Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow (25 page)

“Most likely. They were stuck in the ice for many days before the troll princess found them. Most of the crew were dead.” Tova’s face grew sad. “I visited my parents a few months after I went to live in the palace of ice. My father thought that Hans Peter had died as well.”

The lass put one hand over Tova’s to comfort her. “Of course,” Tova went on, “my father is now a rich merchant who owns many ships.” Her voice was bitter.

Before the lass could answer, both young women were startled to hear a troll calling from inside the palace. “Hey, you! Lackwit!”

“That’s me,” Tova said with a tight smile.

They embraced again. Tova scrambled up the bank of snow beneath the window and the lass gave her a push to
help her back in. “Sorry,” she called, when Tova tumbled head over heels onto the floor of Princess Indæll’s sitting room.

With a laugh, Tova leaped to her feet and shook down her skirts. “I’m all right.” She looked around quickly. “I’ll leave this window open. Keep spinning so that you can make your bargain for tonight. If
she
doesn’t come by in the next few minutes, I’ll figure out a way to lure her. And I’ll get a note to the prince.” She bounded off to answer the ever-more-shrill summons. The lass sat back down and began to spin.

After a little while, Rollo came wandering over. “Are you still just sitting there? Hasn’t anything happened? It’s been hours!”

“Rollo!” The lass dropped her spinning and reached out to take hold of his ruff. She was so excited that she kissed him on the nose, which made him sneeze. “I can’t wait to tell you—”

“You can and will wait to tell him,” rasped a voice behind her. “For now, you will keep on spinning.”

The lass whirled, but the window behind her was still empty. She heard a cough like rock being rubbed on a steel file from above her head. Looking up, her whole body went numb. The windows of the second story were full of trolls. It seemed that the entire court, save only the princess herself, was gathered to watch the lass. The order, and the cough, had come from the queen herself.
She pointed an imperious finger at the lass. “Continue. And face us, this time.”

Shaking, the lass did as she was bid. When the spindle was wound with a more or less even thread, the lass held it up for the court to admire. They applauded and began to drift away from the windows. When it looked like the queen might also leave, the lass gave a deep curtsy.

“Your Majesty, a favor?”

“What is this?” The queen scowled at her.

“Your Majesty is so wise,” the lass said carefully, “she surely knows that I have bartered my wealth and skill to spend the past two nights with Princess Indæll’s betrothed.”

“I had heard.” The queen’s red-lacquered nails tapped on the windowsill.

“I thought that, since Your Majesty has gotten so much pleasure in watching me spin, I . . . might have . . . earned . . . another night? I will give Your Majesty this gold spindle, and the fine thread that I have made.”

“Very well.” The troll queen waved one hand. The spindle sprang from the lass’s grasp and flew to the queen. “Present yourself at the front doors at sunset.” Then she held up one finger in warning. “This will be the last time I allow such a thing, you understand. Tomorrow my daughter and the prince will be wed, and there will be no more dallying with human maids.”

“Of course. Your Majesty is very kind.” The lass curtsied again, and the window shut with a slam.

“Quick, back to our cave,” the lass said to Rollo.

“What? Why?”

The lass hiked up her skirts and started off at a run without seeing if he followed. “I don’t want the princess to see me standing there. She might demand that I give her something else, and I have nothing left but dirty shifts and snagged stockings. The last thing we need is for her to be angry at us tonight.”

“All right, but then will you tell me what happened while I was asleep?”

“Oh, yes, I’ll tell you everything. And then I need to try and sleep. It’s going to be another long night.”

Dressed in the best that she had left, the lass followed the queen and her daughter through the halls of the golden palace. They both smirked at her when they left her in his rooms, alone save for Rollo, but she smiled back.
This is going to work,
she told herself.

Again she was too nervous to read, and Rollo paced with her. After no more than an hour, Tova stuck her head into the sitting room, grinned at the lass, and told her that she had given him the note.

“And if he didn’t read it,” she whispered, “I may have found the antidote to the sleeping potion.”

“Thank you!”

“I have to go.” Tova winked and ducked back out of the room, closing the door behind her without a sound.

