The Princess and the Snowbird (4 page)

“
W
HAT IN THE
name of life and death are these doing here?” shouted Torus, waving his arm at a strange grouping of animals, all in a circle at the edge of the river.

Jens stared at the animals and could think of no explanation. He had never seen such a group all together.

Were the flesh eaters and the plant eaters at peace? Perhaps the snowstorm had made them all confused? But their eyes were wide and bright.

“I don’t care why they’re here. Think of it as a gift.

We’ll kill them and take their skins back. Then we’ll be men,” said Harald, stroking his scraggly, red beard. He was two years younger than Jens, only fourteen, but he liked to pretend he was older.

“What if it’s a trap?” asked Jens. “To be safe, we should leave these here and go after others.”

“Safe? We’ve been hunting for four days in this storm,
with not a sight nor sound of animals. Now it’s clear and we have a chance. If we don’t bring something back now, we’ll all go hungry,” said Torus. This year the winter had been long and harsh, and more than half of the animals in the village had already been slaughtered. The land had grown less and less productive in recent years, and there were no stores of grain left in the village. If the hunters of the village did not find food in the forest, the village would be doomed.

“There’s something wrong with these animals. They are not acting as they should,” said Jens.

“When they’re dead, they will taste just like any other animals,” said Harald.

“And so many at once,” said Torus. “Think how many days we will be able to eat. And what a celebration the village will throw for us!”

“I am not sure,” said Jens. He was the oldest of them all and had been on the most hunts. But he was not surprised that they did not listen to him.

“What do
you
know?” Torus taunted Jens, for his lack of the tehr-magic was no secret. “The animals feel fine to me.”

“No,” Jens muttered distractedly. He was staring intently at the animals. He had no magic, but he felt something that was different. At the center of all the animals Jens could see a small creature almost like a mouse. No, it was a pika, black and white with shining eyes that turned and stared back at Jens as if pleading for its life.

I can’t speak to you,
Jens thought.
I can’t hear you, either. I’m useless to help you.

But then the pika disappeared in the flurrying snow around the river. The other animals moved sluggishly, as if to follow, but they did not move quickly enough.

“Leave them be!” Jens tried one more time.

But Harald cried out, “Kill! Hunt! Kill! The animals are ours.”

The other boys whooped in excitement. “Ours! Ours!”

“If we die, we die as men. We die with honor!” shouted Torus, who was always trying to prove that he was no coward. In his effort to make sure of it, he sometimes brought danger to those around him.

Torus took out his sword and began to bellow.

The others took out their weapons—daggers and knives—for they did not have the coin that Torus’s family did. Jens had only a slingshot. His father had refused to give Jens a knife after what had happened to his stone blade years ago.

The others began to shout to frighten the animals.

“I will cut you to pieces!”

“You can’t run from me!”

“Dead! You will be dead!”

They charged forward.

A mink was killed and flung over Harald’s shoulder. Then a raccoon, and a ferret. Jens found himself downstream along the banks of the river, though he had not
meant to go so far, and he picked up a lynx, its white belly stained red.

There were dozens of carcasses scattered on the white snow, steaming with blood, and it seemed wrong to Jens. If they had come across a herd of deer or antelope, the hunting party would have killed one or two and left the rest. Here had been a massacre. This felt vicious, though it was true that those who were hungry in the village would not object to eating so much fresh meat.

Torus passed him and patted him on the shoulder. “Good for you. I wondered if you would turn back at the sight of blood. Your father says…” He stopped and gestured at the lynx on Jens’s shoulder. “But here is the proof he is wrong. You will only need some more practice, and any hunting party will take you gladly.”

Jens realized that Torus thought Jens had killed the lynx himself. He expected at any moment for one of the other young men to insist that the lynx was rightly his kill, but they all had so many carcasses to carry that no one argued. Jens began to suspect as they trudged back to the village that the others did not even remember which animals they had killed. For all their tehr-magic, they did not any of them think of one creature as different from another.

Jens shivered and moved the lynx to his other side so that he would not get a cramp. The body had already gone stiff in the cold.

