by Dawn Steele
“It’s for . . . you know.” Helplessly, she waved it before his genitals.
He took it from her, frowning. “But I have never covered myself.”
“Not even once?” she said. He must come from some place seriously liberal. Hanna Cherry would have a fit to know she was talking to a naked man and discussing his state of undress as though it were an entomology dissertation.
“No.”
“Well,” she said firmly, “you’ll have to cover yourself in these parts. It’s the rules, or you’ll be hung for indecency.” Not really, but that would put a spur into him. “This will do until we get you new clothes. Or unless you trap a bear and skin yourself a new coat.”
Don’t expect me to trap one for you, she didn’t say, thinking of the rabbits.
“Are you going to hang me?” he said.
She was taken aback. “No.”
“Then I am not going to wear that loincloth. There are only two of us, and as you do not wish to hang me for indecency just yet, I will remain as I am.”
She was flummoxed. So he was going to parade himself naked in front of her while they traipsed through the woods? Wait . . . he wasn’t intending to have his way with her, was he? The idea of it sent a warm flush down her neck. She clasped the knife by her side to reassure herself. No one was going to have her way with her unless she dictated it, so there.
“Fine.” She sniffed, turning away from him.
He was going to be one of those argumentative foreigners, she could tell. She had seen those foreign dignitaries at court, haggling, mispronouncing everything, behaving as if they owned the place. Let him have his way for now. He would soon run into a reckoning. Or a chill. And when he was shivering and coughing and rattling at death’s door, she would calmly thumb her nose at him and say, “Indecency begets ill humors.”
“Fine,” he repeated, but his tone was agreeable, not miffed.
He began to probe in the ruins of the chrysalis, breaking huge chunks of it off and sifting through the golden pieces. His brow was furrowed with concentration.
“What are you looking for?” she asked curiously.
He held up a handful of golden matter in dismay. Embedded in it were broken shards of a brown crystalline material.
“What is it?” she said.
“Something that belongs to me.” For the first time since she’d met him, he seemed at a loss.
“Is it broken? Can you fix it?”
“No.”
“Well, what does it do?”
He hesitated, then turned back to sift through more crumbling matter. After about twenty minutes, he gave up.
“I hope it wasn’t important,” Snow White said pointedly, feeling a little impatient to be setting off. She was right. Not only was he an argumentative foreigner, he was tardy.
He flashed her a worried look. “No. Not important at all.”
She just couldn’t get a handle on him. Her head told her that she should be wary of him at all times, because he was a foreigner, and he was naked and strange. It was probably best to leave him here to his own devices and set out on her own haphazard, North Star-chasing, extremely parched and hungry way. After her brush with Wolfsbane, her energy levels were all drained out. She didn’t need to be looking over her shoulder for this suspicious foreigner to do something unspeakable.
“Well,” she declared, “I’ve got to be going now. Seeing that you’re fine and all, I’ll leave you to go on your own merry way and I’ll go on mine, so – ”
She was in two minds as to whether she could turn her back on him. Would he jump her? Would he do something, God forbid, indecent?
“Actually,” Aein said, “I seek a place. Do you know of it? It is a mountain surrounded by seven hills. A green lake that looks like a mirror sits at the bottom of it.”
Her geography being only slightly stronger than her Ancient Greek, Snow White frowned. “Does it have a name?”
He looked sheepish, stealing a glance at the broken chrysalis. “I do not know of it. But I must reach it by the time three moons become full in the sky again.”
Three moons. He spoke a failed poet.
“Why? What’s going to happen in three moons? Where do you come from anyway, Aein?” If that’s really your name. Once again, her hand went to the handle of her knife.
A pause. “The East.”
“Which part of the East? Hungary sort of East or farther, like in the lands of the Tartars?” She couldn’t recall reading about any Tartar refusing to wear clothes.
