[gw fic] The Lady in the Tower 1/3
The Lady in the Tower
Rating: PG
Ship: Trowa/Middie (AU)
Summary: Based on a lesser-known version of "The Snow Queen." Long ago, Middie Une sacrificed her soul to survive the war that ravaged her land. When the war ended, she disappeared. Did she become the mysterious and cruel Snow Queen?
A/N: This is based so loosely on Trowa's Episode Zero chapter that it's almost original. Some of the characters will be recognizable, though. Approx. 10,000 words total.
There is a legend in the part of the world where I am from, about a beautiful fairy, a Snow Queen, who lived on the highest, most solitary peak in the mountains of the north. No one knew where she came from or for how long she had lived in her icy castle. The mountain folk, the goatherds and the miners and the hunters, knew about her and lived in awe of her legend. Those who survived the perilous journey to her castle and gazed upon her were smitten instantly, and longed to carry her back to their village. But if the Snow Queen's face and form were perfect as a snowflake, her heart was as cold as one, and she would have no suitor. Some say she was cursed, that in ages past she had spurned the wrong demon and in a jealous rage he decreed that if he could not have her, no one would.
That's only one legend, but it is also said that each suitor was allowed to enter the great ice castle with the crystal roof, where the Snow Queen's throne stood. But the instant he declared his love and asked for her hand, thousands of goblins appeared to grasp him and push him over the rocks, down into a bottomless abyss. And the Queen watched from her tower without the slightest flicker of emotion, her heart--if indeed she had one--a lump of ice.
Nevertheless, word of the Snow Queen's beauty spread and one day it reached the ears of a handsome young chamois hunter who lived in a green alpine valley far to the south. I will return to him in a little while. First there is another legend I have to tell you. I do not know if it is connected to the legend of the Snow Queen, but it may be. Listen to it, and then you tell me.
She can not remember April, or birdsong, or the feel of cool, wet grass beneath her bare feet. As far as she knows the world has always been black and red, the sky choked with fire and smoke, the well water almost black with ashes and other filth. The only lullabies she can remember are the screams and wails that rise to her bedroom window from the street below. She has always been hungry, always been scared. She was a very young girl when the Barons' Wars escalated and became the Great Wars--if wars can ever be considered great--and every pleasant memory from her childhood has either been forgotten or else stored away in some place in her heart that is a secret even to her. Her name, as best we can discern from those few records that survived that horrible age, is Middie Une, and at the time this story beings she is probably about ten years old.
What she does remember is kneeling on her straw pallet by the window daily, watching flames lick the charcoal sky. She grips the windowsill and feels nothing, not even when jagged splinters drive into her fingers and droplets of blood stain the crude wood. Sudden wintry blasts blow smoke into her face, stinging her eyes, making her choke, but she does not move, only blinks and pushes the hair out her of her eyes with a dirty hand. Over the crackling flames and the wails from the neighboring houses she can almost hear the clop-clop of hoof beats, half-see the bulky black shapes of the armored warhorses, writhing like dragons behind the curtain of smoke.
One day there is a knock at the door.
"Answer it, girl," her father, his voice weak from a succession of coughing fits, orders.
Middie shrugs, stands, and walks to the door, gathering her rags about her as she does. She draws the bolt, but does not unfasten the chain. She opens the door a crack and is surprised to find her vision full of mud-splattered, dented chain mail. Tilting her head back she peers into the darkness, but can not discern a face.
"Let me in, girl," a big voice demands.
"I will not," says Middie, clutching the doorknob. "There is nothing for you here. What food and water we have is not fit for Lord C--'s men." The words come out sounding as though they have been choked from her; her belly is cold. She is frightened, she realizes dimly. More frightened than she can ever remember being. This man--if man he was--must not come into her father's house!
The stranger does not seem perturbed by her dismissal. He laughs, and to her ears his laughter rattles like bones. "Your manor lord is dead," he informs her. "The rebel armies are gathering in the south and we need every man to fight them off. Should we fail they will take this village and all the others around it. And when they seek entrance to your house they will not knock. They will come and take what they will, and it will not be food or water they will be after. Now let me in."
Middie swallows hard and shakes her head. "I can not," she insists. "My father is too sick to fight. He began coughing up blood last night. He can not even get out of bed, much less lift a sword. It is the plague."
