The Snow Queen (18 page)

At last the cover was finished. Once Gerda would have been ashamed to show anyone such crude, clumsy work; she would have picked out all the threads and begun again. But now she examined with unexpected pride the big, uneven stitches, the lumpy crimson roses with their strange violet-coloured leaves. The task was meant to be impossible — and together she and Ritva had found a way to do it.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-TWO

“W
e've completed every one of your tasks,” Gerda said.

“We've earned Kai's freedom. Now you must let him go.” But her courage wavered as she met the Snow Queen's cold, implacable gaze.

“And who are you to tell me what I must do? In my own time, I will give Kai his freedom.”

“But you promised!” Gerda's voice was shrill with indignation.

“What did I promise? To play a game. Did I say there would be a prize for winning?”

“But you said . . . ” Gerda subsided into outraged silence. A bargain had been struck, and they had kept their side of it. She could find no words to protest such injustice, such shameless betrayal.

“I said nothing. I can hardly be blamed if you choose to make assumptions. All these tricks of yours have been entertaining — but the price for Kai comes higher than that.”

Ritva asked, in a hoarse, flat voice, “What
is
the price then?”

“You're asking me to make a sacrifice,” the Snow Queen said. “I've grown fond of your friend Kai: he is clever, and amusing. So I will ask a sacrifice in return. If you would earn his freedom, you must do as the people of the northlands do — you must give up your most precious possession.”

“Then the price is nothing at all,” said Gerda, “for we have nothing to give up.”

“Ah, but you're wrong,” the Snow Queen said. “When the people of the northlands ask a favour from their gods, they understand the price. They know they must offer up the life of their best animal. Their favourite dog. The strongest reindeer in the herd.”

Behind her, Gerda heard the sudden rasping intake of Ritva's breath.

“Not Ba,” Gerda whispered. “You would not ask us to kill Ba.”

The Snow Queen smiled. “If you would rob me of Kai, then you must pay the penalty.”

“No! Ritva, you must not!”

“You want your Kai, don't you?” said Ritva. Her voice sounded choked and strange. “Isn't that why we came here?”

Fiercely, she wrapped her arms around the old reindeer's grizzled neck. When she looked up Gerda saw that the robber-maid's mouth was trembling, and her eyes were blurred with tears. Something sharp and painful twisted in Gerda's chest. It was the first time that she had ever seen Ritva weep.

“Not if Ba must die for it. Nothing is worth that price.”

“It's what my mother's ancestors did. What their gods demanded of them.”

Gerda put her own arms around Ritva — cautiously, for fear of being rebuffed. The old reindeer turned his head to peer curiously at them both. “The Snow Queen is not a god, she's just a vile, treacherous woman. And anyway, if she broke her other promise, why wouldn't she break this one as well?”

“Do you mean it — you would give up Kai to save Ba?”

Gerda drew a long, slow breath. Was this the choice she must make? Must she sacrifice Kai, and her dreams of a future with Kai, so that Ba could live?

She took Ritva's cold, trembling hands in her own.

“Don't you see what she wants, Ritva? How cruel and calculating she is, to give us a choice that must tear the two of us apart?”

“But you love Kai . . . ”

“And you love Ba. Surely, Ritva, the two of us together can outwit her. She does not deserve to win.”

Ritva picked up the fishbone harp and settled it on her knees. Her fingers drifted across the strings, coaxing forth a sweet, slumbrous music. In those languid notes, Gerda could hear the rippling of water among green reeds, the wind in the yellow grass of August, the murmuring of bees on summer air. Her eyelids drooped; her limbs felt slack and heavy.

And then she was sitting high up over a cobbled street, with the hot sun beating down on her shoulders. She was dressed in white muslin, with pink ribbons in her hair, and the air was filled with the scent of roses.

“Wake up! Wake up!” In the midst of her dream, rough hands were shaking her, slapping her cheeks. But she must not wake up. If she clung to sleep she could stay in this warm, summer place forever.
Go away
, she wanted to shout.
Leave me
alone
. But no sound came from her lips. She tried to strike out at those infuriating hands, but her arms hung inert as blocks of wood. Someone prodded her in the ribs, yanked savagely on her hair. Gerda's eyes flew open, and she let out a protesting shriek as the dream shattered and cold reality rushed in.

Ritva's hands were on Gerda's shoulders, still shaking her. She let go, and grinned.

“Not you, you stupid thing, I didn't mean
you
to go to sleep!”

Gerda peered groggily about her. She saw two kitchen servants slumped beside the hearth, their snores rattling around the big white-tiled room. The guard dog slept with his nose on his paws, and the cook dozed sitting up with a ladle in her hand.

“They're all asleep,” said Ritva happily. “All over the palace. Even the Snow Queen. I've charmed them all to sleep with my music. See —” She prodded the cook with her foot. The woman made a grumbling noise in her throat and toppled gently sideways till her head came to rest on a sack of flour.

