The Snow Queen (28 page)

On she lumbered. The scents got stronger under tree-canopy, but only because the trail wasn’t hidden under snow. Whatever had happened to the missing men, they hadn’t come back this way.

By the time the sun rose, even the Bear form’s strength was beginning to flag. The scent actually was stronger, though, so at least it was more recent. She was tracking them across the side of a forest ridge now, and considered stopping and curling up for a nap, then decided to press on at least as far as the ridge ahead of her. So far she hadn’t seen a good place to curl up anyway; there might be better cover ahead.

And then, just as the full sun hit the valley below, she crested the ridge—and stopped dead in her tracks.

Below her was a sight that was both stunningly beautiful and utterly horrible.

For as far as the eye could see, the sun reflected blindingly off the branches of a forest of trees of ice.

ANNUKKA STOOD WITH ONE ARM AROUND KAARI, COMFORTINGLY,
as they stared at the wilderness ahead of them. Behind them was the village where Veikko had found his mentor, the Warrior-Mage Lemminkal; it was from here that he, Ilmari, and Ilmari’s brother Lemminkal had departed. The villagers all agreed that they had gone to track down something called the Icehart, which was some sort of monstrous creature that had killed everyone in three separate villages. They had learned of this Icehart from a reindeer herdsman who had returned to his village to find everyone dead, frozen—and from all appearances, it had happened in a single moment in the middle of the night. He claimed that he had seen it, at a distance, moving away from a second village, to which he had gone for help. He had called it the Icehart because it looked like an enormous, ghostly stag, and wherever it went, it killed with cold.

And that was far more information than they had gotten before. At least now they knew to watch out for ghostly reindeer.

It was Lemminkal who had linked the Icehart with the Snow Queen, and according to those who had spoken to him before the three men left, he was determined to eliminate both the monster and its mistress. Ilmari was more circumspect and rather less confident that they could take on the Snow Queen themselves.

Annukka and Kaari had decided to climb up from the valley where the village lay to have a look at what lay ahead of them as they followed the men. From this vantage, on the side of the mountain, what was before them was daunting, a patchwork of alpine forest and glacier, mountains already deep in snow. This was where the road had lost track of Veikko, because after this village, there was no road. And there was no use in calling up the North Wind again, because even if it would answer, which was dubious, the Winds were notoriously bad at being able to give good directions to humans. “Oh, over that mountain and to the east” was usually the best they could manage.

“Now what do we do?” Kaari asked, looking bleakly at the literally trackless wilderness in front of them.

“For one thing, we switch to sledges,” Annukka replied. “Which means that we will be able to carry more supplies with us. That is no bad thing.”

“But how are we going to find them?” Kaari wailed. “There’s no road to follow, and any tracks they made are gone by now!”

Annukka hugged her shoulders harder. “Don’t despair. I have an idea.” She turned Kaari about, faced her toward the village and gave her a little shove. “You go get us sledges and supplies. And find out what, if anything, has been happening here since the men left. I will see if my idea will work.”

Kaari got a firmer hold on herself, and nodded. She turned back to the village as Annukka walked down the slope to their camp, ducked under the flap of their cobbled-together tent and sat down on her bed to rummage through her pack. They had set up their tent here in the shelter of one of the reindeer sheds because this was a small village and had no inn. This was probably why the only witness to the appearance of the Icehart had taken his deer herd and moved on.

Which was a great pity, because Annukka would have liked to have been able to question him herself.

As for a way to track the three men into the wilderness, she had an idea, indeed. But it was nothing that she, nor anyone she knew, had ever tried. She had gotten this notion earlier today when one of the men of Ilmari’s village had offered to sell them a lodestone, demonstrating for them how it always pointed to the North Star.

“But if it always points to the North Star, why would you need it?” Kaari had asked, shaking her head in puzzlement. “You can see the North Star!”

“You can’t during the day,” the man had said, with some impatience.

“But then you can see the sun,” Kaari had replied, with the patience she used when speaking to particularly dense little boys. “The sun will tell you where North is.”

