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  But this was selfish fantasy. Gerda would never stay unless coerced, and Helvig had promised to do her best not to wheedle or force Gerda’s choices. She should be ashamed of herself for wanting to see Gerda so miserable that she needed Helvig to care for her. She had to let go.

  But not tonight. It was too soon, too unexpected. She needed tonight at least to say goodbye.

  "Gerda, it's pitch black out there with snow up to your knees. Pass one more night with me, I beg of you. In the morning I will send you on your way with food and water and the kindest encouragement." Her voice wavered. "Would it be so terrible to spend one more night in my bed? How could one more night hurt anything at all?"

  Gerda tipped her face towards heaven, her eyes shut tightly. Helvig had never seen her in so much pain, not even when she had tripped over a log while foraging with Wilhelm and come home limping on a sprained ankle.

  "Do you remember the witch?"

  Helvig blinked. The subject seemed incongruous to the issue at hand.

  "From your stories? The one who taught you your art?"

  "Yes."

  Gerda pulled herself onto the bed and sat still for a moment, shoulders sagging. She looked a hundred years old, sitting like that.

  "Come here, Helvig," Gerda said quietly.

  Helvig sank down beside her and pulled one of her frail hands onto her knee. She was so cold, too cold, and a fresh wave of fear at releasing Gerda into the merciless weather passed through Helvig.

  "I had already been travelling for over a year when I met her. I heard of a woman wise in the art of mending bones and curing heartache, so I offered to work as her household servant in exchange for being taught the secrets of her trade."

  Gerda threaded her fingers through Helvig’s own and averted her eyes. She was afraid, the thief realized. No. She was ashamed. But what in the world could clever, capable Gerda, who never wavered in her commitments, have to be ashamed of?

  "And she accepted?" Helvig prompted tentatively.

  "More than that. She took me into her arms like I was a long-lost daughter and opened her home to me. I was given my own bedroom, my own share of her dinner table. By day we would go out into the fields to harvest herbs, and by night she would tell me stories while I threaded her needles or wrote out her spells. I summered with her, then wintered. The next thing I realized I had been with her almost a full year. I had never intended to stay more than a month or two, but when I tried to remember how I had come across her house, or how long I had stayed, I found I couldn’t recall. Events that happened only days before felt fuzzy, and events from weeks prior were barely any clearer than a dream."

  Helvig’s dark eyebrows knit together.

  "I don’t understand."

  Gerda smiled wryly with tears glistening in her eyes. Irony, it seemed, did not dull the pain of what had happened.

  "She mixed a forgetfulness draught into my tea every morning with a bit of blackberry jam. Another one of her spells. She was lonely, I gather, and didn’t want me leaving her to go hunting for my brother."

  Understanding settled in Helvig’s stomach like sickness. In that moment she wanted terribly to run that old woman through with a sword, and the ferocity of the thought frightened her.

  "Joseph and Mary, Gerda, I’m sorry. That’s so awful."

  Gerda shrugged.

  "Life is like that. You want to know something grim? I can’t part with that charm she made for me, even though I know what she did. Part of me still loves her, despite it."

  "I don’t think that’s grim. You’re allowed to love someone who also did wrong by you. That’s just how hearts are, sometimes."

  Gerda almost smiled, and her fingertips swirled across Helvig's skin with idle acquiescence.

  "At any rate I learned my lesson. I let her distract me from Kai; I let her into my heart and my poor brother was left alone for another year because of it. So you see, no matter how much I may want to, I can’t let that happen again."

  "She drugged you, Gerda," Helvig said firmly. How long had Gerda been carrying this guilt inside herself? Triple swords of pity, anger, and admiration pierced Helvig's heart. "You had no choice."

  "Didn’t I?" Gerda swiped a dainty palm across her eyes, poised even as she cried. "All those lives I lived, all those people who brought me into their home and treated me as a sister or a daughter...they were moments of happiness I stole from the span of Kai’s life. Every month I passed eating buttered bread with the tanner’s son or telling stories by the fire with the witch was another month Kai spent trapped under the Snow Queen's spell. I have been so selfish, Helvig."

