Red Queen (16 page)

Brynja shifted uncomfortably, and Alice realized she had gotten lost in her thoughts and that the other woman might be thinking she had offended by asking about the scar.

“It happened many years ago, when I escaped a bad man,” Alice said.

Brynja nodded, and did not ask any more questions. Alice was glad, for telling a small part of the story would necessitate telling all of it, and there was so much she did not wish to speak of, things she wished that she didn't remember—

(like girls stacked like firewood, their faces eaten away)

Whatever the White Queen did to those children—could it possibly be worse than the Walrus? Alice thought that nothing was worse than the Walrus.

“Brynja,” Alice said, for she had been thinking on what she had seen in the night. “Is the Black King related to you?”

Brynja lowered her eyes. “Why would you believe such a thing?”

Because I saw you with him,
Alice thought. Instead she said, “Is he?”

Brynja nodded, a short, sharp nod. “He is—or was—my brother. I don't know what he is now.”

“Are you—” Alice paused, not certain how to ask the question. Brynja might be offended.

“A witch?” Brynja offered.

“I was going to say Magician,” Alice said. “For the Black King is certainly so, and it seems to run in families.”

She resolutely pushed away the thought of her own mother, who was also a Magician, but who had hidden that power from herself and from Alice.

“There is no magic in my blood,” Brynja said. “We have had those among us who could see visions of the future, and sometimes perform small spells, but nothing like the White Queen. And nothing like what my brother became. Magic does not run strong among us.”

“Then how did he gain this power?” Alice asked.

“I believe he stole it,” Brynja said. “Though the story he told me was somewhat different, and showed him in a better light.

“My brother was called Bjarke, and that name in our language means ‘little bear,' and that was what he was to us, a little roly-poly bear that we all adored. He was younger than me by many years, my only sibling, but the apple of my parents' eye, and mine too. He could charm you, charm the birds right down from the trees if he so wished. We all spoiled him, for we couldn't help it, and none of us could bear to see him sad for even a moment. It is likely, then, that what followed was our own fault, for he never learned to suffer or to wait.

“When Bjarke was sixteen, he went out hunting in the woods for the first time on his own. Our father was ailing then from a sickness in the lungs and could not accompany him. My mother worried that Bjarke would not be safe without my father, though many boys his own age hunted alone. It was a sign of how we babied him, you see, a sign that we did not think him mature enough.

“Bjarke went out in the early morning, carrying his bow and assuring us all that he would return in the evening with a deer or a lovely fat turkey. As the sun fell my mother watched anxiously at the door and my father coughed anxiously in his bed and I paced anxiously before the fire, but Bjarke did not come home.

“My mother wished to raise the alarm and send the men of the village out for him, but my father said that the boy had likely
only lost track of time and would be home tomorrow, none the worse for wear after spending the night in the woods.

“We did not know then of the giants that lurked on the far side of the forest. If we did I am sure my mother would have gone off into the woods herself to find Bjarke. As it was, we all three passed the night pretending to sleep and getting no rest, and when the sun emerged over the mountain, my mother went once again to the door to wait.

“An hour or two later Bjarke appeared. He did not carry a deer or a turkey, and he did not seem harmed at all by his night in the woods. He grinned from ear to ear and told my mother not to fuss and allowed her to make him a very large meal. He said he had come upon a sick traveler in the wood and stopped to help the man, and that had delayed him past sundown. We all accepted this story, for it pleased us to think well of Bjarke and to believe he would help someone in need.

“I, too, was relieved that my little brother was home safe, and did not think more on the story of the sick traveler. We had always been a close family, and enjoyed our company together, playing games and telling stories. But after that night in the woods Bjarke would often sneak off on his own, and he seemed not to enjoy the pursuits we all had once liked. He grew thin, though my mother gave him extra helpings of everything at the dinner table and he gladly spooned it up. It was as if he were being eaten from within by some sickness, and the worry my mother carried grew tenfold, for my father was going very bad. Every day he coughed out more blood, and the healer could do
nothing to help him. I could see in my mother's eyes that she feared the same illness had fallen on Bjarke, and that soon he too would cough and we would lose both of them. The next full moon after Bjarke's hunting trip my father was gone, and we burned him in the old way.

“The morning after we burned my father's body, Bjarke disappeared for sixteen days. My mother was deep in her grief at the loss of my father and now Bjarke was gone. I was no comfort to her, and she too fell ill with fever, and then suddenly she was gone too, so quickly I could hardly believe it.

“Now I was alone in the house, waiting for Bjarke to return, though many in the village told me that something must have befallen him, else he would surely have come home. But I believed—I had to believe—that he would not abandon us. I thought that he was so hurt by the loss of our father that it made him wild like the bear we called him, and that when he was done rampaging he would find his way home again, and be sorry.

“On the seventeenth day Bjarke returned. I wanted to scold him for being gone so long, but his face was pale as death and his bones showed through his shirt.
He is dying,
I thought, and everything inside me crumpled in grief, for all of my family was slipping away from me.

“Bjarke took to his bed, and the healer came and spoke over him and gave him many foul-smelling potions, but nothing seemed to change. I spent all my time sitting in a chair beside him and listening to Bjarke ramble in his fever. Some of the things he said in that fever made me think this was no ordinary
illness, and that he had been fooling with things he did not understand.

“A week passed, and then suddenly one morning Bjarke bounded from his bed as though the illness had never been. When I asked him where he had been and what he had been doing he dismissed me, and when I told him of our mother's death he showed no grief. A short time later he tried to slip away from the cottage without my noticing, but I saw him leave and followed him.

