They stopped in front of a door made of silver and set with pearls. The princess threw it open and gestured for the lass to enter. Timid, she and Rollo stepped into the room. The door slammed shut behind them.
“You will stay in this room until dawn, and then I will fetch you,” Princess Indæll called through the door.
“I don’t like her,” Rollo said when the princess’s footsteps had faded away.
The lass just snorted, taking off her parka and outer boots. Her Highness, the Princess Indæll, was ugly, overdressed, and cruel. “She’s a troll.”
Together they explored the prince’s chambers. They were in a large sitting room, richly furnished. Beyond, they found a bedchamber and a washroom. It was much like her apartments at the palace of ice, though here everything was made of gold and inlaid with jewels. There were books on a footstool near the fireplace, in Norsk and Tysk, and a game of chess was under way on a small table by the windows. In the bedchamber, the lass
found a single dark hair on one of the pillows. She wound the hair around the top button of her vest, thinking of how she had saved Tova’s hair the same way.
This sobered her even more than the situation already had. She settled in an armchair in the sitting room with Rollo at her feet. She tried to read one of the books from the footstool, and he dozed lightly. She could tell it was only lightly, because his ears moved to follow the sound of any footsteps in the corridor, no matter how faint.
The gold clock on the mantel was chiming two o’clock when the silver door opened. The lass had been nodding over her book despite her nerves, and now the sound startled her awake. She and Rollo were on their feet in an instant, the book slithering down her skirts to the floor.
A centaur entered the room. Thrown across the horse part of his body was the prince. He was facedown, his arms hanging down one side and his legs on the other.
“Is he dead?” The lass clutched at the front of her vest. Her knees were shaking and she felt her lower lip tremble.
The centaur gave her a strange look, equal parts pity and worry. “No, he’s just . . . asleep.” He paced through the sitting room and into the bedchamber. The lass and Rollo followed. With a small buck and a roll, the centaur flipped the prince off his back and onto the bed. “My lady,” he murmured, bowing. He left.
The lass approached the bed on quiet feet. Rollo stayed
by the door to give her privacy. With a shaking hand, she reached out and took hold of the prince’s shoulder.
“Wake up . . . Your Highness,” she said softly.
He didn’t stir.
She shook his shoulder, and said, louder this time, “Wake up, my
isbjørn
!”
No reaction.
For the next few hours until dawn, the lass and Rollo tried everything to wake the prince. The lass shouted and shook him, Rollo licked his face and even bit his shoulder gently. She pounded on the outer door, begging for help, but no one came. She poured the ewer of water from the washstand over his head, but the prince did not stir. When Princess Indæll came to collect them, the lass was huddled on the bed by his side, clutching his hand and weeping. The princess smiled smugly as the lass gathered up her parka and boots and pack.
“I have something else,” the lass said in a small voice as they crossed the entrance hall. She dropped her pack and fished out the golden carding combs. Taking up the ball of uncarded wool the
moster
had given her, she demonstrated the technique with shaking hands.
The troll princess was fascinated. Other members of the court gathered around to watch as well, their rancid breath and glowing eyes making her feel faint.
“Come back at sunset,” Princess Indæll ordered after a few minutes. “You shall card the wool fine for me, and then
I shall keep the combs. In return you may spend another night in the prince’s chambers.”
Numb, the lass nodded and put away the combs and wool. The cold outside the palace was like a slap in the face. She felt her eyebrows and lashes freeze instantly, the skin on her forehead tightening. Shrugging into her parka, the lass tramped back around the palace to her little cave. She crawled in and fell asleep with her head on Rollo’s flank.
The next night was much the same. After Princess Indæll and several dozen of her court had watched the lass card the wool into a neat twist, the princess left her in the prince’s chambers. The lass was still reeling from seeing the queen peering at her from the doorway to the ballroom: she was more frightening than her daughter. The lass couldn’t even pretend to read while she waited for the prince to appear, and when he did, he was unconscious across the back of the same centaur.