  She circled her arms around Helvig’s neck and hitched herself halfway onto her lap, holding back sobs that made her narrow frame shake. Helvig was stunned by her closeness, but she clung to Gerda all the same, letting her seek whatever comfort she could.

  After a while, Gerda’s tears ran out, but she stayed draped over Helvig, her slight body warming Helvig’s through their clothes. Despite the plummeting temperatures outside, Helvig felt like she was burning up.

  "You are the least selfish woman I have ever met", she said.

  Gerda sniffled and daubed at her red eyes, giving a bitter laugh.

  "I am no woman. I have become something else altogether, something cold-tempered and poisonous that still holds the shape of a girl."

  "Really?" Helvig ran a light touch up Gerda’s arm, over her narrow shoulder, and around the bow of her gosling neck. Her fingers shook as she slid them into the curtain of Gerda’s hair and rested her palm on the peach fuzz at her nape. "You don’t feel cold to me. You’re warm as summer."

  A smile touched Gerda’s lips. She leaned into Helvig’s touch, just barely, but enough to make the hair on the thief’s arm stand on end.

  "You think so?"

  Gerda’s face was perilously close. Helvig thought of Gerda’s royal bedmate, and of Astrid, flushed and giggling in a field of wildflowers.

  "Yes. And I don’t think you’re poison at all."

  The tip of Gerda’s nose brushed against Helvig’s. A gentle nuzzle, unashamed as a foal seeking the comfort of its mother.

  "No?"

  "No," Helvig replied, with her breath already in Gerda’s mouth. She drew the other woman to her, and the inch of safety between them disappeared.

  Helvig kissed her, drinking in her warmth as though she was a prisoner of war who had been denied water for days on end. Gerda’s hands were on her shoulders and then on either side of her face, tipping her chin up into sweet oblivion. Gerda tasted like sharp anise and melting ice, and when she sighed Helvig’s name, soft as a prayer, Helvig was utterly and irredemptively lost.

  A sigh of hitched breath, the rustle of skirts and fur, and they were reclining against each other on the bed.

  This was worse than unsafe, this was tempting injustice and misfortune and all the other forces that had greedily eaten up the last girl that Helvig had let touch her like this. But it was so hard to stop. Gerda’s narrow hips fit perfectly in her hands, and her lips were nimble across Helvig’s skin.

  "Astrid," Helvig gasped. "Her name was Astrid."

  She didn't want to disrupt their embrace, but she knew that if she didn’t tell her now, she would be sick with guilt no matter what came after. Gerda deserved to know. It was time.

  Gerda pulled just far enough away to study Helvig’s face, her blue eyes shining, her hair falling in a tangle.

  "The girl in the story," Helvig went on, a bit sheepishly now that she was being stared at. "She and I—"

  "I know." Gerda settled down on top of Helvig’s chest, drawing a little design with her fingertip on the skin exposed by the open collar of Helvig’s shirt. Pleasant goosebumps rose on Helvig’s chest. "Or at least I guessed. But I didn’t want to pry."

  "Oh," Helvig said softly. Perhaps she had been foolish to think that Gerda wouldn't put the pieces together, sharp-minded as she was.

  "I’m sorry she died," Gerda said. "You must have been heartbroken. If you s
till miss her, and don’t want us to continue, I understand."

  "No, it isn’t that. Although I was miserable when it happened, and... I do still think about her sometimes."

  "Of course you do," Gerda said, without jealousy or surprise. She seemed so worldly and wise about the subject of heartbreak, and Helvig very much wished she had more experience talking about these kinds of things.

  Helvig rubbed slow circles into the back of Gerda’s neck. It was easier to speak when she didn’t have to look straight at her, when she could just feel her weight and her warmth instead. "I…I treated what we had as a dalliance, as a diverting way to pass the summer but she…"

  "She thought you meant to keep her," Gerda said. She nodded, understanding instinctively, and a relief that Helvig hadn’t expected washed over her. She had told so few people about what happened with Astrid: Rasmus, in gossiping whispers to help break the monotony of chores, and her father, tearfully while begging for him to help fix what she had broken. Neither of them had fully understood, though she was grateful for their willingness to listen.

