“I don’t—but of course, you’re asking the bird,” said her captor. She shook her head and muttered “Why are the pretty ones always crazy?” half under her breath.
“I don’t know,” said Mousebones. “I thought I did, but I don’t. Ravens know wise things, old things, and humans are a young and foolish race. I don’t know.” His beak gaped open and he made a small fledgling sound of distress.
“Come on, then,” said Janna. “Midnight—Mousebones—can come inside as well. The ceilings are very high, and if she—he—craps on the floor, no one will notice in there.” Her lips twisted.
Mousebones shook his head and fluffed up his feathers, as if something was alarming him, and then flew away. “I’ll be back,” he cawed. “I just—I need to think.”
“Or not,” said Janna, watching the raven flutter into a tree.
She led Gerta to the open doorway. Gerta felt herself resisting, trying to plant her feet, and had to concentrate to make herself stop. If I resist, she’ll drag me, and once we cross that point it will all get worse. There may be no difference between being a guest and being a prisoner, but guests are treated better. I hope.
Janna glanced at her. “Gently,” she murmured. “This charade is not all for your benefit…”
They crossed the threshold. There was a drape made of deerskin tied to one side and Janna let it down behind them.
Gerta’s eyes were dazed by the shift from bright snow to darkness. She followed Janna blindly, feeling packed earth underfoot.
“Eh?” said a voice, off to her left. “Eh? What’s all the fuss? Is your father home?”
“No,” said Janna shortly. “Not home, and not likely to be home any time soon. The weather’s turning.”
“Is it?” The voice laughed, a series of short inhalations—aah! aah! aah!
Someone very old, thought Gerta. A woman, I think, but very old. Older than Grandmother. Maybe older than Gran Aischa, too.
“What have you got there, then?” asked the old woman.
“Lost traveler,” said Janna. “Nothing to fret yourself over.”
The voice sharpened. “Traveler? Here? Are you sure it’s not a spy?”
“Quite sure.” Janna was leading her away from the voice. “Don’t fret yourself, Nan.”
Another voice—masculine, scraped almost as thin as the first—said “If the storm runs too long, we can always eat them.”
“Aah! Aah! Aah!”
Gerta’s fingers closed convulsively on Janna’s wrist.
“No one’s eating anyone,” said Janna. “We’re bandits, not cannibals.” Half under her breath, she muttered “An inch of snow on the ground, and the old fools always start deciding who to eat first. It’s like they’re looking for excuses.”
Gerta thought it best not to say anything.
Her eyes were adjusting as they crossed the room. The earth house was larger than she expected, the ceiling high overhead. The beams were blackened with smoke.
The fire in the central pit was low and flickering. Radiating out from the pit, like spokes from a wheel, were a dozen sleeping areas. Most appeared unoccupied.
Seated near the fire, wrapped in blankets, were two people so old that their skin hung off them like empty sacks. It was hard to tell where flesh ended and blankets began. They looked nearly identical, but Gerta could not have said if they were related or if they were simply equally ancient.
The old woman’s hands moved restlessly, working a drop-spindle, not looking down. The old man sat idle. He whispered something to his companion and they both laughed their high, gasping laughs again.
A little ways off from them, with his back to a wall, was a middle-aged man. He was sitting a little awkwardly, and it took Gerta a moment to realize that he was missing his left leg below the knee.
There was a loaded crossbow across his lap. He nodded to Janna, unsmiling, and she nodded back.
On the far side of the earthhouse was another doorway, much smaller. This one had another hide drape over it. The effect was strangely primitive, as if Gerta had stepped back in time to an age of earthen mounds and men who painted themselves in honor to the gods.
Janna herded her to the doorway. As the hide fell down behind them, Gerta heard the two old bandits begin to sing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Janna’s room in the earthouse was not large, but it had a hatch set in the ceiling and a long ladder up to it. Gerta’s eyes fixed on that and it was hard to make herself see the rest of the room.
