The Raven and the Reindeer (17 page)

“Human, I think,” said Gerta. “Mostly, anyway.” Her skin no longer felt as raw as a newborn’s. She stroked her fingers over the reindeer hide she’d slept on.
Herd herd herd
chimed in her bones, the faintest of echoes, like hoofbeats far away in the fog.
 

Livli nodded. “I should think that the longer you spend out of the skin, the more human you’ll feel. And the other way around. Stay in it too long, and you likely won’t want to come out again. At least, that’s what the swans tell me, and they know more about changing skins than most birds.”
 

“Will I have to do it again?” asked Gerta.
Do I want to? It didn’t feel bad…just different…

“If you’re determined to find your friend, then yes,” said Livli. “The Snow Queen’s land is north of here. North and east and north again. If you can reach it in any fashion at all, it will be by the reindeer road.”
 

Janna’s frown deepened. She looked as if she were about to say something, but there was a tap on the door, and she went to open it.

Mousebones hopped inside, looking disgruntled. “Awk! Leave a raven out in the cold, why don’t you?”
 

“Should have known you’d show up when the food was cooking,” said Livli, amused. She tossed him a dried fish and he pounced on it.
 

“I suppose we’ll take the reindeer road again, then,” said Gerta. “If it’s the only way to find Kay.”

The name Kay sounded odd on her lips. For a moment he seemed like a character out of a childhood story, like the Snow Queen herself.
 

Don’t be silly. It’s Kay, who kissed me behind the stove, and who played games with me when it was snowing and who has bright blue eyes and who is my best friend…

Her mind veered off at that point, and Janna interrupted her thoughts by asking, “What if I wear the skin instead?”
 

“Can’t,” said Livli. “Oh, I’m sure you’d try, don’t get me wrong. But you’re too set in your own skin. You’re a healthy young animal and you know it. And people who really live in their own flesh and know it and love it make lousy shapechangers.”

“I…well. But Gerta doesn’t?”

Livli shook her head. “Some people don’t. Their bodies carry them around, but they don’t live in them quite the same way.”
 

She leaned over and patted Gerta’s hand. “Don’t look so stricken, dear. It’s not a personal failing. And I think there may be something else at work here, too. You’re outside your own skin even farther than you ought to be. Have you had a long illness recently?”

Gerta started to deny it, and then remembered the witch and her long waking dream. “…uh,” she said, and explained, as best she could, what it had been like to wake up seven months older, in a body that no longer fit around her the way that it should have.

“Ah!” Livli looked briefly pleased, and then indignant. “How dreadful. Something will have to be done. We are all of us lonely, but we don’t go kidnapping children and keeping them wrapped under spells so they don’t leave. That’s mother-love twisted around and gone sour.”
 

She leaned back. “Well, it’ll get sorted. But that’s not quite it either. You’ve got something, Gerta. Or…not got it?”

“No magic,” said Mousebones from the rafters. “Unmagic until it’s almost something in itself.
I
said she was like a branch covered in frost.”
 

“Yes…” said Livli slowly. “Yes, I can see that. You’re like an empty pot that someone poured magic into and poured out again.”

Gerta did not much like being called an empty pot. Livli laughed at her expression. “Peace, child, it’s not a failing on your part. It’s not that you’re weak-willed or anything like that.”
“But I am weak-willed,” said Gerta glumly. “If I wasn’t, the witch would never have caught me.”

Livli shook her head. “You may be or not be, but it’s no bearing on the matter. Being an empty vessel, magic will always take you very hard, I think, and leave something of itself behind for a time, like dregs at the bottom. But at the same time, it can’t really get at the core of you. You can be filled up and emptied out, but the pot does not become its contents. Does that make sense?”

“A little, I suppose,” said Gerta. It sounded rather dreadful when put like that. Was she going to spend her life wandering around being filled up with other people’s enchantments?
 

“Well, then.” Livli sat back. “The hide is safest on you. You will change easily, but I do not think you will get completely lost in it.”
 

