It was bound to a knot up ahead, and it felt like an old woman sitting in a bar, telling stories.
“That…one…” said Gerta, pulling the words from some deep well.
“Very well,” said Mousebones. “Very well. I hope this doesn’t break us out in some wretched snowfield with nothing to eat.”
She ran on.
It was only a little way to the next knot, although what that meant in time or miles, she did not know. But she veered off the reindeer road and her hooves struck the knot and the threads unbraided themselves around her.
Between one stride and the next, the herd of reindeer faded away. She felt a last few ghosts go with her, shoulder on shoulder, and then they too were gone and she was back, alone, in the world of humans and ravens.
The loss of the herd fell on her like a blow. She had not known that she needed one until it was gone. Her bones and her sinews cried out against it, and she tried to swerve back on the reindeer road.
Mousebones pecked her hard between the eyes. “None of that!”
“I felt that,” said Janna, sitting up. Gerta could feel the girl’s weight shifting on her back. “What happened?”
“We went a little outside of the world,” said Mousebones. “A shortcut, maybe. Like a tunnel carved by the dreams of reindeer.” After a moment he added, “Dead reindeer, mostly. And not one of them there enough to eat. Awk!”
Janna looked at him and shook her head. “You’re saying something,” she said, “but I have no idea what it is. I wish I did.”
“Awk,” said Mousebones.
Gerta dropped her head. Listening to her friends talk at each other eased the ache in her chest a little. They were a small herd, and strangely shaped, but still better than being a reindeer alone.
Janna slid off Gerta’s back and wrapped an arm over her withers. “Are you all right? We went…I don’t know how far we went.”
She glanced around. “We went all night, anyway. I didn’t think people rode all night except in stories.”
It was not yet dawn. The air was cold and grey and smelled of frost. The ground under Gerta’s hooves was frozen hard.
Mousebones took to the air. He flew into the dimness, muttering about visibility.
“Come on,” said Janna. “Let’s walk. If you were a horse, you’d have to walk after all that running. I don’t know if reindeer do that.”
She pressed a hand on Gerta’s neck, and Gerta took a few steps forward, then a few more. She could feel her muscles trembling.
“This is all quite ridiculous,” Janna said. Gerta flicked an ear back toward her. “I couldn’t tell anyone about it. Oh, yes, this reindeer? This is actually a pretty little blond girl who turned up on my doorstep with a story about the Snow Queen.” She snorted. “They’d think I was mad. Perhaps I am. Still, even if I’m mad, I can’t do much but carry on. I suppose most people who are mad are still doing the next logical thing, aren’t they? If you were in there, you’d see it all made perfect sense. Maybe not people like Old Nan, but that’s because she’s cruel, not because she’s mad.”
Her voice was a little muffled. Gerta realized after a moment that Janna’s teeth were chattering. Gerta herself was all too warm. She leaned into Janna a little, trying to warm her, and the bandit girl laughed. “Careful! You’ll knock me over.”
Mousebones landed on her antlers with a harsh caw. “Close!” he said. “There’s a village or something like it.”
Janna looked up at him. “Found something?”
The raven muttered something about humans that thought they were the only species with anything worth saying. “Bear left, Gerta.”
Gerta bore left.
The village that Mousebones had found was very small, and the buildings seemed to grow out of the ground in irregular domes. Gerta smelled peat and smoke. A little outside of town, there was a house that looked almost like the cabins and farmhouses Gerta had passed in human days, but it was up on tree trunks and stood over the rest of the houses like a hen towering over chicks.
There were threads glowing here, too, akin to the ones on the reindeer road. They drifted lazily around the mound houses, snaking between buildings.
One of the houses was wrapped tightly with the threads, and there was a woman standing in front of it.
“Well!” she said. “Took you long enough!”
“Were you waiting for us?” asked Janna.
“Does that surprise you?”
Janna laughed hoarsely. “Nothing would surprise me today. I may never be surprised again.”
