She went and found the isbjørn. He was in a room full of knitting needles and small belt looms. He was holding a belt loom up to a window and squinting at it. When he saw the lass, he dropped it with a clatter.
“Fiona is gone,” he said, confirming the lass’s fears.
“But why?” She clenched her fists and shook them at him. “She yelled at me, but that was all! Was that so terrible? Why did you . . . ?”
She hadn’t thought of it until the words were out of her mouth, but when they burst into the air she realized what was really bothering her. No one beside the isbjørn could have known that Fiona had shouted at her, unless Fiona had told the other servants. The bear had been angry at Fiona for hurting the lass’s feelings, but Fiona hadn’t told her anything that would have gotten her into trouble with the troll princess, as far as the lass could tell. So had it been the isbjørn who told the troll what the selkie had done?
“She was under orders not to talk to you,” the bear rumbled. “Not my orders, either. I said no word about her shouting.”
“Then who? Garth?”
“Nothing happens within these walls that she does not know about. I’m sorry. Truly sorry. I liked Fiona and her pouts.”
“I liked Erasmus and Mrs. Grey, too,” the lass sniffed. To her annoyance, she was crying. It felt like all she did lately was cry or sew. Sometimes both.
“So did I.”
They sat together for a while in silence. Then they both went down to the kitchen. The salamanders didn’t speak, but they did give them cake and cider. Garth and the others came in, and they all raised a glass in a wordless toast to Fiona and Mrs. Grey and Erasmus.
That night Rollo went out and mourned them in his own way, howling at the moon for hours. The lass lay in her bed and listened to the muffled sounds of his howls coming through the ice-paned window.
Chapter 22
The lass did not tell Hans Peter what had happened. His responses to her letters in the blank book were always terse, and she sensed that he was angry with her for being so curious and endangering the servants. She learned that her father was doing well, and could now walk with the aid of a crutch. The king’s physician had recommended lightly exercising the injured leg and arm, to strengthen them.
And then there was a puzzling letter from Tordis. Well, it was puzzling to Jorunn, at least. She reported to the lass via the magic book that Tordis wanted to know, urgently, if the lass had done what she had asked and used you-know-what to look at you-know-who.
I am completely at a loss, Jorunn wrote. But Tordis said that you would understand. She wants to know at once. As soon as you write to me, I am to write to her.
But the lass didn’t write “at once.” She had not done what Tordis asked. She still had the little stub of candle and the matches. The candle had given her a rash and made her nose itch, and she had stuck the candle and matches in one of the pockets she wore under her clothes. She supposed that she could use it at any time, but why? Tordis was convinced that she was in bed with a monster, but the lass was not so sure.
True, when she had asked Rollo to smell the hair she had found, it had carried a hint of troll. But he had also smelled bear and human, so it was hard to say which smell was more accurate. She herself smelled rather like bear, lately. And her nighttime visitor felt like a human. She had touched him, kicked him, and rolled against him by accident in her sleep. She thought that she would know if he were some hideous beast.
After lunch, she made up her mind to lie. She got out the little book and wrote to Jorunn: Tell Tordis yes, and all is well. There, the lass thought, that should soothe her sister for a time.
But then the guilt began to gnaw at her. She was lying to Tordis. And maybe her sister was right. Just because the back she had felt in the darkness seemed to be the back of a human man, that didn’t mean that it really was. And along with the magic that kept her from finding any candles or getting out of the room in the night, maybe there was an enchantment that made him feel human when really he was . . .
“A troll,” she breathed aloud.
As soon as the idea entered her head, it wouldn’t leave. This was a troll palace. Everyone raised in the North knew that the trolls had magic, terrible magic, and they played with the lives of other creatures like dolls. After what had happened to Erasmus and the others, she knew that as well as anyone. How could she have been so foolish? For all she knew, she was lying beside the troll princess herself! Perhaps the feeling that she was lying with a young human man was there to reassure her while the princess did . . . what? Sucked out her soul slowly over the course of a year? Made herself young by aging the lass? The lass had a name, but she had never been baptized—how much protection did her name really provide?
