[500 Kingdoms 04] - The Snow Queen

by Mercedes Lackey

Aleksia was furious, both at Ilmari and herself. She should have known that something like this would happen. Someone like Ilmari could not resist someone like Kaari. Never mind that the girl was the betrothed of his brother’s apprentice. The relationship of Master and apprentice had kept Lemminkal from even considering pursuing Kaari for himself—but not Ilmari.

  Stupid, stupid man!

  She seized Ilmari’s arm and dragged him away. “Do you think I am so stupid that I do not know what you are about, old man?” she spat. “Old fool is more like! You knew very well the sort of state you were likely to find Veikko in! Yes, and you were looking forward to showing Kaari, too, so you could comfort her and win her for yourself! Idiot! You know what her Wyrd is like. And even if it were not, do you think for one moment she would look favorably on the advances of a man old enough to be her father? Even if she should give up on Veikko, there are dozens of handsome young men who would be glad to comfort her in her bereavement in her village, and dozens more who have yet to meet her!”

  For one moment, Ilmari glared at her, his eyes flashing with rage. He opened his mouth, doubtlessly to give her a scathing piece of his own mind—

  And then he stopped, flushed, and hung his head. “You are right,” he sighed. “Curse it, you are right. I have been down this road before, and there is no good ending to it.”

  It was Aleksia’s turn to open her mouth to deliver another few choice words—then she stopped. She had said enough. More scolding and nothing would be accomplished, because she would drive this man into the opposite direction, determined to prove her wrong. She must appeal to his better nature.

  “Then come and help me show her the truth,” she said instead, letting go of his arm. Ilmari nodded, and they both turned toward Kaari.

  “Kaari!” she said, sharply enough to make the girl’s head come up. Her eyes brimmed with crystal tears that rolled down her cheeks like lovely raindrops. Curse the girl and her runes, Aleksia thought, half in annoyance and half in exasperation. Can she not even cry like a normal woman? Where are the red eyes, the blotched cheeks, the running nose?

  But she could not remain annoyed with Kaari for long, and after all, it was hardly her fault that she was so perfect. She had been outstandingly brave and helpful through all of this, coming into as she did, with no experience and only her own courage and her love for Veikko to sustain her.

  “Kaari,” she said, in a more kindly tone. “Listen to me. I knew all about this. I saw it all in my mirrors long before I came here. And I did not tell you, because you already knew all that mattered, that Veikko was in peril, and that we must all work to save him.” She gestured at the image. “This is all false. This is what the Snow Witch does. Veikko is under a spell, an enchantment, and somewhere under all of that, Veikko is screaming in horror at what he is being made to do.” She turned toward Ilmari. “Am I not right?” she asked sharply.

  The Wonder-smith shrugged. “The tales are all about how she takes handsome young men and makes them betray everything to follow her. I have heard of such. I suppose she must have somehow seen Veikko, and decided to take him for herself. I know he would not have gone to her willingly,” he said, and added reluctantly, “I cannot imagine Veikko to ever betray the trust of Kaari.”

  “You see?” Aleksia went on one knee beside the girl, whose eyes were finally starting to reflect hope. “I have seen her do this, time and time and time again. I have looked into the past in my mirror. She abducts handsome young men, she puts their hearts, souls and minds under enchantment, and she uses them as she pleases. Veikko is not the first, though with our company, we can ensure he is the last and make her answer for her crimes.” She put conviction she in nowise felt into her words, and hoped that Kaari would respond.

  She did; it was Kaari’s nature always to respond to the promise of hope. That was her great weakness—and strength. “We can free him? And he will be the same again?” Her face was alight again.

  “That is what I came here to do,” she replied. “But you—there is something that you must do for him. And only you.”

  “There is?” For the first time, she had been told that she personally could do something to help her beloved, and it transformed her. Kaari’s expression would have melted a harder heart than Aleksia’s. Ilmari gulped with guilt, and looked away. Now Aleksia was glad she had not scolded him further. His own sense of guilt would punish him more than any words of hers could.

