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Alexander gave a heavy sigh and turned a little toward her.

“Well, if you won’t accept a pet on the head, at least keep me company. I’m going to try painting. I’ve never done it before.” She walked down the hall, aware of the bear’s silent, looming presence behind her.

“May I paint?” she asked Magni belatedly. She had assumed she was allowed.

He gave slight nod. She turned all the lanterns up and examined her materials. She was bored almost to tears, and the boredom made the loneliness worse.

This was a trial she had undertaken voluntarily, and she wanted to endure it with grace. Even with gratitude, for when in her life had she been able to eat such costly, exotic foods? When had she had such unfettered access to luxurious threads, not to mention paint and canvas and even oil for lamps? Much of this strange prison was luxurious.

But she missed her parents and her little sisters and brothers. She missed their bright eyes and endless questions. She missed Sigrid’s quiet competence with the little ones and Solveig’s thoughtfulness. She missed the way her parents looked at each other, with trust and camaraderie as well as love, because they were a team together against any threat.

In all the hunger and suffering and despair, she had never been alone. The love that surrounded her had been so powerful that she was like a fish swimming in water; the love supported her and filled her lungs, even though half the time she didn’t remember it was there at all. Being known and loved wassuch a natural state of existence that now, isolated, with only wordless strangers for company, she felt the loneliness like a physical loss.

Gytha painted a mountain first, because in her imagination it was easy. Gray here, darker gray here, brown there for tree trunks, green pine needles, a blue sky. None of the shapes or colors were quite right, and she grew frustrated, painting over her crooked trees and unrealistic mountain surrounded by an improbable, flat plain. She lost track of time.

A deep sigh startled her, and she spun around. The bear was lying on the floor with his head upon his paws like a dog, sad or sleepy or bored, staring at her with mournful eyes. Magni was leaning against the wall, his eyes half-closed. He must be bored. She wasn’t very entertaining.

“What? You think you can do better?” she asked the bear morosely. He sighed again, and she rolled her eyes in frustration.

He stood silently and stepped forward, towering over her, and bent his face so that they were cheek to cheek. His hot breath brushed her neck, and she closed her eyes, trying to remember his kind voice. His warmth, his looming presence, comforted her for a moment.

Then she opened her eyes, and the feeling was gone. Magni was staring at them, his eyes glittering with some unreadable emotion. The bear looked at her painting, sighed, and turned around to lie on the floor as before.

Gytha scowled at him. “I didn’t think so.” She huffed and turned back to the painting. It looked childish and awkward, despite her efforts, and she glared at it too. Finally she washed the brushes and put the paints back where she had found them. Her creative urge was quashed.

She went back to her room and cried.

Several days later, she went back to try again. She painted the entire canvas gray and stared at it, planning her painting before she touched brush to paint. The mountain was shades of gray. The sky was gray. The trees were gray-green, the river gray-blue. The colors felt accurate; she felt that the world had turned gray. The excitement of this adventure in the frozen north with her ice goblin prison guard and the gentle-hearted bear was entirely gone.

Neither the colors nor the forms were appealing, but it fit her mood. Her eyes welled with angry, discouraged tears. She rinsed the brushes quickly and rushed from the room.

That night she woke when her visitor slipped silently into bed. It almost didn’t seem strange any more. “Did you see my painting?”

He froze.

“It’s not any good. I wanted to make something beautiful because I want to redeem this time, so it doesn’t feel like I’m in prison. But I just made something ugly.

“I don’t want my time here to be ugly and worthless. I agreed to do this because I wanted to do something beautiful for the bear, because he was kind to my family and me. But nothing about my painting is beautiful.”

In the chill darkness, there was no answer, but Gytha had a strange sense that the man was listening sympathetically. She didn’t know what else to say, though, and he could give no word of comfort.

A flash of fear passed through her mind. What if her nighttime visitor wasn’t Alexander after all, but a different stranger? She shifted away from him and shuddered. How could she know him if he would not talk? How could she endure suchloneliness? She felt fragmented and unmoored from the love she had known all her life.

When Gytha ventured to the room with paints again, she was surprised to find that the painting was subtly different. The grey was tinged with a little blue there, a hint of cream there. Not so much that one would notice at first, but enough. The picture was more alive, more sad, more real. The crooked trees were transformed from awkwardly misshapen to mangled by the wind yet somehow dignified. The mountain looked foreboding rather than simply overlarge, and the flat plain now had the texture of wind-whipped snow and ice, with a hint of flakes eddying just above the ground.

She glanced at the bear, who had followed her in from the hall. He blinked silently and lay down. The paints she had left drying on the palette and the brushes she hadn’t fully cleaned were all neatly washed and dried and put back where they belonged. Gytha felt ashamed of her childish messiness.

Chapter 8

Most nights she slept dreamlessly. The darkness surrounded her, edging in around the light of the lamps and candles, creeping close in the corridor. At night, when she blew out the lamps, she felt it like a thick weight. Day by day, it grew more impossible to even guess the passage of time with any certainty, and she felt this not as freedom, but as an unmooring from reality. She slept when she was tired and woke when she was rested. She painted. She embroidered another rich collar for her mother to sell.

She read one of the books, a book of fairy tales and legends, but the others were too obscure and written in a hand that was difficult and frustrating to decipher. She sat hour by hour curled in a chair by the fire. Sometimes she fell asleep and woke to the same firelight. It might have been moments, or mighthave been days that she had been asleep. She could guess only by how much she ached from the awkward position.

Magni’s clothes were simple, only one layer of decent fabric, not nearly warm enough for the chilly cave palace. This was what finally convinced her that he was not human. The ears, the teeth…perhaps human people from the far north were different. She knew little of different peoples except that their differences were said to be shocking. Designs tattooed on faces, dark skin, even dark hair! Traders from distant lands told of many things a girl from a small town might never see. But all humans would shiver in this cold, would eventually get sick and die without proper clothes. Cold like this was inevitable death without the fires in the grate. Magni never seemed to feel the cold at all. He did not draw close to the fireplace, did not wear layers, did not shiver.

The darkness and the silence wore upon Gytha until she wept. Then her heart steadied, and she resolved that she must go home and see her family. She had lost count with her flowers; she was sure she must have embroidered flowers when she had only napped and the stranger had not entered the room at all, and had also missed embroidering some flowers when he had definitely been there. But there were over two hundred tiny flowers of dozens of species, of colors both realistic and fantastical, and she could barely remember the sound of the bear’s voice.

She felt like she was going mad. The long winters had always tested the ability of humans to endure confinement and darkness. But never had she been so alone, with no sound of a human voice, for so long. Talking would not ease the gnawing in her mind.