Janna still looked rebellious. “But—”

“If nothing else,” said Livli, “it was a gift to her, and gifts given freely are a bit less likely to turn bad on you. It’s a thin bit of luck, but there you are.”

“I’ll take all the luck I can get,” said Gerta determinedly. She was the one who had to find Kay. This was her journey, after all. And if she was going to stop being weak-willed, then she should start now. “Janna, it’s all right. You got me away from…ah…the bandits…”

Janna’s lips quirked as Gerta stumbled over this phrase. “Well,” she said. “More or less, yes.” She slipped her arm through Gerta’s.

Gerta was prepared to feel annoyed by this and was a bit surprised to find that she didn’t. Janna’s hands were warm and her arm was solid. The part of her that was still a reindeer wanted to lean against the bandit girl, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip:
herd, herd, herd.
 

This was a strange set of thoughts to be running under the human ones. Gerta shook her head and would have flicked her ears if she had ears worth flicking.
 

Livli was looking at her. Gerta had a feeling that the old woman knew what she was thinking, and felt vaguely embarrassed. She lifted her chin defiantly.

“I’ll wear the hide,” she said.
 

“Is there some other way?” asked Janna. “Some way that you can teach me?”

“Teach you what?” asked Livli. “Don’t think that I have answers!”

The stove popped and cracked. Janna made a small sound of frustration, rather like the stove.
 

Livli reached out and tapped the bandit girl’s knee. “I am not trying to be unkind here. This is not a Sámi thing. We don’t take our skins off any more often than anybody else. Less often than some, if you believe all the stories of wolf-skin walkers from the south. There are stories of
noaidi
from long ago turning into birds, to lure flocks north to Sápmi, but those are only stories. I’m in the dark nearly as much as you.”
 

“But you seem to know all about it!” said Gerta, surprised.
 

Livli laughed. “What I know, I know from talking to ravens and swans. Birds are terrible gossips. They know as much about shapechanging as anyone, although swans won’t tell you everything they know, and ravens think they know everything worth knowing already. You’ve not got a swan with you, so it’s up to your raven.”

“Awk,” said Mousebones. “And I
do
know everything worth knowing. Almost.” He snapped off a flaky brown chunk of fish and swallowed it down.
 

“At any rate,” said Livli, sitting back, “the swans tell me that shapechanging is easier when your own shape does not quite fit. The door inside your skin is a little way open—or at least, I think that is the human equivalent of what they are saying. Swans don’t speak of doors, and they have very sharp minds.” She rubbed her forehead, as if to banish an old headache. “So children when their bodies change to adults, and old women when they are becoming crones…and girls pregnant for the first time, though that often ends badly for all involved.”
 

Gerta dropped her eyes, faintly embarrassed. “No chance of that,” she murmured.
 

Janna gave her an amused, unreadable glance out of the corner of her eye.

“You’ll need a sled,” said Livli, passing over the awkwardness. “It will be much easier than riding. Gerta can pull it, but Janna, you’ll have to take her out every night. Both the harness and the hide.”

Janna nodded. “How do I do it?”

“I imagine you’ll have to cut her out,” said Livli. “Not a deep cut. Tickle her throat with a knife, eh?”

Janna winced. She reached across the space between them and gripped Gerta’s hand tightly. Gerta squeezed back, wondering who needed more comfort.

Being cut out of the skin does not sound pleasant at
all.
 

“It won’t be quite so bad,” said Livli. “The skin remembers the knife that cut it. Usually.”

“You
didn’t use a knife,” said Janna.

“Get to be my age, girl, and your tongue will be as sharp as one. Then you can try cutting someone out of a skin with words alone. Until then, it’s the blade or nothing.”

Janna exhaled slowly.

“That’s the other reason it has to be Gerta in the skin,” said Livli. “Of the two of you, who do you think could cut the other’s throat, and do it again and again, for however many days it takes you to reach the farthest north?”

Janna’s fingers closed convulsively tight. Gerta laid her free hand on the other girl’s shoulder, not sure what to say or if there was anything
to
say.

