“Let’s just get back to the palace so that I can have a bath,” she grumped to Rollo as they waited in the little copse of trees outside the city. Askel and Torst had driven her there, but she had made them leave at once, knowing that the
isbjørn
would be shy of her brothers.
“You came,” the
isbjørn
said, coming out of the trees as though summoned by her thoughts.
Despite her rash and her bad mood, her stomach fluttered when she saw the bear, and she couldn’t stop a smile from spreading across her face. “Of course,” she said. “I gave my word!” And she scrambled onto his back without being invited, kicking his ribs with her heels as if he were a horse. “Let’s go.” She rubbed at her chest, willing it to stop itching.
The bear rumbled something that might have been a laugh or a complaint, and began to run. Rollo came after, tongue lolling in anticipation. They were going home.
Back at the palace, things soon settled into their old routine. The lass would read and try to teach herself the troll language. She and the
isbjørn
would have their meals together and talk, and sometimes she would ride on his back as he raced Rollo across the snow plain. Whenever she thought the bear or one of the servants was off his or her guard, she would blurt out a question and try to surprise them into answering.
She didn’t make much progress, though. The servants and the
isbjørn
were all accustomed to her startling questions, and they remained silent on the topic of trolls or enchantment.
But not everything was back the way it used to be. She knew that she had upset Erasmus with her questions, but she had hoped that in time he would shake off his fears and wait on her again. Fiona was hardly a cheery companion, and the lass knew that Rollo missed Erasmus as well.
“Mrs. Grey?” The housekeeper was folding linens at one end of the long kitchen table. “Where is Erasmus? I’ve been
back from my visit for over a month, and yet I haven’t seen him. Is he angry with me?”
The housekeeper’s sturdy, gray-skinned hands closed on the napkin she was folding, crumpling it into a tiny ball. Her stone eyes closed, and she breathed heavily through her nostrils. This made them flare, taking the gargoyle’s face from merely homely to downright hideous.
The lass drew back. “Mrs. Grey?” The salamanders stopped cavorting in the kitchen fire. Garth dropped the knife he had been sharpening and lurched out of the kitchen with a muttered oath.
Mrs. Grey’s hands unclenched. Her nails had gone right through the fine linen of the napkin. She smoothed it out, surveyed the holes, and then tossed it into the fire, where one of the salamanders turned it to ash with a burst of breath. The housekeeper flexed the gray wings that were always folded against her back, something the lass had never seen her do. When they had settled again, Mrs. Grey looked at the lass and said, “Erasmus is no longer here.”
“Where is he?”
“He is no longer here,” Mrs. Grey said again. She cleared her throat, a sound like rocks tumbling in a barrel. “Perhaps you should not spend so much time in the kitchen with the staff, my lady. It isn’t seemly.”
Knowing that she was being dismissed, the lass got to her feet and left the kitchen. She went upstairs and found Rollo lying in front of the fire in the great hall. She looked
at the carving on the mantel, but she’d read it so many times it was a blur. Poking Rollo in the ribs with her toe, she went up to her apartment and checked the blank diary to see if there was any news, but no one had written that day. Hans Peter had not written at all since she returned.
“Well, I’ll just
make
him write,” she grumbled.
Sitting at the elegant little ice desk, the lass took up her pen. She wrote a note at the top of the page, apologizing to Jorunn because what followed was for Hans Peter’s eyes only. Then she described Mrs. Grey’s words, her sudden agitation, the salamanders’ silence, and the minotaurus’s abrupt departure.
I know that Erasmus was here when you were here, and so were the others
, she wrote.
Do you know where Erasmus might have gone? I don’t think he returned to his home. But did he run away? I’m concerned about him.
She signed the page with a flourish and closed the diary. Feeling much better, she went into the dressing room and took down a green gown she wanted to refit. She had never cared much about clothing before, having never really had any to call her own. But now that she had endless supplies of beautiful gowns, she was becoming vain.
She held up the gown for Rollo to see. “Whoever these used to belong to was frighteningly tall, don’t you think?” When she held the dress high enough so that the skirt didn’t puddle on the ground, the bodice was over her head.
“Frighteningly tall,” she said again, freezing. “Wealthy.
Vain.” She dropped the gown as though it had burned her. The bodice, heavy with gold bullion embroidery, landed on Rollo’s head, and he yelped.
“Why did you do that?” Backing out from under the gown, the wolf shook himself.
“It’s a troll’s gown.” She looked at herself in the tall mirrors, seeing the pale blue morning gown she wore in a whole new light. “They’re all troll’s gowns.” She gave Rollo an accusing look. “Does this have the smell?”
“Er. Well. They also have a flower smell, from those little bags of dried petals hanging in the wardrobe,” he told her soothingly. Then he added, “With a little hint of rotten meat.”
“Bleah!”
The lass ripped the lace of her blue gown in her haste to get it off. She shed her shift and ran into the washroom to fill the bath with water as hot as she could stand. She scrubbed herself raw and then stood in the middle of the dressing room, wrapped in a towel, staring at the doors of all the wardrobes. In the end, with a sigh, she put on one of her old ragged sweaters and much-mended skirt.
“You smell better,” Rollo said, nudging her hand in a consoling way. “Like your old self.”
“That’s good, at least. Still, I wish there were some clothes here that hadn’t been worn by a troll. There must be something that used to belong to a selkie or a faun or what have you!”
She began pulling gowns out of the wardrobes, piling them onto the floor in the middle of the room. She made a careful stack of her own things: Hans Peter’s parka and boots, her other sweater and skirt, her trousers.
One of the troll gowns caught on something as she yanked it out of the wardrobe, and ripped. Cursing, the lass reached in and felt around, and felt a sharp chunk of loose ice at the back. She lifted it aside and found a bundle shoved into a hiding space between the wardrobe and the wall.
It was a knapsack not unlike the one Mrs. Grey had given the lass. Inside she found a linen shift with long, full sleeves embroidered with flowers, a dark wool skirt and red vest, and a pair of scuffed leather shoes. All the things were worn soft, of good quality but not expensive. What horrified the lass was that they had obviously belonged to a girl of about the same size as she. Where had the owner of the clothing gone?
Underneath these everyday clothes was the worst thing of all. Wrapped in muslin was a wedding
bunad
that had never been worn. It was gorgeous, but in a far different way than the heavy velvet skirts and pearl-encrusted bodices of the troll gowns. The skirt of the
bunad
was black wool, with a deep hem of embroidery in bands of red and blue and green and yellow. The red vest had silver buttons up the front, and the white blouse was of fabric as fine as gauze. There was even a set of silver earrings, and a circular brooch with dangling medallions. There were white
stockings and a pair of black buckled shoes that were too stiff to have ever been worn.
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.
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.