He seemed perplexed. “You ask too many questions,” he finally said. “I do so as well, as people tell me time and again. But there are some things you best not know about me or I would have to kill you.”
That’s it, she decided. She withdrew the hunting knife as her eyes narrowed. The pointy tip caught a flash of sunlight filtering through the canopy of leaves. “Are you threatening me?”
“No.” His tone was level. He did not seem perturbed by the gleam of wicked-looking metal. “I do not threaten well. I am merely stating a truth. As I have told you nothing noteworthy about myself as yet, I do not have to kill you. To get to the mountain, I wish to pass through as many towns and villages as possible. I wish to meet and mingle with the natives.”
“So you can kill them?”
“No.” He frowned, missing her sarcasm completely. “I wish to learn more about them. Can you guide me to the next village? Perhaps a native there will know of the mountain I speak of, since as a native, you do not seem to know many things.”
Oh! She had to grip herself very hard now to stop from flying at him. “Aren’t you afraid that I might be the one to kill you instead?” Her voice dripped with venom.
Aein paused, taken aback. Obviously, he had not thought of this possibility. “Yes, of course. You have every right to kill me too.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
She would have stalked off too, except she didn’t trust to turn her back on him, and she wasn’t sure if he could outrun her if she fled. Total loon. No way she was going to spend one more minute in his unstable, possibly infectious presence even if he resembled a Michelangelo sculpture.
Maybe she could slowly back away, then turn tail and run for her life. Yes, that was the best option. But first, she had to lull him into believing otherwise.
“Talking with you has been thirsty, so I’m going to find water,” she said, taking small steps backwards. Well, it was the truth anyway. She was drier than Hanna Cherry’s forgotten laundry. “It’s no easy feat to find water around these parts, so don’t expect me to come back real soon.”
In fact, never expect me to see me again.
Her steps lengthened, and she kept her eyes trained on him and the knife between them at all times. He made no move to follow her.
Instead, he brightened. “You want a drink? Why did you not say so before?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Snow White watched, gape-mouthed, as Aein knelt and pressed the ground with both palms.
“What are you doing?” she blurted out. Her Greek god suspicions returned. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so mean to him. Hastily, she stashed away the knife in her belt. With his hole-ridden brain, he probably wouldn’t know she was threatening him anyway.
“Searching for water,” he replied.
“You forgot the divining stick.”
“You use precious sticks to divine? But of course, you natives would, wasteful as you are.”
Whatever illusions she wore over his godhood disappeared. His remarks were just too bizarre to be godly.
She watched as he crept to several places on the leaf-strewn forest floor. After a while, he settled on a spot and dug the soft earth out with his hands. She half-wished he would hit a brick wall just to spite his nose. But his scrabbling led to decidedly soggy earth. Snow White was so thirsty that she knelt to dig beside him. Soon, they had a large puddle of water and soil-caked fingernails, but she was so parched that she put her lips to the
cruddy surface to drink, not waiting for him.
He watched her, amused.
Damn.
He was useful after all. Now how in the world was she going to be rid of him? Pity he couldn’t be stuffed in her pocket like a real divining stick, taken out only to be used on needful occasions. Here she was with a potentially dangerous, mentally unstable foreigner with grand travel designs, and he was her currently her best chance for survival.
Damn.
Could she risk striking out on her own and praying for a rainstorm twice a day?
Oh, the indecision.
When she had her fill, he said, “Where were you going, young native, when you encountered me?”
Oh, so he’d thought to notice she had things to do other than being his sacrificial lamb. She lifted her dirt-streaked chin as proudly as she could.
“I’m going to Lapland,” she said, wiping her mouth with her sleeve, “to meet the king so that I can persuade him to build me a university.”
She found that it was true. She was indeed going to Lapland, but she wasn’t content to live on the fringes. She would go to the King and persuade him, among other things, to get her kingdom back. Not that she wanted to rule it, of course, she still had plenty of growing up to do before she chained herself to its uncomfortable, high-backed throne, the one you weren’t allowed to put cushions on. But it was to stick a point to her stepmother: you just couldn’t go around cutting out people’s hearts, especially when they were near-genius princesses.
