The Raven and the Reindeer Page 15
Which does me no good at all, if we can’t get into the fortress…
The sled itself pulled fairly easily, even if one were a human. Gerta hauled it herself backward, over the snow, until they were back in the wind shadow of the thorn wall. Janna knelt and scraped the snow away, down to bare earth, then built a tiny fire.
“I’m glad there’s dirt there,” said Gerta.
Janna nodded. “I was afraid there might only be ice,” she admitted. “Which doesn’t make tea very well.”
They sat on the sled together with the tent raised over them, watching the water heat for tea.
“So what do we do when we get inside?” asked Janna finally.
Gerta took a deep breath and let it out again, feeling as if it were coming from her toes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Find Kay. Bring him back out with us.”
“And the Snow Queen?”
Gerta stared at her hands.
“I will assume by your silence that we don’t have a plan.”
“I still don’t even know what she is,” said Gerta wearily. “A spirit, I guess? Nobody knows anything about her. Maybe she’ll kill me immediately. Maybe if we ask nicely, she’ll just let Kay go.”
“We’ll start with that,” said Janna, taking her hand and twining their fingers together. “After that, I suppose we’ll just have to improvise.”
“I had thought—maybe—if all else fails, I could turn into a reindeer and try to trample her?”
Janna bit her upper lip, obviously holding back laughter. “Well, it’s better than anything else we’ve got.”
The water began to steam gently. The wind howled overhead.
“I didn’t know you were a horse-leech,” said Gerta. “I should have guessed, with the way you were rescuing pigeons.”
Janna nodded. “My father’s band had horses once. But horses are expensive and men are cheap, and my father wanted me to learn something useful, since I was a girl and couldn’t take over the band.”
“Why couldn’t you?” asked Gerta.
Janna snorted. “Women who run bandit troops have to be twice as smart and three times as vicious. I didn’t want to deal with that. And I was not particularly interested in killing people and taking their money, anyway.”
“Don’t think I’m not grateful,” said Gerta, and Janna laughed. “So you took up healing instead?”
“More or less. A real healer would laugh me out of the room, I’m sure.” Janna shrugged. “Our horse-leech was an old man named Reckhardt. He taught me most of what he knew about healing humans and horses both.” She added another chip of dried reindeer dung to the fire. “When you get down to it, humans are easier. Horses are made of legs, the way that birds are made of wings, and when something goes wrong with them, they’re so hard to fix. And you can’t explain that something’s for their own good, either.” She considered for a moment, then added, “Also, humans don’t founder.”
The tea was as warm as it was likely to get. Gerta poured it out for both of them.
Janna wrapped her fingers around her mug. “Anyway. Reckhardt wasn’t a good man, but he was a kind one, if that makes any sense. It’s hard to do anything with animals if you can’t be kind. And he did his best.” She stared into her tea.
Gerta tried to imagine growing up in a bandit cave, surrounded by killers and thieves, and could not. She leaned her shoulder against Janna’s, and Janna leaned back.
“Why did I never ask you about your life before?” asked Gerta, surprised at herself.
“We’ve been busy this last week or so,” said Janna dryly. “And also you’ve been a reindeer for large chunks of it. You?”
“Oh…” Gerta felt again that strange dislocation, as if her grandmother and her home and Kay were creatures from a fairy tale that someone had told her long ago. “Oh. I live…lived…with my grandmother. My father’s dead. My mother’s…um, she visits sometimes, but she married again and it was a small house. You know. And my grandmother needed somebody to help out. Well.” She frowned down at her tea. “She didn’t really, I don’t think. And her best friend was Kay’s grandmother, who’s right across the alley, and his parents all live in the rooms there, and so did he, at least before…” She made a vague hand gesture that started somewhere south and ended up at the thorn wall before them. “Grandmother does weaving. She’s good at it. She sells it. I was supposed to learn it, so I’d have a trade. I suppose I’m all right, but no one would pay for it.”
She laughed a little at that. She hadn’t so much as thought of a loom or a shuttle in weeks. It seemed so odd to consider going back, after all this, and sitting down in front of the loom and trying to start up again.
“How am I ever going to go back?” she said out loud. “Even if we find Kay—when we find him—I’ll go home and say, ‘Hi, sorry, I was gone for a year but I was enchanted for part of it and then I was a reindeer but not any more and by the way, I can talk to ravens now. But I brought Kay back.’”
She closed her teeth with a click but her thoughts ran on, unimpeded: And also I don’t actually think I want to marry him any more and I think I may be in love with a bandit girl who’s killed at least one person that I know of, and why did none of you tell me that I could fall in love with a girl, anyway?
“Perhaps they’ll be so glad that you’re home that they won’t notice the rest,” said Janna. Her voice sounded forced.
“My grandmother will like you,” said Gerta.
Janna gave her an odd look. “You plan on taking a bandit home to meet your grandmother?”
“I assume you won’t try to nick the silverware,” said Gerta dryly.
“It’s not that,” said Janna quietly. “You know that.”
Gerta took a deep breath.
