they were entirely in her power. Neither the Tyrant’s magician, nor any other, could interfere with them until she chose to let them go. Now, all she had to do was watch. If anyone from that cottage accidentally left and got tangled up in her spell, no worries; it only went straight back to the cottage.

  But no one did, and in the blue dusk, two tired children, crying because they were lost and hungry, stumbled out of her spell, out of the dark and ominous woods, right onto a lovely little soft path that ended in a cozy cottage. And the middle-aged, childless couple who had longed all these years for children of their own, heard them and came rushing out—reacting instinctively and without hesitation—to the sound of children in distress.

  They could not understand each others’ language, of course. That wouldn’t matter. In a few weeks, the little ones would be prattling in Dansk, filling the lives of their adoptive parents with joy. They would have forgotten their stepmother, and as for their father, well, he would become something vaguely remembered in dreams.

  And as for the wicked stepmother…

  Another day, Aleksia decided. She wanted to think on an appropriate punishment, in case what her stupid husband came up with was not enough. Or in case she managed to feign innocence and convince him that she was not to blame.

  Having her own child taken by gypsies might serve the purpose…

  She would have to look into that. Then again…there might be a simpler way.

  It was very difficult to deal directly with The Tradition. You could not exactly “communicate” with it, and trying to do anything by brute force was a little like a flea trying to shift a warhorse. But if the flea bit the horse in exactly the right place at the right time…

  She spent a good hour putting together a subtle spell. It was nothing like a compulsion, more like—a suggestion.

  She turned it loose and it settled around the countryside like a cobweb, much too subtle for the Tyrant’s Wizard to detect. And if he did, he would not care about it. This had nothing to do with him, nor with the Tyrant.

  But from this moment on, every storyteller, every woman reciting tales
to put the little ones to sleep, every gaggle of girls about a fire, every twopenny musician singing for his supper would be telling tales of wicked stepmothers who got what they deserved. This was the flea biting the warhorse, for the more these tales were recited, spun and sung, the more The Tradition would be impelled to make them come true. And who, at the moment, was the wickedest stepmother in all of the Kingdom?

  Aleksia smiled with a certain smug satisfaction.

  With that crisis averted, Aleksia continued to look into the Kingdoms for which she was responsible, following the flows of the power generated by The Tradition. Everywhere that there was a situation that corresponded to a tale, a myth or a legend, The Tradition accrued power to force it down that Traditional Path to The Traditional Ending. Sometimes that was just fine; Godmothers didn’t have to intervene. In fact, there was an Ella Cinders story waiting to be recreated in Eisenberg—wicked stepmother, nasty stepsisters, lovely young girl turned into a servant, all in the capitol of Konigsberg. The girl was the right age to be married to the Prince, the Prince had no particular sweethearts and the King and Queen were not at all averse to him wedding a commoner if his heart took him there. It just needed a little more time to percolate, as it were, and then all it would need was Aleksia’s timely appearance and just enough adversity thrown in their path to make the happily ever after all the more satisfying. She smiled to herself as she contemplated the poor girl scrubbing pots at the hearth. She should have been sad, but somehow she was able to take pleasure in small things. The Tradition was truly working hard on this one—if she had been any sweeter, any more self-sacrificing, any better-tempered, she would have been sickening.

  This, of course, was one of her rare ones.

  The list of her usual headaches, however, went much longer.

  There was a woman who was so much a shrew to her long-suffering husband that she was legendary to everyone around her. The Traditional force building around her was such that Aleksia judged it was time to let it take its course. But she made a mental note to keep an eye on the old man, lest her punishment overflow onto him.

  What would be best? There were a number of things in the area that she could put into the shrew’s way.

  The neighbors, she decided, finally. She wove another subtle spell and set that in motion—the idea that it would be a fine trick to play on the nag, to put her in a position where her sharp tongue dug herself a deeper and deeper hole until she found herself in real trouble. The only one with any sympathy for her then would be her long-suffering husband, who, strangely enough, still loved her, despite being mocked, ridiculed and berated without end. Well, there was no accounting for taste. He would save her or he would leave her; in either case, he would no longer be subject to her abuse.

  The Tyrant, however, was more troubling. With his punishment at least three years in the future, and with The Tradition moving now to keep him in his place, she considered that there ought to be something she could do to ease the situation of his people. At the moment, he was grinding them into poverty, and The Tradition wasn’t helping. Tyrants did not get good weather and bountiful crops. Tyrants got late Springs and early Winters, too much rain or not enough, and when their peasantry could not produce bountiful crops, Tyrants took it out on them, adding torture and murder to the hardship of semistarvation.

  This, of course, tended to produce Heroes and Champions, but it was dreadfully hard on the people themselves.

  Tapping one finger on her lips as she considered the image of the Tyrant himself, seated rigidly on his throne, Aleksia wondered what she could do to ease their lot. Interestingly, this man was no usurper; he had come to this throne legitimately.