Gerda stood up, feeling dazed and lightheaded. She put her hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn.

“We must find Kai,” she said.

In all that frozen palace, only Kai was awake. He was huddled, as always, in the midst of the Mirror of Reason, intent on shifting ice-fragments into ever-changing patterns. But the fragments were smaller now, mere shards and splinters, as though he no longer had the strength to drag the heavier pieces from place to place. His listless, repetitive movements slowed as Gerda and Ritva approached, but he did not look up.

“Kai!” Gerda leaned down. The words came out in a hoarse whisper. “Come with us, Kai. We are going home.”

Gaunt, grey, hollow-eyed, he turned his face to her. She wanted to weep for the deep lines across his forehead, the shadows under his eyes.

“You can't go home,” he said in a dull, hopeless voice. “No one leaves this place. There is no way out.”

“Have you ever tried to leave?”

He shook his head. “What would be the point? Someday I will solve the ice puzzle, and everything I have been promised will be mine. And what are the alternatives? To be killed by the hounds that guard the gates, or to freeze to death in the snow?”

“Kai,” Gerda said softly. She picked up a piece of ice in her mittened hands and held it to his face. “Look at yourself, Kai. Look hard and tell me what you see.”

His gaze slid away, stared into the white distance. “Look,” she said, with stubborn patience. “You are already frozen half to death.”

At last he looked into the mirror. Gerda, head close to his, looked with him, and saw that the ice mirror showed his true image: the worn, wind-chapped, haggard features, the eyes glazed with suffering and exhaustion, the flesh worn to the bone.

“This is the Snow Queen's gift,” said Gerda. “She has given you a riddle with no answer, and she will keep you here until your soul is frozen into a lump of ice.”

Kai said, with childlike persistence, “But I have not solved the puzzle. I must spell out the answer to the Snow Queen's riddle, and then I will know everything there is to know in the world.”

“You cannot know everything in the world,” said Gerda sadly. “Only God and his angels know that.” How strange that she should say these things to Kai — he had always been the one who talked, and she the one who listened. Yet at this moment she felt years older than Kai, and immeasurably wiser.

“She has deceived you, Kai. Everything she told you was a trick and a deception. We have come to take you home, to the people who love you and are waiting for you.”

“No one leaves here without her permission,” Kai said in a dreary monotone, as though he were repeating a formula by rote. For answer, Gerda seized his hands, and dragged him to his feet.

“Nonsense,” she said. “We need no one's permission. Show him what you've done, Ritva.” She took firm hold of Kai's arm and led him, weakly protesting, to the edge of the frozen lake. Together they followed Ritva through the echoing icy corridors, the vaulted moon-white rooms of the Snow Queen's palace. Everywhere was emptiness and silence.

“Where are her guards, her servants, her dogs?” Kai whispered.

“I played them a lullaby on my fishbone harp,” said Ritva. Her eyes danced with mischief, and delight in her own cleverness. “The cooks are asleep in the kitchen, and the guards are asleep in the guardroom. The dogs are snoring beside the gates.”

“Where is the rune-chest?” Kai asked. “We must take it with us.”

“What, that heavy thing?” said Ritva “What use is it? We have enough to carry.”

For an instant something hard and dangerous blazed in Kai's eyes. When he answered Ritva, it was in a cool, patronizing tone that Gerda recognized all too well. “Don't you understand? We can't leave the chest behind. It's the source of all her power.”

“What's in it?” Ritva wanted to know. She sounded skeptical, but interested.

“No one knows that. It is never opened.”

“You mean there is magic in it?” persisted Ritva.

“Only if by magic, you mean the secret patterns of the universe. One day, she promised, she would unlock the box and reveal its contents to me.”

“And now you mean to steal it.”

Kai's grey features flushed with sudden anger. “It is mine by right,” he said. “Haven't I earned it, all these weary months, shuffling and reshuffling the ice pieces, looking for an answer you tell me I was never meant to find?”

Ritva shrugged. “Fetch the chest,” she said. “And bring some rope, for you must carry it on your own back. My poor old beast has enough to do.”

Stepping around the sleeping hounds, they went out into the starlit night. The air was clear, the snow frozen into a crust as smooth and hard as pavement.

Ba's saddlebags were full again, with provisions hastily collected from the palace larder.

At first Kai insisted on carrying the Snow Queen's treasure chest clutched awkwardly to his chest, but after a few steps he faltered, his knees buckling under him.

“It's too heavy for him, we must let Ba carry it,” pleaded Gerda.

But Kai was as stubborn as Ritva. “Give me that length of rope —I'll drag it behind me,” he muttered, and he plodded dourly onward with the rope over his shoulder, the chest in its bright needlework cover trailing after him like an obstinate hound on a leash.

“How do you know the way?” Gerda asked Ritva, as she hurried to keep up with the robber-maid's brisk, confident stride.