[500 Kingdoms 04] - The Snow Queen

by Mercedes Lackey

  She had inherited Jalmari, along with the Great Mirror and the rest of the Palace. Veroushka had made much more use of the mirror-servant than Aleksia had, but rather than allow him to think she didn’t need him, when she had nothing specific for him to do, she had given him the rather open-ended task of “keeping an eye on matters in Kingdoms with no Godmother and report back on trouble to Godmother Elena.” Elena had never complained, so it seemed to suit everyone.

  Now, whether he had always been self-reliant and able to act autonomously, or whether this had given him those abilities or strengthened the ones he already had, she had noted that increasingly he had been able to do mirror-magic all on his own. So now she was able to rely on him to do what she did not dare. The magical signature, if any, would be coming from the Palace of Ever-Winter, not from a cave in the frozen Northlands.

  “So far as I can tell,” Jalmari said, “this imposter does not use mirror-magic, and I do not believe she is aware that you do.” He winked at her. He seemed terribly pleased with himself for his detection work.

  Aleksia stared at him in disbelief. “How can she be a copy of me and not know mirror-magic?”

  Jalmari pursed his lips. “Perhaps because she is not a copy of you. I have done a bit of spying on her, and other than the Palace, there is not much resemblance. She does have power over ice and snow, to a greater extent than you do, actually. Perhaps she got a name for being the Snow Queen and grew to like it while being unaware that there was another using that same title. Take that as a given, it is inevitable that when she came to build her Palace, The Tradition forced the design of your Palace into her mind.”

  Well, not knowing mirror-magic meant that Aleksia could be as bold as she pleased about ferreting out information. “That makes sense. What kind of a Sorceress is she? Is she cautious, or reckless? Do you know how easily she can tell when there is other magic about?”

  “I do not think she is careless…but I think she has grown accustomed to never encountering any sort of opposition,” he told her. “I know that I could slip in and around her Palace despite its barriers—for they are barriers to physical things and to attack, not to someone merely looking about.”

  “Then I should like to see what I can, if you will.” Trying not to crow with glee, she asked Jalmari to find her a vantage point within the Palace itself.

  The mirror clouded, then cleared, showing a room. The view shocked her. First, the interior of this place was…unfinished, as if it had been tunneled out of ice and snow, as if the exterior of the Palace had been created perfectly, but the inside left solid and the rooms cut in anyhow. And there was nothing warm or welcoming about this place; it looked better suited to hanging meat for storage than living in.

  Then there were the servants. She had not expected to see Brownies running about, but she had expected to see human servants. Instead…

  “What are those things?” she asked in a whisper. Jalmari’s voice floated out of the mirror in much more normal tones. She stared. They looked like snowmen…well, snowmen made by a reasonable amateur artist. There was a human look about them, but like the walls, they also looked unfinished. No fingers, only shovel-like bits at the ends of their arms, with thumbs. Faces left mostly blank except for sketched-in features.

  “Animated statues,” the mirror-servant replied. “They are made of snow and ice.” Aleksia watched the crude things wandering about with a sense of astonishment at how much magical energy it must take to keep them all going.

  “Why use those instead of human servants?” she wondered aloud.

  “Ah, that I have an answer for,” Jalmari replied. “She hates people. Truly hates them. She won’t have them near if she can help it. Those villages? She cleared them out because she decided that since she couldn’t control them, she wanted them destroyed. At least, that is what things I have heard have led me to believe.”

  “But what about—” Aleksia began.

  “I’ll show you,” Jalmari said, interrupting her. She nodded, and the view changed. This time the viewpoint was from somewhere near the top of the walls, looking down.