“Ah, well.” The woman smiled, turning her eyes into a mass of wrinkles. She had broad cheekbones and a broader smile and everything else was so wrapped in knit blankets that there was no telling about the shape underneath. “You’re young yet. Let us get your friend loose.”
The woman walked around Gerta, trailing her hand over the reindeer body’s long furry flanks. “Goodness. Went deep, didn’t she?”
“She walked the reindeer road,” said Mousebones. “Awk!”
“Dangerous thing for a human to walk,” said the woman. “Even in a reindeer skin. Maybe especially in a reindeer skin.”
“Lord!” said Janna. “Don’t tell me you understand him too?”
“The raven? Sure. Ravens are easy, though they’ll talk your ear off and they think they’re God’s gift to the world.”
“Awk!”
“Hush.”
She set her hands over the base of Gerta’s antlers and spoke words, then, words that Gerta did not recognize, the same words three times over, and then recited the Lord’s Prayer.
The two halves of Gerta’s vision converged suddenly and the world was deeper and darker. The bright braids of light went away. The woman’s blankets shown red and white and green, not just shades of brown and grey.
Gerta was on her knees in the snow, with the reindeer skin over her. It felt heavy and sticky and in her veins, the blood moved thin and hot.
“My heart is smaller,” she whispered.
“Of course,” said the woman. “Reindeer have greater hearts than humans. They have to, to give us as much as they do.” She pulled the reindeer hide back, ignoring the stickiness, and helped Gerta to her feet.
“Are you a witch?” asked Janna.
“No,” said the old woman, “I’m a Lutheran. But we’ll make do. My name’s Livli. Bring your friend inside.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Naked and bloody we come into the world, and sometimes we go out of it the same way.” Livli draped a blanket over Gerta’s shoulders. “But it’s not a good way to spend the parts in between. I’ll heat some water for you.”
Gerta’s clothes had gone somewhere, but that was probably for the best. Freed of the thick coat of reindeer hair, her skin felt raw and over-sensitive, as if she had a full-body sunburn. Even the touch of the blanket was nearly unbearable. She could practically feel each thread in the weave.
She was sitting on a wooden chest with a blanket thrown over it, which was nearly as bad. Where the edge of the lid pressed against the backs of her knees felt like a band of iron.
How did humans go around, feeling things on every inch of their skin all the time? How had she gone around, before?
I used to just ignore this, she thought wonderingly, rolling the edge of the blanket between her fingers. I would hardly notice it at all. How did I do that?
Janna, perhaps mistaking her expression, came and sat beside her. “It will be all right,” she said, in a voice indicating that it damn well better be, or she’d know the reason why.
Gerta nodded. It was easier than trying to talk.
The bandit girl studied her for a moment, then reached out and took her hand, and Gerta no longer thought she could talk. Every whorl and ridge on Janna’s fingertips seemed to stand out in sharp relief, and there was a long bar across the heel of her hand that might have been a scar.
Where their wrists lay together, she could feel Janna’s pulse beating, stronger and slower than
hers.
It was too much. She disentangled her hands and put her face in them to try and blot out a little of the world.
“You’ll feel better in a bit,” said Livli, poking up the fire in the belly of the stove.
“Will I?” Gerta asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Livli. She smiled. “Sounded comforting, though, and that’s worth something. I’ve never met anyone who’s borrowed a reindeer skin before. You’ll have to explain how it happened to me.”
Gerta spread her fingers so that she could look out at Janna. Janna opened her mouth, closed it, and looked helplessly back at Gerta.
In the end it was Mousebones who explained. The raven hopped into the curved rafters, which were hung with cords full of dried meat.
From his perch above, he called down the story. It was slightly more bird-centric than Gerta remembered, but seemed mostly true, and after a time she stopped listening.
She was almost falling asleep, despite the painful sensitivity of her skin, when Mousebones said “Awk! What was her human name, Gerta?”