“He went deep into the woods, striding with a strength that seemed astonishing given his week in bed, and I had trouble keeping up with him. I managed not to lose the trail, though, and came upon a small tumbledown place in the wood, a place so miserable that I could hardly believe it still stood. And when I peeked into the window my astonishment was even greater, for the inside seemed completely at odds with the outside.”

My little cottage in the woods,
Alice thought, though she did not interrupt Brynja's story. There was magic in that house, layers and layers of magic, though Alice had been too silly to notice it at the time. Perhaps some of it was put there by Bjarke, or perhaps it was there in place already and the boy was merely drawn to it. In any case, it would explain why the goblin had been unable to enter and instead had been forced to try to draw Alice out.

“Through the window I saw my brother, and what I saw him doing chilled my heart to the bone. There was an old man lying on a bed there, and the old man looked so shriveled as to scarcely
be alive. Bjarke knelt beside the man, and made a long cut in the man's arm. I saw that there were many other cuts there, on both the man's arms and legs, and most of them looked recent. Then Bjarke put his mouth to the blood that welled from the cut. I covered my face in shock and shame, for what he was doing was terrible beyond comprehension. When I peeked through my hands again I saw the old man shuddering in his final throes, and the look upon my brother's face was horrible to behold. It was no longer Bjarke, my little brother-bear, but a monster made of shadows and flame.

“His eyes met mine then through the window, and I turned and ran, ran back toward the village, hoping against hope that he would not follow me, for I did not want to pretend that this monster was my brother any longer, and I did not want to hear the lies I knew he would tell me. I do not know how I even reached home, for my eyes were blind with tears and I could not see the way.

“When I returned to the cottage he was there already, and I saw at once that he would try to pretend it had never happened, that he would say it was not him out there in the woods. I gave this tale short shrift, and told him to leave and never return, that my brother no longer existed. Then he told me a tale that I would have been a fool to believe, and however much I loved him I could not believe, though I wanted to and my heart broke with the wanting of it.

“He said that the man in the cottage in the woods was the sick traveler he had encountered the night of his hunting trip. He
had helped the man to that cottage and the man told Bjarke that he was a sorcerer, and that he was dying and wished to pass his power along to a worthy child, so that his legacy would live on. He told Bjarke the secret way to take the magic into my brother's own body. Bjarke said he was naturally repulsed by this, but I saw the way his eyes gleamed, and I do not think he was bothered in the least by this. In fact, I think he enjoyed it.

“As Bjarke told it, the old man spent the night convincing him that he was dying and it was very important that his magic not repose in his dying body, for it could be stolen by other sorcerers with evil intent. Since Bjarke was pure of heart, this man strongly wished to pass on his power to him, and finally Bjarke relented.”

“But you do not believe that the power was passed willingly,” Alice said.

“No, I do not.” Brynja sighed. “I think it far more likely that Bjarke saw the sorcerer working magic in the woods, and that he harmed the man to weaken him. Once weakened, he would only have needed to torture the man to find out how to take his magic, or perhaps Bjarke simply solved this difficulty on his own. In any case, the moment I saw through the window was the last moment of the old sorcerer, and all of his magic had now passed into my brother.”

“What did he do then?” Alice asked.

“He tried to stay in the village at first, though I would not have him live with me. I could not accept that the same creature
who would willingly drink the blood of another was also my brother. He showed the others his newfound power, and tried to tell them that he could use it for the good of all. But as I said, that kind of magic does not run through our people, and most were frightened of it, and of the new cruelty they saw in Bjarke. Soon enough he went away, back to the forest. Now and then one of us would see him there, a creature of shadow, and some who went into the woods and encountered him there would find later that they were burned in strange places on their bodies, and that the burns would never heal properly.

“Later, much later, some claimed that they saw him walking hand in hand with a woman in a white cloak, and that the ground was scorched where they had walked and that nothing would ever grow there again.”

“They were in love, your brother and the Queen,” Alice said. “Or at least she loved him. I think that he wanted something from her, and she would not give it.”

“And that is why Eira was taken, and the others,” Brynja said, the light dawning in her eyes. “She is punishing him by punishing us.”

“Yes, I think so,” Alice said. “You must let me go in the next child's stead. This will not end unless someone confronts the Queen.”

“But what can you do?” Brynja said. “You have no power that I can see. If you did she would not have been able to take your man from you. And it is pointless, pointless for her to take our
children. Bjarke doesn't care for them. It did not hurt him to see his niece stolen from me, or to see my husband go mad. We are nothing to him now, for we feared his magic instead of embracing it.”

Alice did not correct Brynja's impression of her as powerless. It tallied, mostly, with the way that she felt herself. But the difference between Alice and the villagers was that Alice was not willing to let Hatcher go without a fight. She didn't understand how they could let their children go so easily and thought that Brynja's husband, though he had gone mad, at least had shown some spirit.

There was not much to do except wait until the time for Alice's meeting with the elders. At the appointed time Alice hoisted her pack over her shoulder, though why she kept it she did not know, really. There was naught in it except a blanket and dirty clothing and something she ought to forget, a jar with something that should be dead by now. The knife was gone and the rose charm that Bess had given her was gone (it had fallen with the knife, she supposed, when she'd been turned upside down by Cod) and all of her food was gone too. She might want the blanket, Alice supposed, especially on the mountain.

Brynja brought Alice to the town meeting place, which was called a hall but was nothing so grand. The room was not very large, with low ceilings and a table at the front, where five old men, including Asgar, sat with forbidding expressions. Still, the entire population of the village could probably fit inside this
space with room to spare. Alice felt very alone and strangely small when Brynja left her.

“What is your name, girl?” Asgar said.

“It's Alice.”

“Well, Alice, I can't say that any of us believe you can make a difference, but our village Seer has told us that you must go to the oak tomorrow in the place of one of our children, and so you shall.”