The Princess and the Snowbird (11 page)

J
ENS WOKE UP
just in time to catch sight of the kestrel flying south over his head. He turned and saw that the space where Liva had snuggled next to him was empty.

Where had she gone?

He saw a scratched drawing in the dirt that at first he could not make out. But then he realized it was a map of the path from forest to ocean.

Liva had found out about the Hunter somehow, and she had gone to avenge her father’s death. Though he could not go as fast as a kestrel, Jens followed after her frantically, toward Tamberg-on-the-Coast. With every step he had a growing feeling of fear. He had to bring Liva safely back home. He would fight the Hunter or the king or any human or animal that stood between him and Liva.

It was not easy to make his way through the forest.
Because of his lack of magic, he could travel without fear that animals would attack him. But that did not make the trees part for him, or streams dry up, or the day longer. He did not have time to catch food to eat, so he went without. A few berries he found along the way were all that he allowed himself. He did not stop when it was night, but went on. He could only think of Liva facing the Hunter and his stone knife. If she had her aur-magic taken from her, he did not think she would survive the loss.

It was the afternoon of the second day when Jens found himself looking down on the town and the ocean beyond it. He could see no sign of Liva, but he would find her somehow.

He picked his way down the forest path and toward the edge of the town. He walked along, his shoulders hunched around his ears, his every sense confused with new experience. So many sounds, smells, tastes, textures, sights, and colors. So many different faces seeming to blend together.

His clothing was no worse than the clothing of some of the townsfolk he saw. A few were even dirtier than he was and wore shirts with ragged holes.

At a water trough that was close to the center of the town, he saw a woman who looked kind, and old enough to be his mother. “Excuse me,” he said.

The woman turned to him. “What’s that?” she asked sharply.

It must be obvious to her that he was not from Tamberg-
on-the-Coast. “I’m looking for someone,” he said. “A friend. A girl. I wondered if you might have seen her.”

“A girl from one of the villages in the forest? No. I haven’t seen anyone like that, and I wouldn’t want to.”

“What about the Hunter? Do you know where he is? I want to speak to him. Maybe he has seen her.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “The Hunter would only notice her if she has the aur-magic. Is that what you’re saying? You’re looking for a girl with the aur-magic?”

“No,” said Jens. He had gone about this all wrong.

“Do you have the aur-magic yourself? Perhaps I should call the Hunter’s men and tell them. I’ll get a fine reward if it is true.” She stared at him.

“I don’t have the aur-magic,” said Jens, wondering if the woman could tell whether he was telling the truth or not.

“Good for you, then.”

“The girl is just a friend of mine. I am worried for her because she has never been to town before.”

“Then why did she come alone? Girls shouldn’t do such things.” The woman scowled and moved off.

Jens watched several people come and go at the water trough before he chose another person to approach. This time it was a young boy who looked small for his age and had bright eyes. Jens thought the boy might see more than he told anyone about.

He walked up to the boy. “My name is Jens,” he said.

The boy said nothing.

“I need your help. I’m looking for a friend who is lost, and I think she may be in danger.”

The boy looked him up and down. “She has aur-magic?” he whispered.

Jens took a chance on the boy. He looked around and nodded. “Do you know where she would be if the Hunter caught her?” Jens did not know whether Liva had been caught. She was smart and strong in aur-magic. But she had never been in a town before, and this was where the Hunter had power.

“There is a jail,” said the boy. He pointed toward the docks. “It is small, but that is where he holds those he is waiting to burn. There is a public square nearby, where the bonfire is lit.”

“Thank you,” said Jens. Then he headed toward the docks, the smell of the ocean guiding him. He had reached the dock without finding the jail or the square where a bonfire could be built and was coming back in a circle when he saw Karl.

His cruel face and curly hair were unmistakable.

As soon as he saw him, Jens ducked to the side and hid his face as best he could.

He waited anxiously as Karl passed by, wishing there were trees or bushes around to hide in. When Karl had gone far enough ahead, Jens followed after him. Karl looked to be doing very well. He wore a jacket that had been tailored to him, decorated with gold buttons and trim. He strode with a swagger that had only been
developing when Jens had seen him a few days ago. Clearly Karl had earned a recent reward, but whether it had to do with Dofin or with Liva, Jens did not know.

Jens had trouble weaving in and out of the crowds of people. He turned a corner, sure that he had lost Karl. Then he saw him just beyond a large pit in the ground that looked as though it was full of ashes. Jens had to look away.