Gerta licked her lips. They were dry and each crack was a canyon and lord, even her tongue against her teeth was a sensation that had to be recognized and catalogued and put away somewhere in her mind. “Who?” she asked.
“The old woman with the sausages.”
“Gran…” said Gerta. “Gran…Aischa. Yes.”
Livli cackled. “I might have known! Well, I did know you were coming, truth be told, but I wasn’t sure who sent you to me.”
“How did you know?” asked Janna. She sounded as tired as Gerta felt, but still sharp enough to question.
“A wood beetle told me, and an owl, and the track of snow geese against the sky. I knew something was coming.”
Janna raised an eyebrow. “A wood beetle? Really?”
Livli grinned. She had excellent teeth. “The wood beetle might have been a coincidence. I am nearly certain about the owl, though.” She poured hot water from a kettle into a cup and threw herbs in it. The scent of tea filled the dark house. “I talk to birds,” she said, by way of explanation. “That’s all I can do, but it’s stood me in good stead so far.”
Gran Aischa said to find Livli. This is Livli. Coincidence? No, surely not. I must have been following some thread as a reindeer, looking…
There was something that Gerta was supposed to tell the Sámi woman, but she could not quite remember.
There were three old women rattling together in her head—Livli and Old Nan and Gran Aischa. The good one and the evil one and the one in the middle, all of them tied together with stories of the Snow Queen…
A proper fairy tale arrangement. Gran Aischa would be delighted.
Just like that, she remembered what she was supposed to tell Livli. “Gran Aischa told me to tell you…to tell you…”
“Drink first.” Livli pressed a cup of tea into Gerta’s hands, and the heat was good. It almost burned, but if she was focusing on the heat of the cup, she was not feeling the blanket or the chest beneath her, or the way that Janna’s hip touched hers as they sat together on the chest.
She took a drink, and it burned hot and fragrant down her throat and made her gasp.
In a proper fairy tale, there would be magical herbs in it, but Gerta thought that it was only tea—and tea was more than enough. She had been drinking tea when she was barely old enough to hold a mug. The cup was carved from a wooden burl and the handle was made of bone, but it was still familiar. Yes. This I understand.
The world settled a little more comfortably around her. She was a girl who had briefly worn a reindeer skin, not a reindeer squashed into the awkward body of a human.
“She said my story was written on the hides of herring.”
Livli threw back her head and laughed. “Oh my! Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
“What does it mean?” Gerta asked.
“Oh, well.” The Sámi woman leaned back, testing the hot water again. “Bit of a joke between Aisha and I. She was always telling stories, and if I told her one back, she’d pick it up and embroider it all out of reason. I got tired of it after awhile, and told her that if she wanted to tell me a fish story again, she’d best send it written on the hides of herring.”
She shook her head. “And here you are, and a ridiculous story the raven’s told me. And yet I believe every word. Strange, isn’t it?”
Gerta slept most of the day under a reindeer hide that was not raw and bloody. It was soft and warm and she had half-expected to find it terrifying, but it was not. The owner had died and surely its ghost moved somewhere on the reindeer road. The skin wanted to be useful, that was all.
Sleeping with the reindeer hide wrapped around her, with Janna back-to-back against her, was a little like being in a herd again.
As close, perhaps, as a human could hope to be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
She woke alone, except for the cooing of the doves still in their cage. We will have to do something about them, she thought groggily, we cannot go to the end of the world with doves. If Livli can talk to birds, perhaps she’ll be able to explain to them what’s going on.
And then slightly more awake, she thought, Are we going to the end of the world, then?
Near enough, I suppose. And who is we? Mousebones and I and…is Janna coming, as well?
The thought caught oddly in her throat. She shouldn’t care, of course—she’d known Janna for what, three days? Four? And she hadn’t even been human for one of those days, and Janna had been one of her captors…
Well, no. That’s not fair. She didn’t capture me. And she got me free as soon as she could, and she left her father behind in order to do it…not that she seemed to care too much about it…
The doves cooed and rattled their cage again.
