The Raven and the Reindeer Page 17

  What? What just happened?

  Gerta stumbled forward, and Janna caught her. They staggered together as Janna’s ankle buckled.

  “I should have listened,” gasped the bandit girl. “You told me, but I thought—well, if someone told you that you were foul, you’d believe it with all your heart, so I didn’t realize—gods, how did you do that twice?”

  “Are you all right?” said Gerta. “She shouldn’t have looked at you like that!”

  “What did you do?” cried Kay, standing over the Queen. “You broke her! You always break everything! Can’t I ever do anything without you chasing me?”

  Gerta gaped at him. Janna hissed.

  “This is why you don’t mate with your nestmates,” said Mousebones pragmatically. “It’s always ‘Oh, yes, and remember the time you ate that cricket that I was supposed to get?’ for the rest of your life.” He paused, and then added, “Well, that and the inbreeding.”

  Ur, who had taken herself off to the corner and was staying well out of the fray, made an indelicate sound.

  The Snow Queen rose.

  She did not stand up like a human, she simply rose up from the floor as if remaking herself from the material of the palace. Which, thought Gerta, given that she was apparently made of ice, seemed very likely.

  Kay’s face shone and he reached out to the Queen with both hands. She took them in hers and Gerta could not tell where one set of white, bloodless fingers left off and the other began.

  Then she swung her head, narrow and sharp as an Arctic fox, toward the girls.

  Gerta stepped forward and pushed Janna back. Janna made a noise of protest, but her ankle buckled as she tried to push back, and so it was Gerta who took the full force of the Queen’s gaze.

  She was nothing and no one, she was the wretched child of a wretched race, short-lived and bedraggled, with her hair in knots and blood staining the front of her clothes. She was half an animal and no one could have loved a creature such as she.

  She could not think, not in human words. Her mind was empty of anything but horror.

  She sank down to her knees, and the Snow Queen’s gaze sank with her, driving her to the floor. The Queen’s eyes were vast mirrors and Gerta was a speck that had dared to marred the beauty of their surface.

  The reindeer hide bunched around her as she fell, and in her reflection, she saw the antlers frame her face.

  The hide had been a magnificent gift, however poorly she wore it.

  The hide. The gift. The herd.

  In the speech of reindeer, she found that she could think again.

  I am here. I am still alive.

  If she was half an animal, let the animal half speak for her, then. The human part was tied up with human things like self-loathing, but that did not matter. There were no words in reindeer speech for I hate myself. It was not a concept that could be thought, and so she did not bother to think it.

  She thought, instead, the thing before me smells of snow.

  Janna was screaming, but she was screaming in the human language, and Gerta did not dare slip back into that.

  Kay came toward her, with his face ominously blank, but then a black shape sliced between them and Mousebones drove his beak at Kay’s face, cawing a raven’s mobbing call, as if Kay were a hawk instead of a human boy. “Awk! Awk! You will not! Egg-stealer! Nest-thief!”

  The thing that smelled of snow leaned forward. Her eyes narrowed.

  She is expecting me to die, but I am not dead yet.

  This angered the snow thing, and it raised its hands and brought them down, like a human with a whip. Reindeer knew whips, and Gerta’s shoulders rose in anticipation of the blow.

  Cold was coming up from her knees, where they were splayed awkwardly on the icy floor. The cold rose, as if she had stepped into an icy river, coming up her body, freezing her ribcage in mid-breath.

  I must get warm—

  The cold reached her face. The world went pale and blurred as her eyes froze and it got darker and darker, a long winter night without the hope of stars.

  Only her heart was not frozen, and the last thing Gerta felt was it hammering in her chest, beating hopelessly against the cold.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The thorns that surrounded the Snow Queen’s fortress were old beyond telling, and they had slept for a long time.

  The roots of the thorns were sunk deep, and many of them had died, but more were tangled in the warm mud around the hot springs. Perhaps even the Snow Queen did not know that they were still alive. The branches were brittle and rimed with ice, but throughout the thickest stems ran a thin, thin sliver of green.

