was going to be hard on the wild things.
With that accomplished, she stood in the middle of the building, swaying on her feet in a kind of daze until she came to herself and realized that she was exhausted. With a shake of her massive head, she considered her surroundings, decided that it was as good a place to den up as any, and lumbered over to a straw-filled corner to curl up for a nap.
When she woke, the sun shining at an angle in through the wrecked door; it was late afternoon. She made a good meal on a frozen goat, and lumbered out to the edge of the village. She ate snow to clear her nose and mouth and cleanse them of any other scent, then stood very, very still, breathing slow, deep breaths with her eyes closed.
There. Human. But fresher scent than the rest. She opened her eyes to discover her head had swung to the right. Still taking the scent in, she followed it until she found what she was looking for.
A human would never have seen it, not unless he was an expert tracker. Beneath the cover of new-fallen snow, the faintest of depressions. Footprints. She snuffled, and concluded with satisfaction that there were three different scents there. It could only be the men that she hunted.
She went back to where she had left her harness and pouch, and pawed and wriggled until she got the harness around her head and over her shoulders. Then she returned to where she had found the scent. With her head down, she began to track it.
She was, of course, not as good as a dog would be. But a Bear was not at all bad at following scent, and this was a Bear's nose with a human mind behind it.
She followed the trail, shuffling along with the Bear's clumsy, and deceptively slow-looking gait, past sunset, past moonrise and on into the night. She felt good — well-rested, with a full belly — and there was absolutely no reason to stop now. A Bear's eyes were not very good, so traveling at night was not exactly the problem it would have been for a creature that depended more upon sight. And as for the danger of attackers — there wasn't much that would be foolhardy enough to attack something as large and powerful as she was, not this early in the Winter. Later, perhaps, when wildlife began to starve, she would have been in danger from wolf packs. But not now, and not as long as there were frozen dead things back in that village. The only danger she was in would be from human hunters, and the only human hunters there would have been out here were all back in that village — dead. Well, there was the possible danger from this Icehart, whatever it was…but so far, its chosen victims all seemed to be humans; the animals it had slain were simply the unfortunate creatures that shared space with its intended victims.
Or the intended victims of the Witch. Although it didn't make any sense — would the Witch have wiped out three full villages for no apparent reason?
It was a shame that the wretched North Wind had so poor a sense of direction, otherwise she could have gotten the location of the Witch's stronghold from him. But the Winds didn't really understand human concepts like maps. After all, the Winds went where they chose, and there wasn't much that could stop them, so what did they need with maps or directions?
On she lumbered. The scents got stronger under tree-canopy, but only because the trail wasn't hidden under snow. Whatever had happened to the missing men, they hadn't come back this way.
By the time the sun rose, even the Bear form's strength was beginning to flag. The scent actually was stronger, though, so at least it was more recent. She was tracking them across the side of a forest ridge now, and considered stopping and curling up for a nap, then decided to press on at least as far as the ridge ahead of her. So far she hadn't seen a good place to curl up anyway; there might be better cover ahead.
And then, just as the full sun hit the valley below, she crested the ridge — and stopped dead in her tracks.
Below her was a sight that was both stunningly beautiful and utterly horrible. For as far as the eye could see, the sun reflected blindingly off the branches of a forest of trees of ice.
11
Annukka stood with one arm around Kaari, comfortingly, as they stared at the wilderness ahead of them. Behind them was the village where Veikko had found his mentor, the Warrior-Mage Lemminkal; it was from here that he, Ilmari, and Ilmari's brother Lemminkal had departed. The villagers all agreed that they had gone to track down something called the Icehart, which was some sort of monstrous creature that had killed everyone in three separate villages. They had learned of this Icehart from a reindeer herdsman who had returned to his village to find everyone dead, frozen — and from all appearances, it had happened in a single moment in the middle of the night. He claimed that he had seen it, at a distance, moving away from a second village, to which he had gone for help. He had called it the Icehart because it looked like an enormous, ghostly stag, and wherever it went, it killed with cold.
And that was far more information than they had gotten before. At least now they knew to watch out for ghostly reindeer.
It was Lemminkal who had linked the Icehart with the Snow Queen, and according to those who had spoken to him before the three men left, he was determined to eliminate both the monster and its mistress. Ilmari was more circumspect and rather less confident that they could take on the Snow Queen themselves.
Annukka and Kaari had decided to climb up from the valley where the village lay to have a look at what lay ahead of them as they followed the men. From this vantage, on the side of the mountain, what was before them was daunting, a patchwork of alpine forest and glacier, mountains already deep in snow. This was where the road had lost track of Veikko, because after this village, there was no road. And there was no use in calling up the North Wind again, because even if it would answer, which was dubious, the Winds were notoriously bad at being able to give good directions to humans. “Oh, over that mountain and to the east” was usually the best they could manage.
“Now what do we do?” Kaari asked, looking bleakly at the literally trackless wilderness in front of them.
“For one thing, we switch to sledges,” Annukka replied. “Which means that we will be able to carry more supplies with us. That is no bad thing.”
“But how are we going to find them?” Kaari wailed. “There's no road to follow, and any tracks they made are gone by now!”
Annukka hugged her shoulders harder. “Don't despair. I have an idea.” She turned Kaari about, faced her toward the village and gave her a little shove. “You go get us sledges and supplies. And find out what, if anything,