“Perhaps we should go together, at least until the next village,” Aein suggested.
Actually, when she mulled over it, it was the most logical thing he’d said all day.
“Perhaps,” she acquiesced.
Maybe by nightfall, she could grow two more eyes at the back of her head.
#
It was to their credit that by the end of the first day, they hadn’t killed each other. They set a brisk pace northward, her pockets bulging with samples of the amber material. He was still a little unbalanced, but she left him to find his own pace. She walked slightly behind him so she could keep her eye on him at all times. He turned his head this way and that, seemingly admiring the trees.
But oh, he was distracting to look at. His arms were lightly muscled, but not overtly so. His stomach was rippled in six corded pieces, and his thighs belied a strength that made her go slightly weak in the knees. Of all the crazy people she had to be saddled with, why did he have to be so attractive?
Her hand did not stray far from the hilt of her knife.
Aein stopped to run a reverent hand across the bark of a tree. “Such riches,” he murmured.
“Huh?”
“I was told your land is rich, but I did not know how rich.” He touched a dangling red leaf as one would caress a rare jewel.
“How do you learn to speak our language so well if you’re from the East?” she said, curious. It was true. He treated every syllable like a rare chocolate dessert, but he spoke it well nonetheless. In fact, he spoke her language better than most of Tom Cherry’s brothers.
“I learned it for many moons when I knew I would be making this journey. It was difficult, but I mastered it.”
“So you were on a journey when you became trapped in that cocoon thing?”
He ignored this, plucking a dandelion instead. He sniffed at it. “What is this?”
“Something you just killed.”
Before she could stop him, he bit its head off and crunched it with his teeth. Snow White stared, speechless. He chewed, savoring the taste and texture.
“Delicious.” He plucked another and ate that too. He handed her one, his mouth full. “Would you like one?”
“Um, no thanks. We haven’t eaten them since . . . Adam and Eve.”
He nodded, stooping to gather more dandelions. At this rate, he’d mow the dandelion population to extinction.
“Who are Adam and Eve?” he said, munching.
This was going to be a long day. “People.”
“That you knew?”
“No.” He was worse than Tom Cherry’s baby sister, who ate tufts of her own hair. “They’re dead. They’ve been dead a long, long time ago. Before you came here,” she added, just in case he asked to meet them.
Aein was very taken by everything in the forest. He kept examining the trees, leaves and bushes. Perhaps, Snow White thought, he was planning to eat them.
At least she was getting used to him being naked now. She was still struck by the contours of his face, the way the sun played on the angles of his cheekbones. But all that beauty, she convinced herself, was becoming blasé. Most people were taken aback by her beauty too, until they got to know her.
Still, she was alive. She wondered forlornly what had happened to Tom Cherry. He had obviously rounded up a search team on horseback to look for her, but to no avail. She wondered if he had found Wolfsbane’s bloated body. Would the Queen then hold him responsible and throw him into the dungeon?
The very image of Tom in chains, possibly sent to the axe, sent a stab of panic into Snow White’s breast. She clapped a hand to her mouth. She would absolutely die if she had Tom Cherry’s death on her conscience.
“I wish we lived in trees,” Aein remarked, juddering her out of her reverie. “Where I come from, trees are so few and precious they are guarded like sacred temples.”
Snow White tried to temper her racing pulse. She cleared her throat. “If not trees, what do you have plenty of then?”
“Gold. The whole surface of our land is paved with gold.”
Snow White pictured a golden land shimmering in the heat. Castles and cottages made of gold. Horses wore bridles made from gold leaf, and the streets glittered with a Midas touch.
“Oh really?” she said disbelievingly. With all that gold, one could surely afford more clothes. “When we get to the village, you’d better not go around telling everyone that. There are many who would kill to be in such a place.”
