indicated. It was difficult. Only the most skilled and powerful of magicians ever mastered it.
So they watched carefully as she surprised Veikko at his wood-gathering, as she bound him in place so he could not move. And then as she did, indeed, in a rather horrifying ritual, stab an enchanted sliver of ice into his heart.
Now that she could see it happen, she could analyze the magic. And it didn't merely look horrifying, it was horrifying. It ate at people, devouring them slowly from within. That was why the young men she took for herself didn't last very long.
But the oddest thing was, Aleksia was also certain that the false Snow Queen didn't know this. As Jalmari replayed what he could to confirm this, they realized something else. She also never saw them die. She had no idea that at some point, each of them would wander out into the snow at night and just walk northwards until they stopped. All she knew was that they disappeared, which was an inconvenience to her, but nothing more. This was unexpected.
“Is there a mirror in her room of magic-working?” she asked, finally.
“There should be,” the mirror-servant said. “Why?”
“Go as far back as you can — you don't need to show it to me, but tell me if she ever had a mentor or if she has done all of her learning out of books.”
While Jalmari searched, the Bear dozed with the mirror between her forepaws, and her back to the fire. The Bear form was good for that; dropping into a half-sleep that was as refreshing as a human's full sleep. A cough from between her paws made her open her eyes again.
“She inherited the tower and its contents from her grandfather,” Jalmari said flatly. “She never had a mentor.”
“Then that explains a great deal.”
The mirror-spirit nodded. “She looks up what she wishes to do in a book, she masters the spell and she looks no further than that. She would not be able to do this if she was not as powerful as she is — and that is the problem. She does not know to research what she wishes to do further. She thinks it is like a cooking book — you look up the dish that you want and you make it, and there are no other considerations other than eating it.”
Aleksia nodded. “Like the young apprentice who tried to create a servant to do his chores for him but did not look further to discover that it would continue to work until it wore out. She has set in motion things of which she has no idea. And now we must be the ones to set them to rest.”
The mirror-servant sighed. “Better in your hands than mine, Godmother,” he said. “Is there anything more?”
“Not now,” she replied, and the mirror went blank.
She pondered the situation that faced her for a long time, occasionally getting up to grasp another few pieces of wood in her teeth and drop them on the fire. She was faced with a Sorceress powerful enough to have learned her magic solely out of books. She must not have had much of a childhood and adolescence. And perhaps she had been one of those souls who, solitary by nature, preferred being left alone. But one day, long after most women had had their first love and either gotten over him or married him, she encountered a man that captured her. And she must have given him all the passion she had pent up for — perhaps — years.
Now Aleksia had no idea why the man had not returned. But this Sorceress had been convinced that he had abandoned her, and passionate love turned to passionate anger. At that point, she had forsworn love, went out of her way to destroy lovers and had placed a barrier around her stronghold. Nothing could pass that barrier, and probably she was the only one that could open it.
In keeping with the state of her emotions, she had locked her land in eternal Winter.
Then —
Well, all Aleksia could think was that she had become incredibly lonely. Why else would she have started to kidnap young men? But she couldn't chance them abandoning her like her love had, nor did she want them to love her. She wanted them as objects, and that was when she had looked up and found the ice-shard spell. And she went no further than to find how to control them, not what the shard would do to them.
Veikko, however, might last a bit longer due to being a Warrior and a Mage.
Aleksia brooded over what she had seen in the mirror. The Imposter, it seemed, used to hate living things; but now she had lived so long that she had even worn out hatred. She seemed weary, more than anything. But the one thing that seemed to keep her going is the will to make others suffer as she did, when her false-true-love abandoned her.
What an utterly miserable life.
13
Aleksia dropped the last of the wood on the fire and dozed off in
Bear form. By the standards of the Bear, the cave was pleasantly warm at this point. By spending a few moments shoving rocks into a ring around the fire, she was fairly certain that the cave would remain that way as long as she was asleep. There was something to be said for being in this form, besides the obvious. The Bear did not have nightmares. In fact, she rarely remembered the Bear's dreams at all, and mostly they seemed to feature food. This night was no exception; she dreamed of feasting on honey, berries and fat, rich salmon. By the time she woke, the fire was down to coals and she had a better idea of what she was going to do.
It was time to get help. She had been fairly sure she was going to need it when she started this — it had all the earmarks of the start of a quest, and The Tradition had very firm paths for quests. Even if you began one alone, even if you would say to your friends, over and over, “You can't come with me,” at least one and probably more would find a way to follow you or otherwise get involved. She already had the Godmothers looking out for her at a distance, which might satisfy the need for questing partners, except that there were people out here already on the same quest. So she might as well give in to it and round them all up. At least that way they wouldn't be stumbling over each other and interfering with each other's plans.
Now, knowing that the Sorceress in question did not know mirror-magic, made things a little more straightforward. At least Aleksia knew that she and her allies would not be spied on by means of reflective surfaces, so that meant they need only beware of the usual sorts of spying, and perhaps not so many of those. Most of the other ways she knew to spy magically were through agents, either animals or human, and she had seen no