"Have you no brothers?"
"My three brothers are younger than I am, and small and weak as babies. The well water is contaminated, and what crops that could be harvested went to feed the soldiers. Our herd animals are dying. Their bodies are burnt on the same pyres as the people. No doubt you saw them."
"YOU have spirit enough."
"I..." Middie looks down at her feet. Blue veins stand out against her skin. Knobby ankles jut out of her shoes. Her stomach is so empty that she no longer feels hunger. "I would not say that," she mutters.
"I would." Though she can not see his eyes Middie feels the man's gaze raking up and down her small body. She trembles under his scrutiny, but she holds herself erect. "Yes, indeed I would," the man murmurs almost to himself. "You're a scrawny girl--too skinny to interest my men. But you're healthy. And you do have spirit. Belike some god--or some demon--holds you in his favor. That being the case, perhaps you could be of some use to us."
A cold wind lifts and spills Middie's hair about her bowed shoulders. She hears the words and understands them. "No," she says softly.
"Yes," says the man, still to himself, but in a normal voice as though he is done musing and has reached a decision. "Yes, you will do. Small and skinny, and quick no doubt with those coltish legs of yours. It's good that you're a girl; they'll think you're just some camp follower. They're more likely to think that, despite your looks, than to suspect you of being a spy. Now"--to Middie-- "say your goodbyes and let's go."
"I won't!" And suddenly there is a knife in her hand. It gleams in the dying daylight and the rust that encrusts the blade make it look blood-splattered. It has never been a weapon, but Middie brandishes it like a sword, remembering how the young pages held their weapons when she watched their practice long ago. "You will not come in!" she spits. "I will not go with you!"
The man only looks down at her and Middie feels certain, though she can not see his face, that he is far more amused than frightened. His soft and mirthless laughter confirm her fear.
"I was right!" the man says, sounding pleased. "You'll do, although I'll have to teach you a thing or two. Come now. Put that bread knife away and we'll be off."
Middie grips the knife's handle with both hands and wonders frantically what to do. There is no one she can call to for help. Her father and brothers are too ill, and her neighbors have either fled or else succumbed to the plague. She is alone.
She undoes the chain lock and runs at the man with a cry, stabbing upward at the dented chain mail.
He catches her easily, crushing her thin wrists in one large mailed hand, wrenching the knife from her and tossing it aside. Middie hears it clatter along the flagstones and then it is lost in the deepening twilight shadows.
"Brave, too," the man mutters approvingly as he fights to steady the girl's writhing form. "Or stupid. Oh, relax, girl. One way or another the war will be over soon and you'll be back here. You'll marry some village clod and have five screaming babies ere you're twenty. All this will be forgotten. If we lose, well, you'll be dead so it won't matter. Stop, I said." He shakes her roughly, but she keeps struggling. "Stop thrashing or I'll relieve your poor father and brothers of their misery!"
Fear for her defenseless loved ones brings Middie to her senses. She wills her body limp, clinging to one last hope: that by showing this evil man what a weak and fragile person she really is she might be allowed to go free.
No such luck. The man only smiles with satisfaction and tosses her up into his horse's saddle as though she is a sack of meal. He is up behind her before she has a chance to scramble back down, and they are off.
The acrid stench of burning bodies fills Middie's nostrils and smoke fills her eyes and mouth, making her choke and tear up, as they ride through the village. The man keeps one arm tight around her waist, but there is no chance of her bolting now; they are riding so quickly that a fall would kill her and Middie wants to live.
I will get home, she promises herself as they ride past the familiar houses and shops, now soot-blackened and gutted. I'll find my way back here and help my father and brothers somehow.
They pause only twice: once to steal food and blankets from an abandoned shop and once at the unguarded village gate.
"What's that thing?" the man demands, points to the stone altar that stands beside the gate under a shelter of leafless tree branches. Resting upon the altar was a lumpy stone thing that vaguely resembles a seated man. Time and harsh weather have worn away most of his features, but the broad smile remains. It has always cheered Middie in the past. This time, though, the sight makes her shiver with foreboding.
"It is our god," she replies with a shrug. "He is supposed to guard travelers until they return home."
"I wondered. Well, pray to your rock if you like. Maybe you'll see it again."