The centaur rolled him onto the bed, bowed to the lass, and left again. She tried to stop the centaur, to ask him what was going on, and even dared to touch his arm and then his horselike flank, but he would not look at her. His eyes straight ahead, he paced out of the room, shutting the door and bolting it despite her pleas.
“Well! No help there,” she said to Rollo. She remembered the compassion in the centaur’s eyes from the night before, though. “Probably under threat of death if he talks to me,” she reasoned.
She and Rollo spent another night trying to wake the
prince. They pulled his hair, and the lass slapped him as hard as she could, although it brought tears to her eyes to do it. He did not respond, and for their last hour together, the lass simply lay beside him and reveled in the familiar sound of his breath.
The troll princess came to fetch them at dawn, her smile even broader. The lass was too exhausted and out of sorts to remember the spindle until she had been shut out of the palace. She and Rollo went to their nest, but neither could sleep. They had only one more night.
After a restless hour the lass got up, stripped, and scrubbed herself with snow. Her hands and feet were blue and her joints ached with cold by the time she was done, but she did it all the same. She put on the cleanest of her shifts and stockings, her favorite blue skirt and scarlet vest, and then put the parka over it all. She brushed her hair until it shone, and plaited it in a four-strand braid that Tordis had taught her. Leaving her pack with Rollo, who thought she was crazy, she took the gold spindle and the hank of wool she had carded the day before and went to sit under Indæll’s window.
She scraped the hard snow flat to give her a place to drop the spindle. Then she rolled a large snowball for a seat. Arranging her skirts neatly, she took the wool and began to spin.
The window behind her creaked open a few minutes later, but the lass didn’t turn around. She forced herself to keep on spinning, and even hummed a little.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?”
The voice was female and speaking Norsk, but it was not Princess Indæll’s. It sounded human, and young. Surprised, the lass stopped spinning and turned around.
Dressed in blue livery with an embroidered scarlet ribbon at her neck, a young woman leaned out the window of the princess’s chambers. Hair so fair it was almost white was braided into a coronet around her head, and she had the milky skin and rosy cheeks of the North. Her wide blue eyes held a touch of humor, and her mouth was caught between gaping and smiling.
“Oh, no! You too?” she said when she got a good look at the lass.
“Tova?” The lass gasped. “Is it really you?”
The blue eyes widened even farther. “How did you know my name?” Then her eyes fixed on the white parka that the lass wore, and the roses disappeared from her cheeks. “Where did you get that parka?”
“It belongs to my brother, Hans Peter.”
“Are you—why, you must be the youngest, the little pika!”
Tova hoisted herself up and over the windowsill and half fell into the lass’s arms. They hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks and cried.
“I feel as though I know you,” they both said at the same time.
This set them to laughing and crying again. Tova demanded to know where Hans Peter was and how he
fared; the lass wanted to know why Tova was working at the palace.
Sobered by the question, and by the news that Hans Peter was safely at home but still haunted by his enchantment, Tova sank down on the snow beside the lass. She reached out and fingered the embroidery on the white parka.
“I changed the embroidery to make it so that Hans Peter could escape from
her
,” Tova said. “But I’d never done magic before and didn’t think that it had worked. I came here, looking for him, and was caught.” She shrugged. “I thought, too, that I might be able to break the hold on your brother completely.” She pointed to some of the embroidery that ran along one sleeve. “It’s a curse: not even in death will he be free. She wants them to love her, to think only of her, forever.”
“You’re so good!” The lass clasped Tova’s hands, a fresh wave of tears running down her cheeks. “I’d like to do the same thing, but if you have been here for years and haven’t made any progress. . . .” The lass sighed, feeling even more hopeless than she had earlier. “I didn’t even guess that the bear and the man in my bed were the same person.”
Tova giggled at this. “Hans Peter talks in his sleep. I would say things to him and he would answer, thinking it was part of his dream.”
“Oh.” The lass thought about this. “That explains why Torst and Askel always complained about having to share a bed with him.”
Tova laughed again. She had a merry spirit, despite the shadow in her eyes. The lass estimated that she had been in service to the trolls for nearly ten years. She must have been nearing her thirtieth birthday, for all her youthful looks.