  There is nothing in the world so patient as a plant awaiting spring.

  Gerta sank beneath the fortress in a dream that had no waking at the end of it. Her body was distant and useless and cold.

  Underneath the fortress there was snow, and under the snow was earth and threading the earth were the roots of the wall of thorns.

  Ah, thought Gerta. I remember this.

  She reached out to the sleeping plants and they wrapped around her, more watchful than any plant that Gerta had spoken to before, for all that they were sleeping.

  She tasted earth and water and the harsh minerals of the springs. Surprise. Puzzlement. It had been a long time since a living thing spoke to them. Someone had spoken to them long ago, and they had answered, but it had been long and long and long ago.

  How long have you been here? asked Gerta.

  Winter. The land was green and then ice came and covered everything. There had been ice before. Eventually the ice would melt, and there would be green, drowsy days under the pale northern sun.

  How long has that been?

  Confusion. Seasons follow seasons. One begins when another one ends. If spring had not begun, then winter had not ended.

  It occurred to Gerta that the thorn hedge had a strong grasp of the seasons and no sense at all of time.

  She would have laughed if her body had not been frozen somewhere far away. Of course. Of all the plants that she had touched since she left the witch’s house, had any of them understood time?

  I should hurry, she thought, and hard on the heels of that, or perhaps I am dead and it doesn’t matter anyway.

  Well. If she had already died, there was nothing to be done about it. For Mousebones and Janna and poor foolish Kay, however, she might yet do…something.

  Tell me your dreams, said Gerta to the thorns.

  They did.

  The sun was kind and this was a good green land. Someone stood with her bare feet on the earth, someone that was not human. Gerta did not know what she was, but she was good and kind.

  The kind woman stretched out her hands and asked.

  The answer lay in growing. Wood pierced Gerta’s flesh. Leaves swelled and broke across her skin. It hurt, like a stretch across sore muscles. She stretched farther and farther until she met herself in a circle, with the kind woman in the center.

  She rose up, many feet high, branches curving inward like a secret, the old wood growing hard and brittle, the new shoots young and strong. Berries erupted from her. The kind woman reached up and picked them. That was good. That was correct. They were a gift from Gerta and the thorns to the woman who had asked them to grow.

  Seasons chased one another. There were many. Snow fell on the brambles, only to melt again. Birds nested under the thorns, and ate the berries that grew there.

  The thorns were glad. They could be generous. The birds were such small, fleeting things, but the thorns could feed them and make their short lives easier. Then the birds would spread the seeds far and wide, a gift given in exchange for a gift taken. Kindness fed kindness. It was good.

  Then a storm came. A thing came walking inside it, a thing that was not good or kind. It touched the wall and spoke a word and the word was winter.

  The thorns knew their place in the order of things. They settled down to sleep through the cold season.

  It was only the deepest
roots that were wakeful, and only they who felt the screaming of the kind woman, and the blood that melted away the snow and sank into the earth.

  The thorn hedge drank in the trace of iron, the shudder of salt, and made them part of itself. It was the last gift that a plant could give to the one who raised it up.

  And then it settled down, the green buried deep, to dream and wait for spring.

  That is why you are so wakeful, said Gerta. The blood of the kind woman, whatever she was.

  Agreement. Taste of iron.

  Can you help me?

  Puzzlement. Winter. Frost on the branches. Waiting.

  No. I can’t wait. Don’t you understand? Spring is not going to come.

  Disbelief.

  The thing that came. The storm. That was the Snow Queen. While she is here, there will never be spring. Winter will never end and you will never grow again.

  She did not think the thorns understood. Perhaps it was too alien a concept. She tried to shape a picture in her mind, of snow laying over the branches, the sun crossing the sky, over and over, winter unending, until at last the roots froze and the skeleton of the hedge stood held up by ice and spring never came.