He gives her a few seconds, and then they are riding again, hard over the ravaged countryside.
Middie doesn't pray. I will get home, she thinks, is all she can think as the night hurtles past and the long road stretches out before her.
But she never did. Not really.
What happened to Middie Une after that is a matter of conjecture. The fate of children brought to the battlefield is not something about which I like to think. Most soldiers are trained to protect those weaker than themselves, but when conditions are very harsh... Well, I won't have you up tonight with nightmares, so I'll tell you what I think.
I think that Middie Une survived. As I have said records of that dark time are few and ill-preserved, but there is one that mentions a little blonde girl who worked as a cook in one of the mercenary camps. That is the last time anyone of Middie's description is mentioned in the records of that time, but I think she survived the war by working as a spy and by holding fast to the belief that some day soon the wars would end and she would be allowed to return to the family that needed her.
But the battlefield is no place for a child. What she did and what she witnessed, my lambs, I dare not tell you. The betrayals and the deaths, the pangs of hunger and fear, the keen remorse and grim satisfaction over having survived when someone else did not... There is no armor strong enough to protect the heart from such things as these, not for a grown man and certainly not for a child.
When I picture Middie she's huddled before a heap of smoldering ashes. It's night, but the smoke from the recently doused campfire blots the stars from view. There are other people in the camp and they sleep fitfully. One stands guard, but Middie slipped something into his drink and he'll soon doze as well. I picture a boy at her feet, lost in dreams. He is young; perhaps he is her very age. I made him up, but I'd like it if he were real. I'd like it if she had someone with whom she could talk, someone who might understand how she must feel.
Doesn't matter. She is wretched. These mercenaries have been kind to her--well, as kind as men living in such harsh conditions can be to a young girl--but she is a spy and the time has come for her to go back to her own camp. All the people here will die in the battle tomorrow because she knows their plans and she must tell them to the ones who hold her leash, who would harm her father and little brothers--providing they still live--should anything go amiss.
She looks at the boy at her feet. How she would love to slither down beside him in the dirt and put her arms around him so that they might share each other's warmth on this cold night! How she would love to wake him, grab his hand, and run away with him into the night, far away from this place.
She reaches out tentatively, touches his hair as she used to touch the hair of her baby brothers while they slept. His hair is so soft. How she'd love to...
Mustn't. Oh, the trouble she'd be in if she did!
She pulls her hand back, bites back an unhappy little cry.
She looks at his sleeping form, memorizing his features. If they meet again in another lifetime--if there are other lifetimes--she wants to know him on sight. She'll beg forgiveness then and maybe...
Oh, why think about it? The more she thinks, the more difficult her task.
She stands; her feet are so numb with cold that she almost falls over. She looks around. Yes, the man left to watch is now asleep. There is no one who can stop her.
She buttons her cloak, takes one last look at the sleeping figures huddled around the campfire. When she comes to the point after which she'll no longer be able to stand it she tears her gaze from them, and runs away into the night.
What happens in the morning can only be called a massacre. No, I'll not tell you any details! For one thing I don't know them and for another, you're too young. You're younger than Middie, and she was too young. Suffice it to say the rebel army is completely destroyed in a matter of hours. There was not even anyone left to bury the dead.
Was Middie there? I imagine so. There would have been no place else for her to go. I suspect remorse and sick curiosity would have drawn her to the battlefield after the fighting was over. I picture her walking over the crest of a scoured hill at sundown, staring at the bodies and patches of smoldering armaments with dull eyes. Every pale face looks like someone she knew, but she can't bring herself to go closer and see for sure. She is looking for the boy.
A man on a black horse rides up behind her. She does not turn when he approaches, but she knows who it is: the man who wrenched her from her home and brought her here to this misery.
"Hurry up and take whatever valuables you can find," he tells her. "We leave here in an hour. There's another rebel army camped some miles to the east of here and we'll need your...talents."
When he is gone she falls to her knees upon the charred earth, grabs her hair in her fists, and screams.
She can't do this again. She can't.
She will, though. They'll make her. They know exactly how to make her do what they want. "See this?" the man who brought her here will say as he pulls a map from his saddlebag and spreads it out on a table before her. "Here is your village," he'll indicate with a quick jab of his knife. "It'll take one of my men three days to reach it from here if he rides hard. That's how long your father and brothers will have to live if you don't do exactly as I say." And she'll give in. She's done it before, she'll do it again.
