This was a very great risk. The North Wind was not a mere human, and certainly was not one of the lesser elementals. But—
“She will punish you, even if I do not,” she told the North Wind, her voice silky with menace. She rather thought that her deception would hold up, since the North Wind had never dealt with her before. It did not know what she would—or could—not do. It had no idea of her power, and what was more, it was used to dealing with something that was completely evil. “You know this, or you would not be so afraid. And you know that if you see her, she will have that out of your mind—you cannot possibly conceal such thing from one such as her.”
The North Wind wailed; she had thought it was afraid before, but now it was nearly mindless with fear. I must hide from her! Hide! It made as if to flee, but Aleksia still had its magical “leash,” the summoning, and she metaphorically jerked it back to her side. It flattened itself against the ground and tried to blend in with the snow at her feet. Whatever, whoever this Witch was, she must be terrible and powerful to frighten the North Wind like this. Not for the first time, she wondered if it was a demigod. If so, she would need some help in being rid of it.
Then again, there were two Heroes and an apprentice out there. If she had not killed the Heroes outright, there could very well be some help here for her. She must definitely research this in the archives. If there had ever been a similar situation, she needed to find it, and figure out how to make The Tradition work for her.
Meanwhile, given that the North Wind was so terrified of her and the Witch, that it would do anything, she was going to take full advantage of the situation. “If you run, she will chase you. If you hide, she will find you.” She smiled nastily. “I would.”
By now, the poor North Wind was shaking so hard that all the icicles of his hair and beard were rattling together like glass reeds in the wind, and the one on his nose broke off with a metallic “chink.” What will I do? What will I do? It clawed desperately at her hem with translucent blue hands. Under any other circumstances she would have felt sorry for it. But it had brought this situation on itself. You must save me, Godmother! It is your duty! You must save me!
“Save someone who betrayed me?” She widened her eyes as if in astonishment, and chuckled dryly. “So you think you are dealing with some soft creature like a Godmother of the South? I am the Snow Queen, as cold as ice and as hard as the rock of my mountain! Don’t you know I have no pity in me?”
Please! I beg of you! Have mercy! The poor thing was really reduced to a pitiable state now. She had rarely in all her life seen anything so consumed with fear and desperation. She hooded her eyes as it wept copious amounts of ice crystals. So demoralized was it that it even forgot to maintain its ice-fog. Now it was just a translucent blue caricature of a man, with comical hair and beard, emaciated and helpless.
Finally, before it was reduced to babbling, she spoke again. “Very well. I will save you—”
Now it was all over the hem of her dress again, kissing the cloth, blubbering its thanks. Have I ever had any creature abase itself so much to me? She couldn’t remember. This is remarkable. She would have to research the archives to see if any other Snow Queen had had such an experience. Truly, this was a reasonable revenge for what it had done to her; she enjoyed it for a moment, then cut it short with an upraised finger and a single command. “Silence!”
It went as still as a windless day, ironic since it was a wind. It even stopped moving altogether, looking now like a grotesque ice-sculpture clinging to the hem of her gown.
She became incongruously aware of how wet and sodden her gown was, with the chill and wet almost all the way up to her knees now. Small wonder the Sammi women wore the dresses and breeches that they did.
“You must give me a piece of yourself,” she said, flatly. “You must give me a piece of your memory, the memory of my summoning you here, of you telling me about Loviatar, and of my agreeing to help you. You will lose that piece forever.”
It hesitated, for to a creature like the North Wind, only imperfectly tied to the world and unable to have possessions as such, its memories were everything. Even bad ones. Its memories were the map to tell it what to do should something like this arise in the future. But it hesitated only for a moment. Then it bowed its head to her. I give my consent.
“Let go of my dress.” When it had released her hem as if the thing burned it, she called up her warming spell and infused it into the velvet. The gown steamed for a moment, drying quickly in the arid air of the heights. With a sigh of satisfaction, she wrapped her magics around herself again like a cloak of power, and prepared another summoning, although this one was not so much a summoning as an invitation. One did not summon a god, even if it was a very small god. That sort of arrogant behavior rather well got one in trouble very quickly. And she must phrase her invitation in a very different pattern—the chant of the Skald and not the rhyme of the Bard.
Harbinger of storm and battle, black-winged, bright-eyed secret keeper, will you grace me with your presence, swift all-seeing Memory-holder?
She knew that the North Wind could hear her; his eyes widened as he realized what she had meant. It was not possible for him to become more deferential, but he certainly became quieter. They waited. Presently, a distant, mocking sound echoed across the snowfields and a black speck appeared in the sky. The speck grew larger and showed itself to be a bird. A great, black bird.
A Raven. But no ordinary Raven, as she and the North Wind both knew. This was a very special bird, one of a pair—they did not “belong” to the being that they aided, but they served as his eyes and ears on all of the world that gave him worship and regard.
Aleksia stretched out her arm as the Raven approached, and it landed heavily, talons biting into the fur and velvet of her gown and coat. “Greetings, Munin,” she said, bowing her head to him. “I thank you for your attendance.”
