Mercedes Lackey - Snow Queen

Kaari bit her lip. “Well, there is another complication. I am not sure you would want this sledge, Mother Annukka,” she said reluctantly. “I am told it belonged to Veikko's Master, the Warrior-Mage Lemminkal…”

And that was when it struck Annukka like a blow. They might not have anything that belonged to Veikko — but Kaari had just bought the sledge that had belonged to Veikko's Master! Now that was an unexpectedly good stroke of luck! A man spent a great deal of time with his sledge, and a surprising amount of emotional contamination rubbed off onto it. When it got stuck, or was reluctant to slide properly, anger seeped into it. When it was running smoothly and men were racing against each other, pleasure, excitement and other good things seeped into it. While not quite as “personal” as other effects might be, this was still as close as she was going to get without breaking into the Warrior-Mage's house.

And that…would be ill-advised. Not only was it possible he had left unpleasant

surprises for anyone who tried such a thing — assuming he hadn't warded the place the way she had warded her house — but he would probably know just what they had done when they finally met up with him, and as a consequence they might well be marked as thieves and unfriendly from the beginning.

She jumped up and hugged Kaari, hard. “Want it?” she exclaimed. “This is the best thing you could have done! What does he want for it? Buy it! Hitch a deer to it and bring it here, quickly!”

She chuckled as a bewildered Kaari hurried back to whoever it was that was selling her the sledge. It was no bargain — two swords and two daggers, and a silver coin to boot — but Kaari's charms had worked on him as well.

Lodestone be damned. She was going to enchant the whole sledge. Besides all the emotional contamination, anything that had once belonged to a magician generally was alive with the residue of magic. It should be easy for her to use that.

This sledge was going to guide them to its Master!

Aleksia had thought that the frozen villages were a horror. Somehow this ice-coated forest was worse, because it was so beautiful. It was a deadly beauty, and had killed as surely as the Icehart had killed in the three villages.

It had been a birch forest, and birches were some of the first trees to lose their leaves in the Fall, so all of the trees were leafless at the point when this had happened to them. And normally in the Winter, birch forests like this were gorgeous, with white snow on the ground, and papery white trunks with their black markings rising out of the snow, the mist of white twigs softening the starkness. Somehow, even in the dead of Winter, birch trees managed to look alive. Maybe it was because of how supple they were, how they bent gracefully to the wind. Maybe it was because beneath that paper-white bark there was a creamy glow, a hint of warm color, too subtle to really point out to anyone, but there if you had eyes for it. For the Bear, at least, that was not the whole of it. Birches had a scent of life to them, even in the worst of the Winter, a subtle perfume that promised that when Spring came, the birches would be the first to awaken.

But not now.

The trees glittered, reflecting the cold light lifelessly, the trunks smooth, perfect and encased in at least an inch of ice. Every branch, every twig, every bit of undergrowth was sheathed in ice, perfectly preserved, and perfectly dead. There was no scent of life here, only the cold breath of the ice. Birch trees did not restrict much light, and beneath the canopy there had been a lively tangle of undergrowth — bushes, vines, weeds — exuberantly flourishing in the shelter of the birch branches. And now all that was frozen as hard and dead as a stone. Aleksia stared. This was appalling. And this was where the men's trail had led.

Carefully, the Bear picked her way through the trees, digging her claws into the ice-crusted snow with every step, and the horror deepened as she worked her way inward. Here was a bird frozen in a bush, coated with ice…a rabbit with its eyes still wide open, coated with ice…a deer encased in ice like a statue, actually caught in midbrowse, a mouthful of grass pawed out of the snow, half-chewed, the individual stems poking out of its mouth also coated in ice.

Every hair on the Bear's body stood up, and not just because of the cold; she was afraid, instinctively afraid. Chills ran down her spine, and a coldness grew in her stomach as Aleksia fought against the rising discomfort that told her to flee, and won. For long moments, she stood there, shifting from paw to paw, with the ice-covered snow cracking beneath her weight.

I have no choice. I must find out what is in here. This is no village, and there is no obvious reason for the forest to have been frozen like this. There are thousands of acres of forest just like this one — so why freeze it? She forced herself to go deeper into the forest. The Icehart — for she was sure that was what had done all of this — must have had a compelling reason to freeze an entire forest. Even for a supernatural monster or a great Mage, this kind of act took too much power for it to be random. Just as she was certain that there was something in each of the frozen villages that the Icehart had wanted to stop, so she was certain that there was something here that had threatened it.

She had a fairly good idea what that something was.

And in a small clearing in the heart of the birches, she found them.

That is, she presumed they were the men she was looking for. There were two of them, in the midst of a tidy camp; both sitting, both as still as statues. One had a gray-blond beard and carried a kantele, his hands still on the strings as if he had been caught in the midst of playing it, the other was older, and had a sword strapped to his back. Both wore the clothing of the Sammi.

They sat beside the remains of a dead fire, one on either side of it, looking sightlessly at the coals. The older of the two of them had a forked stick with a gutted, skinned rabbit on it; presumably he had been holding it over the flames. The other had a flask down by his feet. There was a hide tent behind them, and a stack of wood beside it. Both were covered in an inch of ice, just like the trees. From the look of things, they had been taken completely by surprise.

These two were Ilmari and Lemminkal, and there was no sign of Veikko. She felt sickened, and if she had been a woman, she would have cried. She had never felt as close to anyone other than her Brownies as she had to these men. And now, to see them like this — it nearly broke her heart.

The Bear prowled around the campsite, snuffling, hunting for clues. There were three packs, three bedrolls in the tent, three rabbits to be cooked — two skinned and waiting the fate of the first — three of everything, in fact, except men. The village had been bad enough. These two men, staring into the long-dead fire, were enough to send a strong man screaming away, running as fast as he could. It took everything that Aleksia had to keep from doing just that.

A line of footprints led away from the camp; Aleksia followed them to where they ended. There was no sign of a struggle, but there was a small hand-ax lying in the snow, under a layer of ice.

Aleksia nodded to herself. So, the third man, presumably Veikko, had been here, and had been abducted. If this was the work of the false Snow Queen, this only made sense. Veikko was young, handsome, and if the false Snow Queen was following Aleksia's pattern, she would be abducting young men. Both Ilmari and Lemminkal were too old to draw her interest.

So she had Veikko — or at least that was a good enough supposition to follow for now. All right. The help I was hoping for in the shape of those men is gone. I am going to have to find the false Snow Queen’s Palace, and learn what I can from it….