“I need to open it up,” said Janna, following her eyes, “and knock the snow off. Have to do it every few hours or else there’s six feet of snow over the hatch and I can’t get into the coop.”
“Coop?” said Gerta. That came out very normal, she thought. She was proud of how normal it sounded, while dread came clawing its way up her throat. She kept hearing the laugher from the other room, like birds calling over frozen ground.
“The pigeon coop,” said Janna. “You go up the hatch and it’s right there. It’s not in great shape, but it holds pigeons. I’ll show you tomorrow if you like.”
“Tomorrow,” said Gerta faintly. “But I must go…”
“Not until the snow is done,” said Janna. “Whoever you are trying to save, they can’t move any farther in this snow than you can.”
“They can if they ride in the Snow Queen’s sled,” said Gerta.
Janna’s eyebrows climbed toward her hair again. “I can see you have quite a story to tell me,” she said. “And I already doubt half of it, but I shall listen quite attentively.”
There was a single bed platform, very wide and covered in furs and ragged blankets. Janna sat down and patted the edge. “Have a seat,” she said. “I will get you a bowl of stew and then you may tell me all this tale. I find that preposterous stories sit better on a full stomach.”
“It’s not preposterous,” said Gerta. “Or—it is—but—” The dread was clawing at her throat again. She clenched her hands in her skirts. “It’s all true. I swear it is.”
“You have come here with a raven that I know personally,” said Janna, “which is quite preposterous in and of itself. She—he—was hardly a local bird. I found him a long ways off and brought him here when it was clear that his wing needed to be set. I could just barely believe that he remembered there was food here and returned, and that you are some mad girl that follows ravens about, but that hardly seems likely either.”
She smiled when she said it, and it was a good smile, a little rueful. Gerta found some tiny hope that perhaps she might yet leave alive.
I can’t hope, I can’t, the witch smiled too, she was very kind, kindness cannot save me…
Janna patted her arm. “It has been a long day for you,” she said. “Sit and rest. I shall see to the hatch and to stew and then I will listen to what you have to say.”
In the end, she told the bandit-girl everything.
She meant to omit a few things. Not so much because they were improbable, but because they were embarrassing. But one thing led to another, and one step of the journey led to the next, and she could hardly leave out the witch, after she had already told Janna that she had seen her in a dream. And if she had already explained about the witch, there was hardly anything left in the story to shame her.
“And then that man grabbed me,” she finished at last. “I suppose I was trying to find you, but I didn’t know—Mousebones said that you were here, but not that you were a—well—”
“A bandit?” asked Janna, amused. “Well, how would a raven know such things?”
She leaned back. “If you were trying to find us for some nefarious purpose, you’d have a better story,” she said. “Or—well, no, that was an excellent story! A less improbable one, I mean.”
Gerta flushed.
“And there is the matter of Mousebones…and you seeing me among wood-pigeons and grapevines.” She put her chin in her hand. “That alone would make me think that you had been spying on me, but the grapevines died in the f
rost weeks ago and since the alternative is to believe that you have been in the woods all fall, watching me…” She shook her head slowly, chin still on her hand. “No, I think perhaps you are telling the truth as you understand it.”
“As I understand it?” Gerta had calmed a good deal, between the story and the stew, enough to feel a trifle indignant about this. (The old bandits had fallen silent, which helped.)
“As you understand it,” said Janna, unruffled. “You may have dreamed the parts about your Snow Queen, after all. We have only stories and your word that you were awake. You still might have come north on the strength of those dreams and run afoul of a witch and met a raven, even so.”
She set aside her carved wooden bowl. The stew had been good, for an early winter stew—the deer still fat, the potatoes large. It would probably not be so good, come midwinter, when the deer were nothing but bones and hide.
“The Snow Queen is real,” said Gerta, almost inaudibly.