  And there she was. The false Snow Queen. Sitting on a throne that looked to be carved from the same crystal as her own, this woman did not, however, look much like Aleksia. She had pale hair, rather washed out, done up in a very tight and severe style. Her gown was equally severe, and her eyes were a pale blue that was almost white. The throne looked nothing like Aleksia’s, either; this one was extremely angular, more like slabs of ice stacked atop one another. The throne room looked like the interior of a glacier: rough walls, slick floor and no place to sit. Not that she needed any place to sit, since there was only one other person here, and that one was seated at her feet. Aleksia shuddered in sympathy; it looked as if he was sitting on ice.

  He would have been exceedingly handsome, if his face had held any expression at all. Blond, like most Sammi, with brilliant blue eyes, chiseled features and a warrior’s physique, he should have filled the room with vibrant warmth.

  But instead, he looked no more animated than one of the snow-statue servants.

  And she knew him. Veikko.

  And being what she was, Aleksia knew exactly what had happened to him. While the legends about her often claimed that she put some sort of enchanted shards of ice in the hearts and souls of her victims to make them emotionless, it was quite clear to Aleksia that this was precisely what the false Snow Queen was doing in truth. It wouldn’t be all that difficult for a reasonably adept Mage. And The Tradition would make it easy for her; that sort of thing was in stories all the time.

  She was absently petting his hair as she sat there, her face very still, her brows knitted in thought. It seemed she must be planning something. Perhaps the retrieval of Ilmari and Lemminkal.

  Aleksia shook her head. “This is bad,” she said out loud.

  “Without a doubt,” Jalmari agreed. “My assessment is that the spell she put on this young man is literally killing him a bit at a time. Possibly the only thing that is saving him so far is that he is a Mage as well, and has some resistance to the magic.”

  Aleksia shivered, then considered her options. She needed to know about this Sorceress, everything she possibly could. And she didn’t think it likely that the woman was going to simply babble what Aleksia needed to know. That sort of thing happened only in badly written stories.

  That only left one option. Looking into the past.

  “Jalmari,” she said aloud, “I want to—”

  “You want to mirror-scry into the past and find out what happened,” Jalmari said smoothly. “Which means you want me to do it while you observe. Actually I agree with you entirely, Godmother. We need to find out what made her what she is, if we are going to find the key to taking her down again. If ever there was a situation with ‘went to the bad’ rather than ‘born bad’ written all over it, it is this one.”

  “What was your clue?” Aleksia asked, eager to hear more of what the mirror-servant had to say.

  “The boy. If she was born bad, he would have been sucked dry by now.” Jalmari’s head bobbed, semitransparent, in front of the scene in the mirror. “That she keeps him alive tells me that she is trying to get some sort of comfort out of him, and if she needs comfort, something terrible happened to change her.”

  Aleksia sighed. “I also thought the rather unfinished state of her servants also indicated she didn’t feel comfortable with cold and perfect simulacra of humanity. And that, too, tells me she wasn’t born bad.”

  “Well, Godmother, you transform to the Bear, why don’t you?” Jalmari suggested. “You look cold, and the Bear form will be more comfortable. You don’t need to be human to stare into the mirror.”

  She felt rather foolish for not thinking of that. “Good notion, Jalmari,” she said, and allowed herself, gratefully, to fall back into the warm furred form that did not find the pebble-strewn sand of the cave floor uncomfortable. She flopped herself down with the mirror between her paws and waited.


  Brief scenes began to blink across the face of the mirror as Jalmari flicked through moments of the past that had been caught in reflective surfaces. Back they went. And back. And back. Until Aleksia finally realized that this false Snow Queen was a great deal older than she looked.

  Much, much older, it seemed.

  “Ha!” said Jalmari suddenly, and a scene formed and steadied. “This looks promising.”

