Read The Princess and the Snowbird for Free Online

Jens thought. I can’t hear you, either. I’m useless to help you.
    But then the pika disappeared in the flurrying snow around the river. The other animals moved sluggishly, as if to follow, but they did not move quickly enough.
    “Leave them be!” Jens tried one more time.
    But Harald cried out, “Kill! Hunt! Kill! The animals are ours.”
    The other boys whooped in excitement. “Ours! Ours!”
    “If we die, we die as men. We die with honor!” shouted Torus, who was always trying to prove that he was no coward. In his effort to make sure of it, he sometimes brought danger to those around him.
    Torus took out his sword and began to bellow.
    The others took out their weapons—daggers and knives—for they did not have the coin that Torus’s family did. Jens had only a slingshot. His father had refused to give Jens a knife after what had happened to his stone blade years ago.
    The others began to shout to frighten the animals.
    “I will cut you to pieces!”
    “You can’t run from me!”
    “Dead! You will be dead!”
    They charged forward.
    A mink was killed and flung over Harald’s shoulder. Then a raccoon, and a ferret. Jens found himself downstream along the banks of the river, though he had notmeant to go so far, and he picked up a lynx, its white belly stained red.
    There were dozens of carcasses scattered on the white snow, steaming with blood, and it seemed wrong to Jens. If they had come across a herd of deer or antelope, the hunting party would have killed one or two and left the rest. Here had been a massacre. This felt vicious, though it was true that those who were hungry in the village would not object to eating so much fresh meat.
    Torus passed him and patted him on the shoulder. “Good for you. I wondered if you would turn back at the sight of blood. Your father says…” He stopped and gestured at the lynx on Jens’s shoulder. “But here is the proof he is wrong. You will only need some more practice, and any hunting party will take you gladly.”
    Jens realized that Torus thought Jens had killed the lynx himself. He expected at any moment for one of the other young men to insist that the lynx was rightly his kill, but they all had so many carcasses to carry that no one argued. Jens began to suspect as they trudged back to the village that the others did not even remember which animals they had killed. For all their tehr-magic, they did not any of them think of one creature as different from another.
    Jens shivered and moved the lynx to his other side so that he would not get a cramp. The body had already gone stiff in the cold.
    Around him Jens listened to a hunting song and thecongratulations of one hunter to the next. As if they had done something remarkable in killing animals that had not even tried to escape death.
    Jens thought of the small pika and was careful to check to see if any of the dead creatures were that one. Somehow it had escaped when the others had not, and Jens was glad of it. At least there was some life to rejoice in still.

C HAPTER S EVEN
Liva
    L IVA CIRCLED BACK in the direction the humans had gone. She told herself she would return to tracking her father in a moment, but something inside her compelled her to follow the boy with the white-blond hair. He was taller now, but she recognized him right away. Jens, the one who had seen through her animal skin when she had been following the felfrass kit.
    He had been a member of a hunting party then, too. With humans, but not at all like them.
    As a pika, she was small and low to the ground, black and white like dirty snow and nearly invisible. She followed the humans past the river, along a wide trail of trampled snow, blood, and noise.
    She stopped at the first sight of the human village. All around it the forest had been cleared away. There were a few bony animals corralled by fences, sheep and goats and aurochsen, some of them with shelters to retreat to,others curled around stones or pressed against the human