The lass’s heart sank when the centaur servant brought the limp prince into the room, just as he had the last two nights. But when he rolled the prince onto the bed, the centaur winked at the lass just as Tova had. He even reached down and patted Rollo’s head as he went out.

“Your Highness?” The lass shook the prince’s shoulder gently.

His eyes popped open, making the lass gasp. He grinned up at her. “Hello there, my lass.”

Without thinking, the lass threw herself into his arms. He caught her easily and they embraced. He kissed her cheeks and then her mouth, and she clung to him, laughing and crying as she had earlier with Tova. But this was very different.

“I can’t believe that you’re
my isbjørn,
” she said at last.

“I can’t believe that you came all this way,” he said. “How did you get here?”

“I rode on horses loaned to me by three old women who had also loved and lost the princess’s
isbjørner
. Then I rode the backs of the winds, east, west, south, then north, to reach this place.” She gasped, out of breath when she finished her recitation.

He squeezed her tightly. “Thank you a thousand times for coming so far. It’s more than I had hoped to be able to see you and speak to you as a man.” Then his dark brows drew together, his expression clouding. “But tomorrow I must marry Indæll.”

“There has to be a way out.”

He shook his head, his mouth a thin line. He shifted her so that she was sitting more comfortably on his lap, and she put her arm around his broad shoulders. “We’ll never get past the guards, even if we make it out of the palace. And there’s no way off the island.”

“We have to think of something. There must be a way out for us. And Tova.”

“Tova, the human chambermaid?”

“Yes. When my brother Hans Peter was the
isbjørn
who lived in the palace of ice, Tova was the girl who lived with him. She followed him here, but he had escaped.”

The prince’s eyebrows shot up. “How?”

“Tova altered the embroidery on his parka. I’ll show you.” She hopped off his lap and hurried into the other room, grabbing her parka off the chair where she had left it. The prince lit more candles in the bedchamber, and studied the embroidered bands closely.

“Ah, very clever. As an
isbjørn
I couldn’t see details like this very clearly.”

“Why didn’t you look at it in the night?”

“The enchantment. There was very little that I could do as a man, at night. Sleep would come over me quickly. It was all I could do to hide the candles before I slept.” He smiled at her, and her stomach flipped.

“I wish I was strong enough to defeat the trolls and see you safely away.” She remembered and snapped her fingers. “Do you have your parka? Tova can alter it.”

But he was already shaking his head. “It was taken from me as soon as I arrived.”

“There has to be a way,” she insisted. “The winds that brought me here, the old
mosters
who gave me gifts so that I could get inside, they all hope that I can defeat her. And my brother and Tova. They deserve to be happy.”

“And what of yourself? Don’t you deserve to be happy? Maybe it would be better for you to leave while you still can, so that you, at least, will be free.”

“I couldn’t live with myself, knowing that I had given up,” she said.

He nodded. “And that’s why I love you.”

Her breath caught. “You do?”

“After all those days talking to you about your family, and all those nights lying beside you, listening to you breathe . . . how could I not?”

They kissed again.

A knock and a cough from the open door to the sitting room separated them. Tova stood there, smiling with a wistful light in her blue eyes. “Hello?”

“Hello!” Embarrassed, the lass jumped to her feet.

“Tova?” The prince got to his feet with much more grace, but the lass was glad to see that he was blushing. “As you can see, I took your advice about the wine.”

“Excellent, Your Highness. I just hope that Indæll didn’t notice that you didn’t drink.”

“She didn’t.” He shook his head. “I kept emptying my goblet into a large vase at the back of the dais. Or I spilled it, pretending that it was already taking effect.”

“Bravo!” Tova clapped. She took a needle and thread out of the pocket of her apron and held them high. “I’ll see what I can do to help.”

But the lass and the prince shook their heads in unison.
“The only thing I have from my time as an
isbjørn
is this,” he said. He went to a chest and opened it. With a flourish, he drew out the soft linen nightshirt. On one shoulder was a yellow tallow stain. “Is there anything we can do with this?”

Tova’s mouth turned down. “I don’t know how to cast an enchantment, only alter one that already works.”