“Well then, you can’t see the North Star at night when it’s cloudy!” the man responded, and Annukka got the impression that if it hadn’t been Kaari he’d been talking to, he would have lost his temper.

“Why would I want to travel at night when it is cloudy?” Kaari asked, looking at him as if he was mad. “For that matter, why would I want to travel at night at all if there was no road to follow? It would be of much more use if it pointed to something other than the North Star—like the village you needed to go to.” She looked at the lodestone indulgently, with the air of a girl who is looking at something that she considers to be a particularly foolish “boy’s toy.” Annukka had seen that look before, on the faces of most of the women she knew, when men came trotting up with some wonderful “new” thing that was allegedly better than any previous iteration of such a thing. Men never understood that look, and generally went off, aggrieved, to show the prize to another man, who certainly would understand why it was better, shinier and altogether superior to anything else that anyone had that was like it.

Now truth to tell, Annukka could certainly see a great deal of use for something like the lodestone. What if they had not had the road to follow when they were making their way through dense forest? You could see neither sun nor stars under trees like that and the only way of getting one’s bearings would be to climb a tree at intervals. You could wander in circles forever in such a place, and people had. People had died under such circumstances.

So she had quietly traded for the lodestone herself from the fellow after soothing his wounded pride; a couple of copper coins from the bandit’s loot, a handful of charms and one of the swords they clearly did not need. He had told her then that it came from a much larger piece of metal that had fallen from the sky, and showed her how it was also attracted to iron. Interesting, that, but not terribly useful. On the other hand, she could use that to make sure it didn’t go astray, by storing it with the ax.

But what if such a thing could be made that pointed to other things? People, for instance? Kaari had been right; something that pointed to another object or person would be very, very useful. Especially now, when they didn’t know where to begin looking for the three missing men.

If she could just work out a way to make a lodestone that pointed to Veikko…There should be a way to do so with magic. Loathe as she was to use it, nevertheless if ever there was a time to start, it was now.

But how to get it to point? She would have to have something of his, she thought.
If only I was home when I had thought of this. I have so much of his: his baby clothing, a lock of his baby hair…
When he had left, Kaari had given him a lock of hers, but he had not done the same. She supposed that was partly caution and partly a lack of sentiment.

After a thorough rummage through both her belongings and Kaari’s, she had to give that idea up. Neither of them had so much as a hair from Veikko’s head, nor any token from him that would have much magical attachment to him. But although disappointed, she was not discouraged. There should be a way to do this, and she would find it.

In the meantime, that lodestone would serve to guide them so that they did not go completely astray. They did know the general direction that the men went in when they were told about the strange creature that was killing whole villages. That would be the place to start.

Meanwhile, she would
find
a way to make this new sort of lodestone point to Veikko.

When Kaari returned, though, it was with the news that she could find only one sledge. Annukka was outside the tent again, looking to repack what they had to fit on sledges and trying to reckon what else could be traded for. They still had several swords, knives and bows that were fundamentally useless to them—but this village had been the home of a Mage-Smith, which meant that the weapons were somewhat devalued here.

On the other hand, with their resident magicians gone, some people were feeling anxious about magical protections. Her charms were unexpectedly welcome, it seemed.

But the droop of Kaari’s shoulders as she approached warned of trouble. “I tried, Mother Anukka,” she said, as soon as she was within hearing distance, “but they would only sell me one.” She looked stricken, as if she felt she was personally to blame somehow.

That was an unwelcome development, but Annukka tried to put a good face on it. She shook her head, and patted Kaari’s shoulder. “Never mind,” she said, kindly. “We haven’t got so much that we need more than one, and we’ll be able to rest one deer while the other pulls.”

Kaari bit her lip. “Well, there is another complication. I am not sure you would want this sledge, Mother Annukka,” she said reluctantly. “I am told it belonged to Veikko’s Master, the Warrior-Mage Lemminkal…”

And that was when it struck Annukka like a blow. They might not have anything that belonged to Veikko—but Kaari had just bought the sledge that had belonged to Veikko’s Master! Now that was an unexpectedly good stroke of luck! A man spent a great deal of time with his sledge, and a surprising amount of emotional contamination rubbed off onto it. When it got stuck, or was reluctant to slide properly, anger seeped into it. When it was running smoothly and men were racing against each other, pleasure, excitement and other good things seeped into it. While not quite as “personal” as other effects might be, this was still as close as she was going to get without breaking into the Warrior-Mage’s house.