  Well, after a fashion, anyway. The King had managed to die without an heir, and that was entirely due to the current Tyrant. Benevolent though the old king had been, he had also been weak. His nephew had had no difficulty whatsoever in persuading him to put off marriage, meanwhile ingratiating himself to the old man and all his advisors in order to be named Crown Prince over all the other claimants. A little judicious spending, a bribe here, the assurance of reward there, the creation of a small private army, and when the King died, the Crown Prince was virtually rushed onto the throne by the greedy and corrupt Court.

  Then, when the new King proved to be something other than what had been expected, it was too late. Because the new King had known very well that a man who takes one bribe will take many, and a man who seeks his own preferment over the good of his country can be counted on to turn his coat whenever anyone offers him something he wants.

  So…the problem before Aleksia was how to distract him. “Show me those upon whom he depends,” she ordered the mirror.

  There were the usual types. The Tyrant did not much care for fighting, but he was very smart about how he dealt with the need to go to battle. He had put a General in charge of his armies who lived for conquest and blood—but was not at all interested in the tedium of ruling.

  Aleksia frowned. The General was a simple sadist. He knew what he wanted—free rein to allow his men to run roughshod over the populace. He got it often enough, whenever the Tyrant saw the need for an object-lesson. No hope there; there was nothing that anyone could offer the General that he did not already have.

  The Tyrant’s advisors were all very shrewd as well as suspicious, shrewd enough to know that none of them stood a chance of deposing their Master alone, suspicious enough not to trust any of the others to help with a palace coup. That was a pity; it would have been the ideal solution.

  The Magician was content to enjoy the fruits of his Master’s success. Like the General, he had what he wanted: a luxurious life, the freedom to pursue whatever line of research in magic that he fancied, regardless of how blackly evil it was, and a steady supply of victims upon whom to experiment. Like the General, he had no interest at all in ruling a country, and his ambitions all centered on success in the Dark Arts.

  But then, as she let the viewpoint roam, the mirror showed her someone she had not expected.

  Ensconced in a tower chamber was a fellow in elaborate robes of black and purple. Surrounding him were all the trappings of a Wizard, although Aleksia knew he could not be anything of the sort, since there was not one jot of Traditional power about him, nor any other sort of magic so far as she could tell. This intrigued her enough that she issued orders not to be disturbed and had the Brownies bring her dinner in her rooms.

  Who are you, my little man? she asked him silently. The Tyrant’s Magician did not seem to consider him a threat nor a rival. She had never heard even a rumor of this fellow, who, from the crockery piled outside his door, seldom left his tower.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening watching him, and finally enough of what he did struck a chord with her that she realized she knew what he was.

  An Alchemist.

  But this was more than merely an Alchemist. He was clever enough not to call himself one, hence the Wizardly trappings, although the Magician visited him once, and it was obvious that although the Magician considered the Alchemist an inferior, he also respected the Alchemist’s abilities.

  Once again, the Tyrant had been clever enough to find someone who could be given everything that he wanted. Now, whether he was also clever enough not to waste his time in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone—which was a metaphysical concept anyway and did nothing to transmute base metals to gold—or whether he really did realize it was a metaphysical concept, he was not involving himself with crucibles and alembics and furnaces. She watched him, instead, making very useful things such as poisons and antidotes—cures for the unfortunate diseases that men who indulged themselves in certain vices were prone to—and watched with extreme interest as the Tyrant appeared for what must have been his daily dose of a concoction of at least thirty common poisons. No wonder he didn’t employ a taster! His Alchemist gave him immunity to anything but a truly exotic poison, and probably had the antidote handy for anything truly exotic. Exotic poisons tended
to kill slowly, leaving plenty of time to administer an antidote. This was sheer brilliance.

  Once the Tyrant was gone again, the Alchemist turned to another pursuit entirely. Aleksia watched as he secured the door, bolting it from the inside, pulled a velvet pall off of some object and settled himself into a comfortable chair in front of it. He imbibed some sort of concoction of his own…and went into a trance. His head fell back so that Aleksia could see that he was staring into an enormous crystal ball.

  Now, as every Godmother knew, it was possible for perfectly ordinary people to have visions of the future, if they took the right sorts of potions. You had to be very disciplined—which this Alchemist clearly was—and you had to be good enough to know how to sort the hallucinations from the real visions. Usually these visions were not very accurate once you tried to look more than three months into the future, but for someone like the Tyrant, that would be enough.

  “Well!” Aleksia said aloud, staring into her mirror with probably the same expression that the Alchemist was wearing as he stared into his crystal ball.

  But it just so happened that anyone who did this sort of parlor trick could also be very easily deceived. And that gave Aleksia precisely the opportunity she was looking for.

  After all, the great crystal was a form of glass. She could make him see whatever she wanted him to see. In his drugged state, he would be very suggestible, and his powers of discrimination would be set aside. Besides, he would have no reason to suppose that anyone else would be sending him visions. Why should there be? There was no reason to think that anyone could, or would, interfere. No one knew about him but his Master and the Magician, and neither wanted him deceived.