  Gerta tasted salt and ash, sudden and powerful. It choked her and she had no body to gag and clear it from her mouth.

  It took her a moment to realize that was the only way that plants could express horror.

  Of course…they can’t grow in salt. Salt kills fields. Of course…

  Winter never ends? asked the thorns.

  Never.

  No more birds in the branches? No more berries?

  None. Unless you stop the Snow Queen. She tried to shape another image, of birds landing in the frozen hedge, birds with nothing to eat, birds starving and flying away again.

  Salt. Ash. The smell of burning.

  In the heart of the thorn hedge, something woke.

  It felt like rage.

  Gerta tried to fall back. The thorn hedge was too large, too old, too angry. Thousands of years of sleep had ended and transmuted into fury.

  She could not escape. She was locked into the hedge as if she were a bird herself and the stems had grown up to trap her.

  The roots dug deep and pulled warmth from the earth, sending it violently through the stems. Green shoots erupted in every direction, splitting the ice apart. The outer layers of green died as soon as the frost touched them, but were shoved forward by the growth behind them, like an army climbing over the bodies of its dead.

  It felt to Gerta like thrusting her hands into a fire and trying to heal her flesh faster than it burned away, and yet somehow, agonizingly, she was doing it.

  She screamed, or tried, but it was lost in the rage and the growth and the dying. She had nothing to scream with anyway. Her body was far away and there was only root and branch and thorn and ice, and the ice was shattering away.

  The thorn hedge reached into the fortress and tore the white walls down.

  Inside the walls was the thing made of storms. Gerta could see it, distantly, a thing that wore a human face to reflect the faces around it. It was a small thing. It brought cold, but there was no cold that could stand forever against the armies of spring.

  The thing reached out and tried to speak winter to the hedge again, but the hedge was no longer listening.

  Cracks shot through the halls of the Snow Queen’s fortress, zig-zags that widened and deepened and split apart. Green tendrils grew out of them, withering to brown even as they grew, but the damage was done. Ice fell from the ceiling. Pillars toppled by themselves, or were overgrown with vines and thrown down.

  From underneath the snow, under the frozen layer of earth, the roots heaved up stone and dirt. The foundations of the fortress split and whole wings fell, crumbling into drifts of rock and snow.

  The hedge reached the room where the Snow Queen stood. Gerta saw herself, from the outside, lying stiffly in Janna’s arms. Kay crouched down with his arms over his head. Mousebones was cawing.

  And the Snow Queen stood there, calling storm, calling blizzard, shouting the name of winter over and over.

  Thorns rose up and wrapped around her. They died at once, but the next rank was ready and the next, like a prison made of wicker, and it did not matter if the stems died as they wrapped around her for the hedge had a raging green heart.

  The Snow Queen vanished under a hundred layers of leaves. And then the fortress began to fall apart in earnest, as the Queen pulled the cold toward her, trying desperately to gather enough power to freeze the hedge that bound her.

  The voice at the heart of the thorns roared with triumph.

  In the great growing maelstrom, Gerta could not imagine that anything would hear her, or listen, but she had to try.

  Please! she said desperately. Please let me go!

  She shaped the image as best she could, the bird trapped by stems, fluttering.

  For a long, terrible time she thought that the rage of the thorns was too deep and that it could not hear her. It would tear the palace apart and never notice the tiny creatures within it.

  Then—

  Agreement. Kindness.

  Birds in branches.

  She felt herself gathered up. She could no longer see anything but leaves.

  The taste of berries filled her mouth, and that must mean she had a mouth again, and then she was falling into a sleep that had no dreams inside it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Gerta woke feeling pleasantly warm for what felt like the first time in her life.

  She was lying against something soft, and there were arms around her.

  It was very comfortable. It was not quite as warm as a sauna, but it was pleasant. If she had not been developing a crick in her neck, she would have fallen asleep again.

  She stretched and yawned and Janna said, “Please tell me that you’re alive and that your brain wasn’t blasted out of your head by whatever it was that happened.”