Quork, said the Raven derisively, then made a chuckling sound as it looked down on the trembling North Wind. There was no doubt that Munin was amused to see the North Wind in this state. Then again, in the past, the Wind had probably tossed the Raven all over the sky just for the malicious amusement of it. Small gods were not powerless, but their powers were very narrow; it was unlikely that Munin had any means of retaliation against insult by the Wind—until now.
“Indeed.” Again, she bowed her head. “I crave a boon and grant you a gift with one and the same act. We give to you a piece of memory, this creature and I. This is a piece, not for keeping, but for your own devouring. Not for the One-eyed, but for you. Not for sharing, but for consuming. You will, however, need to it with great care. No one must be able to tell that the North Wind’s memory was tampered with. I know that you, and only you, have the skill to do this. Do you consent to this?”
She had just offered the Raven called Memory something that he rarely got—for it was his duty, his function, to serve as the repository for the memories of the One-eyed Father-God of the Skandians. It was his duty to whisper those memories into the One-eyed’s ear when they were needed, as it was the duty of his brother Raven to read the thoughts of mortals and immortals and whisper those into the One-eyed’s other ear. And yet, Munin yearned to consume those memories; they were, for him, the same as the flesh of the fallen for the lesser Ravens of the earth. Only rarely was he granted such a treat. And this! It was the memory of a creature not mortal at all! Such a feast as he had not been presented with in—surely a hundred years.
Ravens are by their nature, greedy, even demigods in the shape of a Raven. So The Tradition arranged things; the outward appearance dictated the inner self. And having been offered such a thing, he could not resist it. Quork! Qwa, qwa, qwa! he assented, head and shoulders bobbing with eagerness.
“Then go, feast, and work with skill upon this creature’s mind.” She held her arm out and he bounced from it to the North Wind’s shoulder. “You may take the memory from the moment he left the Wise Woman Annuka and her daughter-to-be until the mome
nt you and I both leave him. Only this much, and no more—but you will find it flavorful with fear, I think, and with the echoes of magic.”
Inside, she was feeling as alive and excited as she had ever been. This was all new ground she was breaking here, using her knowledge of the creatures of the North and all that they stood for. Rarely did a Godmother ever get to forge whole new paths, even small ones! It was as hard now to keep her icy demeanor as it had been when she was livid with anger.
Gahhh! said Munin with relish, regarded the North Wind with a shining black eye, then quick as a thought, stabbed his huge black beak into the North Wind’s head. The saberlike, ebony beak plunged fully, encountering no resistance; the Wind’s eyes went glassy blank as the Raven worked his will within the Wind’s mind.
She turned her back on them both, knowing that the North Wind was safe now. And in the scale of things, both Munin and the Wind owed her, although the Wind would not remember. It didn’t matter if the Wind remembered. The Tradition would. She made her way quickly back into her Palace; she had used a great deal of energy calling on Munin, and had been forced to sacrifice her own spells of warmth to do so—that was the cost of forging new ground, the magical power did not come from Traditional magic, but from her own. Swiftly as she moved, she was still growing chilled by the time she reached the little door to the garden, an entryway that could scarcely be seen at all unless you were looking for it, barely more than a rectangular crack in the otherwise seamless white walls of the Palace.
The wave of warmth struck her in the face, forcing her into involuntary relaxation. She felt very weary all at once, as if she had been running for a dozen miles. Then, with a chuckle at herself, she realized that, besides working personal magic, she had certainly been walking for a mile or more out in the heavy snow, if not running. Oh, she was going to ache…and a hot bath was probably in order once she knew that she had done everything that she could, for now.
Once safely inside, she went to the great window that looked out into the garden, rendering the outside reflective so that not even the keen eye of an elemental could see her there. She watched the Raven feasting, making the same motions as a mortal bird would, as if it was tearing out bits of carrion, tossing its head back and gulping the morsel down. Eventually, it finished its invisible meal, shook itself hard and took a good, contented look around. It lumbered clumsily into the sky. Then she watched it fly away, slowly, heading upwards into the ice-clouds. By that time she had noted at least two of the Brownies appear, look at her thoughtfully, then slip away again. As the Raven vanished into the hazy blue of the sky, one returned.
As the Brownie put a fire-warmed shawl about her shoulders she watched the North Wind slowly come to himself, look about as if surprised to find himself here, then shrug. In the blink of an eye he was gone, whirling away into the ice-clouds, going North and east. Whether or not he was going to report to the Witch Loviatar was irrelevant for now. The Wise Woman Annukka and the Maiden Kaari could not get within her purview for some time yet. By then, Aleksia would have more of a plan in place and some idea of what she needed to do to keep them safe as well as deal with this Loviatar.
Even if the Witch found that scrap of memory, the only thing that linked Aleksia to the North Wind, the fragment of him awakening to find himself at the Palace of Ever-Winter, by the time he reached the Witch, the Wind would have constructed a perfectly good reason why he was there for himself. That was the way that memory worked. If you did not have a way to make something make sense, you would construct it for yourself. Memory was odd that way. That was why it was so unreliable.
With a shiver, she turned away from the window. Time to think, to plan.