The lass couldn’t take her eyes off that stain. It loomed in her gaze, reminding her of that night: the smell of the herbs in the candle, the warmth of the bedchamber, the golden glow falling over the prince’s face. She thought of the palace of ice and the carvings there that she had pored over, looking for an answer.

“Oh. Oh, oh, oh!” She snapped her fingers to interrupt the prince and Tova, who were talking now about the possibility of the lass escaping alone.

“What is it?” The prince turned. “What’s wrong?”

“Troll weddings!” That was all the lass could think to say for a moment. In her mind she ran over everything she remembered from a certain pillar in the great hall of the ice palace. “Trolls can’t create with their hands!”

“That’s right,” the prince said, puzzled.

“Can they make things clean?” The lass looked to Tova for the answer. “There were washboards in the ice palace. And I thought I saw a copper washtub here.”

“You’re right,” Tova agreed. “But I don’t understand what this has to do with weddings. . . .”

“I deciphered a description of a wedding on a pillar at the ice palace,” the lass explained. “As part of the ceremony, the bride and groom ask each other to prove their suitability. The bride asked the groom to “provide for her,” so he slaughtered a bull. And he asked her to always be beautiful, or something like that, and she did a spell that made her beautiful, or more beautiful. I think it was the troll queen, and her consort.”

The prince had caught her line of thought. “What should I ask her for? Should I ask her to release me?”

“She won’t do that,” Tova interjected. “I’m sure every one of her husbands has asked for that.”

“Ask her to do something that she can’t do,” the lass said. “If she can’t do what you ask, the marriage is invalid.” She pointed at the nightshirt, still gripped in the prince’s hands. “Ask her to wash this clean.”

“The princess does not like to lose,” Tova warned. “Neither does the queen.”

“But trolls are bound when they make a bargain,” the lass countered. She turned to the prince. “You have to make her promise that she will do what you ask, or let you go. Then ask her to wash it.”

Slowly the prince nodded. “It just might work.”

Tova gave the lass an appreciative look. “It’s a better plan than I can think of. But you had better be ready to run. There’s no guarantee Her Highness won’t take out her anger on you.”

“That’s true.” The lass sighed. “I’d like to be there to watch, but I should probably be waiting outside instead.” She clenched her fists. “And we’ll have to find a way to free you, too.”

Tova just shook her head and gave the lass a sad smile. “It will be worth it, just to see her lose another one.”

“Yes, lass, you must wait on the shore,” the prince said. He cast the nightshirt aside and came over to take her hands. “Stand on the shore and look to the south. If you feel the faintest breeze, call out to it.”

Tova caught sight of the clock on the mantel and made a face. “I’d best get back. The princess might send for me.”

She hugged them both and Rollo. Then Rollo, too, excused himself to go and lie by the fire in the sitting room. With one hind leg, he kicked the bedchamber door closed behind him.

“He always did enjoy the sitting room fire,” the prince said.

“Yes, he’s very lazy,” the lass agreed, looking down at her hands awkwardly. They were alone together, in a bedchamber, and there was no enchanted sleep to overcome them now.

“You’re very—”

“I just realized—”

They both laughed. “You go first,” the prince said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and scuffed his feet on the rug nervously.

“I just realized,” the lass repeated, “that I don’t even know your name.”

“Oh.” He screwed up his face and laughed. “Sorry. It’s a bit embarrassing, actually. My mother, rather like yours, was fond of old stories. I’m a prince, but I’m not the first son. I’m the third.”

The lass groaned. “Don’t say your name is Askeladden, please!”

“Close enough: it’s Asher. My father thought Askeladden too foolish and romantic. And there was always the chance that something might happen to my brothers and I would be king. King Askeladden was just too much for him. Even for my mother, really.

“Of course, we should both be grateful for her silly stories, or we never would have met.”

“What?” Feeling more comfortable, the lass sat beside him on the bed. “Why?”

“We heard tales, even in Christiania, of a girl in the forests who could speak to animals. Mother was all agog over them. That’s why I sought you out. I thought that if I could talk to you as a bear, I would be able to tell you what was happening. I couldn’t, but all the same I’m glad it was you I found.”