Karl stopped at a small building, hardly more than a shed, though it was built with thick wood and there were no windows in it. Two adult men stood out front, one younger than the other, but both were well muscled and armed with swords.

This must be the jail.

Karl talked easily with the guards, and Jens held his breath so that he could hear everything Karl said. He laughed about the girl from the forest who had come directly to the jail and then run from it with a speed and uncanniness that proved her aur-magic.

Liva.

Jens waited until Karl had gone. Then he opened his pouch and stared at his possessions. There was only one thing that would be seen as valuable by these men of the town. It was the golden half circlet with the ruby set into it. He knew that the hound had not meant for him to sell it for money, but what else could he do? She would surely not want her daughter to be burned by the Hunter’s men, either.

Jens took out the half circlet and closed his pouch.
Then he walked past the guards casually. And then a second time, holding out the half circlet so that it would glint in the late-afternoon sun.

The younger guard turned and stared at it, nudging the other.

Jens stepped forward. “You would like this?” he asked.

“What do you want for it?” asked the younger guard.

The older one shook his head sternly, but the younger one ignored him. “Tell me.”

“I want you to open the lock to the jail and let the girl inside go.”

“Only the girl?” asked the younger guard.

Jens felt guilty, thinking who else might be inside, and how they would be just as innocent with aur-magic as Liva. But he did not dare trust the guard to let all his prisoners go. One might be let go by mistake. More than that, and there would be no excuses.

“Only the girl,” said Jens.

“Give it here,” said the guard. “And I’ll open the door.”

“Open the door first, and then I will give it to you,” said Jens.

“Clever, aren’t you?” said the guard.

Jens threw the half circlet into the air to let the light shine on it. Then he caught it and looked up. The guards stared. But Jens shrugged and put it back in his pouch. “If you are not interested,” he said, and pretended to walk away.

“Wait!” called the guard.

Jens turned back.

“The bauble for the girl.”

“Yes,” said Jens.

The younger guard took out his key and moved to the lock.

“You’re a fool,” said the older guard.

“I’ll share the coin I get for it. All you have to do is to stay quiet.”

“Quiet as the grave,” muttered the older guard.

But in a moment the door was open.

“Liva!” Jens called.

She did not come out.

“Don’t know what’s wrong with her,” said the guard. “Must have hit her too hard.” He smiled broadly and showed several missing teeth.

“You get nothing unless she comes out.” Jens had a terrible feeling. What if they had hurt her? She would have fought with them, turned into any animal shape she could.

The younger guard went into the jail and carried a limp Liva out.

She looked pale, and her eyes were closed, but her chest was moving with breath.

“You see? She’s not dead.”

Jens nodded, relieved. Then he noticed there was something around her neck. A stone of some kind.

A white stone, like the one on the knife.

Jens’s stomach clenched.

He lunged forward, but the younger guard held Liva back. “Throw the bauble to me first,” he said.

Jens threw the half circlet as hard as he could, past the edge of the jail into a dark corner.

The younger guard tumbled Liva’s body to his companion and ran for his reward.

Jens reached for Liva, but now the older guard held his knife to Liva’s throat. “She waits for the Hunter,” growled the older guard.

“But—,” protested Jens. “I paid you!”

“You paid enough to see her, to know she lives. Not enough for more than that.” The younger guard had come back, and the half circlet was nowhere to be seen, except on the smile across his face.

The older guard took the unconscious Liva back into the jail and locked it once more. She would not even know that Jens had come for her.

“No!” shouted Jens. He punched the younger guard’s face but was kicked down. The older guard came back and the two worked together to hurt Jens. Dizzy, blood in his mouth, Jens heard voices behind him and realized Karl had come, along with several other boys his age.

But Jens had used the hound’s half circlet. It was gone, and he had gotten very little in return for it. He should never have wasted it like that, though he knew he would do it all again, just for the hope of freeing Liva.

“Who is this?” asked Karl of the guards.

“He tried to bribe us,” said the younger guard.

“With what?” asked Karl.

The younger guard opened his mouth, then closed it.

Karl reached out his hand. “Give it here,” he said.

The younger guard put his hand into his pocket and handed the jeweled half circlet to Karl.

“Pretty. Where would a boy from the forest like you get something like this?” he asked. “Stolen, no doubt, from some old merchant or a wealthy man with ancient heritage.” He motioned for the two guards to hold Jens.

“I didn’t steal it,” Jens said, spitting out blood.

