The lass sat on the floor in the middle of the dressing room and cried over those shoes. Some other young girl had come here, to this cold palace of ice, expecting to be made a bride. But what had happened to her? Had she died? Had she tried to escape across the snow plain? Or pined so for her family that she had wasted away? Or maybe she had just disappeared one day, like Erasmus.
Picking up the everyday vest, the lass saw that there was a single long hair clinging to the back of the wool. It was so pale as to be almost white, but when she held it up to the light, it caught glints of gold.
She coiled the hair carefully around one of the buttons of the wedding bunad, so that it would not be lost. Her sobs faded to hiccups, and Rollo licked the tears from her face.
“It’s just some clothes,” he said, confused.
“Don’t you understand? Some other girl was brought here, and she left without her things. That means that she’s . . . dead . . . or something.” A fresh flow of tears ran down her cheeks. “I think . . . it must have been Hans Peter’s Tova.”
Rollo sniffed the clothes. He shook his head over the bunad; it was too new to smell like anything other than wool and maybe the lingering scent of the hands that had made it. He snuffled the everyday clothes more thoroughly.
“She was human,” he reported. “And clean, very clean. She liked strawberries and books. And Hans Peter. And she didn’t die in these clothes.”
“Are you sure?”
Rollo sniffed the shift again and then nodded his head. “They smell like isbjørn, but not our isbjørn. And they also smell like Hans Peter. Or at least this does”—he nosed the shift—“faintly.”
The lass caught up the shift and gave it a good sniff herself, but couldn’t smell anything. Well, she smelled dried flowers from the wardrobe, and leather from the knapsack. But no strawberries, or books, or Hans Peter.
“Your nose isn’t that good,” Rollo reminded her, with just a trace of smugness.
“It was Tova’s,” the lass said with certainty. “When Hans Peter was here there was a beautiful girl named Tova with him, and they loved each other very much.”
“Even I couldn’t smell all that,” Rollo said.
“But I can feel it,” the lass insisted. “I think she’s the one who embroidered the blue parts on Hans Peter’s coat. The red bits are some sort of enchantment, and Tova changed it.
“I wonder what happened to her, and to their isbjørn,” she finished, a final tear slipping down her cheek.
“Their isbjørn? ”
“You said that it smelled like one, but not ours.”
“Ye-es.” But now Rollo didn’t sound as sure as he had been. “Really, these smells are quite confusing. One sniff and it’s isbjørn, the next it’s Hans Peter. There’s a whiff of troll, too.”
“There is?” Again she lifted the shift to her nose, but again the smell eluded her. “What does it mean?” Her hands shook a little. “What did the trolls do to her? What do they want with—” She started to say “me,” but changed it at the last minute, unable to even voice her fear. “With my isbjørn?”
“I don’t know,” Rollo declared, “but I think we should stick to Hans Peter’s advice. Wait, be careful, and go home.”
“But don’t you want to help?”
“I don’t think we can help,” Rollo countered. “I think we can just make things worse. And when this year is over, maybe Hans Peter will tell us what happened to him. And this girl.” He nosed the bunad. “I think her mother helped her sew it,” he added. He turned his head aside, and sneezed. “Somebody who liked rosewater, and freshly dug potatoes, did the seams on that skirt.”
The lass sat for a long time in the mess of her dressing room and pondered all that she and Rollo had discovered. When it was time for dinner, she packed Tova’s things neatly into the knapsack and put it in the first wardrobe with her own clothes. She left the troll dresses where she had thrown them.
The isbjørn looked taken aback when he saw her old clothes. They appeared even shabbier in the light from the chandelier over the dining table, but he said nothing. He made conversation as best he could, and the lass answered in monosyllables. Rollo’s words about them only making things worse were haunting her, and she didn’t try to winkle any information about the enchantment out of the bear that night. Subdued, she went to bed early.
