The Raven and the Reindeer (19 page)

Gerta swallowed hard. She’d offered…something…and been rejected.
 

She wasn’t even entirely sure
what
she’d offered, only that it hadn’t been accepted.
 

Janna searched her face. “After,” said the bandit girl, taking her hand. “After all this is over, after you’re done being a reindeer—”

She folded her fingers around Gerta’s and kissed each knuckle. Gerta watched her do it. The wind was freezing cold, but her skin felt burning hot.
 

They put up the tent together. There is hardly anything romantic about putting up tents, but every time their hands touched, Gerta felt it down to her bones.
 

It was a clear night and there were ten thousand stars. But it was also burning cold, and they stayed outside the tent only long enough to make hot tea and eat. Livli had given them dried fish jerky, which was…edible, anyway.

“I’ve had better,” muttered Janna.

“It’s salty,” said Gerta, tearing at hers with her teeth. “I really want salt right now. Salt is amazing.”

“Reindeer do love salt,” said Janna. “I suppose it’s not impossible that stuck with you…”
 

Gerta paused, alarmed, but only a moment.
 

“I suppose it’ll wear off eventually,” she said. “Once I’m not wearing the skin every day.”
 

When they had finished—or when their jaws were too tired to chew off any more fish—Janna banked the fire and they crawled inside the tent.
 

It was too dark to see each other. There were only sounds and rustling and Mousebones making irritable noises. And yet Gerta was incredibly aware of where Janna was, of the sound of her breathing, and her stomach clenched even though she knew that nothing was going to happen that night.
 

And what do I want to happen, after all?

“Would you really end up with a terrible passion for reindeer?” asked Gerta, when she could not stand the charged silence any longer.
 

In the darkness inside the tent, Janna snorted. “Probably not that, no. But the cutting…there are some things you shouldn’t do to your lovers.” She coughed and added something under her breath that Gerta didn’t quite catch.
 

“I don’t mind,” said Gerta. “Truly.”

Janna sighed. “
I
mind,” she said. “And my sanity is not quite so solid that I can keep putting a knife against your throat, night after night, and not bleed for it.”
 

Gerta reached out and found Janna’s hand, and squeezed.

“All right,” she said, and Janna squeezed back.

They said nothing for a little while, and Janna’s breathing evened out, and the wind muttered around the outside of the tent.
 

“Afterward, though?” said Gerta, finally. Her voice was very small, in case Janna was asleep.
 

The bandit girl rolled over, so that her face was against Gerta’s shoulder.
 

“After,” said Janna. “And I hope your friend is worth it.”
 

In the morning, when the tent was broken down and the fire stamped out, Janna handed her the reindeer hide. But she pressed a kiss against the corner of Gerta’s mouth as she did it, and Gerta felt her insides go warm, as if she’d drunk a cup of hot tea and it had burned all the way down.

It took them five days to reach the Snow Queen’s palace. Five days of walking on the reindeer road, surrounded by ghosts, and five nights of being cut alive from the hide. Five nights of lying next to Janna in the dark and dreaming of the plants that slept beneath the snow.
 

The short Arctic day was nearly over when they saw a dark shape on the horizon.
 

The reindeer road swerved away from that darkness, swerved hard and final. Around Gerta’s shoulders, the ghosts whispered to each other—
danger the queen of snows lives here danger run run run
—and she listened to them because they were the herd, until Mousebones cawed a warning and woke her.

Here. This is it. This is the Snow Queen’s home.

There were no threads bleeding off where other reindeer had beaten a path to the human world. Gerta realized this almost too late and had to shoulder her way through the kindly ghosts and jump.
 

A thread drifted after her, one reindeer’s worth of a path.
Which I suppose will make it easier for the next one to walk this road…

This did not help her very much.
 

She knew in mid-air that the jump was bad, that the distance had twisted somehow. She landed it, barely, but the shock went up through her hooves and rattled her teeth and her antlers and left her breathless.
 

The sled slammed down hard on one runner, then the other. Janna squawked and overbalanced, falling hard. Gerta froze, trying to stop—what if the sled went over Janna?—and the sled slammed into the back of her legs and they folded up and she really did fall over, tangled in the traces.

She kicked, hard, in a panic, and then the human part of her panicked even harder
oh god oh god did I kick Janna or Mousebones oh god stop
and the panic bled to the reindeer body, which tried to kick again.
 

“Whoa!” said Janna. “Whoa! It’s all right, Gerta, easy. Are you hurt—no, that’s stupid, you couldn’t tell me if you were—careful, love, careful—“

Gerta tried to listen but it was hard. Being on her side was bad and she couldn’t run and her legs were tangled and if she just
kicked,
she could get loose,
surely
she could get loose—

“Easy…easy… I’m going to cut you out of the skin now…”

“Be a human for a bit,” advised Mousebones, as if it were that were an easy thing to be.
 