Around him Jens listened to a hunting song and the
congratulations of one hunter to the next. As if they had done something remarkable in killing animals that had not even tried to escape death.

Jens thought of the small pika and was careful to check to see if any of the dead creatures were that one. Somehow it had escaped when the others had not, and Jens was glad of it. At least there was some life to rejoice in still.

L
IVA CIRCLED BACK
in the direction the humans had gone. She told herself she would return to tracking her father in a moment, but something inside her compelled her to follow the boy with the white-blond hair. He was taller now, but she recognized him right away. Jens, the one who had seen through her animal skin when she had been following the felfrass kit.

He had been a member of a hunting party then, too. With humans, but not at all like them.

As a pika, she was small and low to the ground, black and white like dirty snow and nearly invisible. She followed the humans past the river, along a wide trail of trampled snow, blood, and noise.

She stopped at the first sight of the human village. All around it the forest had been cleared away. There were a few bony animals corralled by fences, sheep and goats and aurochsen, some of them with shelters to retreat to,
others curled around stones or pressed against the human habitations. Smoke rose from the chimneys.

Liva felt acutely uncomfortable in this human place. Everything seemed wrong. The tehr-magic had a sour, rotten taste. She had never had to be this close to the way the humans took and corrupted the aur-magic for their own purposes.

She called out softly to the few animals fenced in here, but they did not respond. Liva had heard stories from her father of tame animals, how they forgot their own language and learned to be more human. Her father had told her that the animals chose this, that there were benefits for them in the relationship. But Liva could not see how it was possible. She wanted to set all the animals free, even if they might die in the forest. She wanted to teach them to speak again as wild animals spoke She wanted to take their tehr-magic and make it aur-magic again, but she did not know how.

Liva sniffed her way forward until she reached a large building in the center of the village. There were sounds inside, not just human voices, but rhythmic thumping and something like the call of birds. There was an opening, a small crack in the wood, and she peered in, then nudged her way inside.

The humans were dancing around the stripped and smoking animal flesh. Some of the younger ones she recognized from the hunt; they wore animal skins over their shoulders, not yet cured, and they had blood smeared
onto their faces. They laughed and copied different mating calls. But there was no real wildness in their eyes, only the imitations of it.

Was this what it was to be human?

She strained, leaning forward, then stepped away from the wall.

Suddenly, a hand swooped down and picked her up. Liva squirmed, surprised that she had been caught so easily, without any warning through the aur-magic. She could not get away unless she used magic to change her form, and she feared the consequences of that in this human village, so she held back for the moment.

The boy who held her did so without anger, without pain. She looked up to his face, wondering what human would treat an animal so well.

Of course. She should have known it from the lack of any magic at all.

It was Jens.

Liva stopped struggling, and slowly he opened his hand. With one finger he petted her cheek. “I know you,” he whispered.

“I know you,” Liva eeped at him in the language of the pika. He could not know what she meant, but he nodded in response.

“What is it, Jens?” asked one of the other humans who had killed the animals in the forest.

A human with the tehr-magic, Liva felt clearly, disliking him.

Jens tried to close his hand around Liva again, but it was too late.

The other human had snatched her up and held her high.

“Stomping game!” he shouted.

Liva heard the anger in his voice as he directed his look at Jens. It was like an animal challenging another, but without any joy of life, and far more viciousness.

“No!” said Jens. He flung his fist into the other human’s face, and Liva felt herself falling.

She was back in Jens’s hand in a moment, and shivered there.

“It’s only a mouse,” said the human who was pulling himself off the floor, his face beginning to show a livid bruise where he had been struck by Jens.

“A pika, idiot Torus,” said Jens.

“Doesn’t matter. Just as good for stomping. It will run, won’t it?”

A part of Liva wished she were home with her mother at that moment, that she had never thought to go after her father, and had never seen the hunting party of humans.

But Jens was so different. He reminded her of a fierce mother bear, protecting a child. But at the same time, he was like a wolf with hackles raised, growling low, giving a snake the chance to slink away from marked territory.

