The Raven and the Reindeer (22 page)

She hadn’t expected that he wouldn’t want to come with them.
 

“Is that a
dead reindeer?”
asked Kay. “Why are you dragging a dead reindeer around?”
 

“It’s complicated,” said Gerta wearily.
 

“This is going well,” said Mousebones.
 

“And you’ve got a crow,” said Kay.

Mousebones gave him a look of withering disgust. “Crow?
Crow?
Are you
sure
you want to rescue him?”

Ur scratched her ear. “His heart’s frozen,” she said.
 

“Oh!” said Gerta. This was a relief. Obviously Kay was acting strangely, obviously it was the Snow Queen’s fault. “Can we thaw his heart?”

“I suppose you could roast it,” said Ur doubtfully.
 

Mousebones snickered. Janna said, “That’s…not as helpful as it could be.”

“Oh. Sorry.”
 

“You don’t need to talk about me like I’m not here,” said Kay. “My heart is fine.” He turned his back and put his hands into the strange array of ice crystals again.

“What is that you’re working on?” asked Gerta.

“A puzzle,” said Kay. “
The
puzzle. The final one. If I can fit it all together, it will show me eternity.”
 

“People say they want to see eternity, but it’s really quite boring,” said Mousebones. “It just goes on and on, you know.”
 

Gerta looked at Janna helplessly. “What do we do now?”

“I could hit him over the head,” said Janna. “He might die, though, so I don’t recommend it. But once he’s out, we could turn you into a reindeer and hog-tie him and then leave.”

Kay made a disgusted noise, not looking at them. “This is the worst rescue attempt I’ve ever heard of. I don’t need rescuing anyway, and even if I did, I could do it better myself. If you don’t know what you’re doing, go away. And maybe clean up too. You look a fright.”

“On second thought, a good blow to the head might be just what he requires,” said Janna.

Gerta put her face in her hands. “Your family’s really worried,” she said hopelessly.

For the first time, Kay faltered. He turned his head, with his fingers still full of ice. “Are they?”

“Your grandmother took to her bed. She might be dead by now. I don’t know.”

“Oh,” said Kay. He frowned, but then his face smoothed. “Well, you can go back and tell them that I’m fine. I’m doing very important work. They’ll be happy to know that.”

“They won’t be happy until you come home,” said Gerta desperately, feeling the moment slipping away.
 

He turned back to the crystals. “They’ll have to be. I can’t leave this. I’m close to solving it.”
 

“But if you stay here, you’ll freeze to death! Like all the others!”

He hitched up one shoulder, not looking at her. “Then I’ll freeze. If I can solve this and see the shape of eternity, it’s worth it.”

“What a load of bollocks,” remarked Janna, to no one in particular.

“Awk,” agreed Mousebones.
 

Gerta started to say something—anything—and then she saw Kay pick up a jagged crystal and move it. The edges sliced into his flesh as if he’d grabbed a naked blade…and nothing happened.

There was no blood. There was only a thin pink line across his white, white fingers.
 

Fingers that, she saw now, were crossed and re-crossed with hundreds of pink lines.
 

If he cannot even feel pain, how did I think he’d feel love or gratitude or guilt or anything else?
 

Gerta clutched the reindeer hide. It was warm under her fingers, and steadied her a little. She could feel the pulse of the reindeer road in it, and even if she could not reach it, she knew that it existed. There was one place in the world where time went in all directions and the herd moved together as one.
 

She wanted to cry or scream or demand that Kay go with them, but none of those things would help. Therefore she must move in the next direction, whatever that may be.

She straightened.
 

Gerta did not pretend to know what made someone live, but she knew that a person with a frozen heart, who could slice themselves to ribbons and not bleed, was in a fair way to not being alive any longer.
 

She turned to Janna and leaned over and whispered “Hit him over the head. We’ll just have to risk it.”

Janna nodded.

And what might have happened next, no one would ever know, because the doorway behind them filled with frost, and a high, shattering voice said, “What has come into my kingdom?”
 

The voice was not human. That was the thing that struck Gerta first. It was not human, nor even close to human, no matter what the Snow Queen chose to look like. The vowels were the shrill complaint of frozen metal and the consonants were the crackle of breaking ice. No human born could have a voice like that.

Gerta turned, and the Snow Queen stood in the doorway.

She was very tall and very pale and very beautiful. She wore a robe of white, trimmed in ermine fur, and the fur glittered under a glaze of frost.
 

She looked at Kay, and he gazed back at her and a light came into Kay’s face like none Gerta had ever seen, and he said, “I’ve almost got it.”
 

The Snow Queen turned her head, and the first thing that Gerta felt was gratitude that she had not looked at Gerta, and the second was a stab of shame, because her eye fell on Janna instead.
 

Janna staggered.
 

Her face went slack and her eyes went wide. She let out a tiny moan and Gerta
knew
what she was seeing reflected in the Snow Queen’s eyes. The worst of herself, the messy mortal bloody bits, filthy and stinking and small and weak and unworthy and
how dare she look that way at Janna?
 

Rage rose up in Gerta’s heart, as hot and red as the ice palace was cold and blue. She launched herself across the room, away from Kay, thinking of nothing except that no one,
no one
, should ever think such thoughts about Janna.
 

Her shoulder struck the Snow Queen and it was like falling against a shelf full of glass jars—the hard interspersed with the shockingly brittle. Things shattered. The Queen’s robe bucked strangely as the body under it broke apart and fell back.
 

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.
 

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.