“Many things are real,” said Janna. “It does not mean that all the tales told about them are.” She frowned, rubbing her hands together. “Although if it is a tale, there is one person we might ask…”
Gerta cringed when Janna lifted the hide drape and ushered her into the main room. It was very dark and smoky, and malice seemed to radiate from the two figures wrapped in furs and loosening skin.
But she followed anyway, when Janna led her across the floor, because she had no real choice. She did not want to run. Some animals would only chase you if you ran.
What am I thinking? They cannot run. I doubt they can stand without canes. They couldn’t possibly chase me, not really.
Her head was aware of this. Her heart keened like a dog that remembers being beaten.
“Nan,” said Janna, kneeling down an arms-length from the old woman, “you know lots of stories.”
“Eh?” Nan turned her ancient head. “I do. A few.”
“Tell me about the Snow Queen.”
Nan inhaled. “Aah! Aah! That one I haven’t heard since I was young.” She turned her eyes to Gerta, who was crouched behind Janna. “Aah! Ran afoul of her, have you? She’ll suck the marrow out of your bones and fill the holes with frost.”
Gerta shuddered. It was not so much the threat as the gloating tone in which it was delivered.
“Never mind that,” said Janna. “Tell me what you know.”
“An old spirit,” said Nan. “Old as old. Older than I am, but she doesn’t look it.”
She leaned back. Her hands never stopped on the dropspindle, spinning, spinning. The old man was asleep with his mouth open.
Gerta wrapped her arms around herself and focused on keeping Janna between them.
I don’t trust you, but I trust her even less, and you don’t seem to want to kill me yet…
“Old,” said Nan. “I don’t know much. She controls the frost, or the frost controls her, or they’re the same thing. They say she made a deal with the dark powers, that love would never hurt her again.” She licked her lips. “The devil took her heart and turned it cold. Now she loves however she likes, and when she’s tired of them, she wraps them up in ice. She keeps them in her palace in the farthest north, they say, all the pretty boys like frozen flowers.”
Kay… thought Gerta, and pictured him with ice rimed over his skin, like a snowdrop edged in frost.
“Always men?” asked Janna. “Never women?”
“Aah! Aah!” Nan paused with the dropspindle long enough to shake her finger at Janna. “Well, who’s to say? No one goes to the Snow Queen’s palace and lives. There might be a pretty girl or two in among the lads.”
She leaned forward, peering around Janna to where Gerta hunched in silent misery. “Round little thing like her, might take the Queen awhile to freeze her out completely. She’d make a dozen meals.”
“Stop it,” said Janna, annoyed. “You ate a man once fifty years ago, and you relive it like it was your glory days.”
“Everybody should eat somebody once,” said Nan. “Changes your mind about a lot of things. Aaha!”
“We’ll get no more sense out of her,” said Janna, turning back to Gerta. “Come on.”
“Ma’am,” said Gerta, terrifying herself with her own boldness, “how does the Snow Queen travel?”
“Aah?” Nan looked up, her eyes watery. “Find your tongue at last?”
Gerta suspected that she was swaying on her feet. She thought she might throw up again.
She’s only an old woman, she’s only an old woman, she’s not that much different than Gran Aischa, just horrible, why am I so afraid of her…?
Those awful eyes searched her face, and perhaps failed to find what they were looking for.
“Flies on the wind,” said Nan, suddenly brisk. “On a sled pulled by winter weasels or some such. Never saw her, myself. Never want to. Go away, Janna, and let an old woman sleep by the fire.”
Janna grabbed Gerta’s wrist and pulled her back to the rear of the earthhouse.
“Winter weasels,” she said. “Close enough to white otters for me. I won’t swear you didn’t hear the story somewhere and make up the whole mad tale, but I also won’t swear it’s not true.”
“What’s wrong with her?” asked Gerta dully.
“Old Nan? I’d say she’s old, but she was like that when she was younger, too, from what I’ve heard. She was always cruel, but she got worse. And the healers tell me that you probably shouldn’t eat your enemies, even if you’re starving.”
Gerta stared at her.
