The Raven and the Reindeer (6 page)

Chores,
she thought.
I will offer to do chores. And I will not sleep in the house or drink anything they offer me, except for water.
 

She gritted her teeth.
 

They can’t possibly be witches, too. Every farmhouse between here and the North Pole is not inhabited by a witch. I was just very stupid and very unlucky.
 

The familiar flush of shame started up the back of her neck, and she waited it out grimly.
 

The farmhouse she chose was smaller than Helga’s, and there were cobwebs on the porch. When she climbed up the steps, the boards creaked under her feet.

She stared at her hand and the door and lifted one to knock on the other, then lowered it again.
 

I have to knock. I’m being stupid. They can’t all be witches.
 

But she did not have to knock. The door opened to reveal a girl only a few years older than herself, severely pregnant.
 

“I heard the steps,” said the girl. “Can I help you?”

Gerta took a deep breath. “I’m traveling,” she said. “I was hoping that I might do a few chores in return for a meal.”

The girl’s eyes moved over Gerta—the too-small clothing, the too-good muff and cloak, but she did not say anything. “I think we can manage that,” she said. “The rugs need beating. It’s heavy work and easier with two.”

“Thank you,” said Gerta.

They beat the rugs and then Gerta set to work with a broom, taking down the cobwebs on the porch. The windows were very small and the sills were very thick, and had acquired a coating of dead insects trying to get inside, away from the frost. She swept them away, the little brown husks pattering to the ground.

A few days ago—
and seven months
, she added mentally—she would have been squeamish about such work. Now it was simply an obstacle in her way to finding Kay, and she no longer had the luxury to worry about such obstacles.

“Thank you,” said the girl, when Gerta returned. “You’ve been a help. I can’t get around quite so easily at the moment.”

Gerta smiled.

The girl fed Gerta a large lunch, with farmhouse cheese and bread stuffed with fish and a few apples. Gerta braced herself to decline tea or small beer, but she was apparently not considered an important enough guest for anything but water.
 

The girl wrapped another few apples up in a cloth, with a roll and a wedge of cheese. “It’s a long way to the next town,” she said, handing them over. Her eyes lingered again on the gaps in Gerta’s clothing. “Did you leave someone’s service?”

“Sort of,” said Gerta. “It’s…complicated.”
 

“I will trade you a shirt,” said the girl. She stood with her hand braced against her back, leaning back against the weight of her belly. “Mine’s not such a good fabric as yours, but it will fit you better.”

Gerta looked up, startled.

“People will think you’ve stolen that cloak,” she said. “And perhaps you have, but it’s no business of mine. I’d guess by the look of you that somebody turned you off without your wages. You worked hard for me, so whatever it was for, it wasn’t shirking.”

“I didn’t steal it,” said Gerta, licking dry lips.
 

“Then you’ll do better with a shirt that fits,” said the pregnant girl. “Otherwise people will wonder where you got the money for a cloak like that, when you can’t afford a shirt.”

Gerta bowed her head. “Thank you,” she mumbled, feeling hot with embarrassment. How must she look, covered in hay dust, with her shirt hanging open?

She was glad to leave the house. Even though the girl had been kind enough, and more than fair in her payment for the work, it had been awkward.
 

The new shirt was rough homespun, and it did fit better, particularly across the chest. The girl had gotten a bargain, since Gerta’s old shirt was linen, but there was no point in carrying around a linen shirt that didn’t fit, particularly when it made her look like a servant girl who had been turned off from her employer without her wages.
 

She walked on.

It was a warm autumn day, the sort that can happen right into October. Gerta pushed her cloak back and put the muff in her pack.
 

The road surface was drier here, and walking was easier. Since she did not need to watch her feet, she looked around.
 

There was not a great deal of scenery. Trees marked the divisions between fields, and there was a blue band on the horizon that might be more trees. The fields were mown stubble and the weathered fences looked the same as weathered fences have looked since time immemorial. The ditches were full of dried grasses, which rattled in the breeze.
 

