The Raven and the Reindeer Read online

  The Snow Queen could be days and days north of here. She probably is days and days north of here. I’ll have to walk the whole way, and there won’t be farmhouses for most of it. I’ll have to sleep in the woods. And make camp. And build fires.

  She took a deep breath. She knew how to build a fire in a stove. Presumably it wasn’t that much different from building a fire on the ground. Making camp…well…that was something else again.

  Her grandmother had taught her any number of things, like embroidery and spinning and plain sewing and some basic knitting. She had started to teach her how to use the great loom that stood in the corner, so that someday Gerta could earn her living as a weaver, if she didn’t marry, or if she outlived her husband as her grandmother had done. And Gerta could cook on a stove and clean nearly anything. All good, useful skills. She’d make someone a fine wife some day. Everybody said so.

  Making someone a fine wife had not included learning how to sleep in the woods without freezing or getting soaked. This struck Gerta as an enormous and unexpected gap in her education.

  This is stupid. This isn’t suffering. I don’t get to feel bad about this.

  Feeling bad about feeling bad was not significantly better than feeling bad in the first place. Gerta sighed again.

  I will learn how to make a camp. I will learn how to sleep in the woods. I will find someone to teach me or I will figure it out myself.

  People do it all the time. I’m not stupid, even if I’m not as smart as Kay. If I can take apart a stove, I can do this.

  She squared her shoulders and went on.

  Her newfound determination bought her a few more hours. The hill crested and going downhill helped.

  She tried not to think about how long she had been walking.

  I’ll sing. It’ll be easier if I sing a song.

  She tried to think of one, and for some reason all that came to her was a hymn which she’d never even liked very much.

  “The rose in the valley is blooming so sweet,” she sang, “and angels descend there the children to greet.”

  Her voice died away. There were no roses here, and if there were angels, they were staying well hidden.

  Eventually the world was no longer black but a seeping brownish-grey. Each twig was outlined with cold light.

  Gerta did not really notice that it was dawn. She had moved from thinking too much to a place where she was no longer thinking at all. The pain on her heel had been absorbed by a general pain in her feet and her back and her hips and her shoulders.

  She also did not notice that the trees were getting thinner or that the pines had given way to scruffy brambles with green buds on them. All she saw was the road.

  It was not until she emerged from the woods completely that she stopped. Morning light broke over her like a wave.

  “What…?” she said aloud, looking up, as if someone had spoken her name.

  There was a farmhouse in the distance.

  It stood by the side of a stream. The whitewashed sides sparkled. Gardens ran around it on three sides, dotted with green as the spring plants emerged.

  Gerta stared at it for a long time, then lurched toward it.

  Chores, she thought fixedly. I must do chores. You go to the farmhouse and ask to do chores and they give you a place to sleep. In the barn, I think.

  She had never slept in a barn in her life. Presumably there was straw. You could sleep on straw, if you didn’t mind being jabbed by a thousand individual pointy bits.

  At the moment, Gerta would have slept on a bed of thorns if it meant that she could lie down.

  The door was bright turquoise, painted with small white roses. She limped up the steps and stared at it stupidly for a moment.

  Do I go in?

  No. I knock. Knocking is a thing people do.

  She knocked.

  Footsteps sounded. A door banged. A moment later, the front door opened, and a middle-aged woman stood in the doorway. She had on a very extraordinary hat, covered in even more painted flowers.

  “Yes?” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “May I help you?”

  Gerta blinked at her in surprise. Somehow, groggy with cold and walking, the fact that she would have to talk to another person had not really occurred to her.

  Oh. Yes. There would be someone, wouldn’t there?

  Of course there would be a person. Ask at the farmhouse did not mean that you addressed your questions to the front porch. She had not thought it through.

  I have been stupid. Kay would laugh at me. She flushed a little and lifted her chin and realized that she had been standing there staring at the woman for nearly half a minute.