When the young man came to lay with her at midnight, she rolled close to him as though she were having a dream. When she thought he was asleep, she sniffed him. He smelled like soap. She wished again for Rollo’s sensitive nose, or at least that he would wake just once when her visitor came. But she didn’t have a wolf’s keen nose, and Rollo wasn’t even in the room, so she gave up. He didn’t smell like troll, or even potatoes.
Chapter 20
The next day, the lass was sitting in the library making notes when Mrs. Grey came in to dust. Remembering how she had gotten the housekeeper to volunteer the information that she was from Frankrike the last time, the girl prepared herself to ask another question. The only problem was deciding which one. Her plea for information from Hans Peter the day before had been rewarded with only the brief message: “Be careful. Don’t ask.” She had mentioned the clothes she had found to the isbjørn, but he had no idea whom they belonged to.
So she opened her mouth to say something about her nighttime visitor. The strange visitor who smelled of soap and linen, who snored but never spoke, and surely must be known to the servants.
“My lady?”
The lass’s mouth snapped shut and then opened again in surprise when Mrs. Grey spoke first. “Yes?”
“Erasmus is dead.”
“What?” The lass leaped to her feet, dumping her books onto the floor. Her elbow joggled the inkpot sitting on the table next to her chair and it fell to the carpet, spilling ink like black blood across the floral pattern.
“He said too much and now he is dead,” Mrs. Grey said. She was wringing her duster in both hands, shedding feathers all over the ruined carpet. Her hideous face twisted with grief. “I shouldn’t say anything, either, but Erasmus was a good friend to me. You’re not to blame yourself: he knew better. But we’ve never had one of you who could understand us before.”
“How did she find out?”
The gargoyle snuffled and fingered the ribbon at her throat. “I’m sorry to distress you, my lady. But I wanted you to know.” Her bat wings flapped miserably. “I wish that I had tears to cry for him, but my kind don’t.” Then she fled, dropping her mangled feather duster into the widening pool of ink.
The lass sank back down into her chair. She watched the pool of ink seep into the carpet. Her troll dictionary was on the edge of the puddle—actually, it was in the puddle now—but she didn’t care. Erasmus was dead. Because she had asked him questions. And he had answered. He was six hundred years old. Had been. But now he was dead. She had taken him away.
“The troll princess,” the lass said. Then she started to cry. Once she started she couldn’t stop, and when Rollo found her a few minutes later, she was down on the floor in the puddle of ink, eyes swollen and nose streaming, sobbing and pounding her fists into the cushion of the chair.
“Are you all right?” Rollo hopped around the black mess, pushing his nose into the lass’s shoulders and arms, whatever he could reach without getting his clean paws in the black mess. “What’s wrong?”
“Erasmus is dead! He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead! Because he talked to me, she killed him!” The lass howled and beat the cushion with even greater ferocity.
“Who killed him?” The wolf’s hackles rose.
“She did, she did, that troll, that troll . . . hag!” The lass picked up the fallen inkpot, now mostly empty, and hurled it at the window. It smashed into the ice, leaving a spiderweb of cracks before falling to the floor with a thunk.
Rollo breathed heavily on his mistress’s hair and then turned and ran out of the room. The lass thought that she had finally chased away her last friend, and began to cry
even harder. Hans Peter wasn’t talking to her; Erasmus was dead; Rollo had abandoned her. Who was left?
The great white isbjørn’s paws were so large and soft that he made no noise entering the room. He stepped right into the inkstain and laid his huge head on top of the lass’s. The low rumbling of his voice vibrated her skull.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ll kill her,” the lass hiccupped.
“Who?”
“You know who. The troll princess, the one who killed Erasmus’s Narella. And now Erasmus. I’ll kill her.” She raked her nails down the cushion of the chair, snagging the fine silken embroidery.
Another rumble from deep in the bear’s throat. He sat back and the lass leaned against his warm, furry torso. Even though she’d thought her tears had dried, a new wave swept over her, and she wept into the bear’s soft fur for a long time.