  “Of course there is.” She put an awkward hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Listen to me. You must keep love in your heart for him. You must concentrate on it, and love him with all your heart. As long as you remain brave and keep that love for him, the Snow Witch can never win, and you strengthen him.” She looked up at Ilmari. “Am I correct?”

  She could see the struggle in his eyes, but honesty and his better nature won out. “Yes,” he said. “Love has an energy, and a magic all of its own. Veikko is a Mage, and that energy will surely reach him and make him stronger. There are tales and tales and tales of such a thing, and I believe them.”

  In that moment, Aleksia looked up and caught his gaze, and saw something in the man that she had not seen before. He had realized something profound about himself, and in a single moment his soul had—well, grown. There was no other way to put it. She smiled at him, encouragingly. He looked surprised, then smiled back and there was a shyness in that smile that was both odd in one with his years, and strangely endearing.

  She stood up. “I will go back into the sky,” she said. “For one thing, there are only four deer, and although I could ride Urho while he pulls the sledge, I am of more use where I can see any possible ambushes. I just did some hunting—” She noticed more frozen fish, neatly wrapped in a bit of leather, tied onto the top of the sledge, and smiled. “And with that and what Urho has got for us, we are well-provisioned. Now, let me do some real scouting, and I will come back to you with word.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she transformed into the Gyrfalcon again—

  But before she could labor into the air, Ilmari unexpectedly bent and offered his arm. “Lady?” he said, and smiled. “I am no stranger to falconry, though I have not got a bird at present.”

  After a moment of surprise, she jumped onto his arm, taking care not to put her talons through his coat and into his arm. He launched her expertly into the sky with a hard shove of his arm upwards, and she labored skyward.

  This time she was looking at the horizon, rather than below her—and as a consequence, got a bit of a surprise.

  On that horizon was a shape that she recognized from hours and hours of scrying.

  The original tower of the Snow Witch was in a valley with a mountain behind it. Now, this was not the most distinctive mountain that Aleksia had ever seen, but after looking at it for so long, she knew she was seeing its shape again.

  And that meant that they were not as far from their goal as they had thought. Two or three days at most would bring them to the village outside the gates.

  Movement below caught her eye, and she glanced down. It was the rest of the group, finally on the move again. All four deer were being ridden now, as Urho was making light work of the sledge.

  I shall have to make sure I stay in some form other than human when we are on the move, Aleksia thought to herself. Bird by preference, really: she could continue to hunt and feed herself easily enough, and coming to earth by night should keep the Falcon from taking over.

  She was about to go on ahead when more movement on the trail caught her attention, and she kited back a little.

  And that was when she nearly sideslipped out of the sky, she was so startled.

  Because following them, and staying just out of sight, was the Icehart. Moving in broad daylight, surrounded by an obscuring mist of ice-fog, passing like a ghost on the face of the snow.

  Two days later Aleksia and Ilmari stood quietly just beyond the edge of the firelight, staring at the Icehart. It was doing nothing, except staring back at them. She could sense nothing
from it by ordinary means and she hesitated to do anything to it with magic. For now, it was just following them, and given the results of their last confrontation, she did not want to goad it into battle.

  “Do you still have the crystal?” Ilmari asked in an undertone. “It might want that…”

  “But you don’t think so,” she stated, staring at the ghostly stag. Moonlight glittered on the points of its antlers, and the misty eyes seemed to be looking right through them.

  “You don’t, either.” Nervously, he rubbed his neck.

  “No, I don’t,” she admitted. “But I also have no idea what it does want.”

  She stared at the strange beast. This was the third night it had come to stand at the edge of their camp and…do nothing. She felt for the crystal in her pocket. It was still there. She weighed all the considerations, and finally decided that, since two nights had gone by without it attacking, it was worth taking a risk.

  “I am going to approach it,” she told Ilmari. She expected him to object, but instead, he nodded.

