Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [58]
Don’t they ever get bored? She’d have gone mad.
Well, evidently not. Perhaps The Tradition ensured that all swan maidens were born as brainless as the birds themselves….
That’s unkind….
“Here,” said the girl, shaking in every limb, pointing to a spot where the feather cloak still lay.
But true. “You didn’t take her cloak with you?” she asked, a little stunned.
“No. Should we have?” The girl blinked at her.
“What happens if someone who isn’t one of your sisters puts on the cloak?” Katya demanded.
The girl blinked again. “They become a swan like us, I suppose….”
Katya did her best not to smack herself in the head in frustration. “And it didn’t occur to you that someone could put on the cloak, become a swan, and follow you back to your father where he—or she—could then enchant you and put you all in his power?”
The girl’s eyes widened, and she dropped to the ground, crying. “Oh no—oh no!” she sobbed “Oh this is terrible, dreadful—”
“Oh for—” Katya strode over to her and took her by the shoulders and shook her hard. “It didn’t happen! The cloak is still here! Get control of yourself, for pity’s sake!”
Startled, the girl stopped sobbing.
“Now, take your sister’s cloak and go,” she ordered. “Leave this to me.”
She didn’t have to give the order twice. In the blink of an eye, a swan stood where the girl had been. It picked up the cloak in its beak and flew off, white feathers streaming behind it.
Katya went back to examining the area where the swan maiden had been taken. And she was not too terribly shocked when she found a patch of moss in the deepest shade where the temperature was considerably colder than anywhere else. And beside that patch of moss, a cluster of snow-drops was blooming.
So, now she knew that both girls had been taken from the same place. What else did they have in common?
Magic, she decided. The likelihood that it was any other common denominator was vanishingly small. The snow maiden was a peasant, the swan maiden was a princess. One was born of magical blood, the other made by magic. One lived in a simple hut in the forest, the other in a palace East of the Sun and West of the Moon. One was hardworking, the other pampered.
Well, there was one good way to test this theory. And Katya didn’t think she was going to be able to get into the Katschei’s palace any other way.
But first, she needed a disguise.
Bereginia. She would disguise herself as the riverbank maiden. Magic enough, but not too much magic, and surely exactly what this kidnapper was looking for.
She waited for The Tradition to notice her, waited to feel it focusing on her. I must be a bereginia, she told it. This thing that hunts maidens does not belong here. I will make it go back to its place. But I must be a bereginia to do so—
She felt the magic of The Tradition gather around her, she pulled it to her, and felt it settle on her like a heavy cloak—
The sunlight gathered around her and dazzled her eyes. Then it was gone.
And there she was, dressed from head to foot in brown and green, green as the reeds and the rushes, green as the grass and the river water. Brown as the mud of the bank and the stones. She felt something on her head, touched it, and realized she was wearing a crown of water iris and plaited rushes. Her shift was of filmy brown linen, light as gossamer, with huge sleeves that swept the ground, embroidered in green. The sarafan, the over-gown, was green, and embroidered in a hundred different colors of green and brown. A green half cloak, slung over the right shoulder and under the left, was also embroidered in green and brown.
She was enchanted. She had never actually seen a bereginia; she’d no idea what they looked like or what they wore; she had only been hoping that it wasn’t entirely hideous, some strange primitive thing of rawhide and rattling bones.
She didn’t get much time to appreciate it though—
She heard a strange