The lass stopped and read what had been written to the impatient Rollo. This last part made her catch her breath.
Father’s good luck?
Day after you left, the first tree he cut down had a treasure inside it. A steel chest of gold coins that had been buried next to the tree when it was a sapling. The tree had grown up around it, hiding it until Father came along.
The lass was very pleased about this. She knew that it would grate on her father’s pride to prosper solely because of Askeladden. Now he could boast (not that he ever would) of his own wealth.
Oh, I am so glad,
she wrote.
Hans Peter replied,
What of you?
I hazard that you know what my life is. I live in a palace of ice.
It is as I feared.
You were here, weren’t you?
My cowardice has cursed us all. I am sorry, sister.
What do you mean? What happened to you?
There was nothing for a long while, and the lass feared that Hans Peter had gone away and left the book, too sick inside to even respond. She paced the floor in anguish, turning every five paces to look at the book again, willing more writing to appear. When it finally did, she ran to the desk so fast that she stubbed her toe on the chair. She had to hop around and curse for a minute before the tears cleared and she could read.
I cannot say. Even after all these years and all this distance,
I cannot say. Her power is too strong. I am sorry, sister, but you must stumble in the dark as my Tova did.
“Tova?” The lass blinked and looked down at Rollo. “Who is Tova?”
“I don’t know,” he responded, scratching at her foot impatiently. “Ask him.”
She was beautiful,
Hans Peter wrote in a shaking hand,
and kind. You would have loved her. She is gone now. I can hear Rolf Simonson hailing me. I shall have Father write to you this evening when he returns.
And her father did, joyfully begging for news of her well-being and relating the happenings of home. The gold that Jarl had found had allowed him to send proper dowries to his married daughters.
That’s wonderful, Father,
the lass wrote.
I am glad that you are all doing so well.
It was late now, and she was already in her nightshift. During supper she had told the
isbjørn
about her conversation with Hans Peter, omitting the mysterious Tova and the talk of his curse. The bear had been pleased that his gift had delighted her, but again warned her not to speak of it in front of anyone else. Whenever Fiona had come in to serve one of the courses, the bear had changed the subject.
Once more, Erasmus was not to be seen.
The lass and Jarl wrote back and forth for some time that night, each desperately trying to sound cheerful and pretend that they were chatting over the table. Jarl promised that he
would bring Jorunn in on the secret when she visited next, and have her write to the lass as well.
Elated but tired, the lass closed the little book and climbed into the big bed. Her mind was so busy turning over the events of the day that she hardly noticed when the strange man came and got into bed beside her. When a snore alerted her to his presence, she merely reached over and gave him a poke, much as she would have done to one of her sisters. He rolled over, and they both went to sleep.
Now that the lass had unlocked the troll language—and had learned that it
was
the troll language—she could not stop searching for answers. She scoured the palace for more carvings and embroidery, and then turned to the library. Finding a blank book, she began to record what she had learned about the troll princess, the fauns, herself, and Hans Peter.
She located a Norsk dictionary and marked the troll counterparts to the words in the margins. Doing this made her realize how limited her troll vocabulary was, but she decided that such words as “ambidextrous” and “penultimate” were useless to her anyway.
“Unless I ever meet the second-to-last troll, and he can use both hands equally well,” she mused aloud, with a snicker.
“Pardon me, my lady?”
The lass jumped, slamming the dictionary shut. She turned, guilty at being caught defacing a book, and saw the housekeeper, Mrs. Grey. The gargoyle was standing in the doorway of the library with a long feather duster in
one hand. She didn’t appear at all concerned that the lass had been writing in one of the books, and the girl relaxed.
“Hello, Mrs. Grey,” the lass said. She put the book behind her back anyway. “How are you today?” She really wished that people would stop sneaking up on her.
“Very well, thank you, my lady,” Mrs. Grey said. She hovered in the doorway, looking uncertain. “Shall I go to another room, my lady?”