And that…would be ill-advised. Not only was it possible he had left unpleasant surprises for anyone who tried such a thing—assuming he hadn’t warded the place the way she had warded her house—but he would probably know just what they had done when they finally met up with him, and as a consequence they might well be marked as thieves and unfriendly from the beginning.

She jumped up and hugged Kaari, hard. “Want it?” she exclaimed. “This is the best thing you could have done! What does he want for it? Buy it! Hitch a deer to it and bring it here, quickly!”

She chuckled as a bewildered Kaari hurried back to whoever it was that was selling her the sledge. It was no bargain—two swords and two daggers, and a silver coin to boot—but Kaari’s charms had worked on him as well.

Lodestone be damned. She was going to enchant the whole sledge. Besides all the emotional contamination, anything that had once belonged to a magician generally was alive with the residue of magic. It should be easy for her to use that.

This sledge was going to guide them to its Master!

Aleksia had thought that the frozen villages were a horror. Somehow this ice-coated forest was worse, because it was so beautiful. It was a deadly beauty, and had killed as surely as the Icehart had killed in the three villages.

It had been a birch forest, and birches were some of the first trees to lose their leaves in the Fall, so all of the trees were leafless at the point when this had happened to them. And normally in the Winter, birch forests like this were gorgeous, with white snow on the ground, and papery white trunks with their black markings rising out of the snow, the mist of white twigs softening the starkness. Somehow, even in the dead of Winter, birch trees managed to look alive. Maybe it was because of how supple they were, how they bent gracefully to the wind. Maybe it was because beneath that paper-white bark there was a creamy glow, a hint of warm color, too subtle to really point out to anyone, but there if you had eyes for it. For the Bear, at least, that was not the whole of it. Birches had a scent of life to them, even in the worst of the Winter, a subtle perfume that promised that when Spring came, the birches would be the first to awaken.

But not now.

The trees glittered, reflecting the cold light lifelessly, the trunks smooth, perfect and encased in at least an inch of ice. Every branch, every twig, every bit of undergrowth was sheathed in ice, perfectly preserved, and perfectly dead. There was no scent of life here, only the cold breath of the ice. Birch trees did not restrict much light, and beneath the canopy there had been a lively tangle of undergrowth—bushes, vines, weeds—exuberantly flourishing in the shelter of the birch branches. And now all that was frozen as hard and dead as a stone.

Aleksia stared. This was appalling. And this was where the men’s trail had led.

Carefully, the Bear picked her way through the trees, digging her claws into the ice-crusted snow with every step, and the horror deepened as she worked her way inward. Here was a bird frozen in a bush, coated with ice…a rabbit with its eyes still wide open, coated with ice…a deer encased in ice like a statue, actually caught in midbrowse, a mouthful of grass pawed out of the snow, half-chewed, the individual stems poking out of its mouth also coated in ice.

Every hair on the Bear’s body stood up, and not just because of the cold; she was afraid, instinctively afraid. Chills ran down her spine, and a coldness grew in her stomach as Aleksia fought against the rising discomfort that told her to flee, and won. For long moments, she stood there, shifting from paw to paw, with the ice-covered snow cracking beneath her weight.

I have no choice. I must find out what is in here. This is no village, and there is no obvious reason for the forest to have been frozen like this. There are thousands of acres of forest just like this one—so why freeze it?
She forced herself to go deeper into the forest. The Icehart—for she was sure that was what had done all of this—must have had a compelling reason to freeze an entire forest. Even for a supernatural monster or a great Mage, this kind of act took too much power for it to be random. Just as she was certain that there was something in each of the frozen villages that the Icehart had wanted to stop, so she was certain that there was something here that had threatened it.