I suppose that’s what I am. A great big human dove that fluttered in and Janna put me in a cage until she could figure out what to do with me.
The thought should have been demeaning, but she found it oddly cheering. After weeks on her own, Gerta was prepared to be grateful to find anyone at all who was on her side.
The door opened and Janna herself came in, stamping her feet. “You’re awake,” she said. “Do you know where we are?”
“Sápmi, I think?” said Gerta, sitting up.
“Sápmi,” agreed Janna. “Did Mousebones tell you, then? Livli, the old woman, she’s Sámi.”
“Okay?” Gerta knew nothing at all about the Sámi, except that they lived in the north and drove reindeer and her grandmother had said once that they were the most ruthlessly taxed people in all the world.
“I had no idea we’d come so far,” said Janna. “I’ve always wanted to come here. Though I might have come in summer instead. It’s cold out there.” She blew on her hands.
“Are you all right?” asked Gerta.
“Oh, sure. Doing chores, that’s all. Half the village is off somewhere—they camp in hide tents in this cold! Can you imagine?—and Livli’s got no grandsons to do the heavy work. I get the impression that her people’ll do anything she asks, but she doesn’t like to need to ask. So I’ve been swinging an ice axe all afternoon to try to pay for the supplies we’re going to be taking.”
Gerta ran her fingers through her hair and scrambled into the clothes that Livli had left her. They were shapeless and worn and two sizes too long, but her own clothes were gone somewhere—part of the reindeer hide now or something. She was gladder to hear the we part than she liked to admit.
Livli herself came in, carrying an armload of something that looked like bark, but which were actually dried fish. She began poking up the fire and dropping the fish into the stewpot. “Are you human this morning, my dear, or reindeer?”
“Human, I think,” said Gerta. “Mostly, anyway.” Her skin no longer felt as raw as a newborn’s. She stroked her fingers over the reindeer hide she’d slept on. Herd herd herd chimed in her bones, the faintest of echoes, like hoofbeats far away in the fog.
Livli nodded.
“I should think that the longer you spend out of the skin, the more human you’ll feel. And the other way around. Stay in it too long, and you likely won’t want to come out again. At least, that’s what the swans tell me, and they know more about changing skins than most birds.”
“Will I have to do it again?” asked Gerta. Do I want to? It didn’t feel bad…just different…
“If you’re determined to find your friend, then yes,” said Livli. “The Snow Queen’s land is north of here. North and east and north again. If you can reach it in any fashion at all, it will be by the reindeer road.”
Janna’s frown deepened. She looked as if she were about to say something, but there was a tap on the door, and she went to open it.
Mousebones hopped inside, looking disgruntled. “Awk! Leave a raven out in the cold, why don’t you?”
“Should have known you’d show up when the food was cooking,” said Livli, amused. She tossed him a dried fish and he pounced on it.
“I suppose we’ll take the reindeer road again, then,” said Gerta. “If it’s the only way to find Kay.”
The name Kay sounded odd on her lips. For a moment he seemed like a character out of a childhood story, like the Snow Queen herself.
Don’t be silly. It’s Kay, who kissed me behind the stove, and who played games with me when it was snowing and who has bright blue eyes and who is my best friend…
Her mind veered off at that point, and Janna interrupted her thoughts by asking, “What if I wear the skin instead?”
“Can’t,” said Livli. “Oh, I’m sure you’d try, don’t get me wrong. But you’re too set in your own skin. You’re a healthy young animal and you know it. And people who really live in their own flesh and know it and love it make lousy shapechangers.”
“I…well. But Gerta doesn’t?”
Livli shook her head. “Some people don’t. Their bodies carry them around, but they don’t live in them quite the same way.”
She leaned over and patted Gerta’s hand. “Don’t look so stricken, dear. It’s not a personal failing. And I think there may be something else at work here, too. You’re outside your own skin even farther than you ought to be. Have you had a long illness recently?”
The Raven and the Reindeer Page 12