How could he have no aur-magic?

“You’ve killed enough today, I would think,” said
Jens, gesturing toward the smoking animal meats.

“That’s meat,” said Torus. “Not fun.”

“I’ll give you fun,” said Jens.

Liva felt a chill run through her, and even the humans hushed.

But not for long. Soon Liva could hear whispers growing. “Torus, Torus, Torus!” they called.

No one rooted for Jens.

He was the lone wolf here. The one who had lost his pack and his home but was still ready to fight. It was in the way he lifted his head against the odds, and how he held his shoulders high and let his eyes dart about.

In one swift movement, he tucked Liva into a pouch wrapped around his middle. It was dark and warm, and in it was a large white feather threaded with silver. Liva put her nose against it and felt thrilled by the burst of aur-magic. It rarely happened that birds let their feathers fall without taking back the magic in them first. But a bird with a great deal of the aur-magic might not notice.

Torus taunted Jens.

Jens seemed to dance back and forth.

Torus threw a punch at Jens. Then another.

Inside the pouch, Liva was jostled as Jens staggered backward.

Liva tried to send magic to him, to heal him more quickly. She dared not send too much, for it would be too obvious to the other humans that it was not a natural healing. But the magic she sent to him seemed to slide
right through him and was taken up by other humans. Made into more tehr-magic, never to be returned. As if there were not already too much inside this building.

Jens got to his feet and put up his hands in fists.

Liva braced herself.

“Jens!” shouted one loud voice. “Jens, smash him! Make him sorry he ever touched you!”

Jens tried to swing at Torus’s face, but the other boy slipped underneath the blow, then came back with a kick at Jens’s knee.

Liva heard a cracking sound, and Jens went down hard.

“Get up, boy!” came the same voice from the crowd. “Don’t let him beat you!”

Torus was already circling the center of the building, his hands held high above his head, a picture of victory.

“Torus! Torus!” the crowd cheered relentlessly.

Jens got up on one foot. He made a loud heaving sound, and with each breath, there was a whimper of pain.

“Move!” shouted the voice. “Show yourself a man now!”

Liva focused her senses on the voice. Whoever he was had a great deal of the tehr-magic, gleaned from countless animal deaths.

Then Jens hopped forward, bouncing Liva in the pouch, drawing her attention back to the fight.

“Try it. You know I’m stronger than you are, and
I always will be,” Torus said, arms across his chest in invitation.

Torus was no more than a shrieking magpie, Liva thought in fury. If only Liva could have shown him her bear form. Then they would see who was afraid and who was not. Jens would stand firm and Torus would be cowering in fear.

“I do not want to hurt you,” said Jens.

“Then that is the difference between us. You will never be a hunter if you do not learn to be ruthless.”

“And you will never have any true friends. They will all be waiting to hurt you when you are weak.” Jens tried to put weight on his injured leg and grimaced in pain.

Torus stepped forward. “Here, let me help you, friend,” he said with a sly grin. Quickly, he tugged Jens off balance.

There was applause from the other humans in the audience.

“Useless!” shouted the voice. At last Liva got a glimpse of the face of the man with dark tehr-magic. She was startled to see that he had white-blond hair, just like Jens did. In fact, his face was similar to Jens’s in many ways. The same jutting chin, the same light eyes, the same flushed cheeks.

His father.

But there was none of the love in his eyes that Liva had seen in both her mother’s black hound eyes and her
father’s bear eyes. How could there be with such poison held inside of him?

Jens winced at his father’s voice, then took a breath and steadied himself.

He breathed out and in.

Then he clenched his fist, drew it back, and flung it forward with all the force he had, striking Torus in the chest. The punch would have done damage on its own, but Liva added aur-magic to it. Only a little, and only at the last moment. She told herself she was only making the battle more fair.

Liva could feel her aur-magic slam into Torus and rip through him. It was moving too quickly for him to take it into himself, and it tore out some of his own tehr-magic with it.

Torus took in a great, gasping breath of air. His mouth opened, but no words came out of it. He waved his arms, then slumped to the floor, his eyes rolling back in his head.

