“Love and betrayal always are,” Jalmari said cheerfully, and the scenes began again, flickering across the surface of the mirror. Then they steadied.
This time, the woman was certainly near enough to hear every word — not that this would be difficult, since she was in a towering rage, pacing back and forth across the room. She was cursing and not under her breath, either. Her hair had escaped from the net and billowed out around her shoulders like clouds boiling up before a storm. The vantage point must have been from a mirror on a wall. There was a window just within the field of vision; it was snowing heavily outside and nothing more could be seen. So the man was not back yet, and he had left in the Summer.
Someone dressed in a heavy cloak entered, shaking off snow. The woman whirled to face her. “Anything?” she demanded. The woman, who beneath the cloak was dressed as a servant, shook her head. The Sorceress's eyes blazed. “Not a word!” she raged. “Not a word, not a line, nothing! Faithless, worthless — ” She broke down, hands clenched at her sides, sobbing aloud as tears poured along her red, streaked cheeks, painful, harsh sobs escaping that sounded as if each one physically hurt her.
It was a dreadful scene, and even though Aleksia knew it was in the far, far past, it was still uncomfortable to watch. She wanted to find a way to comfort the poor thing, even though, at the same time, she knew that if she had actually been there, she would have been too clumsy and awkward to actually manage to do that. This was not the sort of thing that she was good at. Being cold and aloof, scathing and sarcastic — those she was good at. Not at being comforting.
The scene shifted again, as Jalmari went hunting for more relevant images. “Hmm. This seems typical,” he said at last, as the mirror steadied. It was a view of the same tower from the outside, somewhere at a distance, but — what a difference! The gardens were dead, there was a new wall about the place and the village looked deserted. Ah, but it wasn't, not quite. There were some furtive movement in the streets there — so there were still people in the village, but they did not want to draw attention to themselves.
The point of view suddenly changed. To one of…the sky? And a wooden wall of some sort. For a moment, Aleksia was puzzled, until she realized that what she was seeing were the sides of a bucket from the inside, and that Jalmari had moved the viewpoint here, not so that they could see, but so that they could hear.
“Can she see us?” came a furtive whisper. Female. A pause. “I don't think so. And I don't see any of her spies.” A note of desperation crept into the voice. “Aili, I have to see you more often!”
“No!” came the equally desperate reply. “You know what she will do to us if she even guesses you think about me! Look what she did to all the others! If she didn't outright murder them, she did horrible things to them that made them hate each other! I couldn't bear it if she
did that to us!”
“Then come away with me!” the boy said. “You know she is only going to get worse! She's forsworn love, and wants to destroy it — ”
“And that is why we can't be together!” The girl sobbed.
“Yes, we can! She can't be everywhere! She might be a Sorceress, but she's not the only Sorceress in the world!” He dropped his voice again. “And look what she's been doing to her servants, Aili. They aren't even human anymore! They not only don't love, they don't even feel! That is what she will do to you, do to me, if she gets a chance. Do you want to end up like that?”
“I believe that will be enough there,” Jalmari said smoothly. The image dissolved into Jalmari's face. “Now, just a little more forward in time…let us see what she has built for herself.”
Now the scene was much more familiar — although the copy of the real Palace of Ever-Winter was not in place. The rest of it, however, was just as Aleksia had seen it in her first view of it. The ice wall. The magical barrier. The dark village outside the walls. And above all, the snow, the ice, the bleak impression that Winter had always been there and always would be there, camped at the gates of the tower like a guardian dog. Only the Sorceress's dwelling was different; it was still the stone keep. But around it, doing some sort of work, were the animated snow statues….
The scene again dissolved, darkened and became the void, with the mirror-servant in his usual spot. Jalmari bobbed thoughtfully in place while both of them considered what they had seen. “Well I am glad you urged me to that, Godmother. That answers a great many mysteries.”
She nodded. “Now we know just where the false Snow Queen came from, and why she is doing what she does. She was betrayed, forswore love — ” She grimaced. “You know, in a tale, that might seem a justifiable reason for going to the bad, but I have known any number of kindly folk who have done just that, and then dedicated themselves to God or good works instead. But she — ”
“She declared war on love,” Jalmari said, frowning. “With the results that we both saw. I suspect that the sheer misery she generates may be giving her a great deal of her power. The more misery, the more power. Whether she knows that or not, well, that would be the question, wouldn't it?”
Aleksia nosed the mirror, and shifted the Bear's weight. “That would be typical — although most of the dark magicians get their power through death rather than mere misery.”
“But that would account for why she has been increasing her territory very slowly,” Jalmari replied. Aleksia nodded.
“Can you show me something else?” she asked. “I would like to see why she took Veikko — and whether she has taken other young men in the past.”
“Easily, Godmother,” the being said, and the little hand-mirror misted over again. Well, the second question was definitely answered right away…and it made her a little sick to watch it.
It was always the same. The Sorceress went through any number of young men; they tended not to last very long. It was always the same, she accosted a young man in some way, then bound him to her with a ritual spell. Once he was hers, he was as mindless as one of those snow statues, and she could do with him whatever she pleased. They became white-faced and expressionless, and day by day they faded a little until at last, they simply — stopped. The snow-servants would drag the bodies out and take them somewhere; Jalmari did not bother to find out where. And another question was answered, one that Aleksia had not actually asked out loud.
For Jalmari showed her the taking of Veikko.
The question was: what was the spell she used to make certain of these young men?
Everything pointed to a peculiar enchantment that only those magicians whose power was linked to ice and snow ever used. It was very effective, but far, far rarer than all of the tales that were told about such things ever
