The Raven and the Reindeer (21 page)

“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.

Mousebones flew up out of the tunnel and landed well out of reach of the otters, who were instantly fascinated.

“A raven!”

“We speak Raven!”

“Ark! Ark! Ark!”

 
“That is not speaking Raven,” said Mousebones severely. “That is saying ‘Ark’ and you are saying it badly.”

“Can you fly, raven?”

“Of course I can fly!” said Mousebones.
 

“So can we!”

“When Herself hitches us up to her sled.”

“Then we fly like ravens.”
 

“No, we don’t. We fly like clouds. We don’t flap.”

“Flapping would be undignified.”

“It would be if you lot did it,” agreed Mousebones. “Otters aren’t made to flap.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Ravens always have the best names.”

“They’re so long and they take them so seriously.”

Mousebones looked offended. “I have an excellent name and I don’t think I will tell you what it is if you’re going to act like that.”

“Oh, don’t be like that.”

“We’ll tell you our names.”

“We will.”

They sat up, one after another, with their tails wrapped over their feet like cats.
 

“Glint.”

“Glitter.”

“Ur.”

“Frost-eyes.”

“Misting.”

“Fish-eater.”

The raven looked unimpressed. “Typical. And short.”

“We have to take them off sometimes.”

“Sometimes we trade them with each other.”

“It’s easier when they’re shorter.”

“Tell us yours.”

“I am The Sound Of Mousebones Crunching Under The Hooves Of God,” said Mousebones.
 

(Gerta translated this exchange in an undertone for Janna. “Good lord,” said the bandit girl. “They could talk the legs off a wooden goat.”)

“Ooooh!”
 

“That is an
excellent
name.”

“I want a name like that.”

“But taking off a name like that would take so
long
.”

“I do not intend to take it off,” said Mousebones. “I may even add to it. I believe that after this mad adventure into the north, I shall be The Sound Of
Frozen
Mousebones Crunching Under The Hooves Of God. Assuming that I am not dead, which requires a different sort of name.”

Gerta translated this as well, and Janna cleared her throat. “On that topic, we would like to prevent dying if possible. Can we find Gerta’s friend and leave?”

The otter who had identified herself as Ur—Gerta thought it was the one who had pulled her out of the tunnel, but it was very hard to tell—said “Oh. Right. The unfrozen one.”

She turned and padded across the floor. Gerta and Janna hurried after her. Janna leaned on Gerta’s shoulder.
 

“He’s boring,” called Glitter after them.

“We are much more interesting.”

“We would trade names with you, if you like.”

“Maybe later,” called Gerta. It wouldn’t do to get on the otters’ bad side. They were playful and cheerful and their teeth were longer than human fingers.
 

“We shall see you later, then.”

“Báhcet dearvan.”

“Come back and talk to us.”
 

“We have fish.”

“It is excellent fish.”

“We should have fish now.”

“Yes.”

Mousebones cast a longing glance behind them as the white otters fell on the pile of fish as if they were starving.

Ur led them out an archway and up a flight of stairs. Everything was made of ice. Gerta had never known there were so many colors of ice—deep greens and metallic blues and silvers.

Everything was very silent except for the sound of the wind rushing overhead. Their footsteps barely made any sound, and the antler points on the reindeer’s head dragged on the ice like the poles of a travois, a thin little scraping sound against the wind.
 

At the top of the stairs lay an immense corridor, which opened into an even more immense hall. Pillars of ice held up a ceiling so distant that Gerta began to think that the otter’s den, which had seemed so huge, was actually rather small compared to the rest of the palace.
 

They exited the hall by a doorway that would not have been out of place as the entry to a cathedral, but which seemed unobtrusive. Then another hall and another door and another, all unmarked, all glazed in frost.

“I’m glad we have a guide,” said Janna quietly. “We could wander in this place for days. Until we starved, or froze.”

“People have,” said Ur. “Sometimes Herself’s toys decide they don’t want to be here. They almost never find the way out, though.”

She paused, as if waiting for another otter to say something, and then seemed to remember that she was the only one there. “We tell them, if they ask us. One or two left. But then she gets upset and there is no fish. And sometimes she freezes their hearts. Then they don’t try to leave any more.” She gave another of her long, rippling shrugs.

“Does that kill them?”

“Oh, no. Humans are fine if their hearts freeze. They can keep moving for years like that.”
 

“Can you take us by a way that will avoid Herself? We…ah…don’t want to bother her,” said Gerta. The otters did not actually seem to like the Snow Queen very much, but she didn’t want to push her luck.
 

Ur flicked her tail, like a large cat. “I’ll do my best,” she said, sounding a bit dry, and Gerta thought that perhaps the question hadn’t been as subtle as she thought.
 

 
They entered yet another hallway. This one was reflective ice, and made a vast, distorted mirror of the walls. Ur became three giant white otters, weaseling along in unison.

Gerta looked at her own reflection and recoiled.

“Oh…” she said softly.
 

It was stupid. She had not worried what she looked like for many days now. It did not matter. She only needed to find Kay.

But the girl in the mirror was a wild, ragged thing, her hair straggling under the fur cap that Livli had given her. There were dark circles under her eyes and smears of dirt. The reindeer hide hung lumpy and bunched and the dead head lolled behind her.
 

