Spellbreakers (39 page)

They were each one made of the whitest snow, and yet
Leal had no doubt at all that they must have been alive once, that each of them
had tried to gain entrance to the palace and kill the Ice Queen. Past this
garden of death, the palace rose out of the snows, clear blue, shimmering in
the setting sun. Every pillar and every beam was shaped like a terrible
creature, snarling, roaring or screaming, claws and talons, fangs and spines, a
nightmare of razor sharp icicles and glittering blue-green eyes.

“It’s just ice. What can it do?” said Leal in the dead
silence. But her voice was tiny.

She walked up the wide steps at the front of the
palace and entered its gleaming portals.

There was an immense vaulted room, round, upheld by
pillars made of the clearest green ice. Each pillar was shaped like a spiral of
beasts in pain, each beast trying to climb over the bodies of the ones above,
reaching for the pale green light which filtered down through the ice roof.
Leal crossed the room in silence towards a tall doorway on the opposite side.

There was a long hall flanked by walls of pain. Carved
ice pillars adorned the length of it. Each showed the same man, handsome, proud
and strong, but always naked, always contorted in a thousand shapes of torment.
Tied, gagged, straining in pain.
Leal almost retched
with revulsion.

It was darker here. The light was less turquoise
green, and more of a chilly sapphire blue. Everything was carved in ice, floors
and pillars and high ceilings. It was strangely, eerily beautiful but deadly
cold. The cold closed on her like claws. She turned quickly, half expecting one
of the frozen creatures on the walls of the round hall to have followed her and
grabbed her. But there was nothing.

She walked on.

As she walked slowly on across hall, she passed pair
after pair of the ghastly sculptures, one to the right one to the left, again
and again. In the shifting blue light they seemed to come alive, sometimes. An
arm twitched; an eye opened and followed her, a mouth contorted in a gaping
silent scream. Leal shuddered violently, in fear and cold.

Fear and cold were one, in this place. She walked on.

At the far end of the hall, the Queen waited for her.

****

She stood under a canopy of ice, upheld by four
pillars in the shape of huge creatures, short legged and long armed, with
brutal faces and long claws. Leal guessed that these were the snow trolls she
had heard about, or at least the semblance of them.

The Queen was a woman of maybe thirty years.

She was the most beautiful woman Leal had ever seen or
dreamed of.

She was tall, much taller than Leal. Her hair had the
color and shine of white gold, and fell in glistening curls all the way down to
her narrow waist and shapely hips. Her brows were crowned, but it was not gems
adorning her diadem, rather a purity of lacy light, like early morning sun
shining through the frosty petals of a frozen winter rose. Her white dress was
no heavier than the most diaphanous silk, yet she did not seem to feel the
cold. Her eyes were ice-green and serene. Her feet were bare.

“Welcome to my hall,” she said, and her voice was
ageless, deep and warm and yet light and fresh, like a rill of melt water, after
many months of barren frost.

Her long white cloak grazed the ice floor, and at her
ankles shone frosty jewels. In
all that
azure gleaming
her skin was awash with cold reflections. And Leal could not say where or how
the Queen could pick from the hard ice the white rose that, smiling, she handed
to her.

Leal’s head snapped up from a sleep-like nod.
Nieves
penitentes! I’ll be one of them if I don’t stand straight!

Weaver of glamours!
said
a
faintly remembered voice in her puzzled mind.

“No,” she said slowly. “This is not true. This is not
how things
are
.”

The Queen lifted the white rose to Leal’s face, still
smiling. There was no scent. Leal jumped back, unsheathed her dagger from its
scabbard, and slashed the rose from the Queen’s fingers.

There was a clatter of metal as a curved bronze knife
skittered away on the ice floor.

The Queen’s serene smile was slowly turning into a
hideous leer.

Leal remembered Jalal’s voice, long ago, in a
different world.
You must get past their defenses ... after that, sticking
the business end of a knife in their vitals usually does the deed all right.

She lunged, not very gracefully, and stuck her dagger
in the woman’s stomach.

To her dismay, the Queen just laughed.

“Well done. Well done,” she said, but her voice was
cracking now. Her shining curls were fading, and her white smooth flesh fell
from her bones in deep wrinkles. She shrank in front of Leal’s eyes, to an old,
old woman.

“Well done, you insolent child. All my charms are
broken, and you’ve seen through my last glamour. But it will serve you nothing.
You don’t have enough love to bring him back. All your love is given, thrown
away before your time. You don’t have any more to give, you haven’t!”

Her hair, now dull and colorless, was falling away
from her, leaving a bald mottled scalp over a yellow, bristly face dominated by
huge eyes and a hooked nose. “You don’t have enough life to bring him back,
little girl. You—don’t have—enough—heart...” said the cracking, cackling figure
in a mocking drawl, as if from a growing distance. It was smaller than a child
now, but old, old, toothless gums munching withered lips. It had hooked, claw
like fingers; man or woman Leal could not say anymore. Its flesh darkened and
wept from its bony cheeks, and then it was all gone, a dark smudge in the ice,
grease and gristle, foul to see and to smell. Her dagger was caught in it, and
Leal left it there.

She staggered away backwards, bent double under a
pillar and threw up.

“Nasty, ugly, lying troll,” said a voice behind her.

She turned to see Ljung approaching. He was limping
and swaying, but he came down the length of the dreadful hall, bow in hand, and
an arrow nocked. She wanted to throw her arms around him and hold him tight,
but the Queen’s last words, cackled on in her mind:
you don’t have enough
love to bring him back ... thrown away before your time.

