The Raven and the Reindeer

by T. Kingfisher

When Gerta fell asleep again, she dreamed of plants. There were bands of trees a long way off, but this part of Sápmi was low grass and meadow. The plants slept beneath the snow, or had died outright and were only dreaming seeds. The plants knew the teeth of reindeer, and the reindeer knew the taste of plants. Gerta sank into a dream that ran like the reindeer road, free of thought, the living and the dead going on together, on and on forever.

I am strong, she said to Mousebones, astonished. “Awk! Very strong! And I am clever,” said the raven, laughing for both of them. “We ought to be unstoppable now.”

Gerta braced her hooves. I will not run. I will not. It was surprisingly easy not to run. Janna was the herd, and you did not run from the herd.

She would trust Janna to the ends of the earth. And that was good, because that was where they were standing.

“It’s a hot spring!” said Janna. “Something’s coming out of the thorns to use the hot spring. But what would do that?” Mousebones hopped over to a small, steaming mud puddle and held his wing out over it. “Ahhh…that’s the stuff.” It’s the otters, Gerta wanted to say. That’s a giant otter slide. She’d seen them in winter, near her village. When everyone bundled up and went out to throw snowballs, or to ice fish or check the trap lines, you’d find otters playing on every snowbank, sliding down over and over, until their bellies beat the snow into glossy ice. Then they loved it even more.

She nudged Mousebones with her nose and the raven hopped to one side, grumbling. “What is it?” The otters can fly. Why are they sliding down here if they can fly? The raven cocked his head at her skeptically. “You don’t know otters very well, do you?” Gerta regretted that reindeers have little concept of sarcasm. She snorted instead. “Ravens can fly, too. We still slide sometimes. Sliding is fun,” said Mousebones. He tucked in his wing, flopped over in the snow, and rolled. Janna laughed.

Mousebones flew past them, a series of hops. Occasionally he would tuck himself into a feathery black oval and slide down the ice on his back, snickering in raven-fashion. “They do that on steep rooftops sometimes,” said Janna. “When our winter quarters were over near the coast, I’d see them doing that on the stable roof. It always looked like fun.”

Janna poked her head up through the tunnel entrance beside Gerta. “I can understand them…” she said wonderingly. The otters seized on this immediately. “Of course you can. “We speak human very well.” “We speak several human languages.” “Suohtas duinna deaivvadit.” “Hyvää huomenta!” “Sprichst du auch Deutsch?” “Diné bizaadísh dinitsʼaʼ?” Gerta looked at Janna helplessly. Janna shook her head. “Maybe if you spoke a lot slower…” she said. “Oh, never mind.” “We speak this one fine.” “We learned a lot of languages.” “It’s not like Herself was going to learn our language.” “She said it was undignified. Just because there was chittering.” “And smells.” “Musk is very expressive.” “Some people don’t appreciate musk nearly enough.” “So we learned her language.” “Not that we had much choice.”

“Words are like fish and you catch them and you get to keep them forever.”

They sat up, one after another, with their tails wrapped over their feet like cats. “Glint.” “Glitter.” “Ur.” “Frost-eyes.” “Misting.” “Fish-eater.” The raven looked unimpressed.

“I am The Sound Of Mousebones Crunching Under The Hooves Of God,” said Mousebones. (Gerta translated this exchange in an undertone for Janna. “Good lord,” said the bandit girl. “They could talk the legs off a wooden goat.”)

They entered yet another hallway. This one was reflective ice, and made a vast, distorted mirror of the walls. Ur became three giant white otters, weaseling along in unison. Gerta looked at her own reflection and recoiled. “Oh…” she said softly. It was stupid. She had not worried what she looked like for many days now. It did not matter. She only needed to find Kay. But the girl in the mirror was a wild, ragged thing, her hair straggling under the fur cap that Livli had given her. There were dark circles under her eyes and smears of dirt. The reindeer hide hung lumpy and bunched and the dead head lolled behind her. She could not think for a moment, what the pattern on the front of her tunic was, and then she realized that it was long rivulets of dried blood, where the cuts on her neck had dripped and healed and dripped again. She thought, No wonder Janna does not want me right now. I look like a madwoman. Oh, I am being so stupid! I should not care. We are going to face a great enemy. It doesn’t matter what my hair looks like. And then, a long moment later, she thought, What will Kay think? Gerta knew that he should be grateful for rescue, for any rescue, but she remembered Kay. Kay who loved snow because it was clean. And she would appear, filthy and stained and stinking of dead reindeer, and he would think…what? She was surprised to feel a spark of irritation at the Kay in her imagination and had to shake her head at herself. Now I’m inventing slights with the per...