A few fields had a single tall tree in the middle, but not many. Her grandmother had said that such trees were sacred to Ukko, but perhaps no one cared about that any longer.
 

She kept an eye out for movement. Occasionally, a horse and rider would cross one of the fields, far away.
 

Mostly, though, she tried to remember the last seven months.
 

There was almost nothing left to her of those days, except for the dreams. She worried at it like a loose tooth, prodding from all angles, and was rewarded with fragments—a cup of tea, a fire, the red quilt covered in roses. Tying up beans and cutting down the withered stems of the peas.
 

There were slugs on the roses
, she thought, staring over the landscape of brown and grey and white.
I picked slugs off the roses. But surely I didn’t do that for an entire seven months!

Even now, it was hard to believe that it had been so long. She did not even have a sense that time had passed.

But it was autumn. And her clothes no longer fit. Her breasts had grown, which was not entirely a blessing, and her thighs had thickened and her arms were more muscular. Her face, when she had seen it in the farm-wife’s glass, was sharper around the cheekbones.
 

To her deep digust, she had not grown even a fraction of an inch taller.
 

Seven months. And all I have to show is dreams about plants. A whole spring and summer gone.
 

You only got so many springs and summers. Gerta stalked down the road, imagining herself as an old woman, looking back on those lost seasons, feeling robbed.

After awhile, she sighed and rubbed her forehead.

Well, so she had lost two seasons. So had Kay, presumably, since he was in the Snow Queen’s clutches, and Gerta could not imagine that the Snow Queen lived anywhere but winter.
 

Being angry isn’t getting me any closer to Kay. I just have to keep going. Maybe I’ll remember more and it’ll all come back to me.
 

She tried not to think about things that might have happened during her time in the witch’s house, things that she might not
want
to remember.

She went on for most of a week, walking all day, hoping to reach the next town. The blue band proved to be a belt of trees, barely a hundred paces through. After that, there was nothing but fields.
 

She stopped at three more farmhouses.
 

Two of them were easy. The farmwife had children at both of them, and she was hailed with relief as another adult to talk to. (
Adult?
thought Gerta.
Me?
) She ate well and the second one even offered her a bath in a bucket of heated water, which Gerta accepted with gratitude.

The third house had a man living alone. He told her three times over supper that his wife had died and how lonely it was for him, and tried twice to touch her hair. His lower lip trembled when he talked. Gerta offered to sweep the porch, left a copper on the step to pay for her supper, and slipped away.

I may have spent the last seven months under a spell,
she thought grimly,
but I’m not a total fool.
 

The sun sank on her left. Gerta left the road, for the dubious comforts of another haystack.
 

She was tugging bits of hay into a nest when there was a flapping, fluttering noise, and a raven landed on the ground beside her.
 

Gerta raised her eyebrows. It was definitely not a crow. It was enormous and grey black. It tilted its head and looked at her with one bright eye, fluffing out a beard of narrow grey feathers.

“Are you hoping to share my dinner?” she asked. “Or pluck out my eyes?”

The raven hopped backward. “Auurk,” it said. It had a deep rattlebone voice. “Auurk.”

She tossed it a bit of bread.
 

It hopped closer, inspecting the bread. There was something wrong with one of its wings, she thought. It held the wing away from its body, not as if it were in pain, but as if it didn’t bend quite properly.

It picked the bread up and swallowed it neatly. “Auurk.”

“You’re welcome.” Gerta tossed it another crumb. It was strangely pleasant to have company that was not a human who might ask inconvenient questions. “What’s wrong with your wing, bird?”

The raven looked up. “I broke it,” it said simply.
 

Gerta’s jaw dropped.

“You talk…” she said.
 

“So do you,” said the raven. “Kudos all around. We are talking beings. Auurk.”
 