We are so far beyond what is normal here, there are no words. My grandmother never told me any stories about this. Kay and I…

She looked down at Janna’s dark fingers laced with her own pale ones. She could not think of anything that she and Kay had ever done that had mattered half so much or had been even half so strange.
 

“You must not let her sleep as a reindeer,” said Livli. “Not if you can avoid it. I don’t know this for certain, the birds never told me, but my gut says she’ll go so deep that getting her out again will be a job for saints, not women. I don’t say that she
can’t
come back—there are stories of people who have come back from years in wolf skin, but they aren’t right afterwards, not by a long stretch.”

“So I cut her throat at night, or I—
we
lose her completely?” asked Janna. She gave a hoarse bark of laughter. “When you fetched up on the doorstep, Gerta, if I’d realized what this would be like…”

“You don’t have to come,” said Gerta. It hurt her to say it, more than it should have. “I’m sure Mousebones can…I’m sure there’s another way.”

“No,” said Janna. She released Gerta’s hand and pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. “No, I’ll do it. You always want someone you trust to hold the knife, hey?”
 

Do I trust you?
thought Gerta.
I barely know you and you frightened me and then you kissed me, and truth be told, that frightened me even more.
 

 
Livli smirked. “I bet it’s not the first throat you’ve cut, girl,” she said.
 

Janna gave her a wry look. “No,” she said, “but it’s never been anyone I
liked.”
 

This was a reminder that Gerta hadn’t really wanted, even as Livli laughed.
 

Well. Still, it is probably better to take someone who can cut throats along. Who knows what it will take to get Kay away from the Snow Queen?

“Tomorrow, then,” said Livli, and both girls nodded.

In her dreams that night, Gerta saw Marten die. She saw it in far greater detail than she had seen it in reality, every drop of blood the size of an apple, striking the snow and staining it red. The bolt grew to the size of a tree trunk and she watched him twist and fall, over and over, until she woke up gasping.

Janna’s back was against hers. Her breathing was slow and even.
 

Yes. I’m awake. I’m alive. It’s not happening. It isn’t real.
 

Except that it was real, and the man was dead.
 

She curled her fingers in the reindeer hide.
 

She wasn’t mourning for him. She hadn’t known him, and what she knew she didn’t like. He’d done violence to her and to Janna both.
 

No, it’s more…it was just…there. In front of me.

I’ve never seen anyone die before.

Her father had died when Gerta was very small, but she did not remember it. She sighed and settled herself more solidly against Janna’s back. The other girl mumbled something, gave half a snore, and subsided.

When Gerta fell asleep again, she dreamed of plants.
 

There were bands of trees a long way off, but this part of
Sápmi
was low grass and meadow. The plants slept beneath the snow, or had died outright and were only dreaming seeds.
 

The plants knew the teeth of reindeer, and the reindeer knew the taste of plants. Gerta sank into a dream that ran like the reindeer road, free of thought, the living and the dead going on together, on and on forever.
 

Livli brought out a reindeer sled the next morning; or rather, had two Sámi men drag it out from storage. The two men laughed and joked, flirted with Janna in the few words that were common between them, and then took themselves away as soon as Livli shooed them off.
 

“They’re good lads,” she said fondly. “But if they sit and watch girls turning into reindeer, they’ll ask too many questions.”

“Won’t they wonder where the sled has gone?”

“Certainly. I’ll tell them I traded it to a smashing young man in return for a night of passion. It’ll do my reputation no end of good.”

Gerta raised both eyebrows. “Will they believe you?”

“Probably not, but they won’t dare ask any questions for fear of getting more details.”
 

Livli herself took down the reindeer hide.
 

“I’ve cleaned it,” she said, “and stretched it a little. It’s all I dare do. The swans do something to their feather cloaks that keeps them supple, but they won’t tell an outsider how they do it.” She shook out the hide, like a cloak. The inside was faintly pink. “Scrub it down with handfuls of snow. It won’t last forever, but the cold will keep it from rotting out while you need it. When it’s done, give it to
Jábmiidáhkká.”