She ran into her dressing room and studied her face in the mirror there, but couldn’t see any difference. Well, that wasn’t quite true. She did look a bit older, but that was probably just from having traveled so far and seen so much. Her face had rounded out, but that was thanks to good meals.
“Well, it’s not that,” she said aloud.
“What are you doing?” Rollo came into the dressing room.
“I just thought that . . .” She let the sentence trail. Rollo would only be upset by her suspicions that a troll shared her bed. He would want to protect her, but there was no way that he could. At midnight every night, a deep sleep came over him that lasted until dawn. Even when he fell asleep on her bed, her visitor lifted him off and put him by the sitting room fire. She suspected that her visitor also hid the candles before climbing into bed, but he was so quiet that it was hard to tell.
“I thought I had a gray hair,” the lass said. “But it was just a trick of the light.”
“Hmmph. Vain” was Rollo’s comment.
By the time they went to meet the bear for dinner that night, the lass had made up her mind. She couldn’t continue to sleep beside someone—or something—that she had never seen. She knew it would be risky, so she made preparations.
After dinner, she filled her secret pockets to bursting with pearls and rubies and coils of gold wire thread. She packed her troll dictionary and clothing into the knapsack Mrs. Grey had given her. She begged food from the salamanders and they gave her bread, dried meat, cheese, and apples. As an afterthought, she attached Tova’s pack to her own knapsack with silk scarves. She laid the awkward bundle by the hearthrug where Rollo slept and told him to keep an eye on it.
“Why?”
“Never you mind, dog.” She put the candle and the matches under her pillow, and then she cleaned her teeth and slipped into bed.
She had worried that she would fall asleep and not wake up until after her visitor had gone, but that wasn’t a problem. She lay, rigid as a board, while her thoughts screamed at her: run, hide, run, hide!
She told herself over and over that she had done it for months, she could do it one more night. The memory of all those past nights curdled her stomach. She could not go on like this. She would look, and then in the morning, as soon as he? . . . she? . . . it? . . . left, she would grab her pack and Rollo and run home. It was possible that she would die somewhere in the forest or on the snow plain, but it would be better than having her life sapped away by a troll.
By the time the creature climbed into bed with her, she was vibrating like a fiddle string. When the weight of her nighttime guest hit the mattress, she almost bolted. Instead she gripped the edge of the blanket and concentrated on breathing deeply. This calmed her somewhat, and she was able to keep up the pretense of sleep until she heard a soft snore from her companion. She counted to fifty, just to make sure that it hadn’t also been feigning sleep, and then she fished the candle and matches out from under her pillow and slithered out of bed.
There were thick silk curtains all around the bed, and she stood outside these, counting to twenty to make sure that she hadn’t woken whatever it was. Her fingers shook so badly that it took three tries before she could get the wick lit. Then, cupping her free hand carefull
y around the flame, she crept around the bed.
Biting her lip, the lass parted the curtains and leaned into the bed to see what had been lying beside her all these months.
A man.
A handsome, young man. Dark hair, a fine straight nose, long eyelashes fanned on a smooth cheek. He looked older than the lass by a few years—perhaps he was twenty, twenty-one years old. He wore a linen nightshirt, and the collar was open to reveal a glimpse of smooth, muscular chest. The lass leaned over him, studying the planes of his face, but could see no flaw, no sign of a monstrous nature.
And then.
And then the burning wick reached one of the scented herbs Frida put in her candles. The herb sizzled, making the flame sputter. A little streamer of smoke curled up the lass’s nose.
She sneezed.
Hot wax dripped off the candle as the sneeze jolted through her body. It fell on the shoulder of the young man’s white nightshirt, and he woke. His wide eyes fastened on the lass’s. They were violet.
