The forest through which she was trudging was not the sort inclined to raise the spirits. “Gloomy” was probably the most flattering thing that could be said about it. There was no undergrowth, for the trees that crowded each other on either side of the dirt road blocked out the sun. Those trees were, for the most part, black pine, whose dark branches dripped water and occasionally sap, and dropped needles that carpeted the floor of the forest. Overhead, their branches formed a canopy so thick that not even a scrap of sky was visible. If there were birds, they were high up in the boughs and certainly not visible from the girl's point of view. There were no animals in sight, but one could easily imagine wolves or Bears lurking in the distance, suitably obscured by the closely crowded tree trunks. Even on the hottest of Summer days, this forest would be dank and chill. Now, in the Autumn, with sunset drawing near, it would be bitter under those trees. And it would be so damp that the cold would penetrate even the warmest of cloaks. Small wonder she was bundled up as she was.
There was no sound, though Aleksia could easily have it if she chose. Right now, though, she knew that all she would hear was oppressive silence, overlaid perhaps with the dripping of water onto a thick layer of dead needles, and the girl's soft footsteps, and perhaps the far-off call of a crow or some other bird of ill-omen. Hardly worth the trouble.
Kay, of course, could see none of this. All he saw was Aleksia staring into a mirror that cast no reflection. And ignoring him. He did not in the least appreciate being treated in this way. Aleksia caught his reflection off the ice. The corners of his mouth turned down farther, his eyes narrowed and a crease appeared between his brows. And then he spoiled it all, as his lower lip began to protrude in the start of a pout. For all that he allegedly wanted to be left alone, he hated being ignored. But then, Aleksia knew very well what was actually going on in her guest's mind.
“And you, of course, have such a vast experience of Fairy Godmothers,” Aleksia finally answered him, in a voice that dripped with sarcasm the way that the trees in her mirror dripped moisture. Her voice rang crisp in the empty chamber — utterly calm, and maddening. At least, she hoped it was maddening. She shifted again, this time for the little pleasure of feeling the silk of her gown slip across her body.
Kay started at the sound of her voice, then glowered. He hated having his “authority” challenged even more than he disliked being ignored. Aleksia would have found it more amusing had she not played this same sort of scene over and over again with other guests in the past and would play it with still more in the future. Still. It was potentially as funny as watching an ill-tempered rabbit challenge a warhorse.
And that was a dangerous stance to take in the hall of one who could have sent him outside to be eaten by an ice-drake by merely snapping her fingers, but he was very young and utterly convinced of his own intelligence, knowledge and immortality. “I — ” he began.
“Most of your sentences begin with I, and you might find it more profitable to find some other way to begin them,” Aleksia continued, still not turning from the mirror. She wished that the next act of the drama she was watching would hurry up. She was regretting deciding to allow Kay to find her today — but this was the only mirror powerful enough to let her see all she needed to, from so far away, and she hated asking the Brownies to move it.
“No one cares about you. You are an unlicked cub, a mere youth, barely out of childhood.” She had been longing to say this for days; she might as well do so now. She began to warm to her subject and chose her words with care. “You have no experience worth hearing about, no store of wisdom from reading or studying with wiser men and your personality is repellant. There was but one person who loved you, and you persisted in thrusting her away. Instead, you wanted to be left alone to concentrate on your work. You were, in fact, injudicious enough to wish for just that out loud.” She saw him start again, out of the corner of her eye.
“So. I have given you that, on condition that you devote yourself to your work and make me wonders. There is a library here. There is a workshop. You only have but to say that you want something, and it appears. Go and make use of these resources, for which older and wiser men than you have pined and languished. And when you find something or make something you think might be worthy of my attention, you may bring it to me, provided I am not otherwise occupied, and provided you begin your sentence with some other word than I.”
Reflected in the surface of the ice, Kay looked utterly, utterly shocked. No one had ever spoken to him like that before. He had been rather too much indulged and made much of by parents who thought he was clever; as a child, he'd had the best schooling and a mother and father who greeted every accomplishment as if he was the only boy in the universe to have achieved such things. And he was very clever, even Aleksia would admit that — but clever did not compensate for the level of self-absorption he had managed to achieve in seventeen years. When she had appeared before him on the night of the first frost — heralded by an out-of-season snowstorm — in her flying sleigh pulled by four snow-white reindeer, he had taken it as his due that such a creature should offer him her help. He had accepted her invitation, of course. There was never any doubt that would happen. He was too self-centered to consider that it could have been a trap.
And now he had been here for three weeks, seeing nothing and no one but Aleksia herself. She had made her servants and helpers invisible to him, so that he would be unaware how full the Palace really was, and so that he would be unable to talk to anyone. She had made herself unavailable to him as well, making it as clear as possible, without ever actually saying it, that she was far too important to cosset him.
And now, he found himself in the position of having everything he had asked for, and yet being subject to something he had never, in all his life, actually experienced before.
He was alone. There were no parents to praise him, no sweetheart to gaze at him with adoration, no rivals to triumph over or peers to boast to. There were not even any visible servants to question, look down upon or bully. It was just him and his own thoughts, and he was finding that an uncomfortable experience.
He was a prisoner in a cage made of gold and lined with silk, as isolated as any hermit-hunter snowed-in inside a mountain cabin. He took his meals alone, was attended but never contacted in any way, and only glimpsed her briefly, generally at a distance. Day by day, she watched him without his being aware of the fact, and saw it wear on him.
Today she had told the servants to allow him to find the throne room and her in it, rather than confusing his steps as they generally did. This was the result.
He could be redeemed — he would not be here, in the Palace of Ever-Winter, the home of the Ice Fairy, if he was not capable of redemption. The Tradition had made that part clear enough by building such an enormous store of magic about him that, if Aleksia had waited until Winter to fetch him, he would have found his initials written in frost on the windowpane, snowmen having taken on his features when he passed, and the cold having grown so bitter that wildlife would have been found frozen in place. Even so, things had gotten to the point that Ravens had taken to following him, which was a very ominous sign had he but known it. Presumably if Aleksia had done nothing, and no other wicked magician had discovered him and virtually eaten him alive for the sake of that power, he would have gone to the bad all by himself. He was too self-centered and arrogant to have escaped that particular fate — and most likely, given his turn of mind, he would have become a Clockwork Artificer, one of those repellant individuals who tried to reduce everything to a matter of gears and levers, and tried to imprison life itself inside metal simulacrums. While not usually dangerous to the public at large the way, say, the average necromancer was, Clockwork Artificers could cause a great deal of unhappiness — and in their zeal to recreate life itself, sometimes resorted to murder.