“Is this magic?” asked Gerta, getting to her feet. “Are you another witch?” She would walk all night if she had to. Frostbite was nothing compared to being trapped by another magician.
 

“Aurk!” said the raven contemptuously. “Aurk! Ravens have spoken since Odin brought us to sit on his shoulders. My great-grandmother rode on the Morrigan’s battle-harness. It is not our fault that humans are usually too cloddish to understand.”
 

Gerta pulled her cloak tightly around her shoulders, not sure what to do next. “Then why can I understand you?”

The raven made a very derisive squawking noise. “
I’m
not doing anything,” it said. “If you can hear me talk, it’s all on you.”
 

“Are you saying
I’m
doing something magical?” asked Gerta, baffled.

The raven turned its head to one side, then the other, fixing her with each eye in turn. “No,” it said finally. “You haven’t a drop in you. There’s magic coating you like frost on a tree branch, that’s all.”

“But how do I get rid of it?” asked Gerta.

The raven spread its wings. The right one did not extend all the way, and moved stiffly when it flapped. “Shouldn’t think you’d want to,” it said. “Being able to talk to ravens is a sensible magic. Moreso than most of the fool stuff you see flying about. Aurrk!”
 

It leapt. Two ragged wingbeats and it was aloft, the stiff wing dipping. It flew low over the ground, to a fencepost, and landed.
 

“Wait—!” called Gerta, but the bird took off again and was gone.
 

Gerta saw the raven again the next day, when she stopped to eat. A small copse of birch trees kept the wind from cutting through, and when the road passed through, she decided to stop for a few minutes. She had been smelling snow in the air, but was hoping that she was wrong.

She sat with her back to the largest birch, alternating mouthfuls of bread and cheese.
 

The raven landed in front of her, light on its feet despite the awkward wing. “Aurk!”

Gerta eyed it suspiciously. It tilted its head and eyed her right back.

“Do you still talk?” she asked.

“Hell of a thing to forget in a day,” said the raven. “Do you have any cheese?”

Gerta tossed a chunk of cheese to the bird. It snapped it up in a single bite and looked expectantly for more.
 

“Do you have a name?” asked Gerta.
 

“I do,” said the raven.
 

Gerta waited.

The raven fluffed its beard. “I am the Sound of Mouse Bones Crunching Under the Hooves of God.”
 

Gerta blinked a few times. “That’s…quite a name.”

“I made it myself,” said the raven, preening. “I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having.
Sound
and
God
were particularly well-guarded.
Crunching
I found in a squirrel nest, though.”
 

“May I call you Mousebones?” asked Gerta. “It’s…a lot to say all at once.”

It was hard for a creature with a beak to scowl, but the raven managed, mostly with the skin around its eyes. “I suppose,” it said. “If you
must.”
 

“Mine’s Gerta,” said Gerta.

“There’s your problem right there,” said Mousebones. “Much too short and not enough in it. I don’t know how you expect to become anything more than you are with a name like that.”
 

Gerta put the bread and cheese away. The smell of snow was stronger, and she needed to move quickly if she wanted to find shelter by nightfall.

“Hugin and Munin,” she said, looking straight ahead at the road, “the ravens who sit on Odin’s shoulders, have names five letters long. Same as Gerta. They manage.”
 

“Aurk! Aurk! Aurk!” laughed the raven. “Oh, aurk! Not bad for a fledgling human, not bad. Who told you that?”

“My grandmother,” said Gerta. “She told me lots of stories. Fairy tales, mostly, but some about the old gods, too.”

Her grandmother had been a good Christian, as everyone in Gerta’s village was, but she loved a story and so Gerta had grown up on tales of Thor and Loki and Sampson and Martin Luther all tangled together like rumpled knitting.
 

“Aurk.” Mousebones hopped from fencepost to fencepost beside her, keeping pace. “You have no magic in you, you know, not even the little bits that come down because somebody’s great-great-grandsire crossed a fairy mound the wrong direction.”

Gerta tried not to feel insulted.