“No? I think you did. Somewhere in the forest where you live, eh? And I am sure the Hunter will wish to talk to you about it, since he fancies himself the ruler of the north. If there are any who think they have a claim to royalty, he will want to know.”

“I will tell you where there are more just like it, buried in the forest,” Jens said, thinking quickly. “If you let the girl go.”

“The girl? The one I caught this morning who turned out to have the aur-magic? You are a friend of hers? Oh-ho!”

“No,” said Jens, with a sinking feeling. “Please. I only want to help the girl.”

It was no use. Karl called for rope, and Jens was soon bound with his hands behind his back and his feet tied together.

Jens told himself to be calm as they dragged him
away from the jail, toward the ocean. He might still do something for Liva. If he could talk to the Hunter, convince him of—something. He would not give up.

By dark, Jens was tied to a post and left alone. The smell of salt and death was all around him, and he could hear the lap of water near him. Soon he could also hear squeaking and scratching.

Rats.

He could not see them, but he could feel them coming closer. And then he remembered that rats were wild animals, with aur-magic.

Jens held himself absolutely still, trying not to breathe any more than he had to, keeping his legs from twitching no matter how much they hurt.

And the rats stopped.

They moved around him. He could hear their scurrying little feet, could even hear them dragging meat back with them—and the smell of it, always rank. The remains of a fish that had been left out for several days. Or a dead cat or dog, Jens suspected. But the rats did not sense him. As in the forest, if he made no sound, they did not notice him, because he lacked all magic, and magic was the way they sensed the world around them.

W
HEN LIVA AWOKE
, it was to a terrible pain in her head and a deadening feeling around her throat. The only light came from the cracks in the roof and in the doorway. It was not much, but it was enough to see that the boy was still there with her, in the corner far from the door.

“Hello?” she said, the human language strange in her ears.

The boy did not answer.

Liva struggled with the stone necklace, trying to turn her head this way and that to get it to fall off. But that did not work. At last she forced herself to touch it. It burned, but she threw it off with a supreme effort of will. She did not think that anyone who had less magic than she could have thought of how to fight against it. But at the sound of it dropping to the floor, she breathed relief. Then she moved away from it and slowly toward the boy.

He pulled himself upright, flattening his back against the wall.

“I have magic,” she said. She tried to give some to him, but what did not seep out of his wounds, he pressed back at her, as if afraid to take it in.

“Can you speak?” she asked.

He began to breathe more quickly, as though the very sound of another human voice frightened him.

Probing the boy’s magic, Liva found it was cut in several places: on one leg, across a wrist, and in dots over his chest. But he would live.

“Do you have a name?” Liva asked, as a beginning. “I am Liva.” When he looked up at her, she said her own name again, and pointed to her chest.

The boy looked away again a moment later, but then he moved an inch closer to her.

“Tern,” he whispered.

“Tern,” Liva echoed.

Beckoning her closer, he used his magic to change his hand from a sturgeon’s fin to a tern’s wing to a lynx’s paw, and then back to a human hand again.

Liva put out her own hand and did the same simple sequences of changes.

Tern did the sequence over and over again. At last, Liva realized he was doing it to show her what was wrong with him, not what was right. Whatever had damaged him had made it so that he could not change his whole body, only his left hand and part of his forearm.

“I understand,” said Liva.

He kept doing it.

Liva thought he must have learned the sequence from his mother or father. Now they were gone, and this was all he had left of them.

There was a scraping at the lock of the door.

Liva scrambled with her hands to reach for the stone necklace again. She hated how weak it made her feel, but she did not want her captors to know she could remove it, so she put it back around her neck.

Tern made a soft sound of distress. He curled up in himself, and put his head to his chest, as though that would make him disappear.

Liva turned to face the person at the door, the necklace swinging around her neck to land on her chest with a burning sensation. A flash of light blinded her for a moment, but she blinked and saw a man, tall and strong, with keenly intelligent eyes and a cruel look. His hair was gray and tied neatly back, his clothes finely cut, and his nails were carefully clipped and clean.

Liva felt her legs spasm, as if they were trying to run away. She knew him from her dream, but in person he was worse.

There was something dangerous about him. Not wild, but fierce and unpredictable.

He looked over Liva and the boy, and gave a chilling, wide smile as he closed the door. Only cracks of light from the wood now showed where he stood.

“Ah, my young friends have done their work today. They will be well rewarded indeed,” said the man.