She yanks her hair until her scalp bleeds, screams until her throat is raw, but the tears don't come. It's like they've burned up inside her, or frozen. Strange how her chest feels so cold and empty, as though there is nothing in it at all. Strange how she can't hear the roaring of the blood in her veins, and strange how her torn scalp and scratched throat don't pain her.
"Why, I don't feel anything," she realizes. She feels a flicker of surprise, which she suppresses quickly. She mustn't feel anything any more, not ever again, not a single thing. If she feels--then she won't be able to do it. She remembers the anguish she felt leaving the campsite last night and the helplessness this morning watching the soldiers ride down on their unsuspecting enemy. She doesn't want to feel that again. She can't.
"Don't let me," she mutters. "Please, don't let me feel this way ever again. I don't want to feel anything ever again. Take everything inside of me. Please, just take it."
Well you know, demons like nothing better than a battlefield (where else can they witness the very worst of mankind for an extended period of time?) and I should think at least one would have heard her pleas. Now, demons love catching people in weak moments such as these, and binding them to promises made in anguish. So this one slithers out of the night and says to her, maybe sounding like himself, maybe sounding like the young boy whose death she caused, "Pretty child, I can help."
She looks up, sees no one. "Who is there?" she asks.
But demons don't like to answer questions, so this one says, "Nasty things, emotions. I heard you offer yours. I'll take them, if you like, but don't expect to get them back."
She turns this way and that, but still can't see a body. "Who are you?"
If the demon's taken the voice of the young boy, perhaps she thinks she's hearing a ghost. If that's so, then this won't be the last one she sees before this war is done. "Take my emotions!" she yells. "Take every feeling inside me! I don't want to feel anything any more."
And then it's done. But of course she feels no relief. She feels nothing.
This makes spying considerably easier.
In time the war ends. The rebel armies are crushed and a new leader is put upon the throne to keep them in line. Those who survive drift back to their homes, if their homes remain. Eventually Middie Une finds herself back in her own village, now plague-free. Maybe a year has past, maybe two or ten. She is numb to time, numb to all things. Her village is familiar, and yet it is not. There is a vaguely man-shaped rock sitting on an altar at the gate to her village that looks familiar, but she can't name it. Her feet walk along streets she knows she knows, but when she thinks about them she can't remember what they're called or where they go.
Some of the people know her.
"Why, Middie Une," says a woman. "We thought you were dead. What will you do now, now that your family's all gone?"
The words register, but all she can think is, So it was all for nothing.
She doesn't feel anything.
When she finds her own house--her feet know the way if her heart's forgotten--she looks at the little thatch-roofed structure, empty now, the little walled garden full of long-dead leaves and flowers. If she could feel, her heart would feel like that garden: closed off and heavily guarded, but with everything inside it yellowing and crumbling.
The boy didn't have to die, a voice deep inside her says. None of them did.
What boy? She can't remember any boy.
They'd have died anyway. Somehow or other.
Who would have?
It's a terrible thing when your heart remembers one thing, and your mind another.
Middie turns and walks from her house.
Where does she go? Who knows. She finds out soon enough that a peaceful world is no place for a person with no emotions, who has not even the memory of ever having had emotions. Maybe she wanders for a great deal, going from land to land watching things both beautiful and heart-rending, hoping for a flicker, the slightest feeling, but never finding it. Maybe she finds some of the men for whom she spied, safe at home with their families, happiness and contentment mingling with and mitigating remembered pain and fear.
This is my story, so I say she called upon the demons to help her once again, knowing this time what she did. I say they came for her and took her away to a castle on the highest, most solitary peak in the mountains of the north. I say the demons and goblins there became her jailers as well as her subjects for she was beautiful and clever. I say she became a thing out of legend--a Snow Queen--and that she ruled over a land as numb as her own heart.
There, now, this seems a good place to break. Yes, there is more, but I'll not tell it now. Why? Because I'm tired even if you're not. And let me remind you that you, my dear, were very sick not so long ago and need your rest. Now. Yes, I did mention a chamois hunter. I've not forgotten him. I'll tell you about him tomorrow.