“And then we passed notes to each other as well,” Tova said, lowering her voice. “When he was human, just before he would come into my bedchamber, he would leave a letter in the sitting room. And I would leave one for him there as well. The servants never knew, or the princess would have found out.” She paused, smiling in reminiscence. “Did you never find your prince’s parka?”
“
His
parka?”
Tova plucked at the white fur cuff. “This is Hans Peter’s; your prince has one as well. If we could change his, the way I changed this one, he could get free. But there isn’t much time; they’re to be married tomorrow noon.”
“Wait, you mean—?” The lass felt even more foolish than she had before. “This is what
causes
the transformation?”
“Didn’t you know?”
The lass only blushed in reply, then a thought struck her. “How is it that
she
can make such fine parkas, if she cannot even card wool?”
“Trolls can’t make anything,” Tova said, shaking her head. “They aren’t natural creatures: they can only destroy.”
“Erasmus said something about that, that they cannot make things, which is why they are so fascinated by human
tools.” The lass swallowed. “And I’ve heard the legends about their . . . palaces. Rollo, my pet wolf, said that the ice palace smelled of rancid meat.”
“It’s true,” Tova said, her nose wrinkled with disgust. “They take thousands of lives, filled with the creative forces they don’t have, to build a palace like this. He’s probably smelling the . . . evilness of it.
“
She
doesn’t sew the parkas and boots, either,” Tova continued. “A servant does, and from the pelt of her last husband, no less.”
They both shuddered.
“Then she enchants the ribbon and has it sewn on.” Tova reached out to finger one of the embroidered bands.
The lass shook her head; trolls were beyond her ken. “But Hans Peter’s pelt . . . ? Hans Peter is still alive.”
“She used the scraps from the one before, the same one this parka is made from,” Tova explained, her expression dark. “I had to help the gargoyle who made it. It was terrible.”
“Why don’t you leave?” This had been bothering the lass since she recognized Tova. “Hans Peter isn’t here; why don’t you go?”
Tova pointed to the ribbon around her neck. “This. All their servants wear one. It’s how they know where we are and what we’re doing. It’s too close to the skin to alter. Some of the other servants have volunteered to let me experiment with theirs, but it hasn’t worked.” She opened
her mouth to say something else, closed it, shook her head, and then said it anyway: “A naiad, a faun, and a centaur all asked me to try with their collars. They died.”
“Oh, no,” the lass gasped, and put her arm around Tova. “At least you tried to free them,” she consoled her. She hesitated and then plunged ahead. “Do you think that you could alter my prince’s parka?”
“We’ll have to hurry. You’re not allowed in during the day?”
“No, but I’ve been bartering things for a chance to be with him at night. He won’t wake, though!”
“She puts something in his wine at night so that he will sleep,” Tova said. “She’s taking more precautions since Hans Peter got away.”
“Why does she toy with them this way? Why the year of being an
isbjørn,
and why were we there with them?”
“A good question,” Tova said. “It took me two years to find someone who could answer it. It seems that the first human prince she ever married extracted a promise from her, that she would give him and anyone who came after a way out. If the prince can find someone to stay with him as a beast by day and a silent, unseen man by night, to live that way for a whole year, then he can go free.”
“It seems almost crueler than just stealing them away and marrying them right off,” the lass said.
“That’s their nature,” Tova said simply. “I’m not allowed to speak to your prince. But I prepare his meal
trays. I can hide a note on one and warn him not to drink any wine tonight. And I’ll see if I can’t find his parka. It was more luck than cleverness that I found your brother’s. He kept me awake, talking in his sleep, and as I paced one night I tripped over it.”
“But how did you know what this said?” The lass fingered the embroidery. “It wouldn’t have meant anything to me, except Hans Peter had taught me the troll symbols.”
“My father was the captain of the
Sea Dragon
,” Tova explained. “He had run afoul of trolls before, and had taught me the runes, as he calls them.”
“Did he teach Hans Peter?”