“Oh, no,” he breathed, an expression of horror creeping across his handsome face. “What have you done?”
“I only wanted to s-see what you were,” she stammered, backing away from the look on his face. “I thought that maybe—”
“One year and one day. You had only to endure one year and one day of my company. Bear by day, man by night, just like your brother. Tova failed too. They always fail. And then we have to go.” He shuddered and his eyes closed.
“Go where?” She could barely speak; a terrible coldness was coming over her.
“To her. I must marry her and live in her palace east of the sun and west of the moon.”
“But isn’t there any other way? Can’t I . . . do . . . something?” The cold was making her face numb, and her hands. She dropped the candle; the flame went out as it fell, plunging the room into darkness once more.
“If you had waited three more months—just three—I would have been free,” the young man said. “We both would have been free.” Then: “She comes!”
“Isbjørn!” The lass called to him as the cold rose up and swallowed her. The wind rushed in her ears. She fainted.
Part 3
The Lassie Who Should
Have Had the Prince
Chapter 23
The lass awoke to Rollo nosing her face and whining. Her head was pillowed on her bulging knapsack, and she was cramped and cold. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she sat up and looked around.
“Rollo? Where are we?”
“I don’t know, and I couldn’t wake you for hours, and I didn’t dare leave you,” he whimpered. He lowered himself down until his upper half was in her lap, something he had not done since he was a puppy. “What happened?”
What had happened was that the palace had disappeared, the lass thought, looking around. She and her wolf were deep in a forest somewhere. Judging by the thickness of the trees, they were far from the ice plain. Or perhaps they were right in the middle of the ice plain, but the trolls had taken away the palace and replaced it with this forest as part of her punishment.
“I saw him,” the lass told Rollo. “I lit a candle, and I looked at him.”
“Who?” He raised his head and looked at her.
She looked off through the trees, but didn’t really see them. “I think he was a prince. He was so handsome. Our isbjørn. Every day he was an isbjørn, and every night he was human and lay beside me. If I could have gone one year and one day without looking at him, without being curious and asking too many questions, it would have broken the enchantment. But I looked, and now he’s gone.”
Rollo whimpered. “Gone where?”
“To a castle east of the sun and west of the moon,” she said, remembering the words as clearly as if they had been written on the inside of her eyelids. “To marry her.
“Hans Peter did this as well,” she continued after a long silence. “He was an isbjørn, and Tova was the girl who had to lay with him and not look. But she looked, too. I guess we always look.”
“But Hans Peter didn’t marry the troll, did he?”
“I don’t know.” She reached over to her parka, Hans Peter’s parka, which lay to one side of the knapsack. “But I think that Tova did this, this embroidery, to change the spell. She must have found this somewhere and done it, to help him get away.”
Another long silence. The lass was very cold, sitting in the snow in just her nightshift, but didn’t want to move. Finally a shiver took her unawares, and she sneezed. It reminded her of the sneeze last night, the sneeze that had spilled the wax and woken the prince. She got to her feet and shucked off her wet shift.
Rollo scrambled to his feet and stared at her. “What are you doing?”
She opened up her knapsack and pulled out a clean shift, a heavy velvet skirt, and a vest of stiff brocade. “We’re going to find him,” she declared, dressing as quickly as she could.
“I did this,” the lass went on as she fastened the ties of Hans Peter’s parka. “I caused the deaths of Erasmus, Mrs. Grey, and Fiona. I caused the poor isbjørn”—a sob shook her—“my isbjørn, to be taken away, and now he’ll be forced to marry a troll. I caused it, and I’m going to fix it.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I never even knew his name,” she said in a whisper. “I should have asked his name.”
“All right,” Rollo said finally. “Which way do we go?”
“What’s east of the sun and west of the moon?”
“Nothing.”