  “I will go with you,” he said instead. It didn’t sound like a request, but at this point her nerves were feeling so rattled she decided that not going alone was a very good idea. “Don’t worry, I won’t attack unless we are attacked first. But I would rather you did not go alone, Aleksia. It took all four of us the last time to defeat it. I would rather you had someone to guard your back.”

  She nodded. And felt oddly touched. Because he had not blustered that she was merely a woman and could not face this thing—he had given her the courtesy of assuming she was his equal.

  The two of them approached the strange deer, their feet making crunching sounds on the snow as they broke through the ice-crust atop it. Tonight there was just enough moonlight to be able to see the Icehart clearly.

  It seemed to Aleksia that there was something odd going on with the Icehart’s face. The eyes…. around the eyes…there was movement.

  Then as the Icehart looked away from her for a moment and at Ilmari instead, she realized what it was. She saw shining bits of ice dropping from its cheeks. She had seen that before—when Kaari had wept for the forest-spirits.

  “It’s weeping,” she said, so shocked that she was not sure she was really seeing what she thought she was. “Why would this thing be weeping?”

  There was a silence from Ilmari, then the Wonder-smith sighed. “You may think me mad,” he said, slowly, “but I believe that it is weeping because it has a broken heart.”

  She shook her head. None of this was making any sense. First the thing attacked them. Now it followed them, crying. It was clearly intelligent, yet it was not telling them what, if anything, it wanted.

  She knew it was responsible, in part at least, for the deaths of dozens of people, and yet her heart went out to it.

  “How can a spirit have a broken heart?” she asked, falteringly.

  Ilmari sighed. “I do not know,” he replied, as the Icehart slowly stalked away, leaving them with nothing but questions. “Perhaps it, too, is a victim of the Snow Witch. Perhaps it has lost all it ever cared about to her. All that I know is that not even a Wonder-smith can mend a heart when it is broken.”

  16

  THE VILLAGE WAS NAMED KURJALA, AND ALEKSIA SUSPECTED this was an attempt at sarcasm, since the word meant “misery.” Certainly it lived up to—or down to—the name. The area seemed to be under a perpetual overcast. The houses were dark, and poorly repaired, and the people in them shabby and unsocial. Even the ice and snow in the streets was filthy. When they first approached the place, she had not at all been sure there was anyone living there. Only when they actually entered it did they see the occasional surly or furtive figure crossing a street ahead of or behind them, although doors were always firmly closed by the time they reached the spot where the figure had been seen.

  Only after they came to what passed for a village market did they find anyone willing to speak to them. Once they showed their coin, though, people did come out. Money, it seemed, overcame just about every other consideration.

  The barrier across the Palace gate that Aleksia had seen in her mirror visions had become a barrier around the entire Palace. There was literally no way to get past it.

  The group was now camped outside the wall around the Palace, a good distance from the village at the front gate. They had originally thought to stay within the village, rather than camping, but a quick look through the place had convinced all five of the humans that this was absolutely the last thing they wanted to do. Urho, who must have had some way of telling what lay ahead of them here, had already been convinced that they should not chance the village.

  It was full of the most repellant individuals that Aleksia had ever seen.

  She remembered the fragment of conversation that she had heard in her mirror-visions. She had assumed that the speakers had meant that the people of this place were being killed by the Snow Witch if they showed any sign of human feeling.

  The truth was far worse.

  Once they were outside Kurjala and safe from observation, Aleksia took out her hand-mirror and did a touch of scrying. What she saw behind those closed doors shocked and dismayed her, and finally made her put the mirror away, feeling sick. There was no hope here, no love—no kind of human feeling or kindness at all. Even the children were heartless, competing grimly with siblings, if need be, and parents used them as virtual slave labor. But how was that surprising for children born to mothers who gave their bodies to men out of desperation, men who took them with no thought for anything past the fleeting pleasure of the night? There were no marriages here, only temporary alliances for purely material reasons. No real market, no inn, no places of worship or gathering; no beauty, no music, nothing that was not strictly utilitarian. There was, literally, nothing to lift the heart, or even touch it.