Part Two
Rating: PG
Ship: Trowa/Middie (AU)
Summary: Based on a lesser-known version of "The Snow Queen." Long ago, Middie Une sacrificed her soul to survive the war that ravaged her land. When the war ended, she disappeared. Did she become the mysterious and cruel Snow Queen?
A/N: This is based so loosely on Trowa's Episode Zero chapter that it's almost original. Some of the characters will be recognizable, though. Approx. 10,000 words total.
There is a legend in the part of the world where I am from, about a beautiful fairy, a Snow Queen, who lived on the highest, most solitary peak in the mountains of the north. No one knew where she came from or for how long she had lived in her icy castle. The mountain folk, the goatherds and the miners and the hunters, knew about her and lived in awe of her legend. Those who survived the perilous journey to her castle and gazed upon her were smitten instantly, and longed to carry her back to their village. But if the Snow Queen's face and form were perfect as a snowflake, her heart was as cold as one, and she would have no suitor. Some say she was cursed, that in ages past she had spurned the wrong demon and in a jealous rage he decreed that if he could not have her, no one would.
That's only one legend, but it is also said that each suitor was allowed to enter the great ice castle with the crystal roof, where the Snow Queen's throne stood. But the instant he declared his love and asked for her hand, thousands of goblins appeared to grasp him and push him over the rocks, down into a bottomless abyss. And the Queen watched from her tower without the slightest flicker of emotion, her heart--if indeed she had one--a lump of ice.
Nevertheless, word of the Snow Queen's beauty spread and one day it reached the ears of a handsome young chamois hunter who lived in a green alpine valley far to the south. I will return to him in a little while. First there is another legend I have to tell you. I do not know if it is connected to the legend of the Snow Queen, but it may be. Listen to it, and then you tell me.
She can not remember April, or birdsong, or the feel of cool, wet grass beneath her bare feet. As far as she knows the world has always been black and red, the sky choked with fire and smoke, the well water almost black with ashes and other filth. The only lullabies she can remember are the screams and wails that rise to her bedroom window from the street below. She has always been hungry, always been scared. She was a very young girl when the Barons' Wars escalated and became the Great Wars--if wars can ever be considered great--and every pleasant memory from her childhood has either been forgotten or else stored away in some place in her heart that is a secret even to her. Her name, as best we can discern from those few records that survived that horrible age, is Middie Une, and at the time this story beings she is probably about ten years old.
What she does remember is kneeling on her straw pallet by the window daily, watching flames lick the charcoal sky. She grips the windowsill and feels nothing, not even when jagged splinters drive into her fingers and droplets of blood stain the crude wood. Sudden wintry blasts blow smoke into her face, stinging her eyes, making her choke, but she does not move, only blinks and pushes the hair out her of her eyes with a dirty hand. Over the crackling flames and the wails from the neighboring houses she can almost hear the clop-clop of hoof beats, half-see the bulky black shapes of the armored warhorses, writhing like dragons behind the curtain of smoke.
One day there is a knock at the door.
"Answer it, girl," her father, his voice weak from a succession of coughing fits, orders.
Middie shrugs, stands, and walks to the door, gathering her rags about her as she does. She draws the bolt, but does not unfasten the chain. She opens the door a crack and is surprised to find her vision full of mud-splattered, dented chain mail. Tilting her head back she peers into the darkness, but can not discern a face.
"Let me in, girl," a big voice demands.
"I will not," says Middie, clutching the doorknob. "There is nothing for you here. What food and water we have is not fit for Lord C--'s men." The words come out sounding as though they have been choked from her; her belly is cold. She is frightened, she realizes dimly. More frightened than she can ever remember being. This man--if man he was--must not come into her father's house!
The stranger does not seem perturbed by her dismissal. He laughs, and to her ears his laughter rattles like bones. "Your manor lord is dead," he informs her. "The rebel armies are gathering in the south and we need every man to fight them off. Should we fail they will take this village and all the others around it. And when they seek entrance to your house they will not knock. They will come and take what they will, and it will not be food or water they will be after. Now let me in."
Middie swallows hard and shakes her head. "I can not," she insists. "My father is too sick to fight. He began coughing up blood last night. He can not even get out of bed, much less lift a sword. It is the plague."
