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W hen Gytha awoke, her guest was gone. Either he had stirred the fire for her before he left, or a servant had done it, because the flames crackled merrily and the room was relatively warm. She still needed all her layers, but at least her fingers weren’t stiff with chill.

She added a tiny yellow northern poppy to her sampler and then continued work on the embroidery to sell. The intricate pattern was taking shape well, and she imagined the piece as the collar of a rich man’s coat.

Meals came at intervals; for breakfast there was tea and a warm, flaky, buttery biscuit beside some berries, and lunch and dinner were hot meals. There was goat milk and hot tea and broth to drink.

When she was tired, she went to bed.

Her nighttime visitor came again, and again he accepted only the barest corner of the fur that she had put between them. Perhaps he was afraid of touching her, or perhaps he was merely being chivalrous.

But his silent shivering tugged at her heart.

She added a tundra rose to her sampler and asked Magni, “Is it too bold to ask for some more blankets for my bed? And a drop spindle and a carding brush? I’d like to make yarn.”

He inclined his head politely and disappeared into the hall.

Soon Magni returned with the familiar tools, along with two thick wool blankets over his shoulder.

“Thank you! May I have some more light, too?” She bit her lip.

He brought her more lanterns, and soon the room was brighter than she had thought possible. Magni retreated to stand at the door.

“You’re guarding me, aren’t you?” she said at last. “You’re always watching.”

Something in his eyes flickered, and he nodded slightly.

She sighed. It wasn’t pleasant to be watched all the time, but she supposed he wasn’t doing it for his own amusement. He must have been given the job by the queen.

She stood and hauled one of the comfortable chairs over to him. “Are you allowed to sit while you watch me? It makes me feel guilty that you’re standing there all day long just watching.” Then she frowned. “Don’t you get hungry? I’ve never seen you eat.”

He blinked. Then he shrugged one shoulder .

Gytha wasn’t sure exactly what that meant.

When he brought her lunch, she offered him one of the puffy, meat-stuffed pastries. He shook his head, but there was a sudden gleam in his eye.

“Don’t you want it?” she asked.

His sharp features tensed just a little, and he gave a faint, reluctant nod.

“Are you not allowed to have it?”

He twitched his head sideways.

Gytha frowned. “Well, I don’t want to get you in trouble,” she said at last. “But you may have it if you want. It’s your decision.”

His stony eyes flicked up to meet hers, and perhaps they were a little softer than before.

“Anyway, there’s no need for you to stand all day. I’m not going anywhere. Sit down if you want.”

He did sit, one lean leg crossed over the other and his arms folded across his chest.

Alexander stood and loomed over him, and he shrank back into the chair, his eyes wide. Then the bear turned away and flung himself to the floor beside Gytha’s chair. He sighed heavily.

“What’s gotten into you?” Gytha frowned at him and then knelt before him. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous.” She smiled teasingly and ran her hands over the bear’s huge head until he lifted it and stared at her. She scratched under his chin and behind his rounded ear.

She bent closer and murmured, “I’m doing this for you, you know. Because you were kind to my family and me. Because you saved them, all of us, from starvation and fever and death.”

The white fur beneath her fingers was so thick and warm! She hesitated and then said, “My nighttime visitor is cold. May I have some of your fur to make night clothes for him?”

His dark eyes held hers, and she rubbed softly down his great muzzle.

The scratch her father had given him had become a deep red scar from the inside corner of his eye down almost to his black nose.

She ran a finger down his muzzle next to it, not touching the tender red skin in case it hurt, and then, impulsively, kissed him on the top of the head. “Thank you.”

She began combing Alexander’s fur. It was so thick that it took only a few minutes for her to produce an enormous pile of fluff. It wasn’t enough for her plan but it was enough for a start.

The carding brush was a great help, but she still picked through the fibers to separate the long outer coat strands from the shorter, softer strands from the undercoat.

She set the outer coat aside and considered the soft fur that remained.

These fibers would make a much softer, warmer fabric than the outer coat would.

She twisted the fibers between her fingers and threaded it through the top of the spindle.

The spinning motion was rhythmic and soothing, and she had produced a great length of fine white thread before too long.

She wound it into a ball and hesitated. A fine, thin fabric would be more comfortable, but a thicker fabric would be warmer.

She spun this fine thread into a two-ply yarn. It was still quite fine and soft.

In the basket with all the embroidery supplies she found knitting needles, so she set to work. She started with one leg of the trousers, and by the time she had used half the ball of yarn, her fingers were tired and her eyes were bleary.

When she looked up, Magni had put a tray on the nearby table.

“Oh, thank you.” She stretched her arms and shoulders and felt a rush of dizziness. Her fever had been gone for days, but the weakness would take longer to vanish.

She ate slowly, savoring the rich flavors. Again, she offered a piece to Alexander and this time, at her encouragement, he took it delicately from her fingertips. His huge teeth did not even touch her fingers.

She reminded herself that he was not, in fact, an extremely large, gentle dog, but a bear .

A wild bear, with his own thoughts and plans, even if he couldn’t speak them now.

But it was difficult to imagine him as anything other than gentle and patient.

He endured her combing, her questions, and the boredom of their confinement with the mute patience of an animal.

But as she sipped her tea sleepily, she thought that she had never heard of an animal who could talk before. Not really. There were children’s stories, of course, but nothing anyone had taken seriously. What sort of magic could give such an intelligent mind to an animal, and what did it mean?

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 woman who 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.