  “I’m sorry,” said Gerta. “I’m…I’m sorry. I’ve been walking. Uh.” She raised a hand and pushed the hair out of her face. Her cheeks felt very cold and she wondered when she had stopped being able to feel them.

  The woman’s face softened. “Oh, my dear,” she said. “Have you been walking long?”

  “All night,” said Gerta. She thought for a moment. There was something important—“Chores. I’m supposed to do chores for you and ask for a place to sleep. Please, ma’am, if you don’t mind.”

  Well, it wasn’t elegant, but she seemed to have gotten all the right words out, even if they weren’t in quite the right order.

  The woman smiled. “Of course,” she said. “I have plenty of chores you can do. But first come and get warm and rest.”

  This sounded wonderful to Gerta.

  She went inside the house. The turquoise door painted with roses closed behind her, and the lock went snick.

  There was a fire on the hearth. The woman in the flower hat led her to a chair in front of the fire. “My name is Helga,” she said. “Please, get warm and make yourself comfortable.”

  Gerta sank into the chair. It was very soft and overstuffed and she was not sure that she would be able to get out of it again, but that was all right.

  “Why did you walk all night?” asked Helga, bringing her a cup of something hot. The steam smelled of herbs.

  “I have to find Kay,” said Gerta. “My friend. The Snow Queen took him.”

  She looked up at Helga through the steam and it seemed that the woman was frowning. But by the time she had finished the hot drink (was it tea? She couldn’t tell.), Helga was smiling again. “Rest,” she suggested. “Warm your feet.”

  Gerta bent down to untie her shoes. She remembered getting the right one off, and had just started on the left when sleep crept up and hit her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gerta woke in bed.

  She did not feel any disorientation, although she wasn’t sure where she was. The ceiling was high and whitewashed. She was lying in a small, snug trundle bed with a bright red quilt covered in roses. Her shoes were tucked down by the foot.

  She got up, and the woman in the painted hat came to the door, smiling. Helga. Her name was Helga.

  “Come and eat breakfast,” said Helga.

  “I’m supposed to do chores for you,” said Gerta, remembering.

  “You can weed the garden,” said Helga. “After breakfast.”

  Breakfast was large. So was the garden. Chickweed, which loved a cold spring, overran the corners of the vegetable beds and formed green hillocks under the bare rosebushes.

  Gerta set to work, gouging out great damp handfuls and throwing them into a basket. There were springs when chickweed was the first green food available, when everyone in town ate chickweed salads three times a day to keep from getting winter sickness.

  “Come and eat,” said Helga, when Gerta had weeded half the garden.

  Gerta wiped her hands on her apron. Her fingers smelled green.

  After lunch, she had thought to move on, but there was still so much to weed in the garden. Tomorrow, she thought. I will set out again tomorrow. Helga is living alone (for there was no one else in the house) and needs my help. I will go out tomorrow after Kay. One day will make no difference.

  She was not eager to start ou
t again, in truth, especially not so late in the day. The open fields would be cold at night. If she set out in the morning, she could get farther, and perhaps find another house to stay at, or at least a haystack. Travelling all night was clearly a bad idea.

  Tomorrow.

  She dreamed that night of chickweed, which was a strange thing to dream about. Chickweed is a low, weedy little plant, not very distinguished. No one writes poetry comparing their lovers to chickweed (or if they do, the poems are rarely well received).

  In her dreams, she stood in a field of it, and the plants grew over her feet, cool as well-water. Tiny white flowers spangled the field like stars.

  “Have you seen Kay?” she asked sadly. “I must find him.”

  “Ahhhh…” whispered the flowers, and the sound went out around her in a circle, like a wind blowing. “Ahhhh…who is Kay...we do not know…”

  “He is my friend,” said Gerta. “The Snow Queen took him.”

  The chickweed shivered. Gerta knelt and ran her hand over the stems, and they rippled into water, reflective, as if she stood knee-deep in a green pool.