"Have you no brothers?"
"My three brothers are younger than I am, and small and weak as babies. The well water is contaminated, and what crops that could be harvested went to feed the soldiers. Our herd animals are dying. Their bodies are burnt on the same pyres as the people. No doubt you saw them."
"YOU have spirit enough."
"I..." Middie looks down at her feet. Blue veins stand out against her skin. Knobby ankles jut out of her shoes. Her stomach is so empty that she no longer feels hunger. "I would not say that," she mutters.
"I would." Though she can not see his eyes Middie feels the man's gaze raking up and down her small body. She trembles under his scrutiny, but she holds herself erect. "Yes, indeed I would," the man murmurs almost to himself. "You're a scrawny girl--too skinny to interest my men. But you're healthy. And you do have spirit. Belike some god--or some demon--holds you in his favor. That being the case, perhaps you could be of some use to us."
A cold wind lifts and spills Middie's hair about her bowed shoulders. She hears the words and understands them. "No," she says softly.
"Yes," says the man, still to himself, but in a normal voice as though he is done musing and has reached a decision. "Yes, you will do. Small and skinny, and quick no doubt with those coltish legs of yours. It's good that you're a girl; they'll think you're just some camp follower. They're more likely to think that, despite your looks, than to suspect you of being a spy. Now"--to Middie-- "say your goodbyes and let's go."
"I won't!" And suddenly there is a knife in her hand. It gleams in the dying daylight and the rust that encrusts the blade make it look blood-splattered. It has never been a weapon, but Middie brandishes it like a sword, remembering how the young pages held their weapons when she watched their practice long ago. "You will not come in!" she spits. "I will not go with you!"
The man only looks down at her and Middie feels certain, though she can not see his face, that he is far more amused than frightened. His soft and mirthless laughter confirm her fear.
"I was right!" the man says, sounding pleased. "You'll do, although I'll have to teach you a thing or two. Come now. Put that bread knife away and we'll be off."
Middie grips the knife's handle with both hands and wonders frantically what to do. There is no one she can call to for help. Her father and brothers are too ill, and her neighbors have either fled or else succumbed to the plague. She is alone.
She undoes the chain lock and runs at the man with a cry, stabbing upward at the dented chain mail.
He catches her easily, crushing her thin wrists in one large mailed hand, wrenching the knife from her and tossing it aside. Middie hears it clatter along the flagstones and then it is lost in the deepening twilight shadows.
"Brave, too," the man mutters approvingly as he fights to steady the girl's writhing form. "Or stupid. Oh, relax, girl. One way or another the war will be over soon and you'll be back here. You'll marry some village clod and have five screaming babies ere you're twenty. All this will be forgotten. If we lose, well, you'll be dead so it won't matter. Stop, I said." He shakes her roughly, but she keeps struggling. "Stop thrashing or I'll relieve your poor father and brothers of their misery!"
Fear for her defenseless loved ones brings Middie to her senses. She wills her body limp, clinging to one last hope: that by showing this evil man what a weak and fragile person she really is she might be allowed to go free.
No such luck. The man only smiles with satisfaction and tosses her up into his horse's saddle as though she is a sack of meal. He is up behind her before she has a chance to scramble back down, and they are off.
The acrid stench of burning bodies fills Middie's nostrils and smoke fills her eyes and mouth, making her choke and tear up, as they ride through the village. The man keeps one arm tight around her waist, but there is no chance of her bolting now; they are riding so quickly that a fall would kill her and Middie wants to live.
I will get home, she promises herself as they ride past the familiar houses and shops, now soot-blackened and gutted. I'll find my way back here and help my father and brothers somehow.
They pause only twice: once to steal food and blankets from an abandoned shop and once at the unguarded village gate.
"What's that thing?" the man demands, points to the stone altar that stands beside the gate under a shelter of leafless tree branches. Resting upon the altar was a lumpy stone thing that vaguely resembles a seated man. Time and harsh weather have worn away most of his features, but the broad smile remains. It has always cheered Middie in the past. This time, though, the sight makes her shiver with foreboding.
"It is our god," she replies with a shrug. "He is supposed to guard travelers until they return home."
"I wondered. Well, pray to your rock if you like. Maybe you'll see it again."
