Eleven

 

Briska took a deep breath and then exhaled on the mirror. When the condensation from her breath faded, Mistress Kun's face appeared. "Mistress, I can't help but feel this is terribly wrong. I drove my sleigh through town, as you commanded, and just as you said, I stopped when the reindeer could go no further, and found a boy near frozen in his own sled, hooked onto my sleigh runners."

"Is he there with you now?" Mistress Kun asked eagerly.

Briska frowned at the boy, as still as a corpse in his icy bed. "Yes," she said slowly. "But I should really take him home, for his family must surely miss him. I've put him into an enchanted sleep, which helps preserve him a little in this icy cold, but I'm not sure how long I can keep him that way, or whether it will do untold harm to do so. He's cold to the touch, barely draws breath..."

Kun waved her hand airily. "If you tried to take him home, he would undoubtedly freeze to death anyway. He has no family, no one who cares, except the girl he was trying to impress when he fastened his sled to your sleigh. Once she starts to miss his company, she will come to claim him. But if you do not, she will not yet care...and you will have to find another way to make this match."

Briska wrung her hands. "But if anything happens to him...I can't make a match if the boy's dead. And it's a dangerous journey up the mountain alone. All sorts of things might happen to the girl before she gets here."

Kun laughed. "The girl will not be alone, for she'll have plenty of help. You're not on that lonely rock any more, with nothing but deer. You just concentrate on keeping the boy there, ready for when she arrives."

"But..."

"That is an order."

Briska slumped. "As you wish, Mistress."

"If you tire of watching him, then perhaps you can make a new match while you wait. Lubos and Molina, a prince and a miller's daughter..."

Briska stared at the unlikely pair, wondering what could attract a prince to some common peasant. Oh, she was pretty, she supposed, but not unless she stretched out naked before him, at precisely the moment when he fancied a roll in the hay...

Men. So predictable. She would have this pair so tightly entwined with one another not even the king himself could break them apart. And before Kai woke, too.

"Yes, Mistress. I will match them, too."

"Good. Watch out for Rumpelstiltskin, though, for he will try to stop you at every turn."

Briska opened her mouth to ask for more information, but it was too late. The mirror's surface returned to a reflection of the icy walls of the palace. Only then did Briska curse the day she'd ever agreed to become a djinn. A prince and a peasant, some man with a strange name, plus this frozen boy and a girl intent on rescuing him...Briska could feel it in her bones: neither match would not turn out well for her, at all.