  In villages this far north, villages that got so few visitors, newcomers were often greeted with enthusiasm and welcome and, if there was no inn, offered a bed with some prominent person of the village.

  But here—that was, to put it mildly, not the case. One and all, the villagers turned the travelers away coldly, until Lemminkal offered them money from the bandit store, but even that only bought them fodder for the deer, supplies for themselves and permission to camp outside the wall, not house-room.

  They huddled around their fire, looking at the dim lights of the village houses, feeling a depression of spirits so great that it was hard to muster the energy to do anything more than make camp, fix a meal and stare at the fire or into the night.

  “Is this us?” Kaari asked, suddenly. “Or is it this place?”

  That aroused Lemminkal. “It is the place,” the soft-spoken warrior said, with difficulty. “Which must be the work of the Snow Witch…”

  “It’s what she wants,” Aleksia managed. “The more misery, the better.”

  They had not seen the Icehart since camping here, and Aleksia was not at all surprised. If the creature wept because it had a broken heart now, setting foot in this place would drive it to fling itself off a cliff. She was not all that far from doing the same thing herself. “Whatever made them like this is foul,” she said, finally. “Just foul. These folk are worse off than animals. Even animals have joy.”

  “It is the ice in their hearts,” Lemminkal said, unexpectedly.

  “What?” Aleksia turned to face him. She could have sworn she had said nothing about how Veikko had been changed.

  “I…feel it,” the big man said, scratching his head in puzzlement. “It is a part of my magic to feel things. It lets me know what my foe is going to do, and it lets me know what his heart is like. There is ice in their hearts, a tiny grain of it, and it is the ice that has frozen them and made them cold and cruel.” He shook his head, showing his grief. “I cannot help them.”

  “Only defeating the Snow Witch will help them,” Annukka responded, lifting her head as if it felt very heavy. Then she patted Lemminkal’s hand comfortingly, and the big man put one of his massiv
e paws over hers and held it as if it sustained him. “But how are we to do that if we cannot even get inside?”

  Aleksia racked her brains. “We cannot fight her, we cannot force our way in—we have to trick her.” She went over the scenes of the Snow Witch in her mind, trying to think of a way to get past the barrier, past the snow-servants and into the Palace. “We have to get her to let us inside, or at least to let us get to Veikko. One of us at any rate.”

  “You know, she’s not an idiot,” Ilmari said crossly. “She knows we’re here now, if she didn’t before. She has probably figured out that we are here for Veikko. Just what do you propose to do about this? Make her forget all that and invite us in for a welcome feast?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he flushed. “Forgive me. You did not deserve that. It is this place…”

  She had felt a flash of anger, but suppressed it, because he was right. It was this place. “No…” Aleksia said, slowly. “But I think I have an idea. What we need to do is make her think that we are weaker than we actually are. Contemptible. She will want to laugh at us, taunt us, and that will bring her to the gate. But we also need something to bargain with. Turn out your packs!” she demanded. “We need the sort of pretty things that women crave! She likes beautiful, rare things that no one else has. She collects them, as she collects beautiful, rare boys.”

  They all went through their belongings, though in the end they had only two things that Aleksia thought would pass muster; a mother-of-pearl comb that was in Annukka’s pack, a beautiful thing carved with seaweed and waves, and a nearly finished kantele, inlaid with so many tiny bits of metal and wire that scarcely anything of the wood could be seen, that had been among Ilmari’s things.

  “This is stunning,” Aleksia said, touching the silk-smooth mosaic with a wondering finger. “I have never seen the like. You are an artist, Ilmari.”

  “I work on this in my spare time,” the Wonder-smith said sheepishly, looking pleased. “I started it for myself, but I never liked it—I thought one day I could give it to someone I wanted to impress.” He looked up at her for a moment, and she was flattered to see frank admiration in his eyes. “Perhaps one day I can make one for you.”