She could not think for a moment, what the pattern on the front of her tunic was, and then she realized that it was long rivulets of dried blood, where the cuts on her neck had dripped and healed and dripped again.
 

She thought,
No wonder Janna does not want me right now. I look like a madwoman.
 

Oh, I am being so stupid! I should not care. We are going to face a great enemy. It doesn’t matter what my hair looks like.
 

And then, a long moment later, she thought,
What will Kay think?
 

Gerta knew that he
should
be grateful for rescue, for any rescue, but she remembered Kay. Kay who loved snow because it was clean. And she would appear, filthy and stained and stinking of dead reindeer, and he would think…what?

She was surprised to feel a spark of irritation at the Kay in her imagination and had to shake her head at herself.
Now I’m inventing slights with the person I’m here to rescue…

“You should have told me I looked a sight,” she said, struggling to laugh.

Janna gave her a puzzled look. “What?” And then she looked in the mirror and laughed, and said, “I’m hardly fit to call anyone a sight!”

Gerta looked at her, really looked, and saw that Janna, too, was ragged. Her dark skin was smudged with dirt and frost had formed on the brim of her hat. She was carrying a pack that was twice the size of Gerta’s and was bent forward under the weight, and she was still limping on her bad ankle.

“I hadn’t noticed,” said Gerta.
 

“Well. Neither had I. Let’s go back to not noticing.”

They toiled after Ur in slightly better spirits. The otter waited for them at the end of the hall. Mousebones shook his head in avian disgust.
 

“Not much farther,” said Ur.
 

They entered the next hall, and Gerta gasped. Mousebones dropped off her shoulder and flew forward, favoring his wing.

There was a figure leaning against a pillar.
 

Frost coated his skin and hair. He had a broad, pleasant face, despite his slight frown. His eyes were closed, and each eyelash was outlined in ice. His cheek was pressed against the pillar as if he had leaned against it to rest and never moved again.
 

He looked to be about sixteen years old.
 

“Don’t mind him,” said Ur. “He’s been frozen for years. Fish-Eater wasn’t even weaned when Herself brought him here.”

This would have been a more useful statement if Gerta had any idea how long a giant otter lived.
 

It was hard to turn her back on the frozen boy. She was not sure if it was out of fear that he would move, or pity for the unburied dead.
 

Is he dead, though?

She looked over her shoulder. He had not moved.

“We can’t save them all,” said Janna. “I don’t know if we’ll even save ourselves.” Gerta nodded.

She was not sorry to leave the hall behind.
 

They passed two more, on the way to wherever they were going. Both had their eyes closed. Gerta was glad of that. It would have been much worse if their eyes had been open.

“That was the one who painted,” said Ur, of an olive-skinned young man clad in bright blue. “We liked him. But she promised him the secret to painting all the colors of ice, and he stayed too long.”

Gerta had never thought about the difficulty of painting ice. It seemed an odd thing to stay and freeze to death over, even so.
 

“Artists are odd,” said Mousebones, walking around the man in blue. “Even for humans.”
 

Janna leaned on her a little less as they walked. “Feeling any better?” asked Gerta.

The bandit girl’s lips quirked. “My feet are cold enough that the ankle doesn’t hurt as badly. That’s not a good thing, but at the moment, I’ll take it.”
 

Gerta was looking over at Janna when she said that, and so it took her a moment realize that the click of Ur’s claws on the ice stopped.

She looked up.

They stood on a balcony overlooking a swirling snowstorm. Before them, six feet high and twice that wide, were pieces of ice seemingly hanging suspended in the air.
 

She understood suddenly how the painter had been trapped. The ice crystals had grown into fantastical shapes, beautiful as flowers, sharp as swords. They shone a thousand colors of blue and violet and silver, rippling with reflected light.

In front of the ice, with his back to them, stood Kay.

“Kay!” said Gerta. Her voice came out too quiet, as if she was in a dream where she could not yell for help. She took a deeper breath. “Kay!”

He turned.

He was a little taller than she remembered, and his shoulders a little broader. He wore a white jacket and fur-lined boots. The seasons that had passed had been kinder to him than to her, except that his skin was very pale.
 

He looked from the otter to Janna and then to Gerta without a trace of recognition, and his eyebrows drew down, as if they were interrupting him.

“It’s me,” said Gerta. “Gerta, I mean. I came to find you.”

“Gerta?” said Kay. His voice sounded exactly the same as it always had.
 

He stared at her and said, “You look
terrible.”

The spark of irritation that Gerta had felt before flared up and became a stab. “I’m here to rescue you!” she said.
 

“I don’t need rescuing,” said Kay. He waved to the crystals hanging behind him. “I’m working.”

Janna made a small sound of disbelief. Gerta looked over at her and the bandit girl shook her head ruefully. “Well, I didn’t see that coming,” she said.

Gerta rubbed her hands over her face.
 

She had been expecting to find Kay, perhaps hungry and half-frozen, in a cell somewhere. She had expected an icy jailbreak, an escape through the halls, and, if they were unlucky, a confrontation with the Snow Queen.