Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [5]
“You’re welcome,” she said, feeling suddenly shy. She hadn’t caught the animal, but maybe, if she asked nicely . . . ? She made a tentative motion with one hand. Perhaps she should grab hold of its antlers, while it still stood so close? But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“I shall grant you a boon,” the reindeer said. Its voice was throaty, yet musical, and it made the girl’s heart ache to hear it, as if she were hearing beautiful music that she would never hear again.
“Oh, please, that would be wonderful,” the lass said. She made as if to clap her mittened hands, remembered just in time that she was still holding the knife, and hastily dropped it into one of the parka’s pockets.
“What do you wish?”
“I wish for my brother Hans Peter to be made whole,” the girl said, breathless with hope.
“He is ill?”
“He went away to sea, and when he came back, he was . . . different. Faded. Sad. Gray.” It was hard to describe the change: there was nothing specific, just a general sense of wrongness when you compared him now to how he had been.
“Hmm, a puzzle,” said the white reindeer. It stamped and shifted its feet in the dusk. The girl moved too, for now that its head was unencumbered, the huge animal was taller than she and its antlers spread wider than her outstretched arms. “What is that?” The reindeer’s voice was sharp. With its velvet muzzle, it pointed at the sleeve of Hans Peter’s parka.
The lass looked down. The moon was rising, and in its milky light the embroidery on the parka stood out like the dried drops of blood on the reindeer’s silky pelt. She frowned at the embroidery. Some of the symbols looked half-familiar, and she hazarded a guess at some that lay around the cuff. “A journey? Ice and snow?”
“That is the writing of the trolls,” the reindeer trumpeted. It recoiled from her. “You have been cursed by the trolls!”
“No, no, I haven’t,” the girl protested. “It’s my brother’s parka, and his boots. He brought them back from his sea voyages. Please help him!” She held out her hands to the reindeer in appeal.
“There is nothing I can do,” the reindeer said, shivering and flinging droplets of blood into the snow around them. “If the markings on this garment are true, then what has harmed him is well beyond my power.”
The lass began to cry. Hans Peter, cursed? Then there was nothing anyone could do for him, and he would have to spend his life there, under the bitter eyes of their mother, haunted by this evil. She sagged to her knees.
“Tch, tch, little one,” the reindeer said in a kind voice. It whuffled her shoulder with its soft lips. “Is there nothing you want for yourself? A pretty gown? A dowry? I am usually asked for such things by human girls. Would you like a handsome suitor?”
The girl gave a wobbly laugh and smeared the tears away from her eyes. “I don’t think I’ll need a dowry, and I doubt that any suitor would court me for long,” she told the reindeer. “I’m an unwanted fourth daughter. I don’t even have a name.”
“Then I shall give you one,” the white reindeer said. “A creature of such generous spirit should have a name of her own, or the trolls might steal her away and use that fine spirit to fuel their dark magic.”
And then the reindeer leaned its velvet muzzle close to the girl’s ear, and named her a name in the language of the great beasts of the forest and mountain, the sea and plain and desert hot, which is the true language of all creation.
The young lass, who now had a name to treasure in her heart, lifted shining eyes to the white reindeer. “Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you.”
Higher up on the side of the mountain, the girl heard the sounds of shouting and the crash of dogs and men bullying their way through the underbrush.
“Go, hurry,” she told the white reindeer.
The huge animal bent its head and pressed its black nose to the center of the lass’s forehead, then turned and ran off into the night. The lass stayed