The Raven and the Reindeer (7 page)

“You get it from your grandmother, I imagine,” said Mousebones. “That’s a guess. Only a guess, but a raven’s guess is worth more than a magpie’s. Aurrk!”
 

“Get what?” asked Gerta.

“No magic,” said Mousebones. “When it’s that strong, being unmagical is a thing itself. Like being a white raven. White ravens aren’t really white, they’re just an absence of black. But they’re very good at it.”

This did not make a great deal of sense to Gerta, but asking questions would probably just make things even more muddled.
 

There was also the small fact that she was talking to a raven, which was clearly a strange thing to do. Ravens were very canny birds, everyone knew, but they didn’t talk. Not to mortals, anyway.

And I am not a fairy and most definitely not a god
. Gerta tried to think if any other class of people talked to ravens.
Witches, maybe. Saints.
 

She did not think that she was a witch. She would have rather liked to be a saint, but saints tended to come to a bad end.
Perhaps I’ll be martyred by the Snow Queen…

If the coming snow caught her outside of shelter, she would be martyred by the weather, and the Snow Queen wouldn’t have to bother.
 

It was probably not worth wondering if she was mad. She was already chasing after Kay, who had been abducted by a woman in a sleigh pulled by white otters. If she had gone mad, it had obviously been months ago, and there was no point in worrying about it now.
 

She kept walking.

Mousebones flew down the road a little way ahead of her, to root around in the ditch. When she drew abreast, the raven made a great hop and landed on her pack. Gerta grunted, more from surprise than the weight. It was the size of a cat, but very light.
 

“Mousebones?”
 

“Aurk?”

“Are you a he-raven or a she-raven?”

“I am a raven,” said Mousebones, “and the rest is none of your business, as we’ll not be having eggs together.”

“Sorry,” said Gerta. “I just…it’s awkward thinking of you as ‘it.’”

“Oh no, a human feeling awkward. How
terrible.”
 

Gerta flushed scarlet.
Do saints blush? What about witches?

Mousebones tilted its head, opened its beak and carefully gripped her ear.

“What are you doing? Stop that!” Gerta ducked her head. It had felt like blunt scissors on her skin.

“It turned so red, I couldn’t resist,” said the raven. “Was that a blush? White ravens don’t do that.”
 

Gerta mumbled something. She had thought that it would be less embarrassing to talk to a bird than a human, but apparently not.
 

She put her head down and walked very fast.

After a dozen fenceposts had gone by, Mousebones said “Sorry. You’re only a fledgling and out of the nest a bit too soon, aren’t you?”

Gerta shrugged. The raven sank its talons into her pack and flapped to keep balance.
 

“The other human girl I know isn’t much older than you, but she came out of the egg with all her pinfeathers. I’m being rude.” Mousebones picked up a lock of hair in its beak and preened it down, which felt even stranger than its beak on her ear had.

“Thanks,” said Gerta, almost inaudibly. She wondered who the other girl Mousebones knew was—had she handled a talking raven better?
 

“You may call me he,” said Mousebones, “for ‘it’ is an ugly word. I may feel differently later, but I will inform you first.” He groomed another bit of her hair. “Are we well, Gerta?”

It had an air of ritual to it, even with the informality of the words.
 

“We’re well, Mousebones,” she answered.
 

“Good.”
 

The snow that night came quietly at first, a few flakes and a few more flakes, then settled into a business-like snow that did not trouble itself with theatrics. The winds did not howl and the flakes did not dance. They simply fell straight down, thick and white and relentless.

There were no haystacks. There were no farmhouses. Gerta had been watching for one for hours, and there were none. The fields were grey and barren. The last house had been four hours ago, before she stopped for lunch.
 

Even the fences had ended. Gerta had a grim feeling that she had walked out of the fields and into moorland.
 

“Should I have gone back?” she asked Mousebones.

“Does it matter?” asked the raven. “You didn’t go back.” He shook himself, and snowflakes fell off his shining black feathers. “Snow. I never liked snow.”

