Or the intended victims of the Witch. Although it didn't make any sense — would the Witch have wiped out three full villages for no apparent reason?
It was a shame that the wretched North Wind had so poor a sense of direction, otherwise she could have gotten the location of the Witch's stronghold from him. But the Winds didn't really understand human concepts like maps. After all, the Winds went where they chose, and there wasn't much that could stop them, so what did they need with maps or directions?
On she lumbered. The scents got stronger under tree-canopy, but only because the trail wasn't hidden under snow. Whatever had happened to the missing men, they hadn't come back this way.
By the time the sun rose, even the Bear form's strength was beginning to flag. The scent actually was stronger, though, so at least it was more recent. She was tracking them across the side of a forest ridge now, and considered stopping and curling up for a nap, then decided to press on at least as far as the ridge ahead of her. So far she hadn't seen a good place to curl up anyway; there might be better cover ahead.
And then, just as the full sun hit the valley below, she crested the ridge — and stopped dead in her tracks.
Below her was a sight that was both stunningly beautiful and utterly horrible. For as far as the eye could see, the sun reflected blindingly off the branches of a forest of trees of ice.
11
Annukka stood with one arm around Kaari, comfortingly, as they stared at the wilderness ahead of them. Behind them was the village where Veikko had found his mentor, the Warrior-Mage Lemminkal; it was from here that he, Ilmari, and Ilmari's brother Lemminkal had departed. The villagers all agreed that they had gone to track down something called the Icehart, which was some sort of monstrous creature that had killed everyone in three separate villages. They had learned of this Icehart from a reindeer herdsman who had returned to his village to find everyone dead, frozen — and from all appearances, it had happened in a single moment in the middle of the night. He claimed that he had seen it, at a distance, moving away from a second village, to which he had gone for help. He had called it the Icehart because it looked like an enormous, ghostly stag, and wherever it went, it killed with cold.
And that was far more information than they had gotten before. At least now they knew to watch out for ghostly reindeer.
It was Lemminkal who had linked the Icehart with the Snow Queen, and according to those who had spoken to him before the three men left, he was determined to eliminate both the monster and its mistress. Ilmari was more circumspect and rather less confident that they could take on the Snow Queen themselves.
Annukka and Kaari had decided to climb up from the valley where the village lay to have a look at what lay ahead of them as they followed the men. From this vantage, on the side of the mountain, what was before them was daunting, a patchwork of alpine forest and glacier, mountains already deep in snow. This was where the road had lost track of Veikko, because after this village, there was no road. And there was no use in calling up the North Wind again, because even if it would answer, which was dubious, the Winds were notoriously bad at being able to give good directions to humans. “Oh, over that mountain and to the east” was usually the best they could manage.
“Now what do we do?” Kaari asked, looking bleakly at the literally trackless wilderness in front of them.
“For one thing, we switch to sledges,” Annukka replied. “Which means that we will be able to carry more supplies with us. That is no bad thing.”
“But how are we going to find them?” Kaari wailed. “There's no road to follow, and any tracks they made are gone by now!”
Annukka hugged her shoulders harder. “Don't despair. I have an idea.” She turned Kaari about, faced her toward the village and gave her a little shove. “You go get us sledges and supplies. And find out what, if anything, has been happening here since the men left. I will see if my idea will work.”
Kaari got a firmer hold on herself, and nodded. She turned back to the village as Annukka walked down the slope to their camp, ducked under the flap of their cobbled-together tent and sat down on her bed to rummage through her pack. They had set up their tent here in the shelter of one of the reindeer sheds because this was a small village and had no inn. This was probably why the only witness to the appearance of the Icehart had taken his deer herd and moved on.
Which was a great pity, because Annukka would have liked to have been able to question him herself.
As for a way to track the three men into the wilderness, she had an idea, indeed. But it was nothing that she, nor anyone she knew, had ever tried. She had gotten this notion earlier today when one of the men of Ilmari's village had offered to sell them a lodestone, demonstrating for them how it always pointed to the North Star.
“But if it always points to the North Star, why would you need it?” Kaari had asked, shaking her head in puzzlement. “You can see the North Star!”
“You can't during the day,” the man had said, with some impatience.
“But then you can see the sun,” Kaari had replied, with the patience she used when speaking to particularly dense little boys. “The sun will tell you where North is.”
“Well then, you can't see the North Star at night when it's cloudy!” the man responded, and Annukka got the impression that if it hadn't been Kaari he'd been talking to, he would have lost his temper.
“Why would I want to travel at night when it is cloudy?” Kaari asked, looking at him as if he was mad. “For that matter, why would I want to travel at night at all if there was no road to follow? It would be of much more use if it pointed to something other than the North Star — like the village you needed to go to.” She looked at the lodestone indulgently, with the air of a girl who is looking at something that she considers to be a particularly foolish “boy's toy.” Annukka had seen that look before, on the faces of most of the women she knew, when men came trotting up with some wonderful “new” thing that was allegedly better than any previous iteration of such a thing. Men never understood that look, and generally went off, aggrieved, to show the prize to another man, who certainly would understand why it was better, shinier and altogether superior to anything else that anyone had that was like it.
Now truth to tell, Annukka could certainly see a great deal of use for something like the lodestone. What if they had not had the road to follow when they were making their way through dense forest? You could see neither sun nor stars under trees like that and the only way of getting one's bearings would be to climb a tree at intervals. You could wander in circles forever in such a place, and people had. People had died under such circumstances.