“Not at all.” The lass made an expansive gesture. “I don’t want to stand in the way of your duties.” It had just occurred to her that she had not spoken to the rest of the staff since she had met them.
The lass went over to a chair by the window and sat down. The ice windows were much clearer than the yellowy, bubbly glass that the lass was used to. Unfortunately, the only thing there was to see out of any of them was an endless plain of white snow.
The housekeeper hunched her shoulders self-consciously as she went about the room. At first her dusting efforts were only perfunctory, but as the lass sat humming and writing in the dictionary, Mrs. Grey seemed to relax. Her cleaning became more thorough, and her shoulders unknotted.
The lass struck: “Mrs. Grey, where are you from?”
“Pardon?” The duster clattered onto a side table.
“Where do you come from? You weren’t born here in the palace, I’ll wager.” The lass smiled at her.
“No, I wasn’t.” The housekeeper picked up her duster with a firm grip, like it was a sword.
“Where, then? I’m sure I’ve never seen any . . . person . . . like yourself in the North.”
“I’m from south of there,” Mrs. Grey said primly.
“Where? Danemark?”
“No.”
“Prussia?”
“No.”
“Italia?”
The housekeeper sighed and looked at her. “My lady, if it will end this questioning: I am from France.”
“Really?” The lass put aside her dictionary and sat forward. “What is it like there? Are your . . . kind . . . common in France?”
Mrs. Grey’s eyes misted over. “It’s as different from the North as turnips and oranges,” she said softly. “My people are fairly populous: the French build a great many churches, and we live in the belfries.”
The lass cast aside the rather disconcerting image of being watched at prayer by a family of gray, winged things. “Don’t you want to go back there?” she asked.
Her spine straightening, Mrs. Grey turned back to her work. “That doesn’t matter,” she said. She finished dusting quickly and left without another word.
The lass wondered what it would be like to be from Frankrike, as she had grown up calling it. “Frahnce,” she
said aloud, savoring the word the way that Mrs. Grey had. Would it be strange, she thought, to be from France? No stranger than having gray skin and bat wings, she supposed.
“It would be stranger to be under a troll spell, I suppose,” she told Rollo later. She was sitting on the floor in the middle of her dressing room again, carefully sewing the blue ribbons back onto the parka. She felt guilty about defacing her beloved older brother’s property.
“At least we aren’t yet,” Rollo said darkly.
“How do you know?” The lass was curious. She didn’t feel cursed, but who knew what that felt like? Rollo had sounded completely certain, though.
“Because I tried to leave the palace,” Rollo explained. “I got quite a ways before I thought I’d better come back.” He yawned, showing his long white teeth. “But I didn’t feel anything forcing me back. So I think that we’re free to go.”
“
You
are,” she said primly. “But I gave my word that I wouldn’t leave.”
“And I gave my word to your brother that I would stay with you,” the wolf countered. “So I shan’t leave you, even if you are enchanted. But I don’t think that you are. You don’t smell like the others.”
“That’s because I’m the only human,” she said with a shrug. She went back to her sewing.
“No, it’s because you’re not enchanted,” Rollo argued. “Everyone here smells different, that’s true enough. But there’s also another smell, over their regular smell.
That rotting meat smell.” His long nose wrinkled. “You don’t smell that way, though.”
“But the servants do?”
“And the
isbjørn.
”
“Maybe they just don’t bathe,” the lass said, but it was only a halfhearted joke. She believed Rollo; his nose was too keen. “So I
don’t
have to stay.”
“Only to honor your word,” Rollo agreed. “Which, as you know, is a completely arbitrary custom,” he added.
“A ‘completely arbitrary custom’?” The lass looked at Rollo in amusement. “Who taught you that?”
“Hans Peter told me that before we left,” Rollo said. “He said to use it if things got bad; to help convince you it was all right to leave. And if you still wouldn’t come, I’m supposed to bite you.” He sounded uncomfortable.