“Better?” He waited until the last sob faded away and she had pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket to mop up her face.
“I suppose. I still want to kill her.”
The bear growled. It rattled the lass’s bones and made Rollo whine.
“You shouldn’t even know she exists,” the bear warned the girl. “Don’t speak of her again. Don’t ask questions; don’t threaten her. Soon the year will be over.”
“That’s what Hans Peter says,” the lass snapped, pushing away from the bear’s embrace. “Wait and be careful, don’t do anything, just wait and then go home. Well, I can’t! Erasmus was kind to me, and now he’s dead.”
“Asking more questions won’t bring him back. It can only make things worse,” the isbjørn warned.
“How could things be any worse?” the lass raged. She stomped around the library, ripping books off the shelves and throwing them to the floor. “My brother’s life is ruined. Erasmus is dead. All the servants, their lives were ruined by her. Your life, my life. The girl whose bunader I found, she’s probably dead, too! There has to be some way to fight her.”
“No, there is no way. We can only wait, and see, and hope.” The bear was watching her rant with an uneasy expression.
“What does that mean?”
“I can’t tell you,” he said.
She rounded on him. “You!” She pointed a shaking finger at his broad white face. “You’re afraid of her!”
“Of course I am,” he shouted, getting to his feet. “Do you know what she’s—” His words cut off abruptly. He stood there, silent, for a moment, and then snarled in frustration. “I can’t—if you had any sense, you would fear her, too!” He came over to stand nose to nose with the lass. On all fours, he was as tall as the lass standing upright. “Believe me: things can be much, much worse. She can make you regret you were ever born.” And then he left.
The lass plucked a globe of the world inlaid with precious stones from a table and hurled it through the already cracked window. The ice pane made a creaking sound as it broke, and the globe hurtled through the air like a falling star, to smash on the jagged ice at the foot of the palace walls.
The next day, the salamanders tearfully told the lass that Mrs. Grey was gone. She had come in the night and taken her away.
The lass didn’t leave her rooms for two weeks.
Chapter 21
After Mrs. Grey was taken, the lass did as her brother and the isbjørn had pleaded. She stopped asking questions. She stopped begging Hans Peter for information. Having been rejected by her mother at birth, the lass wasn’t all that frightened by the threat that she would regret she had been born. But she was sickened by the thought that Erasmus and Mrs. Grey had suffered because of her.
And yet the lass couldn’t just sit there, day after day, idle. She asked Fiona if she couldn’t have some new cloth to sew clothes for herself. She refused to wear the troll gowns, and she had ruined her best skirt by kneeling in the puddle of ink. Tova’s clothes (for she had decided that they were Tova’s) would fit her with a little alteration, but somehow it seemed sacrilegious. Fiona nodded, and the next day the sitting room was filled with bolts of silk and velvet, fine linen, and spools of silk thread.
With a self-deprecating laugh, the lass made herself the kind of clothing she was used to, rather than the kind she had been wearing. Fiona removed the troll gowns, and the wardrobe slowly filled with long bell-shaped skirts, tight vests, and shifts with gathered sleeves such as any farmgirl of the North would wear. Not that the farmgirls of the North had ever worn skirts of rich blue velvet and vests of peacock green satin.
Sewing kept the lass’s hands busy, and even her mouth. When she sewed, she pursed her lips, or chewed them, or stuck her tongue out. Her siblings had always made fun of her for this, but no matter how she tried she couldn’t break the habit. She decided that it was a good thing, now, for it prevented her from asking questions. But her rage over the troll princess caused her fingers to fumble or move too fast. She sliced through the fabric with reckless abandon and angrily threw great lengths of cloth into the fire when she couldn’t get the seams straight.
Once she was done with the new wardrobe, she found her resolution not to ask questions waning. The trouble was that servants avoided her now, and so did the isbjørn, except for dinnertime. Even the salamanders, those chatty little cooks who had enlivened her early days in the palace, were monosyllabic when she visited the kitchens.
