Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [60]
“Never mind the servant, I’ll show you,” said another in blue, the one who had been embroidering, making a dismissive gesture at Yulya. “And never mind her, either. She’s terrified, so terrified it’s made her go all numb.” The girl managed a shaky smile. “So am I, but it hasn’t made me go all numb. I almost wish it would. That bronze fellow says his magic will protect us but—” she glanced up at the sky with a shuttered look of terror “—I keep expecting to melt at any moment.”
So this would be the snow maiden.
The third girl, all in red, looked up and nodded solemnly. “It’s a Jinn, you know,” she whispered. “It’s trying to do what the Katschei did, only much more cleverly. It’s trying to come here, where The Tradition doesn’t know how to cope with it. It took over the Katschei’s castle, though, so The Tradition is making it do what the Katschei did—collect girls.”
“He doesn’t like it, either,” said the snow maiden. “Every time The Tradition makes him send out one of his whirlwinds, he gets very irritated.”
“It doesn’t like being forced into anything,” the other said, closing her book. “It was like that all along, of course, but being confined to a bottle for two hundred years has made it very…” she seemed to be searching for the right word “…angry.”
“How do you know all of this?” Katya asked, eyeing the other doubtfully.
The girl sighed. “Because I was the first one it took captive, before it even came here. I was an apprentice to a hedge-wizard, and he was the one that let the Jinn loose. He bought the bottle from a sailor—he thought it was just some odd magic potion. He broke the seal and opened the stopper on it to analyze it—now, of course, I know that the stopper and the seal were part of the spell that kept the Jinn confined—and the Jinn came boiling out and destroyed him. Then it began wrecking his tower. I was down in the cellar decanting things and heard the noise and hid. By the time the Jinn got down there, its anger had cooled somewhat, and it decided to take me captive to serve it.” Katya noticed at that point that the girl looked very, very tired. “Not like a servant. It leaches power from anyone that has it to save his own. I’m sure it would much rather take more powerful people to leach from, but it decided to take over the Katschei’s castle, so young women are all that The Tradition will let it capture. Still, it must keep us alive so we can recover more power he can steal again. It means we are generally safe.”
“Unless, of course, he can use us as bait to lure in other things. Princes. Sorcerers.” Katya shrugged. “Why do you keep calling him it?”
“I—don’t know,” the young woman confessed. “I suppose because it didn’t show any interest in…” She blushed.
“I had as soon couple with a donkey.” The brass-toned voice made them all start, and the Jinn faded into view, looking down at them with scorn. “You are mere animals, for all that you talk. Your conversation is like the chattering of apes. You irritate me. Go to your quarters.”
Yulya, the swan maiden, shrank back the moment the Jinn appeared; she went absolutely white and, like her sister, she trembled in every limb. The snow maiden and the apprentice, however, though pale and frightened, stood their ground, at least insofar as not falling to pieces in front of him. The snow-maiden took Katya by the hand and led her off toward a doorway in the wall of the courtyard, while the apprentice took