He gives her a few seconds, and then they are riding again, hard over the ravaged countryside.
Middie doesn't pray. I will get home, she thinks, is all she can think as the night hurtles past and the long road stretches out before her.
But she never did. Not really.
What happened to Middie Une after that is a matter of conjecture. The fate of children brought to the battlefield is not something about which I like to think. Most soldiers are trained to protect those weaker than themselves, but when conditions are very harsh... Well, I won't have you up tonight with nightmares, so I'll tell you what I think.
I think that Middie Une survived. As I have said records of that dark time are few and ill-preserved, but there is one that mentions a little blonde girl who worked as a cook in one of the mercenary camps. That is the last time anyone of Middie's description is mentioned in the records of that time, but I think she survived the war by working as a spy and by holding fast to the belief that some day soon the wars would end and she would be allowed to return to the family that needed her.
But the battlefield is no place for a child. What she did and what she witnessed, my lambs, I dare not tell you. The betrayals and the deaths, the pangs of hunger and fear, the keen remorse and grim satisfaction over having survived when someone else did not... There is no armor strong enough to protect the heart from such things as these, not for a grown man and certainly not for a child.
When I picture Middie she's huddled before a heap of smoldering ashes. It's night, but the smoke from the recently doused campfire blots the stars from view. There are other people in the camp and they sleep fitfully. One stands guard, but Middie slipped something into his drink and he'll soon doze as well. I picture a boy at her feet, lost in dreams. He is young; perhaps he is her very age. I made him up, but I'd like it if he were real. I'd like it if she had someone with whom she could talk, someone who might understand how she must feel.
Doesn't matter. She is wretched. These mercenaries have been kind to her--well, as kind as men living in such harsh conditions can be to a young girl--but she is a spy and the time has come for her to go back to her own camp. All the people here will die in the battle tomorrow because she knows their plans and she must tell them to the ones who hold her leash, who would harm her father and little brothers--providing they still live--should anything go amiss.
She looks at the boy at her feet. How she would love to slither down beside him in the dirt and put her arms around him so that they might share each other's warmth on this cold night! How she would love to wake him, grab his hand, and run away with him into the night, far away from this place.
She reaches out tentatively, touches his hair as she used to touch the hair of her baby brothers while they slept. His hair is so soft. How she'd love to...
Mustn't. Oh, the trouble she'd be in if she did!
She pulls her hand back, bites back an unhappy little cry.
She looks at his sleeping form, memorizing his features. If they meet again in another lifetime--if there are other lifetimes--she wants to know him on sight. She'll beg forgiveness then and maybe...
Oh, why think about it? The more she thinks, the more difficult her task.
She stands; her feet are so numb with cold that she almost falls over. She looks around. Yes, the man left to watch is now asleep. There is no one who can stop her.
She buttons her cloak, takes one last look at the sleeping figures huddled around the campfire. When she comes to the point after which she'll no longer be able to stand it she tears her gaze from them, and runs away into the night.
What happens in the morning can only be called a massacre. No, I'll not tell you any details! For one thing I don't know them and for another, you're too young. You're younger than Middie, and she was too young. Suffice it to say the rebel army is completely destroyed in a matter of hours. There was not even anyone left to bury the dead.
Was Middie there? I imagine so. There would have been no place else for her to go. I suspect remorse and sick curiosity would have drawn her to the battlefield after the fighting was over. I picture her walking over the crest of a scoured hill at sundown, staring at the bodies and patches of smoldering armaments with dull eyes. Every pale face looks like someone she knew, but she can't bring herself to go closer and see for sure. She is looking for the boy.
A man on a black horse rides up behind her. She does not turn when he approaches, but she knows who it is: the man who wrenched her from her home and brought her here to this misery.
"Hurry up and take whatever valuables you can find," he tells her. "We leave here in an hour. There's another rebel army camped some miles to the east of here and we'll need your...talents."
When he is gone she falls to her knees upon the charred earth, grabs her hair in her fists, and screams.
She can't do this again. She can't.
She will, though. They'll make her. They know exactly how to make her do what they want. "See this?" the man who brought her here will say as he pulls a map from his saddlebag and spreads it out on a table before her. "Here is your village," he'll indicate with a quick jab of his knife. "It'll take one of my men three days to reach it from here if he rides hard. That's how long your father and brothers will have to live if you don't do exactly as I say." And she'll give in. She's done it before, she'll do it again.
