It hadn't ended there, with the fall and how he started to talk about seeing things. Kay saw everything everyone in town had ever done wrong and the knowledge drove him to something close to hermitage. He took to hiding in his room or closing his eyes when people were around. She bothered him most and the last time they met, before the Snow Queen, he had told her every thing he could see about her.
He hadn't meant it judgmentally, something closer to 'please, please, just stay away from me,' but the visual onslaught of misdeeds and selfishness had barbed his tact. Sitting on the floor, his eyes on the window always, he told her every thing that was ever wrong with her, said he never wanted to see her again, and would she please go now?
By the time of that conversation, they had found four rapists, eight murderers, and sixteen adulterers before Kay insisted that he had to stop using his 'gift,' as they were calling it. The law enforcement, always understaffed in their little town and more so with the Adversary's forces coming, drafted a contract to draft him, as a cursed witness to every crime.
The night they drafted it, he had hitched his sled to the Snow Queen's recruiter's and flown out of the town. She'd tried to go after him, headed as far north as she could until she ran out of villages and then… nothing. Nothing but the witch's intimidating castle and Gerda hadn't been able to get near it.
And she hadn't wanted to. Even knowing that he was defending himself, even knowing that what he saw was real, something broke in her and it was hard not to blame him for that.
And beyond that, to blame Fables for being what they were.
She had been living "fringe" ever since.
#
She was certain Burke had meant to accompany her but that wasn't what had happened. Searing snow tore at her coat and if she had thought the capital was bad, the Snow Queen's world was far worse. Still, it smelled familiar, as the capital world and the Mundy never had, and she knew within seconds that she had grown up here.
Sticking her hands in her armpits to keep warm, she trudged forward, heading what her senses told her was north. Burke would catch up or find his way after her, the way the pair usually did.
The "path" had vanished and she followed first the direction she had arrived in then, when that led into a snow-bedecked forest, along the trail of some caribou. Her thoughts drifted – she was hungry, she was tired, she was always cold – and Kay made his way in and out of them, because he had been the subject of the recent lie and this is what she felt she had always abandoned him to.
She moved inexorably forward, first blaming it on hope then, when hope abandoned ship, on dedication, and before four hours had passed in the frozen wilderness, it was a mix of punishment and continuation of a quest long forgotten. Come hell or low temperatures, she would complete one of her quests, this time.
Snow dunes. That's what she was going up and down. At some point, she might have crossed a lake, watching the moon go through a lazy cool cycle over the sky. It made her change her course midway, since it spoke both hope and doom: she was going the right way now but still finding nothing. Maybe the Snow Queen had moved her headquarters in a great gust of wind.
Maybe the weapon was portable.
Hell, Gerda had heard of a magician in Mundy stories that had a moving castle and everyone knew of Baba Yaga's … whatever it was. A mobile weapon wasn't outside the realm of possibility here.
She stopped at the side of a frozen riverbank (it was the next in the 'north' path she was following) and stared across. Behind her came the sound of hoofbeats, somewhere far behind and growing nearer in a great herd. If the river could hold them, it would hold her, but she couldn't take any chances, as the only representative of a community that wanted the Snow Queen's weapon gone.
"Get moving, human!" someone yelled, the voice fleshy and thick.
She half-turned at the form of address and saw the herd advancing on her, not diverting their course. The caribou generated a snowstorm of white powder and galloping blackness, coming towards her, advancing at a breakneck pace. The sheer bigness of the herd frightened her and she darted forward, terrified, then to the side and out of their path.
"Thank you," the speaker shouted over the noise, for all the world like a taxi driver in New York, as they charged all at once over that fragile lake. So much weight, gracefully borne; it made no impression on the snowfall. Once on the far side, they slowed, some even going so far as to kneel in groups of two or three. Only one stalked back to her on long, knobby legs.
"You have been here before, human?"
"No, I've just the sense to get out of the way."
"But not to stay out altogether. You are headed north, you know that."
"I am, and that's the way I want to go."
The caribou stared at her through dark lashed eyes, nostrils flexing with former exertion. "You know where you are."
"At the edge of a river, which I'm following north. I'm heading to the Snow Queen's castle."
"It does not lie near the river. Humans rarely find it when they want to and often when they don't, unless she is waiting for you."
"That's a no."
"Then you will wander ceaselessly and we will eventually run you down."
"I guess so. Great chatting with you, I'll be sure to climb a tree if I see—"
The caribou drew its head back and flicked its ears several times, giving her a dour look. It took Gerda a minute to realize this was offence ala caribou.
