Relief spread over Rosa's face. 'Well, I assume you can snap the chain? Break the manacle lock?'
Lily shook her head. 'Unfortunately, no. When a Dwarf makes a chain to hold something, believe me, it stays held. They have a magic with metal that even I don't dare meddle with. But I do have a plan to release you, one that will follow the Snowskin Path.'
Rosa made a face, but didn't object. 'Well, I am glad you told me. I think if I had suddenly found myself paralyzed, I'd have gone mad. The Huntsman was bad enough.' She frowned a little more. 'But if the Huntsman isn't yours, who does he belong to?'
'Something I am trying very hard to find out,' Lily replied. 'But let me explain what I have in mind now. The Dwarves will come home and find you dead. After they make sure this isn't a trick, they won't want to have a corpse on their hands, and I fully expect them to unchain you and dump you somewhere in the forest. I'll be watching them. I'll have you taken to a safer place, and lift the spell. We'll decide together what to do from there.' It looked as if Rosa was taking this much better than Lily had dared to hope. In fact, the bees were calmly circling both of them, visiting the flowers among the weeds, yes, but keeping them in a protective ring. A good sign. She sat on the grass near Rosa. 'If I'd had any notion that the Huntsman was going to attack you so soon, I would have put more effort into keeping a watch over you, or told you what was going on.'
The girl smiled wanly. She was certainly game, and resilient. 'And if you had, something else would have happened. I've had a bad time, but it could have been much worse. It was Dwarves who found me. It could have been robbers, who wouldn't have thought me too ugly to touch.'
Lily shuddered. 'From this moment on, I pledge you, you will be entirely in my confidence. I'd also like you to wear this at all times.' She pulled a bracelet out of her pocket and handed it to Rosa. Hanging from the fine silver chain was a piece of obsidian cuten cabochon. By Eltarian standards, this was a mere trinket, the sort of thing a milkmaid could own. The back of it had been polished to a mirror finish. Rose examined it curiously, then put it on. 'As long as you wear that, I can find you.'
Rosa nodded, and fingered it nervously. 'So — what do I do?'
Lily took out the potion. 'Drink this. That's all. The next time you see me, you'll be free, and we'll plan what we should do from there.'
Rosa's hand shook, but she took the bottle, screwed up her face and drank it down. Before she even reacted to the pleasant taste, Lily cast the net of the sleeping spell on her, the strands of it sparkling a little in the sunlight. She caught the girl as Rosa started to topple over, and laid her gently on the grass.
Lily did not trust to the reflective properties of the little pendant; she left a fragment of broken mirror propped among the weeds of the garden, in a position to reflect Rosa's image. With that in place, she escaped the scene, returning to her larger mirror. She took Jimson's mirror out of the basket, and settled down to wait.
'You timed things well,' Jimson remarked, as the Dwarf that Rosa called Coward shambled into the garden, rabbits dangling from one hand, then stopped and frowned.
'Wake up, lazy ugly!' the Dwarf shouted. 'No time to sleep!'
When Rosa didn't respond, his face grew red with anger. He stormed toward her and kicked her. Lily winced as Rosa's body rolled over, head lolling. The Dwarf drew back his foot to kick her again, then realized that there was something very wrong. He bent over, felt her face and cursed.
Rabbits forgotten, he lumbered for the kitchen and the staircase down into the cellar and the secret mine. Sometime later, all seven of the Dwarves emerged from the kitchen, to Coward's babbling and gesturing. Bully cuffed him into silence, and went to examine Rosa himself. By this time, her body was getting cold. After assuring himself that she really was dead, Bully vented his spleen in a round of cursing, blaming Coward in part for the loss of their house-slave. Coward cringed away, as Bully stomped angrily around the garden, cursing the Dwarf, Rosa and anything else he could think of.
Finally he threw up his hands. 'Got to get that thing out of here,' he said with exasperation. 'Spent all day digging, last thing I want to do is dig a hole. You, and you — ' He pointed to Coward and Angry. 'Haul it away, dump it in a ditch.'
'Who'll make supper?' Deaf whined.
In answer, Bully spun him around and marched him into the kitchen, with the rest following.
'Are you marking their passage, Jimson?' Lily whispered, as Jimson switched the view from the fragment of glass to the pendant around Rosa's neck.
'Easily, Godmother. Best go bring your Brownies through. I doubt they'll bother carrying her too far.' She could almost hear Jimson's lip curl with contempt. 'I must say that I have seldom seen seven beings less inclined to do anything more than the barest minimum they need to get by.'
'Nor have I.' She stepped through her mirror to find six of her strongest lads waiting. Now, breaking the spell was going to require more dancing around what The Tradition was trying to do. The Tradition dictated that where Snowskin was laid out in state — and eventually awakened — should be technically within reach of where the Dwarves lived, so they could all go mourn her, periodically. Never mind that this lot was far more likely to give up their illegal mine and form a kitten-rescue society than go and mourn over the body of a virtual slave. The Tradition had to be satisfied. So Lily couldn't bring Rosa back to the safer environs of her own Palace for this; it all had to be done in the woods. Also, The Tradition dictated it be in a forest glade where beams of sunlight could illuminate her lovely form. This also somewhat limited where she could do her work.
Never mind. It was worth all the fuss and bother, since so far, all that fuss and bother had managed to keep Rosa alive.
Unfortunately, Siegfried's triumphant leave-taking from the village of the boar had been marred when he ran across the only thing he feared, lying in a meadow just outside of town.
His Doom. The sleep-charmed Warrior Maid in her ring of fire. He had fled in the opposite direction as if an entire clan of dragons were after him. It was a good thing he'd had the bird to guide him, or he would have gotten completely lost in this forest.