“Don’t give me that look. I haven’t eaten anyone. It doesn’t come up as often as you’d think.”
Gerta rubbed her forehead. It seemed that she was only plodding along from one exhaustion to the next. She was in danger here, but how was that any different than the day before, or the one before that?
Cold, cannibals, witches…it’s all the same…
“Not quite as bad as all that,” said Janna, which was when Gerta realized she’d been muttering to herself. I got in the habit of talking to myself on the road. I have to stop if I’m going to be around people. She pressed her lips together.
“We’ve got the cannibals, certainly,” said Janna, “but no witches, and we’ll be warm enough tonight.”
Janna surprised her by springing up the ladder on the wall, and flipping open the hatch. A dusting of snow came down around them.
She banged the hatch a few times, letting a cold draft into the lodge, then shut it again. Gerta shivered.
“That’ll do for the night,” said the bandit girl. “Now I’m going to bed, and I suggest you do the same. Unless you’d like to get in the sauna…no?”
Gerta glanced around, wondering where she was going to sleep.
“It’s large enough for two,” said Janna, “and will warm up faster. Here.” She opened a trunk and tossed Gerta a piece of fabric.
It was a nightshirt. It was pale blue and embroidered with little flowers around the hem. It did not look even remotely like something that Janna herself would wear.
It was also about two sizes too large and hung on Gerta like a tent. “Did you…err…make this?” asked Gerta.
“All stolen goods, I’m afraid,” said Janna.
Gerta blinked. Well, of course, they’re bandits…did I think she was spending her nights with an embroidery hoop?
Janna nobly refrained from laughing at her, and simply pulled back the furs. She had changed into her own nightclothes, which had significantly less embroidery.
“Come on,” she said. “We’re stuck in here for a few days, and the more time we spend asleep, the less time we spend going for each other’s throats, or listening to Nan talk about who to eat first.”
The sleeping platform was larger than Gerta’s trundlebed, larger even than her grandmother’s big four-poster. Gerta crept in, staying close to one side, as far from Janna as possible.
What do I expect her to do? Strangle me in my sleep?
She had no idea.
Janna pushed a
pillow in her direction and rolled over. Her hair, freed from the kerchief, was thick and dark and curly.
“If you’re thinking of waiting until I fall asleep and sneaking out, by the way,” she said in a conversational tone, “I’d warn you that Aaron—the one with the crossbow—doesn’t sleep well. He’ll be awake for most of the night, and if he is asleep, one footstep out of place will wake him up. The first shot will probably be to wound, but you never know his mood.”
Gerta stared at her back, wide-eyed.
“Sleep well,” said Janna, turning down the lamp. “I’ll be interested to hear about your dreams.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Gerta dreamed that night of rowan trees, of long roots that twined around her. The rowans, too, were dreaming under the blanket of snow. Squirrels scratched around the base of the trees and woodpeckers were tucked into holes drilled into the heartwood. The trees dreamed of these things, of the movement of carpenter worms in wood and the caterpillars sleeping in hollowed out twigs.
She felt very large, immense, stretching out in all directions. Large and cold, alive but dormant.
Nothing happened in the great forest except the fall of snow. Gerta stood in the heart of the rowan and watched the snow pile up and waited for the sap to rise.
Then a disturbance—a chiming sound and a howl of wind—and the trees shuddered. In their hollow nests, the woodpeckers huddled together. The squirrels chattered worriedly in their drays. Only the caterpillars seemed unbothered. Very few things bother a caterpillar.
The wind passed. The trees slipped into a deeper sleep and the small animals settled. The Snow Queen’s sled had passed, and was gone into the distance.
She woke very late. Janna prodded her shoulder and said “I’ve got to go check on the wood-pigeons. Do you want to come with me, or sleep some more?”
Gerta blinked muzzily up at her. For a moment all that she could think was that she was in the room with this strange, familiar girl and they clearly knew each other, and perhaps they were friends.
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