"Honestly, what you do not think of could fill a goblin's mansion. You want to upset the young ones of the herd? Make us hang our heads when we encounter other, less stupid, humans? We don't want to run anyone down. I will take you to her, if you can offer us something in exchange."
As she had nothing but the clothes on her back and the satchel Bigby had supplied, this didn't seem to improve the situation. The caribou shook its head when she proffered the contents.
"Material things. Something else?"
"I'm going to destroy a weapon in the Snow Queen's castle."
The caribou blinked at her: this, then, was an incredulous expression. "A weapon?"
"Of unimaginable power. I was sent all the way from the Mundy world, where the Fables escaped."
"Lumi has dictated unkind weather since she came back to the castle. Driving sleet and hail at times, thick blankets of snow, and you may have noticed we number only thirty. Our herd runs at ninety, most years. If this weapon will impact that—"
"Has to, I mean, anything that Lumi's using will be connected to weather. Probably."
"Then mount."
"You don't need to explain things to…?" Gerda asked as she circled the caribou, wondering how to mount until the caribou knelt.
"They are dumb," it replied simply. "I lead and they will stay here until I return. It will be many miles, since you are off the path and must ride."
"I'll walk—"
"And delay us further." The caribou gathered its energy, assuring itself that she was solidly on its back, and leapt forward. It was the last they spoke for several hours.
#
Maybe it was that the cursed man had been so easily tricked into surrendering his freedom; maybe it was that the caribou was being gracious; but the whole debt being incurred put Gerda on edge.
The temperature slipped downwards, like a child on skates, falling at times then staggering upwards and falling again. Gerda took to flexing her fingers, wiggling her toes, and being keenly aware that she might lose her nose to the cold and that there was little she could do about it. The sword wasn't warm enough to do anything but act like a weak hot-water bottle resting against her leg.
She said nothing of the cold to the caribou until the morning she couldn't get up. It was too cold. She slept until she felt the caribou nudging her up like a new foal and she climbed sleepily onto its back. That was the second day and she spent most of it, her fourth day in this weather, in a rush of wind and powder. This continued until the afternoon when the caribou sank to its knees outside an abandoned town.
Gerda slid off the sweat-soaked back and squinted at civilization.
"The Adversary's work?"
"Made it a ghost town. Lumi's castle is only two miles from here, hours by foot and less if you hurry."
"No hurry." She wiggled her fingers inside their gloves again and stood, less wobbly than her companion. "I'll find some firewood and we can take over one of the houses."
"I should get back."
"You're no more fit to travel then I am. Find a house or we'll both freeze out here. I'll check for the house with the caribou in it when I get back."
"Bae," it said as it trudged towards the town. "My name is Bae."
"Gerda."
At this point, getting cursed didn't seem any more likely than it had with Irene. A suspicious pile of firewood sat a little ways inside the tree line and Gerda stood, looking at it a moment. Fine. If the angels wanted to be passive about it, she was currently accept currency in firewood, matches, kerosene, or battery-powered space heaters. The house in the town soon sang with warmth and she did her finger exercises, warming motions, and buried herself beneath (equally suspicious) blankets she found upstairs. The caribou knelt by the fire, placid and looking like the shaggiest dog ever born.
She curled next to him and they survived several days that way, him eating tree moss and her the remainder of the food in her pack. On several occasions during those days, Bae would leave the town, giving no explanation of where or why. She occupied herself with stocking the fire and attempting to call the angels until the caribou returned, usually with reports on goblin or ice trolls' patrols in the area. They were safe and hidden here, carving out a little cave of sanctuary in a town long abandoned.
Like all good things, it didn't last. When they were both recovered, Bae said, "Lumi's castle is over this town like a shadow in the morning. Follow the shadow and you will arrive at the gate."
She hadn't wanted to go originally; she wanted to go even less now, and burrowed her face into the shaggy, pungent mane. She might have whimpered something to that effect, about things not being fair and it was cold.
Bae continued: "There is no earthly way to open the gates, but by Lumi's word. Find a way." The caribou stood, taking most of the warmth with him. "I hope you succeed in your quest."
"You'll know if I do," Gerda said quickly, lest he think he had to come back and get her. "I will find her-it, rather- and return to my own world. Thank you."
"One less human to run over." Bae dipped his head to leave the house and galloped out into the cold, leaving her alone.
And she finally began to give thought to how she would enter a magical castle, locate a magical weapon, destroy it, and return home.