She yanks her hair until her scalp bleeds, screams until her throat is raw, but the tears don't come. It's like they've burned up inside her, or frozen. Strange how her chest feels so cold and empty, as though there is nothing in it at all. Strange how she can't hear the roaring of the blood in her veins, and strange how her torn scalp and scratched throat don't pain her.
"Why, I don't feel anything," she realizes. She feels a flicker of surprise, which she suppresses quickly. She mustn't feel anything any more, not ever again, not a single thing. If she feels--then she won't be able to do it. She remembers the anguish she felt leaving the campsite last night and the helplessness this morning watching the soldiers ride down on their unsuspecting enemy. She doesn't want to feel that again. She can't.
"Don't let me," she mutters. "Please, don't let me feel this way ever again. I don't want to feel anything ever again. Take everything inside of me. Please, just take it."
Well you know, demons like nothing better than a battlefield (where else can they witness the very worst of mankind for an extended period of time?) and I should think at least one would have heard her pleas. Now, demons love catching people in weak moments such as these, and binding them to promises made in anguish. So this one slithers out of the night and says to her, maybe sounding like himself, maybe sounding like the young boy whose death she caused, "Pretty child, I can help."
She looks up, sees no one. "Who is there?" she asks.
But demons don't like to answer questions, so this one says, "Nasty things, emotions. I heard you offer yours. I'll take them, if you like, but don't expect to get them back."
She turns this way and that, but still can't see a body. "Who are you?"
If the demon's taken the voice of the young boy, perhaps she thinks she's hearing a ghost. If that's so, then this won't be the last one she sees before this war is done. "Take my emotions!" she yells. "Take every feeling inside me! I don't want to feel anything any more."
And then it's done. But of course she feels no relief. She feels nothing.
This makes spying considerably easier.
In time the war ends. The rebel armies are crushed and a new leader is put upon the throne to keep them in line. Those who survive drift back to their homes, if their homes remain. Eventually Middie Une finds herself back in her own village, now plague-free. Maybe a year has past, maybe two or ten. She is numb to time, numb to all things. Her village is familiar, and yet it is not. There is a vaguely man-shaped rock sitting on an altar at the gate to her village that looks familiar, but she can't name it. Her feet walk along streets she knows she knows, but when she thinks about them she can't remember what they're called or where they go.
Some of the people know her.
"Why, Middie Une," says a woman. "We thought you were dead. What will you do now, now that your family's all gone?"
The words register, but all she can think is, So it was all for nothing.
She doesn't feel anything.
When she finds her own house--her feet know the way if her heart's forgotten--she looks at the little thatch-roofed structure, empty now, the little walled garden full of long-dead leaves and flowers. If she could feel, her heart would feel like that garden: closed off and heavily guarded, but with everything inside it yellowing and crumbling.
The boy didn't have to die, a voice deep inside her says. None of them did.
What boy? She can't remember any boy.
They'd have died anyway. Somehow or other.
Who would have?
It's a terrible thing when your heart remembers one thing, and your mind another.
Middie turns and walks from her house.
Where does she go? Who knows. She finds out soon enough that a peaceful world is no place for a person with no emotions, who has not even the memory of ever having had emotions. Maybe she wanders for a great deal, going from land to land watching things both beautiful and heart-rending, hoping for a flicker, the slightest feeling, but never finding it. Maybe she finds some of the men for whom she spied, safe at home with their families, happiness and contentment mingling with and mitigating remembered pain and fear.
This is my story, so I say she called upon the demons to help her once again, knowing this time what she did. I say they came for her and took her away to a castle on the highest, most solitary peak in the mountains of the north. I say the demons and goblins there became her jailers as well as her subjects for she was beautiful and clever. I say she became a thing out of legend--a Snow Queen--and that she ruled over a land as numb as her own heart.
There, now, this seems a good place to break. Yes, there is more, but I'll not tell it now. Why? Because I'm tired even if you're not. And let me remind you that you, my dear, were very sick not so long ago and need your rest. Now. Yes, I did mention a chamois hunter. I've not forgotten him. I'll tell you about him tomorrow.
Part Two