None of the humans seemed to notice that aur-magic had been used. Liva was relieved—that danger occurred to her only after the fact.

There was a brief silence, followed by “Jens! Jens! Jens!” shouted in precisely the way that those same humans had shouted “Torus!” a moment earlier.

Jens’s father came forward and clapped him on the back. This made Jens stagger in pain. “I never thought I’d see the day, boy.” He pushed Jens’s head down, then
let go of it suddenly. “Time to celebrate,” he said, heading to the corner—and the vats of ale. He didn’t take Jens with him, however.

Jens gently let himself down onto the ground and crawled toward Torus.

Liva wanted to shout at him to stop, that Torus deserved what he had gotten. But Jens proved himself kinder than she was. Liva could think of no animal who would have gone back to check on the health of the loser in a battle. As for the other humans, they had lost interest in the fight now that it was over, and they did not try to help Torus, either.

As Jens leaned forward, Liva was able to raise her nose out of the pouch and sniff at Torus. There was something wrong with him more than just the loss of his tehr-magic.

He was not breathing.

The aur-magic Liva had forced into him had done more damage than she had thought. Humans were used to taking from animals, but Liva’s magic was far stronger.

Jens put a hand out and touched Torus’s caved-in chest. “I did not mean to do this,” he said softly. And he looked down at Liva.

She shrank back from his sight, not wanting to admit that it was her fault, not his. She did not want him to despise her.

Gently Jens straightened Torus’s head and neck in line with the rest of his body. He pressed his lips onto
Torus’s and breathed into him.

This time, Liva used the aur-magic more carefully. She let out only a little bit, and directed it to flow into Torus’s blood naturally, as if his heart were beating again. Then she pressed magic into his heart itself, to start it once more.

Liva would never have done this to an animal that had died. Death was part of the natural cycle of the true magic. To fight against it would have been to damage the integrity of the aur-magic itself. But this was an unnatural death, so Liva felt that she needed to reverse what she had done.

Suddenly Torus’s head yanked forward. He coughed, then took a breath. And another.

Liva had not healed his chest wound, which bled again, but she had done enough. She hoped that Torus would not be able to tell easily that she had altered the magic in him. He was not full of tehr-magic now, but had a bit of the aur-magic that flowed in and out with the forest and the animals. Perhaps he would get used to it. Perhaps he would even come to like it.

But at the moment he was angry.

“Get away from me!” said Torus when his eyes flickered open to see Jens’s face. Jens pulled away, and Torus convulsed, his face red. He turned to the side and vomited up a great deal of pale-colored fluid. Finally he tottered to his feet and threw himself away from Jens and out of the building.

So much for her one attempt to save humans from their own magic, Liva thought.

Jens remained on the floor, staring at his knee.

Liva watched him. He was the one who deserved her intervention.
He
was a human she would want to save. But her aur-magic didn’t touch him at all! It made no sense that there could be a human whom neither kind of magic could touch.

She tried to send aur-magic to him again, thinking that she needed to send less and hold it for him until he took it in. If he had some injury to his magic, perhaps from when he was a child, then he might have forgotten how to hold it.

But it was the same as before. She held it, but he never took it in, and when she let it go, it was gone into the world around him.

Liva tried to think what else might have happened to his natural sense for magic. If he hated tehr-magic the way she did, perhaps he had pushed it away too often. In that case, she would need to give him a great deal of aur-magic, but pressed directly into his knee.

Liva guided the aur-magic as precisely as she could this time, then held it in place, but it was no use. It went through Jens and was useless, as before. He had not even noticed that it was there.

He must have been born without magic of any kind. Perhaps his mother lacked magic, too? Obviously, his father did not.

Liva heard Jens sigh next to her. He had pulled both his legs close to himself and leaned against the wall of the building. He took Liva out of the pouch and placed her on his hand.

“What do I do with you now?” he asked.

“Take me back to the woods,” Liva eeped at him. “And you come with me, too. Don’t stay here. Not with humans.” Even lacking magic, Jens belonged more in the woods than in the human village.