And definitely time to call Godmother Elena.
7
GOOD NEWS KEEPS COMPANY WITH THE TURTLE, BAD NEWS WITH the hare. That was the old saying, and before the day was out, Annukka had cause to think that it had never been more true. She and Kaari had gone into her house, thinking to do no more than to put up the kantele safely and go to find some help. And by the time they came out again, scant moments after entering, the carrion crows were already gathering.
Somehow, everyone they met seemed to know immediately that Veikko and his teacher were in terrible danger. Someone must have been watching us, was all that she could think. She should have known better, really. Given what Kaari was, it was inevitable that there was someone watching her, hoping to get her attention, most of the time.
Now that Annukka thought about it, she could have slapped herself for being so precipitate. Kaari had come to her in tears, which meant that she had run out of her own house in tears. Kaari in tears was bound to attract attention, the way that meat attracted Ravens. Someone had to have followed her, hoping to help, seen she was going to Annukka and—
Well, everyone would want to know why Kaari ran to Annukka, now wouldn’t they? So watchers stayed, and the moment Annukka began working magic, something she did so rarely that hardly anyone in the village could say they had seen her do so, you could not have dragged a watcher away with a cart horse.
Bah.
And, of course, what the Road, the Sun, the Moon and the North Wind had to say was audible to just about anyone. The watcher must have torn away with wings on her feet, with news that juicy.
But more discouraging, there was not one of their friends and neighbors, not one, who seemed to be of the opinion that Veikko was anything other than doomed.
By the time the third woman came up to commiserate to Annukka and Kaari on the death of son and sweetheart and offer a shoulder and a lot of unwanted advice, even Kaari’s sweet temper was stretched to the breaking point. And when they reached the center of the village to find everyone assembled there, waiting for them silently, they were both very near to the boil.
Silence descended over the crowd as they both stopped and stared, Kaari with growing anger, Annukka with growing impatience. Awkwardly, Alto Vaara, the headman of the village, cleared his throat, clasping his hands together as if that would help him muster his thoughts better.
“Annukka,” he said, sweat starting to stand out on his red face. “Kaari—we are very sorry—that is—”
“Veikko has been taken by this creature we have been hearing rumors of,” Annukka said briskly. “I intend to find and free him. While I appreciate your sympathy I had rather not declare him buried just yet, and I would much more appreciate some help with finding and bringing him back.”
There was even more awkward shuffling. Finally Alto coughed. “Annukka, you are asking a very great deal of us, you know, and, this is harvest season. Winter will be here soon, and really, you must be sensible—”
“I am being sensible!” she snapped. “If I were not being sensible, I would not have come in search of help from my neighbors, I would have saddled a reindeer and ridden off alone! Now—” she looked around “—who is coming with me? I don’t know one end of a sword from another, and we will certainly need some help from a hunter or a herdsman, someone who knows how to travel in the Winter.”
It was the turn of the younger unmarried men to look away and shuffle their feet. While every single one of them had rushed forward to comfort Kaari on her presumed loss and to offer himself in the place of Veikko, there clearly wasn’t one of them willing to help bring him back.
She raised a scornful eyebrow, and layered her voice with enough contempt to cut with an ax. “What, no one? No one at all? No one is willing to come with two mere women into this danger? Was my son the only man in this village?”
That stung. More than one of them looked indignant, and yet—and yet—not one of them was prepared to step forward even after that insult. Finally Janne found his voice. “Veikko was the only one with the Warrior rune!” he protested, looking shamefaced and angry at the same time. She heard the resentment in his voice that she should ask this of the men of her own village. Resentment that she would dare to compare them to her son, as if they were now somewhat lesser because they did not share his runes. “If he
couldn’t fight his way out of this, how are we to—”
“Oh? Well, then I will have to learn one end of a sword from the other!” Kaari burst out. “For I am surely going! And if you will not, it would be well for all of you if you do not seek maidens from other villages after this, for I will surely let it be known that the young men of this place were such cowards that they allowed two women to undertake this journey without so much as lifting a finger to help!”
“Kaari, be sensible,” pleaded Janne, who had been one of her foremost suitors before she was betrothed to Veikko. “You should mourn Veikko, that’s only right and proper. But go after him to die with him? That’s madness. You mourn him over Winter, and in the Spring, you’ll see, you’ll want—”
“Even if Veikko is dead, which is by no means certain, and even if I chose to take another man someday, I’ll want no coward,” Kaari retorted coldly. She raked the crowd with a scorn-filled glance and Annukka noted how many of them flinched and avoided her eyes. Most of them, in fact.
And those that didn’t looked—well, oddly pleased with themselves and angry and annoyed, all at the same time. It was a mix of people with that expression, too—several of the girls Kaari’s age, several of the young men and a couple of the older ones.
Now under any other circumstances, she would have gone to work, cajoling, wheedling, browbeating if she had to, in order to get more people to come with them. But something inside her hesitated, and she paused to listen to it.
They are frightened.
Well, who wouldn’t be?
The useless sort of frightened.
[500 Kingdoms 04] - The Snow Queen Page 12