“I thought birds spent the winter in the land of the dead,” said Gerta.

“Aurk!” He gave her a suspicious look. “Who told you that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Everyone, I guess.”

“Nobody I know,” said the raven. “
I’ve
certainly never been to the land of the dead.” He considered this. “Maybe sparrows. Sparrows always seem like they know more than they’re telling.” He flew to a fencepost and fluffed his beard briefly.
 

Gerta shoved her hands deeper into the fur muff. At first she left small, melted boot-prints on the road.
 

After a time, they no longer melted and she left white prints on white. The wind began to pick up but the snow fell as thick as ever.

If the snow had been deeper, she would have been in better spirits. Every child in the village knew how to build a snow cave and hunker down in it—it was one of the things you learned about winter, like throwing yourself flat on ice that started to crack, like watching out for icicles that might fall off the eaves and drive themselves into your skull.
 

But a few inches of cold, wet snow were different than two feet of dry, packable snow. Gerta took a deep breath and felt the cold like knives in her chest.
 

“It is possible that I am going to die,” she said. She wanted to feel badly about this, but her nose was running in the cold and it was hard to concentrate on her own death when she felt as if she might drown in snot. She wiped furiously at her nose and wished for a handkerchief.

“It is a certainty that you are going to die,” said Mousebones. “All living things die. Then we eat their eyes.”

“How nice,” said Gerta. “Are you going to eat my eyes?”

“Well, obviously. You’d want a friend to do it, wouldn’t you?” Mousebones groomed a snowflake off her hair. “And it’s not like you’d be
using
them.”
 

Gerta sighed and wiped her nose on her sleeve again. The inside of her nostrils felt raw.
 

“However,” said Mousebones, “since you have given me cheese and carried me all this way, I will not eat your eyes today, unless you want me to.”
 

“
Want
you to?”

“Well,” said Mousebones, fluffing up all his feathers and settling them again. “Some people do. For wisdom, you know. I could pluck out an eye and eat it and then the other one would have the second sight. In theory.”

“Does that work?” asked Gerta.

Mousebones made a drawn out
aaaurrrrr-rrr-rrk
sound. “It might,” he said, a bit doubtfully. “I just handle the eye-eating bit. The second sight is somebody else’s problem.”
 

Gerta could think of nothing to say to that.
 

“I don’t know why people want second sight anyway,” the raven added. “You’d think seeing
one
world would be enough.”

“I might give an eyeball if I could see a haystack right now,” said Gerta, sighing. It seemed unlikely. Visibility had plunged and now the world was grey and white only a few yards off the road. Even if there were mysterious mobile haystacks lurking in the moors, she wouldn’t be able to see them.
 

The raven launched himself into the air. Gerta ducked her head, startled. “That wasn’t an offer!” she yelled after him.
 

Mousebones paid her no heed. She could see the stiffness in his bad wing as he flapped away into the snow.
 

She tried not to feel bereft. Presumably a raven could roost in a tree somewhere and not freeze to death. She couldn’t. There was no reason Mousebones should stay with her and freeze.
 

Gerta had pulled the hood of her cloak low and her face was wet where her breath steamed up into it. She definitely was not crying. It would be stupid to cry about a raven.

“He’d only have eaten my eyes anyway,” she said glumly.
 

The snow grew thicker and thicker. It was no longer crunching underfoot, but piling up silently. Gerta felt as if the world was growing larger and larger, or as if she were growing smaller and more insignificant, a little hooded mouse toiling along the road, not even leaving tracks behind her.
 

She stopped and pushed her hood back. The wind cut at her wet cheeks and froze her eyelashes.

She could see the road ahead and behind, and nothing else.

I am going to freeze. I could walk ten feet from a farmhouse and never know.
 

She could taste despair on her tongue, like dust.

I might as well lie down in the snow and get it over with. At least it will be painless. They say freezing is the best way to die.