  The scene steadied, and settled on a small stone tower situated near a village; the village was reasonably sized, and looked vaguely Sammi. A man and a woman were walking in the gardens around it—these were practical gardens, full of herbs rather than flowers. Aleksia identified them without hesitation as the gardens of a Witch or a Sorceress. He was perhaps in his midthirties, and dressed for travel, in sturdy boots, brown leather trews and a high necked tunic of sober dark brown wool. She was somewhat younger, and dressed rather carelessly, in a yellow skirt and a green and black tunic, as if she did not particularly care what garments she threw on so long as they kept her covered and warm. Her pale yellow hair showed the same disregard for her own appearance; it was bundled rather untidily into a net. Since Aleksia herself had, from time to time, looked exactly like that, she was in sympathy with the woman. There were times when she was so preoccupied that she just pulled on whatever was lying about. Sometimes there were things that were so important to take care of that even eating and drinking became somewhat secondary. It was a good thing she had the Brownies to keep track of her at times like that; they generally marched her back to her suite and dealt with the situation.

  Even in this reflection of the past, Aleksia could see the woman’s potential magic; from this little glimpse, it was not possible to say if The Tradition was putting pressure on her, but there was still plenty of magical energy ambient around her. She was definitely born a Sorceress; Aleksia was absolutely certain of that.

  She and the man were too far away to hear their voices—past-scrying was limited by the physical limitations of whatever reflective surface was being used, so if the reflective object was too far for anyone to have heard voices where it was, well then you didn’t hear speech. It was obvious, however, from the pack on his back and the belt full of pouches and implements, that he was going on a journey; she didn’t want him to leave. But from the look of things, she was not pleading with him to stay, she was desperately asking that he hurry back. She wasn’t weeping, but she wasn’t far from it. She looked up into his face, searching it for something. Reassurance, perhaps.

  He was a very comely man, with ageless, smooth features and bright blue eyes. Aleksia thought shrewdly that the woman was correct to be worried about losing him. She was no beauty, but he was a handsome devil.

  He, in his turn, tilted her face up to his, kissed her, and sent her back into her tower, laughing. Then he strode off toward the village and the scene faded.

  “Hmm,” Aleksia said, thinking. “Well…as you said, this looks promising.”

  “Love and betrayal always are,” Jalmari said cheerfully, and the scenes began again, flickering across the surface of the mirror. Then they steadied.

  This time, the woman was certainly near enough to hear every word—not that this would be difficult, since she was in a towering rage, pacing back and forth across the room. She was cursing and not under her breath, either. Her hair had escaped from the net and billowed out around her shoulders like clouds boiling up before a storm. The vantage point must have been from a mirror on a wall. There was a window just within the field of vision; it was snowing heavily outside and nothing more could be seen. So the man was not back yet, and he had left in the Summer.

  Someone dressed in a heavy cloak entered, shaking off snow. The woman whirled to face her. “Anything?” she demanded. The woman, who beneath the cloak was dressed as a servant, shook her head. The Sorceress’s eyes blazed. “Not a word!” she raged. “Not a word, not a line, nothing! Faithless, worthless—” She broke down, hands clenched at her sides, sobbing aloud as tears poured along her red, streaked cheeks, painful, harsh sobs escaping that sounded as if each one physically hurt her.

  It was a dreadful scene, and even though Aleksia knew it was in the far, far past, it was still uncomfortable to watch. She wanted to find a way to comfort the poor thing, even though, at the same time, she knew that if she had actually been there, she would have been too clumsy and awkward to actually manage to do that. This was not the sort of thing that she was good at. Being cold and aloof, scathing and sarcastic—those she was good at. Not at being comforting.

  The scene shifted again, as Jalmari went hunting for more relevant images. “Hmm. This seems typical,” he said at last, as the mirror steadied. It was a view of the same tower from the outside, somewhere at a distance, but—what a difference! The gardens were dead, there was a new wall about the place and the village looked deserted.

  Ah, but it wasn’t, not quite. There were some furtive movement in the streets there—so there were still people in the village, but they did not want to draw attention to themselves.

  The point of view suddenly changed. To one of…the sky? And a wooden wall of some sort. For a moment, Aleksia was puzzled, until she realized that what she was seeing were the sides of a bucket from the inside, and that Jalmari had moved the viewpoint here, not so that they could see, but so that they could hear.