She knew that it was stupid to trust a bandit and an admitted murderer.
She knew that they had met under dreadful circumstances and those circumstances had gotten steadily worse.
But she also knew that she trusted Janna. Something had happened in those days and nights on the reindeer road, something to do with sharp knives, with hide and herd and things that humans did not have words for.
She would trust Janna to the ends of the earth. And that was good, because that was where they were standing.
“It will be all right,” Gerta said, and meant it.
Janna gripped her hand. Before she could say anything, they heard a familiar caw. Mousebones landed on the sled, shaking out his bad wing. “It’s too cold,” he said. “My wing’s not happy with this.”
Janna built up the fire a little and the raven hopped down next to it, stretching his wing out to soak up the little heat.
The wind howled overhead, and it smelled metallic, like fresh snow.
What will happen if it snows while we’re sitting out here? How long will our food hold out?
“Well?” said Gerta, when she could wait no longer. “Did you find a way in?”
Mousebones snapped his beak. “Aurk! Of course I did.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The way in was farther than Janna could hop. They had to go back through the long weary process of transformation and harnessing. Janna apologized and Gerta brushed it aside.
“If I couldn’t walk, we’d find a way,” she said, and threw the reindeer hide around her shoulders.
They stayed in the wind-shadow of the thorns as they went. Gerta was sweating by the time Mousebones called a halt.
The entryway was very low, only about three feet tall. The thorns grew over the top, but the snow beneath had been hollowed out in a long, curving run. It was slick and compacted in the center, beaten into murky blue ice.
The trail of blue ice continued out from the thorns and over the landscape. Gerta turned and pulled the sled alongside it, away from the thorn wall, to see where it went.
She had not gone far at all before she smelled minerals and saw steam rising in the air.
The ice gave way to mud, and the mud to fantastically colored water. They were ridiculou
sly bright in that landscape of black and white and grey—turquoise and orange in concentric rings and a pungent smell of rotting eggs.
“It’s a hot spring!” said Janna. “Something’s coming out of the thorns to use the hot spring. But what would do that?”
Mousebones hopped over to a small, steaming mud puddle and held his wing out over it. “Ahhh…that’s the stuff.”
It’s the otters, Gerta wanted to say. That’s a giant otter slide.
She’d seen them in winter, near her village. When everyone bundled up and went out to throw snowballs, or to ice fish or check the trap lines, you’d find otters playing on every snowbank, sliding down over and over, until their bellies beat the snow into glossy ice. Then they loved it even more.
She nudged Mousebones with her nose and the raven hopped to one side, grumbling. “What is it?”
The otters can fly. Why are they sliding down here if they can fly?
The raven cocked his head at her skeptically. “You don’t know otters very well, do you?”
Gerta regretted that reindeers have little concept of sarcasm. She snorted instead.
“Ravens can fly, too. We still slide sometimes. Sliding is fun,” said Mousebones. He tucked in his wing, flopped over in the snow, and rolled. Janna laughed.
Gerta gave an exaggerated reindeer nod and turned the sled around. She trotted back along the length of the slide and stood, waiting for the knife.
When she had climbed out from under the hide, she told Janna about the otters.
“I’d forgotten the otters,” said Janna. “Very well, I can see it.” She reached out a fingertip and ran it down Gerta’s throat. “You…ah. It’s scarring, a little. There’s all these white lines. Like cat scratches, only…not.”
Gerta swallowed hard, as much from the touch as the idea of the scars. “Well. I suppose they’ll fade eventually.”
“I suppose.”
They stepped apart. Janna eyed the low, slick tunnel with dismay. “My ankle won’t hold up to that.”
“It’s too low to take the sled in,” said Gerta. “I suppose we’ll have to crawl.”
“My ankle’s going to love this,” muttered Janna. “Very well! Lead on.”
They left the sled and put on packs. Gerta tied the reindeer hide to herself like a strange cape, upside down with the pack between them. The reindeer antlers bounced and gouged long lines in the ice on either side of her hips, but she did not know how else to manage them, and she did not dare leave it behind.
On hands and knees, they entered the tunnel.
It was not quite as bad as Gerta had feared. The slope was very gentle, and the edges of the slide were not completely beaten into ice. If she stayed to one side and dug her gloved hands into the snow there, she could make manage a sort of slithery crawl.
The light under the thorn wall was blue-green and dim, and came as much from the snow itself as from the sky. Black scribbles of stems closed overhead. It was impossible to tell if they were branches or roots or both.
Mousebones flew past them, a series of hops. Occasionally he would tuck himself into a feathery black oval and slide down the ice on his back, snickering in raven-fashion.
“They do that on steep rooftops sometimes,” said Janna. “When our winter quarters were over near the coast, I’d see them doing that on the stable roof. It always looked like fun.”
She sounded wistful. Gerta glanced back over her shoulder, but the light was too poor to make out her expression.
“What was the coast like?” asked Gerta. “I’ve never seen the sea.”