  In the surface, she saw another garden, surrounded by high walls. A girl with dark skin knelt in that garden, cutting plants with a knife. She wore a red dress and her face was sad and angry.

  Gerta was afraid to move, for fear of disturbing the scene before her.

  The girl stood, turning her head back toward a doorway. The anger faded, became only sorrow and confusion. She went through the doorway. A hedgehog trundled across the garden path, looking for slugs.

  The vision faded. The water was no longer water but plants again, a sea of cold-weather weeds.

  “That wasn’t Kay,” said Gerta. “I don’t know who it was. I’m sorry.”

  The chickweed sighed. “Ahhh….” and Gerta woke.

  She was lying in a small, snug trundle bed with a bright red quilt covered in roses.

  She got up, and Helga came to the door in her painted hat, smiling.

  “Come and eat breakfast,” said Helga.

  “I’m supposed to do chores for you,” said Gerta, trying to remember…something. A dream? Where had it gone?

  “You can weed the garden,” said Helga. “After breakfast.”

  The peas were coming up in the garden. Gerta spent the morning wrapping the twining stems up poles. Small white flowers gaped open, perfuming the air. Bees buzzed around them, climbing inside, drunk on the fragrance.

  There were a great many peas. The morning was gone before she noticed. Tomorrow, she thought. I will set out again tomorrow after Kay. One day will make no difference.

  Her dream that night was of twining peas, sweetly scented. She stood inside a bower, looking up at the vines from inside. They rustled and whispered to her in many voices. Bees climbed through the flowers, and the buzzing joined the whisper of leaves until it sounded almost like speech.

  “I must find Kay,” said Gerta. “Have you seen him…?”

  “Who is Kay…Kay…Kay…” asked the plants, making their own echoes.

  “He’s my friend. The Snow Queen took him.”

  The bees buzzed angrily, for bees fear snow, but the peas laughed, because frost on their stems does not bother them. The movement of leaves formed a stream of outlines, in curling green threads—a girl, a goat, a monster, a spoon.

  Gerta shook her head.

  The threads twined together like a tapestry. She saw a boat on the ocean, a great beast under the water, an island. Someone stood in the prow of the boat. The drone of the bees became a roar of triumph.

  “No,” said Gerta. “No, I don’t know who that is. I’m sorry.”

  The tapestry came apart, and Gerta woke.

  She was lying in the trundlebed, with the red quilt. Her fingers moved over the embroidered roses and she smiled.

  Helga came to the door, in her painted hat. “Come and have breakfast.”

  “I should work in the garden,” said Gerta.

  “After breakfast,” said Helga.

  The peas were nearly spent. She harvested the pods. The bees had moved on to the earliest roses, and Gerta was busy picking beetles and slugs off the roses until mid-afternoon. Then came a long evening of shelling peas.

  It seemed, as she stared down at her hands, her thumb splitting open the pods and sliding the peas out into the bowl, that she was forgetting something. There was something she was supposed to do…something important…

  “Is everything all right, my dear?” asked Helga.

  “Fine,” said Gerta slowly. “Fine. Is there something I am supposed to be doing? I can’t seem to remember…”

  “Just keep me company,” said Helga, patting Gerta’s knee. “I’m so glad to have you here, my dear. I was so lonely without you.”

  Tomorrow, Gerta thought. I’ll remember it tomorrow.

  When she lay down in the trundlebed that night, Helga brought her a cup of something hot. The steam smelled of herbs.

  “Drink,” Helga said. “You’re looking tired.”

  “A long day weeding,” said Gerta, and smiled. “I’m fine, truly.”

  But she drank the cup obediently, and laid back in bed, under the red quilt.

  Her hands moved fitfully over the embroidered roses, and it was not until she jabbed herself on a thorn that she realized she was dreaming.

  She put her finger in her mouth. The taste of blood bloomed on her tongue and she stood in a courtyard surrounded by sweet-scented roses. They were larger than the ones in Helga’s garden, nearly as large as Gerta’s head, and vines scrambled between them, covered in golden trumpet flowers. A fountain sprayed into a pond full of darting fish.