  She had always thought that telling the tale again would be hard and painful, an invitation for someone to see her as a spectacle of licentiousness or recklessness.

  "Yes," Helvig said. Her fingers drifted farther up, tentatively threading through Gerda’s hair. "Truth be told, she had started to frighten me. She was horribly jealous and didn’t like me talking to any other girls or boys in the street, and she would pull my hair when I displeased her. When I told her my family would be moving on with the turn of the seasons, she grew…horribly angry with me. Begged me to take her with me, screamed at me for lying to her. We were in her bedroom, and she started striking my chest with her fists. Her parents heard us and came upstairs to tear us apart. I hardly escaped the house without having the life beaten out of me, but her fate was worse."

  "The wedding."

  "The wedding. It was going to happen anyway, but I forced her parents' hand, I think."

  "You blame yourself?"

  Helvig tilted her head to see Gerda better, her fingers still running through all that blonde hair.

  "Of course I do. I corrupted an innocent girl. I ruined her life."

  Gerda traced the curve of Helvig’s lips with one delicate finger. The sensation sent a jolt through Helvig’s body, and she had never been so sure that Gerda was indeed a powerful witch in her own right.

  "You can’t corrupt someone just by touching them," Gerda said. "We corrupt ourselves, with the choices that we make, and I don’t think yours were wrong."

  Helvig thought of telling the rest of the story, of how her father had been forced to move the encampment for fear of the townspeople sniffing her out, of how he had kept a closer eye on her ever since then, and of how she still dreamed of Astrid, no matter how hard she tried to put her out of her mind.

  But in this moment words failed, and Helvig knew that she and Gerda had a stronger understanding between them than any story could explain.

  "Listen to me now," Gerda continued. "You didn’t force anyone to do anything. That girl saw her own fate coming towards her like the gallows and she clung to you thinking you could save her from it. But here’s the hard truth of these things; you couldn’t."

  "How could you know?"

  "What power does a robber girl have to stop the marriage of an eligible young lady to a man who can provide for her what her parents cannot? She shouldn’t have blamed you for showing her some happiness in the meanwhile. It wasn’t your fault."

  "But the storm, the baby…"

  "It wasn’t your fault." Gerda her again and again, murmuring the words like an incantation. Helvig’s hands curled tentatively around the curve of Gerda’s waist, and then Gerda slid them up higher, to explore the swell of her small breasts. This was a pleasure so tender it was almost painful, and Helvig kissed Gerda deeply, forgetting all about Astrid and the ice storm and that awful guilt she had carried for three years. Gerda’s nimble fingers worked at the buttons of Helvig’s blouse, exposing flushed skin inch by precious inch. "It wasn’t your fault."

  Helvig lost herself in what followed, in the pleasure of hands on soft skin and red-bitten lips and quivering legs. Gerda kept repeating her spell until she could hardly form words at all, until the only sound that could pass her lips was Helvig’s name, cried clear and desperate as a prayer.

  TWELVE

  Helvig woke early, so early that the sun had not yet completed its slow climb over the western hills. There was a warm, satisfied ache in her hips and arms, and her sleep had been sound and dreamless.

  She rolled over and reached for Gerda, to pull the other woman’s warmth in and fold herself around her.

  Gerda was not in bed.

  "Gerda?"

  Drowsy and half-drunk from sleep, she did not initially register that she was alone in the tent. Then her head shot up off the pillow and she threw her eyes around the emptiness.

  Helvig was out of bed like a bullet from a gun. She fumbled in the dark for her boots and breeches, every sound amplified by the hollow place in the room where Gerda should have been.

  Helvig swore and gasped, tearing on her clothes while her heart pounded so fast she felt sure it was going to burst. She couldn’t have left by herself in the middle of the night, not without saying goodbye. She would not have left like this, not after…

  Helvig snatched up her knife and coat, almost tumbling headlong as she rushed for the door. Underneath her coat she wore a linen undershirt, far too thin for the weather. She barreled out into the snow without bothering to take the time to find her tinderbox and light the lantern.

