Page 27

Gytha turned the lamps down low and brushed her hair with her eyes closed. As much as she loved her little sisters and brothers, not to mention her parents, she had often wished for a little more privacy and quiet in the lodge. But after only a few days here, she longed for the overlapping voices, the happy laughter, the squirming hugs of the children. She missed her mother singing under her breath while she kneaded bread, and her father teaching the children the many rhythms of old songs. She missed her father’s stomp on the doorstep as he kicked snow from his boots.

The tears slid down her cheeks and she brushed them away. She washed her face in the basin and piled the extra blankets on the pallet where her visitor was sure to find them.

Again Gytha was asleep when her night time visitor entered, and she woke only to the slight shift in the covers.

“I got extra blankets for you. You don’t have to be cold, and you don’t have to feel guilty about taking my blankets. I have plenty.”

There was careful movement, a soft shudder, and then nothing.

More than half asleep, Gytha realized that she felt the same sense of safety with this stranger as she did with Alexander. The thought flashed through her mind, as quick and unexpected as a flash of summer lightning, that she had kissed the unseen stranger on the top of the head and asked him for his own fur to make clothes for him. Of course he would not mind her taking his fur!

Was Alexander really a prince? Was he truly a man or a bear? What was he really like?

She tried to remember the sound of his voice.

“Goodnight, Alexander,” she mumbled.

Of course, he did not answer.

In the following days Gytha added bell heather, snow buttercups, mountain avens, purple saxifrage, yellow marsh saxifrage, northern willow, reindeer moss, diamond leaf willow, cotton grass, and snowdrops to her sampler. She combed more fur from the bear’s coat and spun it into more fine, soft yarn, with which she finished the pair of soft trousers and then knitted a long shirt.

She tried to imagine how big the stranger was. She didn’t want the clothes to be too small. So she added the clever way of tightening the waist that her mother had taught her, with buttons and tabs on the waistband. She made the shirt large, because extra fabric would only make him warmer once he was under the blankets.

The work took well over a month, though she spent nearly every waking minute on it. Not only was it a time-consuming project in concept, even her two-ply yarn was very fine, which meant many stitches were required to make even a small swatch of cloth.

At least her visitor no longer shivered each night. He accepted the blankets she pushed toward him, and though she never looked at him, she imagined that he smiled as he did so.

She did not look in the mirror often; it felt vain to examine herself as if her appearance mattered to anyone. But every five or six days, sometimes seven if she forgot, she would pull the cloth off and examine herself to see what had changed.

As the days passed, the sharp edges of her bones were covered by a little softness, and the sunken, desperate look in her eyes had faded to a kind of cautious resignation. Her hands looked more like hands ought to look, and her skin was smoother over her cheeks. She smiled at herself in the mirror sometimes to remember what it felt like, and to imagine whom she might smile at.

When Alexander saw her smile, did he interpret it as kindness or pity or happiness or something else? Did he know what human expressions meant? Magni seemed to understand, at least some, but it was almost as hard to read his face as it was to read the bear’s.

When she put the last stitch in the soft collar of the shirt, she sighed and stretched. She rubbed her hands over her face and slouched far down in the chair. Aside from Magni, she was alone, and she wished Alexander had been there. He had contributed all the fur, after all.

Alexander was an interesting name, one she had only heard in foreign stories. If his home really was on the other side of the western mountains, maybe he knew the truth of some of those stories. There was a dark myth about an evil fairy womanwho cursed those who stumbled on her cottage made of bones. There were stories about the great wolves in the forests, wolves nearly as big as horses, who in long-past winters had come into towns and pulled down men, women, and children in the very paths between lodges. They had even come into the larger cities to hunt one cold winter, when they were hungry and the elk and deer and mink could not be found.

In the dark, it was hard not to believe all the stories she had once discounted. It was clear to her that Magni, with his pointed ears and iron-gray skin, and his apparent indifference to the cold of this underground prison, was something inhuman. She suspected he was what her people called an ice goblin, but the name seemed ugly. He had not been unkind to her, and “ice goblin” had a nasty sound to it. Surely his people did not call themselves ice goblins.

She lay back in the chair and closed her eyes.

A touch on her shoulder brought her to sudden alertness. Magni took a step back and bowed slightly, his eyes flickering to meet hers for a moment before he looked away.

“Is it night? I should go to bed.”

He nodded and gave his strange, closed-lips smile. Gytha rubbed her hands over her face and stood. She caught up the pajamas and carried them with her to the bedchamber.

She folded them neatly and left them on top of the blankets on her visitor’s side of the bed.

Was it night? It was so hard to tell. What did “night” even mean, if it was dark all the time? Meals came at intervals, but she really had little way to tell if they were regular other than by how hungry she felt, and with little exercise and long practice at ignoring hunger, she did not trust her body to correctly apprehend time.

When she blew out the lanterns it was night. When she lit them, it was morning. But what was the truth?

The truth was something real, even if she couldn’t see it. Far away, past the icy tundra and rolling, snow-covered hills and white-blanketed forest, was her family sleeping too?

She fell asleep with tears on her cheeks.

Chapter 7