Gerta closed her eyes and tried to be human. Then Janna touched her and she couldn’t run and something had her and she kicked again, as hard as she could, and her hooves struck wood and—

“Easy…” crooned Janna. “Easy…”

What was it to be human? Gerta tried to remember and for some reason all she could think of was the dried fish jerky and the taste of salt. Salt was the thing that humans had that they gave you if you were good—

no, no, that’s the wrong way around, you’re
not
a reindeer you’re a human in a reindeer skin

The cut was deeper and slower and hurt more than it had at any time in the last five days. Janna’s angle was bad. Gerta rolled out of the skin, gasping, and blood ran in thin sheets from a gash across her collarbone.

“Are you all right?” said Janna. “Other than me being clumsy—shit—I’m sorry—”

Gerta nodded. Words would take a minute. She held snow against the cut, while Janna untangled the traces from around her ankles. She still had an urge to kick and try to run, but it was ebbing away.
 

Janna was working on her knees, not standing, and Gerta could see that she was favoring one leg. She did not stand up, but hitched herself along the ground to the sled and pulled out Gerta’s cloak.
 

When Gerta could speak again, her first words were, “Did I hurt you?”

“Not you,” said Janna. “The stupid sled tipped up and spilled me out.” She smiled ruefully and thumped her ankle. “It’s not broken, I don’t think. I may have an exciting time walking for a bit.”
 

Gerta winced.
 

“Oh, it’s fine,” said Janna. She grinned. “We’re a pair, aren’t we? Me with my ankle and you bleeding all over the snow. Help me wrap it and then we’ll deal with
that.”

She gestured, and for the first time Gerta looked up, ahead.

The darkness on the horizon was far closer. Their leap from the reindeer road had spanned a great deal more distance than she had thought.
 

No wonder I landed so hard. Thank goodness I didn’t get any farther…we would have been torn to ribbons…

It rose thirty feet in the air, a wall of black lines rimed with frost. Great blades of thorns stabbed the air and crossed and re-crossed so many times that it made a landscape of knives before them.

They had come, at last, to the fortress of the Snow Queen.
 

And Gerta had not the slightest idea how they were going to get in.
 

They wrapped up Janna’s ankle and stuffed it back in her boot. “Before the swelling gets out of control,” she said. “We’ll have to cut the boot off at some point, probably, but I’ve got other things to worry about first.”

“You sound awfully cheerful about this,” said Gerta.

Janna laughed. “I do, don’t I? I was trained as a horse-leech, and then as a healer, since we had more men than horses. So I at least
understand
this, unlike…oh, reindeer skins and women who gossip with swans.” She nodded to her ankle. “This, at least, I can
fix.”

Gerta laughed, and the sound of it surprised her. She had gotten used to the sound of
 
reindeer laughter. The surprise of it made her laugh more, and then she couldn’t stop, and then Janna was laughing too, and Gerta fell over on her back in the snow, giggling, because they were sitting in the snow in front of a terrifying hedge of frozen thorns and for some reason this was
hilarious.

“Humans are all utterly mad,” Mousebones observed dispassionately, which only made Gerta laugh harder.
 

“All right,” said Janna weakly, wiping her eyes. “All right. Okay. I suppose we should go and see what sort of mess we’re in.”

“Yeah,” said Gerta. She helped Janna to her feet. “Yeah, I suppose.”
 

Janna leaned on her shoulder and hopped.
 

They made their slow way to the wall of thorns. It cast long blue shadows over the snow, but it stopped the wind, and so for a moment standing under the thorns felt warm.

It might have been a raspberry thicket once, if raspberries grew as high as houses. Ice glazed every stem. There were only a few leaves, tucked deep into the wall.

“The ice struck in fall or winter,” said Janna, looking at the leaves.

“Or a hard wind came through first,” said Gerta. She stretched out her fingers and touched the wall.

Ice melted away under her fingers. It took a little time, for she was no longer as warm as a reindeer. But eventually the thin glaze of ice was gone, and she touched bare stem.
 

It, too, was cold.

Well, what did I expect? The Snow Queen is old, and this wall has been frozen since Gran Aischa’s day at least…

Up close, the gaps in the wall were larger. Gerta saw a few where she might have been able to squeak through, at least for a few feet. But the gaps were hardly paths and they might close up anywhere, and then she would have had to squirm back out, probably backwards, because there would be no room to turn around.

Janna exhaled slowly. “We’re not getting through here,” she said. “Maybe there’s a way in somewhere…”

The wall seemed to run clear to the horizon in both directions. Gerta shook her head.

“I could walk along it, “she said doubtfully. “Or put on the hide and run. But it’s miles long, at least.”

“Awk!” said Mousebones. “It’s a shame you don’t have a helpful raven with you. You know, with
wings
. Who can
fly.”
 

Gerta laughed, suddenly relieved. “Sorry, Mousebones. I’m an idiot. Can you find us a way in?”
 

Janna slapped her forehead. “Of course! Sorry, Mousebones. I should have thought.”

“Yes, you should have. Awk!” He took to the air, dipped in the wind, and then flew south. His small black form was soon out of sight over the wall.
 

The humans went back to the sled, with Janna leaning on Gerta. For a moment, as she took the other girl’s weight, Gerta felt physically powerful again, the way she had as a reindeer.
 

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.”