The ice crystals had grown into fantastical shapes, beautiful as flowers, sharp as swords. They shone a thousand colors of blue and violet and silver, rippling with reflected light.

If he cannot even feel pain, how did I think he’d feel love or gratitude or guilt or anything else? Gerta clutched the reindeer hide. It was warm under her fingers, and steadied her a little. She could feel the pulse of the reindeer road in it, and even if she could not reach it, she knew that it existed. There was one place in the world where time went in all directions and the herd moved together as one. She wanted to cry or scream or demand that Kay go with them, but none of those things would help. Therefore she must move in the next direction, whatever that may be. She straightened. Gerta did not pretend to know what made someone live, but she knew that a person with a frozen heart, who could slice themselves to ribbons and not bleed, was in a fair way to not being alive any longer.

The Snow Queen turned her head, and the first thing that Gerta felt was gratitude that she had not looked at Gerta, and the second was a stab of shame, because her eye fell on Janna instead. Janna staggered. Her face went slack and her eyes went wide. She let out a tiny moan and Gerta knew what she was seeing reflected in the Snow Queen’s eyes. The worst of herself, the messy mortal bloody bits, filthy and stinking and small and weak and unworthy and how dare she look that way at Janna? Rage rose up in Gerta’s heart, as hot and red as the ice palace was cold and blue. She launched herself across the room, away from Kay, thinking of nothing except that no one, no one, should ever think such thoughts about Janna. Her shoulder struck the Snow Queen and it was like falling against a shelf full of glass jars—the hard interspersed with the shockingly brittle. Things shattered. The Queen’s robe bucked strangely as the body under it broke apart and fell back. What? What just happened? Gerta stumbled forward, and Janna caught her. They staggered together as Janna’s ankle buckled. “I should have listened,” gasped the bandit girl. “You told me, but I thought—well, if someone told you that you were foul, you’d believe it with all your heart, so I didn’t realize—gods, how did you do that twice?”

“This is why you don’t mate with your nestmates,” said Mousebones pragmatically. “It’s always ‘Oh, yes, and remember the time you ate that cricket that I was supposed to get?’ for the rest of your life.” He paused, and then added, “Well, that and the inbreeding.”

The reindeer hide bunched around her as she fell, and in her reflection, she saw the antlers frame her face. The hide had been a magnificent gift, however poorly she wore it. The hide. The gift. The herd. In the speech of reindeer, she found that she could think again. I am here. I am still alive. If she was half an animal, let the animal half speak for her, then. The human part was tied up with human things like self-loathing, but that did not matter. There were no words in reindeer speech for I hate myself. It was not a concept that could be thought, and so she did not bother to think it. She thought, instead, the thing before me smells of snow. Janna was screaming, but she was screaming in the human language, and Gerta did not dare slip back into that. Kay came toward her, with his face ominously blank, but then a black shape sliced between them and Mousebones drove his beak at Kay’s face, cawing a raven’s mobbing call, as if Kay were a hawk instead of a human boy. “Awk! Awk! You will not! Egg-stealer! Nest-thief!” The thing that smelled of snow leaned forward. Her eyes narrowed. She is expecting me to die, but I am not dead yet.

There is nothing in the world so patient as a plant awaiting spring.

Kay lifted his head. His eyes passed over Gerta without really seeing her, and it came to Gerta that he had looked over her like that many times before, that his frost-colored eyes had never really seen her.

Janna shook his hand and Gerta kissed each of the otters on the nose. “You are marvelous,” she told them. “You saved our lives.” “We are very marvelous.” “We are quite excellent otters.” “You brought down Herself.” “We didn’t like her very much.” “There was never enough fish.”

Hans Christian Andersen was a weird dude. I know that I am supposed to use the acknowledgments to tell people about everyone who helped with the book, and I’ll get to that, but I just want to put that out there first. Hans Christian Andersen. Wow.

People remember Andersen’s stories for a reason. The Snow Queen and the Little Mermaid have joined the popular fairy tale pantheon when other authors of the era are forgotten or obscure. He had a line directly to the lizard brain parts that react to fairy tales. Some people do.