  The wind keened and howled, but Helvig couldn’t be bothered to care. She ran frantically from dwindling fire to dwindling fire, looking for Gerda in the meager light.

  Helvig slammed into someone, the collision rattling her teeth. She instinctively swung at her assailant, but they battered away her flailing arms and seized her by the wrists.

  "Helvig, it’s me!"

  Rasmus was tangled around her, his breath misting in front of her face. He had a guilty, wild look in his eyes, and though Helvig knew she must also look a fright, her response was instinctive.

  "What’s wrong?"

  "It’s Gerda. She—"

  "Took off, I know. Did you see her?"

  "Helvig, I tried to stop her, I’m sorry—"

  "Where did she go, Rasmus?"

  Helvig’s voice sounded like she had been screaming for a whole day and night. She hated the desperation coursing through her veins, but there was no escaping it now. Without Gerda she was just a revenant, a half-living thing driven forward by pure need. Why had she left without saying goodbye, without letting Helvig load her up with proper supplies?

  "I have to find her. Rasmus, I need...I have to…"

  "Come with me."

  Rasmus fisted his bony fingers into the shoulder of Helvig’s jacket and began pulling her with him away from the glow of distant fires, towards the forgiving shadows of the treeline. They stumbled over each other but Helvig kept pace, her heart pounding against her ribs.

  "She stole one of the horses," Rasmus said. "She wouldn’t be deterred. I tried, Helvig, I even pulled my knife on her but I just, I couldn't. I’m a God-forsaken coward and everyone knows it. I couldn’t cut her, not even when I was supposed to be standing guard at the stable."

  It was hard to tell in the dark, but it sounded like Rasmus was fighting a wet, treacherous knot in his throat. Part of Helvig wanted to knock him into the snow for letting Gerda get away, but something like affection won out over her vengeance.

  She put one of her gloved hands on the back on his neck and squeezed as though she were soothing a whimpering dog.

  "I know, Rasmus. It’s alright. You did what you could. Where was she headed? To town?"

  It seemed unlikely, but Helvig could hope. If Gerda had turned South to seek her fortune elsewhere, Helvig would be distraught, but at least she would know Gerda hadn’t thrown her life aw
ay in the icy wilderness.

  "No, she rode straight north. And if she doesn’t let up on her speed, she’ll exhaust the mare before she even reaches Samiland."

  "Christ on the cross, she’s going to freeze to death up there. I have to get Bae, I have to go after her—"

  Helvig skidded to a stop as Rasmus pulled her through the trees and into a small clearing where Bae was awake and tied to a fir, chewing feed placidly from the bag hanging from his neck. Helvig was so surprised by the sight of him that she couldn’t initially pull words together.

  "You...When?"

  "I saddled him up as soon as she had gone. I was coming to wake you."

  The boy unhooked a patchwork bag from over his shoulder and thrust it into Helvig’s arms. Inside she spied tinned meats and some strings of dried fish and a few parcels wrapped in kerchiefs that she suspected were hardtack bread. Rasmus had also included a tinderbox and two thick tallow candles which he had undoubtedly had to barter his own possessions to acquire.

  "I couldn’t see what all she was carrying, but it didn’t look like much. You’ll both need food. If you hurry you can catch up with her before she reaches Lapland, and you might be able to turn her around."

  Helvig stared into the bag for a moment more, marveling at his thoughtfulness. Fortune had made unlikely playmates of them by throwing two children of the same age into close quarters, and they had seen their fair share of rivalries, arguments, and scraps. Rasmus cheated at cards and teased her mercilessly, and Helvig was always haranguing him about his lies and threatening to turn him in to the army if he didn’t get better at thieving. But somehow, when Helvig was at the end of her rope, Rasmus as always there, and she had thrown herself between his foolhardy actions and their consequences too many times to count.

  Helvig didn’t have siblings, but she supposed it must feel a little like this.

  Helvig slung the bag over her shoulder and threw her arms around Rasmus. The boy made a surprised choking sound while she squeezed him. They were not a very affectionate pair, and Helvig was always more likely to dole out encouragement with a punch in the shoulder than with a gentle touch.