“And there are many who would kill to be in yours,” he said, his eyes arresting her.
She felt a sliver of foreboding.
He watched curiously when she tried to make a fire with branches and dried grass. She struck two stones together repeatedly, and it was after her fingers were chafed and bleeding that she managed to get a spark onto the kindling.
“What?” She glared at him. “I suppose you can just snap a precious stick and a bonfire will appear?”
“No. I was wondering why you burn these riches.”
“It’s for a fire. Haven’t you heard of fires? Oh, I suppose where you come from, fires sprout from dandelions.”
“We do not make fires.” His expression as the crackling flames greedily devoured the wood was that of someone watching his house burned. “I find this behavior very destructive.”
“So you don’t like fire?” She stirred a twig into the flames and brought it out, tongues flaring from its hoary end.
Aein back-ended quickly.
“Oh, you’re afraid of fire?” Snow White was intrigued. “That is sooooo interesting.” And useful to know. She waved the flaming twig like a flag. He scrambled further away in a gesture that could only be painful to his naked posterior.
He kept a goodly distance away from the fire at all times. Every time a log snapped, he jumped. With satisfaction, Snow White lay down by the fire and closed her eyes for a restful night’s sleep.
She dreamed that she was in the closet of Isobel’s antechamber once again. Isobel, glorious and naked, stood before the mirror. The horned youth in the tapestry now wore the face of Aein, and the wings sprouting from his back were green and blue, like a dragonfly’s. Aein held the weighing scale of justice in his outstretched hand.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” Isobel said, “who is the fairest of them all?”
Her reflection replied: “In the woods with a stranger fair, Snow White approaches the devil’s lair.”
“So she lives. I knew he betrayed me when he didn’t come back. Tel
l me, is he with her? Has he satiated himself with her soft virgin flesh?”
Her reflection smiled unpleasantly. “His eyes pecked out, his flesh stripped a-thither; the hourglass bleeds as your very bones wither.”
“No!” Isobel cried. “I shall hunt her until the ends of the Earth!”
Snow White awoke in cold sweat. Aein slept a good twenty feet away beneath a canopy of trees. The night rang with the occasional chirping of crickets, but the air was sharp with danger. Uneasily, she felt for the knife by her side. It was still thankfully there.
#
The longer they journeyed, the more surefooted Aein became. His tentative steps became confident strides. His speech became less mannered and his accent less pronounced. His wonder at the trees abated in the way a man walking through a path paved with jewels would find himself bored by them after a while. But he still ate every dandelion he found.
On the fourth day, she heard a trickling in the distance. Her heart leaped. She came to a silvery stream and almost slipped on the wet, crumbling banks. The water was wild and mottled with smooth rocks. It smelled like ambrosia, so fresh it had a fragrance all of its own. She threw herself on the bank and dunked her whole head in.
Water! Now she could finally be rid of Aein!
Before she could lift her dripping chin, Aein flopped belly first into the stream, splashing her.
“Oh,” she spluttered, strands of her now wet hair clinging to her like seaweed, “of all the rude, infantile things to mow me with – ”
“Look,” he said, pointing to the far bank.
She swung her head. A grisly sight met her gaze, something she hadn’t noticed before. Several ravens which had gathered flew off, disturbed from their feast, their wings brushing the leaves.
Snow White and Aein half-swam and half-waded to other side. A breeze swept up as she stumbled onto the bank. She shivered in her sodden clothes.
A man had been crucified upside down onto a tree. A large rusted nail was driven through his ankles. His arms dangled, his blood-caked fingers clawing the soft ground. The corpse wore a black beard that flopped over his open mouth. His eyes were literally empty, pecked down to the skull orbs. His black boots stood at the bottom of the tree. From the leaking stench, the corpse could not have been more than a day old, though Snow White did not consider herself a superior judge of rotting corpses.