And then, from overhead, she heard the high, familiar chime of bells.

Gerta looked up.

All she could see at first was white snow rushing at her from a pale grey sky. It was a dizzying perspective, and for a moment she felt queasy, as if the snow was still and the ground was rocketing upward.

Then a shape passed overhead, white-on-grey, eerily silent except for the chiming bells. The white otters poured through the sky, running on air as easily as they had run on snow. The sled cut a long path through the sky, leaving a snowless wake behind it.
 

Gerta was below and a little to the left. She could not see much of the interior from her angle, but the Snow Queen stood in the front of the sled, and behind her, dark-haired and wrapped in furs, but with his head bare—

“Kay!” cried Gerta.
“Kay!”

He did not look at her. Perhaps he did not hear.

The Snow Queen heard, though, and as the sled ran past, she turned her head.

Her single glance fell over Gerta like a blow.
 

—mewling, red-faced, mortal, stinking of sweat—

Gerta staggered and went to one knee under the weight of her own uselessness.
 

The Snow Queen’s gaze flicked away. Gerta gasped for air, feeling the cold stab her lungs, and what did it matter, none of it mattered, she should lie down and die the snow was clean and she was filthy but if it covered her over no one would see what a wretched creature she was and that was the best that she could ever hope for.

“No,” said Gerta. She had to bite the word and spit it out. “
No.
I can’t die now. Someone needs to help Kay.”
 

Kay is alive. I just saw him.
If I am a wretched, filthy creature, so be it. I don’t have be anything else. I just have to get to Kay.
 

Kay deserves better than me, but I’m all there is.
 

The thought got her back to her feet. Her knee was soaked through from kneeling in the snow and the backs of her hands were burning.

She found the fur muff and shoved her hands in it. Walking…yes. That was next. She could walk.
 

She stumbled forward.
 

Mousebones found her a few minutes later and landed on her pack. “Well,” he said.
“That
was something. Did you see the crazy sled pulled by otters?”
 

“The Snow Queen,” croaked Gerta, too broken to realize that Mousebones had returned. “She has Kay. I have to get him back, but I’m going to freeze to death.”

“You don’t sound so good,” said the raven.

Gerta took a deep breath and then a swallow of water from her flask. It was slushy with ice and chilled her deeply, but her lips and tongue moved more easily for it. “She looked at me,” she said. “It’s…I think it’s something she does. Did she look at you?”
 

Mousebones raised his head. “I should say she did. I nearly flew into her.”

Gerta turned her head. She could just see the long, wicked beak alongside her cheek. “And when she did, you didn’t…you didn’t feel…”

She paused, trying to find the words. “Dirty,” she said finally, feeling even more wretched for not being able to describe it. “Mortal. Awful, compared to her.”

“Aur-
k
,” said Mousebones. “Compared to her, I’m a raven. And ravens do not bow to gods or men or giants.” He lifted his head proudly, and Gerta felt even worse. She was not a raven. A little cat-sized bundle of feathers and bone could stand before the Snow Queen and she could not.
 

She trudged on in silence.

“Anyway,” said Mousebones, after a minute, “there’s a stand of bushes about a hundred feet farther up. It’s the only cover we’re going to get, and this storm goes on in both directions for a long time, so I suggest you stop there.”

Gerta blinked.

It occurred to her, rather sluggishly, that she might not freeze to death. This was an interesting idea, although she did not have much energy left to be interested.
 

“You can cut some branches to perch on,” said Mousebones. “And then we’ll roost together, so we don’t freeze to death, and I will be on my very best behavior and won’t pluck out even
one
eye.”
 

He sounded as if he were making a great sacrifice, and Gerta choked out a laugh. The cold inside her thawed a tiny bit.
 

The bushes were only a little way down the road, nearly covered in drifting snow. They were white lumps on white ground and she had to look carefully to see them.
 

“Odin’s forehead,” grumbled Mousebones. “Aurk! They were green when I saw them before. It’s coming down hard.”