Mercedes Lackey - Snow Queen

The sun was westering, and even though the garden was warm and inviting — the earth giving up a scent of rich life, the herbs reminding her with their mingled aromas that she needed to be gathering and drying them — it was time to get more water for dinner, and that was Kaari's job.

It was laundry day as well — also Kaari's job. She liked laundry day; there was something infinitely satisfying about spreading the freshly washed things to dry, although she could do without carrying the baskets of wet clothing up from the edge of the river. Squinting a little against the later afternoon sun, Kaari arranged the wooden yoke over her shoulders, balanced the buckets on the hooks on either end of it and headed for the well at the center of the village. Her mother was too old to be burdened with this now, and her brothers were all at their own work, so that left her. Of course, for Kaari, every trip to the well took twice as long as it did for anyone except the most inveterate of gossips. Everyone had to stop and greet her, so that had to factor into the time she took. And even though it was the last thing she wanted to do on a day already overfilled with chores, she had to stop as well. It was, after all, the polite thing to do. And by now, her parents were more than used to it.

Virtually everything she did that brought her out of the house took more time because of this. And it was all because of her runes. Sometimes she thought that if she heard one more person tell her, “You must be the luckiest girl in the world,” she was going to do something drastic. Scream, anyway. But of course, she never did, because she fundamentally had too sweet a temper. Having runes like hers — well, she suspected that you either had a sweet temper to begin with, or you got one in a hurry, because you had to.

Or else you went to the bad…and that did not bear thinking a bout.

When Kaari was born, her runes were read then and there, because there was a Wise Woman already in the village reading for several older children. It was unusual, but by no means unheard of, for an infant to be read, and since the woman was there, her parents must have thought, “What's the harm?” And at that time, the Wise Woman had pulled a strange face, for three runes had turned up instead of the usual one or two. Hearth, as expected. Also Craft.

But then came the third rune, one that her parents didn't recognize, the one that the Wise Woman pursed her lips over. She told them not to worry about it, and went on her way, with only a single, slightly odd, admonition.

“Don't spoil her.”

Not that they were likely to do anything of the sort. She might have been the baby of the family, but it was a very large family, with many hands reaching for, and many mouths clamoring for, anything that happened to be desirable. Her brothers only considered another sister to be another nuisance. Her sisters already had enough of babysitting to regard the arrival of yet another child with resignation. Kaari had been destined to go through childhood wearing the hand-me-downs of four sisters, mended and re-dyed, turned and turned again, or cut down from much larger garments. Her toys were those her siblings had outgrown. She slept packed in the bed with all four of her older sisters, either too warm in the middle, or hanging on for dear life to her sliver of bed on the edge.

And yet, she had sailed through her childhood with no real difficulty. By nature sweet-tempered, by the gift of the gods a lovely child, the older she grew, the more everyone wanted her around and made a kind of pet out of her, even her siblings. If it was a lean season, people found ways of slipping her tidbits; if the season was bountiful, they still slipped her treats, but always the juiciest apple, the most succulent grape, the most perfect venison pasty. Older children took her with them on adventures or dressed her up like a kind of live doll; younger ones looked at her in awe. And no one thought twice about it.

Not until Kaari came of age and the same Wise Woman read her runes again, did she discover what that third one was. Because it turned up again.

Kaari could still see it, in her mind's eye, the little brown stone, flat, speckled with white, and the strange rune she could not read carved into it and filled with black paint. It had looked so harmless, and yet there was some feeling of portent about it, a heaviness in her chest, the sense that something was watching her.

“This rune,” the woman had said, stirring the stone with her finger. “This rune is Heart.”

Kaari and her parents had looked at her askance. None of them had ever heard of such a thing.

“You must have noticed how everyone loves Kaari,” the woman had continued.

Kaari's mother and father had nodded. Of course they had, because by then, even the most sour-tempered old curmudgeon smiled to see her. On the very rare occasions when she got into naughtiness, it was always something mild, usually because she was the unknowing accomplice of an older child, and was immediately sorry for the results. Her peers made her the center of their games, and if it was work that was afoot, they made sure it went along with such singing and chatter that it seemed half play.

“And you've noticed she's not spoiled by all this.” Again the old woman had stirred the rune. “That is the effect of Heart. It is a power that can bring people together. But it is a double-edged sword. It can cause quarrels, when everyone wants to be first in her eyes — and more quarrels will come in the future, when boys think about courting her in truth. The older she gets the more careful she will have to be. When everyone wants to love and be loved by a person with the Heart rune, that can spawn jealousy, envy, acrimony. As yet, it has not expressed itself too much in her life in that way. That will change before long. Trust me.”

They had sent Kaari away then, and spent long hours that night talking. It had given Kaari an uncomfortable feeling, knowing that they were talking about her — all because of this Heart rune. Surely she could give it up! Surely this was something that she could decide to have nothing to do with!

A ridiculous notion, of course. The runes were only the expression of what you already were. Gradually, over time, she had learned herself what all this meant. For as she grew older, those innocent little flirtations over frogs became something a great deal more serious. When husbands said with enthusiasm how pretty she was growing, wives began to be troubled. When mothers complimented her, their own daughters wondered, even as they walked arm in arm with her, why their own mothers didn't find them as sweet-natured or as pretty or as clever. Everyone wanted to be her best friend, but having someone as a best friend means that someone else must be second-best.

Then things got even more complicated.

It is a sad thing to have a boy fall in love with you when you do not love him in turn. It is worse when someone else is already in love with that boy, or wants to be. Brothers can fall out over such a things, and sisters take sides. Mothers and fathers wonder why you cannot see all the good qualities in their sons. Slowly, Kaari had learned how to tell these boys that she could not be theirs in such a way as to make their heartbreak less — for heartbreak there would be; there was no getting around it. Slowly, she had learned how to shape things so that she became the ally of other girls in love. She learned, too, how to turn away the less-innocent advances of older — and often married! — men.

It was sad for her, too, for she realized by then that she could never be sure if someone loved her for herself, or because of her runes. She had to look on even the most handsome of boys with skepticism when they protested their love. Oh, yes, the Heart rune was the expression of her nature, and she did give her affections generously, but —