The lass had searched the palace top to bottom already. But now she did it again, determined to gather information without endangering anyone else. She turned the strange rooms upside down, rummaging in piles of carding combs, overturning butter churns, and sorting through spindles, spinning wheels, and looms. She even managed to push over every anvil in a room full of metal-working tools, to see if there was anything written or carved underneath, but there was nothing.
She did ask the isbjørn about the rooms full of household tools. She didn’t think it could hurt, just to ask why there was a room in a palace full of old butter churns.
He shook his head, equally puzzled, and told her that there was just something about the tools that attracted them. He didn’t need to say which “them” he meant. The lass knew: trolls. The silent, never-seen rulers of this strange kingdom of barren ice.
“It’s like Rolf Simonson’s spoon,” Rollo said, looking up from his dinner.
The lass and the isbjørn exchanged confused looks.
“Rolf Simonson’s Fransk silver spoon,” Rollo explained. “You remember: it sat on the mantelpiece, and everyone admired it, but no one actually ate with it, because it was foreign.”
“Oh, of course!” The lass nodded. “One of his sons traded two reindeer for it, in Christiania. It was very elegant.” She wrinkled her nose and looked at the spoon she was eating with. “Although not as fine as this.”
“Hmm,” the isbjørn rumbled. “Perhaps Rollo is correct. Perhaps such things attract them because they are foreign.”
Fiona the selkie was serving dinner during this discussion. She looked sharply from the bear to the girl as they talked, and cringed when the bear spoke of “them.” The lass had never seen the tall, proud seal-woman cringe before. As she carried out the dinner tray, she did it awkwardly one-handed; her other hand was curled into a strange sign that she pressed to her side as though to ward off evil spirits. The bear and the lass both observed this, but neither said anything about it. It was almost embarrassing to see Fiona behave in such a way.
The next morning, the lass woke at dawn to find Fiona hovering over her. The selkie grimaced and frowned in the pale morning light. The lass gave a shriek and slid to the other side of the bed. Her nighttime companion was gone, but the bed was still warm where he had lain.
“What is it?”
More grimacing and frowning from the selkie.
“Oh, just speak,” the lass said with impatience, recovering from her surprise. “I don’t yearn for your beauty or want to marry you. What on earth are you doing?”
As though summoning all her strength, the selkie drew herself up to her full height, opened her
mouth, and then blew out all her breath in a gust. Sucking in another breath, she finally spoke.
“You foolish little girl,” she snarled. “What do you think you’re playing at? Do you want to kill us all?”
“I’m only trying to help!”
“But you’re not helping! None of you has ever helped! You poke your little button noses into things that don’t concern you, or you cry and whine and mope about, but you never help! Then it all explodes in your rosy little faces and you run away home and the masters are forced to go away with her.”
“You mean the troll princess? And what masters? The isbjørner?”
The selkie gave a scream of rage. “Stop asking questions! How many of us must die to satisfy your stupid curiosity? All you have to do is wait out the year. . . . Is that too much to ask?”
“Yes!” the lass shouted. “It is too much!” Her outburst startled Fiona into silence once more. “Aren’t you a prisoner here? Don’t you want someone to free you?”
“You can’t help me; you’re just a silly human girl!”
“But I want to try!”
Clapping her hands to her ears, Fiona shook her head and left the room, slamming the door behind her.
When Rollo came cautiously into the room after the selkie’s dramatic exit, he found his mistress pounding a pillow ferociously. He went and got the isbjørn again, who growled over Fiona’s harsh words and patted the lass heavily on the back.
The next day the minotaurus, Garth, brought the lass’s breakfast tray. The lass looked at him curiously, said good morning, and received a grunt in reply. She went down to the kitchen after she got dressed and asked the salamanders if there was anything new with the staff. They didn’t answer her. Nor did the brownie and pixie she found in the scullery. None of them would meet her eyes. None of them would talk to her.