“If it’s easter than east and wester than west, it must be north,” she reasoned. She was thinking of the globe from the library, the one she had recently hurled through a window. The top of the globe was a white disc of gleaming opal where her reading had told her “no man lived.” No man, perhaps, but trolls might.
“Or south,” Rollo interjected.
“But trolls don’t like to be warm,” the lass reminded him. “So it must be north. The lands to the south are all deserts, like the one the salamanders came from.” That thought brought her up short. “The salamanders!”
“What? Where?” Rollo looked around in confusion.
“Not here,” she sighed. “What if everyone who was in the ice palace is dead now, because of me?”
Rollo gave an inarticulate whine.
“We have to stop this,” the lass said. “There will be no more deaths.” Her heart thudded. “And I don’t want her to have him.”
She began to march. A little while later the thought came to her that the servants wouldn’t be put to death just because she looked at the prince. Tova had looked, and the servants hadn’t been harmed. This cheered her, and she was able to walk in a faster rhythm.
When her legs screamed with fatigue and she was sweating beneath her parka, they stopped. Rollo went off after a rabbit whose tracks they had seen, while the lass ate some bread and cheese. She sucked handfuls of clean snow to quench her thirst. When Rollo came back, looking pleased and licking his chops, they went on.
For a day and a night and a day they walked, seeing no one. They came across a fox, and a wolf who could have been Rollo’s twin. The lass called out to them, but they sniffed at her and then ran.
“We smell of troll,” Rollo said, grim.
“It doesn’t matter,” the lass said, and walked on.
They traveled for another day, another night, and another day. The lass ate the last of the food the salamanders had given her, and was forced to stop and build a fire to cook the rabbits that Rollo caught. Every moment that she sat by her little fires, every time she lay down to sleep because her body could go no farther, her mind and heart raced, thinking of her lost companion and the horrors he might be facing. She would clamber upright as soon as she could, and march on.
After two weeks of this, as near as she could reckon, the lass expected any moment to come through a cluster of trees and find a fabulous palace. Perhaps of ice, perhaps of gold or ivory or silver, but gleaming and grand and dangerous, whatever it was built of. She felt certain that the
y must be nearing the top of the world, where the trolls’ palace simply had to be.
She did not expect, deep in the frozen woods, to find a weird little hut made of turf bricks with an old woman sitting in front of it, paring apples.
“Morn’a,” the old woman said cheerfully.
“Morn’a, moster,” the lass said politely.
“‘Moster? ’” The crone cackled with glee. “I like that! ‘Moster! ’ No one’s called me ‘moster’ in years!” She dropped her paring knife in her lap and slapped her thigh. “And I’m old enough to be your moster’s moster’s moster’s moster’s moster, besides!” She wiped tears from her eyes, still laughing.
“She’s insane,” Rollo said, hunching against the lass’s legs. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not insane, you young pup,” the crone said, picking up her knife and shaking it at him. “I’m just starved for fresh company!” She cackled some more. “Set down your pack and have some apples,” she invited in a calmer voice, though still cracked and thin with age.
The lass was footsore, and it had been hours since breakfast. Thinking that anyone who could speak Wolf could not be all bad, she set down the knapsacks on the cleared space in front of the hut and sat on a stump opposite the old woman. Rollo, more cautious, came and stood beside her, not taking his eyes off the crone.
“Can I help?” The lass took off her mittens and loosened the ties of her parka.
“Surely, child.” The crone took another knife out of the pocket of her apron and handed it to the lass.
Taking up an apple and beginning to peel it, the lass stole glances at the woman across from her. She was the oldest person the lass had ever laid eyes on. Her wrinkles had wrinkles. Her hair was as white as the snow, but very thin, and scraped back into a small bun that was mostly covered by a little red bonnet. She wore a bunad, or rather, several bunader. The lass could see at least four skirts in various states of raggedness peeping out from the hem of the uppermost one. She had on three vests, too, which explained how she could sit outside in the snow without a parka.