  “Can she see us?” came a furtive whisper. Female.

  A pause. “I don’t think so. And I don’t see any of her spies.” A note of desperation crept into the voice. “Aili, I have to see you more often!”

  “No!” came the equally desperate reply. “You know what she will do to us if she even guesses you think about me! Look what she did to all the others! If she didn’t outright murder them, she did horrible things to them that made them hate each other! I couldn’t bear it if she did that to us!”

  “Then come away with me!” the boy said. “You know she is only going to get worse! She’s forsworn love, and wants to destroy it—”

  “And that is why we can’t be together!” The girl sobbed.

  “Yes, we can! She can’t be everywhere! She might be a Sorceress, but she’s not the only Sorceress in the world!” He dropped his voice again. “And look what she’s been doing to her servants, Aili. They aren’t even human anymore! They not only don’t love, they don’t even feel! That is what she will do to you, do to me, if she gets a chance. Do you want to end up like that?”

  “I believe that will be enough there,” Jalmari said smoothly. The image dissolved into Jalmari’s face. “Now, just a little more forward in time…let us see what she has built for herself.”

  Now the scene was much more familiar—although the copy of the real Palace of Ever-Winter was not in place. The rest of it, however, was just as Aleksia had seen it in her first view of it. The ice wall. The magical barrier. The dark village outside the walls. And above all, the snow, the ice, the bleak impression that Winter had always been there and always would be there, camped at the gates of the tower like a guardian dog. Only the Sorceress’s dwelling was different; it was still the stone keep. But around it, doing some sort of work, were the animated snow statues….

  The scene again dissolved, darkened and became the void, with the mirror-servant in his usual spot. Jalmari bobbed thoughtfully in place while both of them considered what they had seen. “Well I am glad you urged me to that, Godmother. That answers a great many mysteries.”

  She nodded. “Now we know just where the false Snow Queen came from, and why she is doing what she does. She was betrayed, forswore love—” She grimaced. “You know, in a tale, that might seem a justifiable reason for going to the bad, but I have known any number of kindly folk who have done just that, and then dedicated themselves to God or good works instead. But she—”

  “She declared war on love,” Jalmari said, frowning. “With the results that we both saw. I suspect that the sheer misery she generates may be giving her a great deal of her power. The more misery, the more power. Whether
she knows that or not, well, that would be the question, wouldn’t it?”

  Aleksia nosed the mirror, and shifted the Bear’s weight. “That would be typical—although most of the dark magicians get their power through death rather than mere misery.”

  “But that would account for why she has been increasing her territory very slowly,” Jalmari replied. Aleksia nodded.

  “Can you show me something else?” she asked. “I would like to see why she took Veikko—and whether she has taken other young men in the past.”

  “Easily, Godmother,” the being said, and the little hand-mirror misted over again.

  Well, the second question was definitely answered right away…and it made her a little sick to watch it.

  It was always the same. The Sorceress went through any number of young men; they tended not to last very long. It was always the same, she accosted a young man in some way, then bound him to her with a ritual spell. Once he was hers, he was as mindless as one of those snow statues, and she could do with him whatever she pleased. They became white-faced and expressionless, and day by day they faded a little until at last, they simply—stopped. The snow-servants would drag the bodies out and take them somewhere; Jalmari did not bother to find out where. And another question was answered, one that Aleksia had not actually asked out loud.

  For Jalmari showed her the taking of Veikko.

  The question was: what was the spell she used to make certain of these young men? Everything pointed to a peculiar enchantment that only those magicians whose power was linked to ice and snow ever used. It was very effective, but far, far rarer than all of the tales that were told about such things ever indicated. It was difficult. Only the most skilled and powerful of magicians ever mastered it.

  So they watched carefully as she surprised Veikko at his wood-gathering, as she bound him in place so he could not move. And then as she did, indeed, in a rather horrifying ritual, stab an enchanted sliver of ice into his heart.