They were both silent while they digested this information. For Hans Peter to tell Rollo to bite their beloved lass meant that he expected dire things indeed.
“Well, he
has
been here before,” the lass pointed out. She grimaced. “It makes me wonder how bad things were for him, that he would even suggest it. Something tells me he wasn’t draped in satin and fed such wonderful food.”
At the mention of food, Rollo’s stomach growled. “I have been out running on the snow plain all day,” he said with great dignity. “And it is time for supper.”
“Very true.”
So they joined the
isbjørn
for supper. The lass had read a
play that the
isbjørn
had recommended, and they discussed it at length. The lass thought that the main female character was too histrionic, but the
isbjørn
argued that when the part was performed right, it was very moving. The lass wanted to know where a bear would have seen a play, and the
isbjørn
changed the subject to poetry, of which he was also fond. The lass knew only a few of the old eddas, so the bear suggested some modern poets for her to try. She promised to read one of them aloud to him at luncheon the next day, and they said their goodnights.
When the lass undressed and went to bed, she checked her little magic book one last time, but there were no new messages from her family. She tucked it under her pillow, along with the diary and the dictionary she was making, and went to sleep.
Tonight her midnight visitor did not snore. During a dream, however, the lass kicked him, then found herself half-awake and patting him on the shoulder in apology. He just grunted, and she rolled over and went back to sleep.
The days passed in much the same way after that. The lass would read and discuss poetry and novels with the
isbjørn;
she would make notes in her diary and dictionary and meticulously search the palace for clues. She started visiting the kitchens and talking with the other servants, and continued to be waited on in her rooms by Fiona the sullen selkie.
She learned that the minotaurus was from a small island near Greece, and that Erasmus was from another Greek island. She discovered that Mrs. Grey looked as if she had been carved of stone because she really
was
made of stone, and that she would sometimes sit on the top of the palace for days, not moving or even breathing, completely unaffected by the weather.
None of this told the lass how the servants had come to be here, although one of the salamanders did let something slip about Fiona’s vanity being her downfall. Unlike the story of Erasmus’s beloved Narella, the trolls had not felt it necessary to carve the others’ stories into the walls of the palace. The trolls, or Hans Peter.
“I remember your brother,” one of the salamanders announced one day. “He was very tall.”
The salamander came only to the lass’s knee, so she supposed that everyone was tall to him, but in this case he was correct. “Yes, he is tall.”
“Is? Is he still living?” The salamander was plainly astonished.
“Yes, of course.” The lass was startled by the assumption that he wouldn’t be.
“Well, how interesting!” It scampered back to the big kitchen fire and held a hissed conference with the three others. “How interesting,” it repeated, climbing back out of the fire.
“What else do you remember about my brother?” Then something occurred to her. She had thought that only Erasmus knew that Hans Peter was her brother. “How did you know that my brother had been here?”
The salamanders exchanged sly looks. “The faun told us,” another said, also coming out of the fire. The lass had trouble telling them apart, but that didn’t seem to bother them. “But we haven’t told anyone else.”
“No, not safe,” the first agreed. It looked around, but they were the only ones in the kitchen. “Erasmus knew we wouldn’t tell.”
“That’s very kind of you. Now, what was it that you remember? Anything . . . interesting?”
“He liked to read, when he could, and to carve. He
studied the books in the libraries, then carved things into the mantel. Not the pillars, though.”
“Who carved those?”
“Some of it has always been here, longer even than we,” said the third salamander. It had a higher, softer voice than the others, and the lass suspected that it was a female. “And some was carved by one of the other poor humans.”
The other two salamanders shushed her and they all ran back to their fire. They wouldn’t say anything more, so the lass went back upstairs.
Every morning after breakfast she would write to her father and Hans Peter, and they would write back. That morning when she opened the book, there was already a message waiting for her, this time from Jorunn.
Dear sister,
it said,
I am sorry to tell you this, but Father has been badly hurt.
The lass gasped, and held the book closer to her eyes, as though that would help her read faster: