Five

 

The girl woke first, despite the fever in her blood that sent wisps of steam rising from her clothes until they dried.

Briska approached the girl cautiously, knowing the lattice screen between them would offer her some protection if the girl lashed out. For who knew how these barbarians would react? What she'd seen of crusaders at home had demonstrated they had little honour, and these two looked no different.

"How are you feeling?" Briska asked softly, but the girl didn't seem to hear her.

The girl grimaced as she sat up, holding her head as if it hurt.

Briska was no healer, but she could prepare tisanes for pain and fever. She slipped away to find some herbs to help the girl.

The girl's voice called her back with a question Briska could not quite make out. Yet when Briska returned, the girl's attention was on the cave furnishings...and her mistress's mirror.

A mirror in a place so backward they didn't know how to make glass, let alone a mirror.

The girl's eyes turned to Briska, full of knowing. "Let us out. I must go home." The barbarian girl drew herself up to her full height – a head higher than Briska – and stared down for all the world like she was a queen herself.

A slave she might be, but Briska did not have to obey this order. And she could do queenly better than this girl. "We all want to go home, but not everyone gets what they want. The sea wanted to take you from the beach where I found you, but I rescued you from the waves and brought you here. I must keep you two together. The mirror insists." Briska stepped out of the shadows, letting the mirror's misty glow light up her face as she tried to appear every bit the queen she once was. "Who are you?"

The girl shivered, her courage fleeing with her fever. "I am Gretel." She pointed at the unconscious boy. "That's my brother, Hansel." She kept speaking, but Briska didn't hear the words.

Brother and sister? Kun couldn't mean her to make an incestuous match like this one. Perhaps she intended to keep her here in exile, unable to make the match.

"Who are you?" the girl demanded.

Briska eyed her with dislike. "Once a queen, now a slave, loved by two men, one of whom is now dead and the other is dead to me. I am Briska, now queen of a rock that boasts little more than fearless deer and this horrible stuff called snow."

Forever cursed to be queen of this rock.

"You must let us go," Gretel insisted.

"I must do nothing of the sort." The words came out of Briska's mouth automatically, but even as she pressed her lips together to stem the flow, still the words repeated in her head. She must serve her mistress.

Then what of the mirror? Did she have to serve the mirror, too, or could it be wrong?

Haltingly, Briska continued, "The mirror says...the mirror says you must be together. But if you are brother and sister, as you say...then I am cursed!" The cursed queen of this rock, forever. "Bah, I should have known escape was an illusion." She tried to imitate Kun's superior tone: "You shall not leave here until you break the curse!"

Tears sprang to her eyes, and Briska hurried away, before Gretel could see her weakness.