She put her hands to her temples and shook her head,
trying to clear her mind. The horrible impression of the dying voice was still
on her.

“I must finish this. Now,” she said weakly.

Ljung stared hard at her, and then he nodded and
pointed to a dark hallway behind the troll canopy.

“There’s a staircase back there. I think that is the
place. I will wait for you at the entrance.”

There was more in his voice than just information.
There were concern and tenderness, and a promise. The promise he would be here
for her, after. She loved him for it. But she must not love him now.

 
Find the hero,
break the spell, save the kingdom,
she
thought. And then,
you don’t have enough love to bring him back.
All given away.

No. I will love him. My heart is in the right place.
Isn’t it?

She walked heavily down the icy steps, without looking
back at Ljung, and she felt her heart breaking.

As she walked down the first step, she felt as old as
the Ice Queen.

Chapter
Nineteen

Many steps down, Kjetil Alversen Hawkeneye lay on a
slab of blue ice in the middle of an ice vault like a tombstone, supine, with
his hands crossed on his midriff. The slab was raised, and rimmed with a
drapery of icicles, like a carved sepulcher in a marble crypt. He held a single
white rose, laced all over with hoarfrost, in his bone-like fingers. His
weapons and garments were piled at his feet like a hoard of ancient treasure.
A huge recurve bow, black, with silvery tips.
A quiver of arrows, downy with frost.
Two
daggers with carved ivory hilts.
A long sword in an
icy scabbard, faintly glinting with silver inlay.
A mass of white pelts,
folded.

He, too, was white, white like marble, but tinged blue
by the icy crepuscular light. His skin was glittery with hoarfrost, his
sleeping eyelids laced with ice crystals. Under the frost, it was hard to tell
the true shapes of his face, but he looked lined and drawn, his body shrunk and
famined. His long hair looked dull and grey under the purity of the glittering
ice.

This is my hero,
she
thought, swallowing.
Well, I always knew he was an ancient hero.

She bent over the edge of the icy block, and kissed
the death-like lips quickly.

Nothing happened.

“Wake up,” she said. “Wake up. I am, well, the princess
of the fairytale. I came a long way to bring you back. Don’t you dare let me
down.
”

There was no sign of life in the ice figure. Leal
cupped his frozen cheek in her gloved hand. “Wake up. Please, wake up.”

The silence of the crypt was the only answer. The icy
figure looked timeless and impenetrable, as if it had been carved in marble at
the beginning of time.

“I suppose a kiss will not do, eh?” she said to the
silence, shivering.

She wondered what she was to do. Nobody had said
anything about this. Was there a ritual? She had supposed the spell would break
as the old witch died. But had it?
And even if it had broken?
It was so cold in the crypt, so cold, and he had been here—naked—for a hundred
years.

She sighed, hanging her head. She closed her eyes, and
thought of Ljung’s strong warm body, of Daria’s skin as they made love in the
steamy air of
 
the hot springs.

No,
she thought,
her eyes snapping open.
I must not think of
that.
I am here for him
now. I must love
him.

“My heart is pure,” she said aloud.
Broken,
but pure.
“My will is pure.”

She put down her backpack.

“I came to take you back, Kjetil Alversen
Haukka-Silma’a.”

She shed her fur-lined coat on the icy floor.

“I killed the witch. I broke the spell.” She took off
her gloves and woolen vest.

“You must wake up, Kjetil Alversen Hawkeneye.” She
stepped out of her boots and trousers, and shed all her linens.

“You must live.
Now.
I
will
save you.” Naked, already shivering, she climbed on the slippery ice block and
lay down over his frozen body.

“You must live, now,” she said again, kissing the
deathly mouth. His crossed hands were as hard as bones under her aching
breasts. His body was skeletal between her legs. The cold was brutal. “I’ll
make you warm, and you will wake up.”

She rubbed her body on his, trying to generate some
heat with the movement.

“Wa-wake up, Kjetil Alversen Ha-Hawkeneye,” she said.

Cold was eating at her finger, her ears,
her
toes. She shivered and chattered. Cold was filling her
like a living thing, a glittery, blue, devouring, hungry creature.

Wake up
, but
this time she could not speak the words. She was shaking too much. She held on
as hard as she could,
rubbing
shivering lips on his
frozen face. Her tears melted the hoarfrost from his sleeping lashes before
freezing on his eyelids, but she had gone too far, fought too hard to give up
now. He would wake up, or she would sleep with him forever.
Wake up, damn
you. I am not ready to sleep forever. Not yet. Wake up wake up wake up!

She lost all sense of time.

Then she felt the cold lessen. Wasn’t there a hint of
color gathering round his temples, his cheeks? She could not say. She hugged
his stone-cold shoulders.
Wake up.
You must wake up now, or I’ll be
gone, too. Oh if only I could sleep a while. I am so tired, so tired.

Sleep would be
so good
, she thought.
If I could sleep
just a little bit, I might be strong enough for this. I am so, so tired.

What could she do, tired as she was?
A thousand miles from home.
Too
far, too fast.
I will never make it. It was doomed to fail.

She let go, and gave in to the cold.

On the other side of the cold, there was warmth.
The sun on the ochre walls of Castel Argell.
The summer in the vineyards of the Val d’Eran.
The silvery shimmer of the heat on the olive groves of her
childhood.

If only, if only.
Just memories.
All gone.
All lost.
A thousand miles away.
I am in Dalarna now, and here I’ll die.

She smelled fresh snow in the air. When she opened her
eyes she stood on the wind-swept ice plain, but it was a bright day.