Janna was silent for a moment. Her breathing was magnified by the tunnel, and lit echoes all around them. “The sea is very large,” she said finally. “And it’s not like anything but itself. I can’t explain it. I liked living there, though.”
“I would like to see it,” said Gerta.
“It is very much worth seeing.”
They kept sliding. Gerta’s knees and palms ached with cold, even through her heavy clothes. She was very aware of the way that her knees went together, the joint and the tendon and the kneecap sliding over both and taking the brunt of the ice.
“How is your ankle?”
“It’s felt better.”
Mousebones went by them again on his back.
“By the way,” he called, as he slid past, “you’re almost there.”
“I get the impression he is not taking this seriously,” said Janna.
Gerta would have said something, but the roof of the tunnel slanted upward abruptly.
She blinked up, into bright light, and the interested faces of a half-dozen bone-white otters.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“It’s a human!”
“It smells like a dead reindeer.”
“It’s got a dead reindeer on it. Sort of upside down.”
The otters had peculiar voices, deep but squeaky. Gerta didn’t know whether to laugh or try to run away.
“It smells like both.”
“Perhaps it’s like a centaur. Only the front is a human and the bottom is a dead reindeer.”
The other otters turned and stared very hard at that one, which looked abashed. “What?”
Janna poked her head up through the tunnel entrance beside Gerta. “I can understand them…” she said wonderingly.
The otters seized on this immediately.
“Of course you can.
“We speak human very well.”
“We speak several human languages.”
“Suohtas duinna deaivvadit.”
“Hyvää huomenta!”
“Sprichst du auch Deutsch?”
“Diné bizaadísh dinitsʼaʼ?”
Gerta looked at Janna helplessly. Janna shook her head. “Maybe if you spoke a lot slower…” she said.
“Oh, never mind.”
“We speak this one fine.”
“We learned a lot of languages.”
“It’s not like Herself was going to learn our language.”
“She said it was undignified. Just because there was chittering.”
“And smells.”
“Musk is very expressive.”
“Some people don’t appreciate musk nearly enough.”
“So we learned her language.”
“Not that we had much choice.”
“It was that or be blasted with the wrath of a thousand blizzards.”
“Or whatever she was going to blast us with.”
“Anyway, we like languages.”
“Words are like fish and you catch them and you get to keep them forever.”
“And some of Herself’s toys teach us their words. Before they freeze.”
Gerta inhaled sharply.
They were talking about Kay. They had to be talking about Kay.
…or they’re talking about the one after Kay. Or the one after that. You slept for seven months, while he was freezing.
She kept her voice as steady as she could and said “Does she have one now?”
“Oh, lots!”
“She means an unfrozen one.”
“Well, she should have said.”
“It takes them ages to freeze.”
“There’s one.”
“She only keeps one unfrozen one at a time.”
“She is strictly monogamous that way.”
“Like a praying mantis made out of ice.”
“Oh, very nice image.”
“I came up with that years ago.”
“You did not.”
“You’re always taking credit for things.”
Janna and Gerta exchanged looks. “When did they ever see a praying mantis?” asked Janna.
“Sometimes Herself likes toys from very far south.”
“One explained praying mantises to us.”
“He drew a picture.”
“He was always drawing pictures.”
“Then he froze and he stopped drawing pictures.”
“About the unfrozen one…” said Gerta.
“He doesn’t speak any languages we don’t know, though.”
“And he never draws any pictures.”
“He’s pretty boring.”
“He sits in one room and does puzzles.”
Gerta’s heart squeezed. It must be Kay. It must be.
“Could you take me—?” she began, but Janna held up a hand.
“Is…Herself…here now?” the bandit girl asked.
“Of course.”
“She hardly ever leaves without her sled.”
“Sometimes she walks around the hedge.”
Gerta and Janna exchanged looks.
“Well,” said Janna quietly. “I suppose we will get to improvise after all.”
Gerta said “Can you take me to the unfrozen boy?”
One of the otters shrugged. It was a long, fascinating ripple that started somewhere in the neck and continued all the way to the tail. “I suppose.”
She—Gerta was nearly certain it was a she—leaned down into the hole and opened her jaws. Gerta had a moment of panic. The otter was narrower in the chest than a reindeer, but a great deal longer.
Oh god, they’re basically giant playful wolverines…
The otter grabbed Gerta’s collar in her teeth and flipped her out as neatly as a regular-sized otter grabbing a fish. Gerta landed upside down and narrowly avoided impaling herself on the trailing reindeer antlers.
Another otter dipped its head into the tunnel and flipped Janna out the same way. Janna landed with a yelp.
When Gerta stopped seeing stars, she sat up and looked around.
The room was enormous. The ceiling was lost in swirling winds, like a distant snowstorm. The walls were made of ice. The floor was made of ice as well, but the branches of the thorn hedge had grown into it, so it was ice shot through with blackness.
In one corner of the room was an enormous pile of fish, frozen solid. In another was a nest as big as the house Gerta grew up in. It had apparently started life as silken pillows, but the otters had gutted the cushions and it was now a pile of frosty feathers and long rags of sky-blue silk.