  There was a boy in the courtyard. He was looking into the water, and as Gerta watched, he smiled, showing a wide gap in his front teeth.

  “No,” she whispered to the roses, “no, this isn’t who I’m looking for.” She could not quite remember who she was looking for, but this was certainly not him.

  She came half-awake and turned over on her side, pulling the quilt up. She thought Helga was standing in the doorway, watching her, but turning her head seemed too much effort and she slept again, without dreams.

  The days passed, and the spell on Gerta deepened. Helga was not a powerful witch, as such things are measured, but she did not need to be powerful for this. Gerta’s desire to be useful was an open road down which nearly any magic could walk.

  “It is for her own good,” Helga whispered to herself, fiercely. “It is for her own good. She would never reach the Snow Queen. She would be set upon by bandits, wolves, bears, anyone at all. And if she did somehow reach the Snow Queen…”

  She shuddered. The notion of Gerta, who was sturdy and cheerful and kind and quite desperately mortal standing up against that terrible icy power...

  “She is safe here,” said Helga. She rested her forehead against the windowpane, gazing out at the garden. “She is safe and she is not unhappy and I am glad of the company.”

  In the garden, the plants shivered. A rose dropped its petals, one by one, in rebuke.

  “You don’t have to like it,” said Helga. “The important thing is that she’s safe.”

  The plants did not like it. A witch’s garden gains a sense of itself before long, drinking magic in with the mulch and the rain. They knew that Gerta was looking for someone and they knew by their roots that he was not down under the earth, down among the dead.

  But to plants, most humans look alike, and so the dreams they sent Gerta ranged far afield, in distance and in time, based on some unknown vegetative logic.

  From the grapevines came a vision of a girl a little older than she was, with dark amber skin and thick black curls. She wore a bright scarf and a half-dozen wood pigeons moved around her, cooing to one another. Gerta thought she had an interesting face, and would have liked to know her better.

  The rowan tree at the end of the garden sent her a dream of a heron standing at the edge of a lake. A man approached in ragged finery, and the heron turned and b
owed like a courtier to a king.

  The apple tree, as autumn approached and the small green apples swelled on the stems, sent her dreams of a child with hair as white as bone and eyebrows that stood out like scars. Gerta could not tell if the child was male or female, but she knew that she was looking for someone else, and the dream of apple leaves dissolved.

  She did not know what to make of the dream sent to her by the bindweed, of three white foxes having tea together, drinking from delicate lacquer teacups—and likely no human would have known what to think of the vision brought by the reeds, of golden fish speaking soberly to one another in a language made of fin-twitches and scale ripples.

  None of the dreams held what she was looking for, and the spell grew thicker and more entrenched, and she did not think of leaving.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gerta stood in the garden, pulling out the dead annuals. Frost had killed them down to their roots, and there was nothing left but to put them on the compost pile.

  She stood and stretched. Her breath steamed in the air. The garden smelled of leaf mold and woodsmoke; a good smell, a harvest smell.

  A wedge of geese flew overhead, honking. Gerta smiled up at them, and then a single snow flake caught her eye, and another, and another. “Snow!” she said, out loud. “Like down falling from a goose!”

  Unbidden, the memory rose, of someone saying, It would have to be a big goose.

  “Or a whole flock of them…” she said slowly, remembering the conversation, remembering it as clearly as if Kay was standing next to her and she was standing at the window.

  Kay.

  She shuddered suddenly, violently, as if she had sobbed. She did not know it, but it was the spell sundering.

  Inside the house, Helga cried out.

  Gerta turned, slowly, seeing the garden as if for the first time. The beds were bare, except for the last root vegetables still in the ground, under a layer of straw. It might almost have been early spring, but the geese had flown in the wrong direction, and oak and apple leaves lay strewn about the path. There were red hips on the rosebushes.