This was the Hunter. Whatever had been done to the boy, he had had a part in it. And since it was very similar to what had been done to her father, Liva felt queasily that perhaps she had also found the man she had wanted vengeance against. But here she was, in jail, with no way of striking at him, her aur-magic damped by the stone necklace, and with responsibility to the boy foremost in her mind.

She had to save him first.

The Hunter stepped forward, and the boy began to sob.

Liva moved between them.

The Hunter reached for her arm and pulled her to him. “Tell me where you are from and how many others like you are there,” he said, twisting her arm until she was afraid that he would wrench it out of its socket entirely.

Liva held her lips tightly together and began counting to ten in every animal language she could think of. Anything to keep her mind occupied with something other than fear.

Then she saw the Hunter take a stone knife out of his belt.

Her mind went on, counting in the language of the dovekie, but she could feel the tremors beginning in her eyes and moving to her lips, her cheek, her neck, and downward.

Without a word, the Hunter lunged toward her and sliced with the knife at Liva’s stomach. A shallow cut, but Liva gasped and began to weep. The stone knife had left a hole in her magic. What had been there once was now gone. Suddenly she knew for certain: This was what had been done to her father, a thousand times over.

The emptiness left behind was worse than pain. Liva wished the Hunter had cut off her arm instead, or taken one of her eyes. She was sick at the thought of how her father must have felt as all sense of magic was taken from him. Liva would always remember what the Hunter’s knife had taken from her.

It was the language of an owl, including the mating call she had always loved.

“And now.” The Hunter held out the knife toward the boy.

Even without being touched by it, Tern fell forward, his whole body shivering, his hands behind his back as if they were being held there.

The Hunter seemed to be enjoying the moment. Certainly he was in no hurry.

He moved forward slowly.

Liva took a breath, gathered her strength, and threw herself against his back. There was a satisfying sound of his exhalation of air.

Then she fell to the side, rolled, and hit the wall.

She moved gingerly away.

The Hunter got up, brushing himself off. “Well. You’ve
come after him, have you? One of the aur-magic family, eh? A younger cousin, poor, helpless, weak. And you put yourself in danger to save him. Foolish girl. You are hardly older than he is. And you have no defenses against me.”

He lifted the knife again and moved toward Liva.

“Take my aur-magic then,” she said. “But let him go.” She nodded to Tern. “You have no use for him now.”

“Ah, not true. He has aur-magic still,” said the Hunter.

“He is no threat to you or anyone in this town. He can’t use his aur-magic now for anything that matters,” she said.

“Anything that matters to you, perhaps. But it is aur-magic for all that, and it is wrong.”

“What is wrong with having aur-magic, then?” asked Liva.

“The aur-magic is the way that we are bound to animals and to their world. We will never rise above that beginning so long as we still have aur-magic to remind us of that baser side of ourselves.” He made a fist and slammed it into the open palm of his other hand. “Humans are not animals!”

Liva stared at him, aware that at that moment he looked more like an animal than any human she had ever seen before, and in the worst possible way. A snarling wolf, in fact, long starved from winter, and eager to attack the first creature it found, no matter what its chances of survival.

The Hunter grimaced and seemed to consciously make a decision to drop his hands to his sides. He spoke softly. “If we are to grow past what we once were, we must destroy what belongs in the past and move on to the future.”

“I do not believe I want your future,” said Liva steadily.

“That is only because you are still caught so much in the past,” said the Hunter. “You have spent all your life as an animal in your aur-magic. But now it is time for you to be human, and this knife will help you become like I am.”

“As you have helped him?” asked Liva, staring at Tern.

“Indeed, as I have helped him. Though burning would perhaps help both of you more.” Then the Hunter knocked on the door, and there was a sound of jingling keys.

“Just as a warning,” said the Hunter casually, not even turning to speak to her directly, “if you escape from this place, I will not only see the boy burned, but I will make sure that he suffers terribly first. I will take the rest of his aur-magic slowly and cruelly. And he will call for you to help him, so that you will feel his death on your heart for the rest of your days.”

For all her attempts at disguising herself, Liva knew she had shown too much strength, even with the necklace around her. No doubt anyone else wearing it would have been unable to resist in any way, and she had done so
at every possible turn. She had not thought of the price she would pay for it. Perhaps the Hunter was right. She was used to dealing with animals, and in a battle with an animal, there was no subterfuge. It was only a matter of which was larger and faster and fiercer.

But animals did not take hostages, either.