  Gerta laughed and then her mouth filled up with water and she spluttered. She had to cough and Janna pounded her back enthusiastically until she could breathe again.

  They were in the hot spring, in one of the pools near the edge. It was bathwater warm. “You still had a heartbeat,” said Janna, “but you were freezing. I was afraid if I dropped you straight into the hottest pool, the shock would kill you, so we built a fire until you warmed up a bit, and then into the pool. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “It’s fine,” said Gerta. She tested each finger and toe. They all moved, although not without some complaining. “I think I’m okay. But what happened?”

  “You tell me,” said Janna, and turned her gently to look back across the snow.

  The thorn hedge had fallen inward. Green stems as thick as Gerta’s leg snaked across a mound of buckled earth and jumbled stone.

  “Was that the fortress?” asked Gerta.

  Janna nodded. “After you froze, things got very strange. Your friend was yelling and—ah—well, anyway the Queen just stood there, and then all of a sudden the place was falling down. The bottom came up and the ceiling fell in and there were vines everywhere. It was a mess. I assume you had something to do with it.”

  It was the otters that had saved them, Janna explained. They had pulled the humans out of the falling fortress, swapping jokes the entire time, with Mousebones leading the way.

  “And Kay?”

  Janna looked sheepish. “Oh. I—ah—may have punched your friend in the face.”

  Gerta put her hand over her mouth.

  “He was coming at you after you knocked the Queen down! And Mousebones held him off, but…well.” She coughed. “He made it out, anyway. His hands are a wreck. I bandaged them up, but he’s gone a bit odd. You’ll see.”

  There was a fire burning off to the right. Gerta could see the humped shapes of the otters, and—two figures?

  “They brought one of the other boys out,” said Janna. “The otters liked him, I guess. He was cold too, but not like you.”
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br />   Gerta rested her chin on a stone at the edge of the pool. There was a pile of clothing near the edge. This led to the realization that she was naked, and so was Janna, and that was…interesting.

  “So what did happen?” asked Janna.

  Gerta tried to tell her.

  It was hard to put words on the experience of the thorn hedge. She was sure that she was doing it badly, and she found herself saying things that were not quite right, but she did not know what the right words would be.

  “It was angry because of giving berries to birds?” said Janna, baffled. “Not because she killed the…whatever it was…sorceress…that made it?”

  “Not exactly.” Gerta sighed. “I don’t think death bothered it. But it thought of itself as kind—not that it thought, exactly—but it was doing a kindness, and the birds did one back, and the Snow Queen stopped spring from coming so that the thorns couldn’t do that, then the birds couldn’t do it back. And that made the thorns very upset.”

  It sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud, but it had mattered so much when she was in the thorn-dream—the birds, the berries, the gift given and received. “I suppose if you’re a plant, that sort of thing is important.”

  “Huh,” said Janna.

  She put her arm around Gerta’s shoulders, and Gerta found that she was not at all bothered by that. She leaned her head on the bandit girl’s chest, and then something else occurred to her.

  “Where did the reindeer hide go?”

  Janna shook her head. “Gone,” she said. “Under the plants and the stone. I pulled it off so the otter could grab you.”

  It hurt less than Gerta expected. “Well,” she said. “Bury it under scree or under earth, Livli said. I don’t think it can get any more buried than that.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Janna.

  The old reindeer had saved her, had given her a way to think underneath the Snow Queen’s gaze. Gerta shook her head. “It’s all right,” she said. “It was good to be a reindeer, but…I think it would be greedy to want more.”

  She rested her forehead against Janna’s collarbone and breathed the mineral scent of water. She could feel her pulse, or perhaps it was the hoofbeats, far away, of the reindeer road. “I’ll miss it,” she admitted. “But I don’t think it’ll go away, either. Not really. I can sort of feel it, in the back of my head. That’s how I got out from under what the Snow Queen was doing. The reindeer saved me.”