Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [1]
But the pika worshipped him. She thought that her brother was still the handsomest man in the district, even though everyone else said that title had surely passed to the next brother down, Torst (for all the woodcutter’s children were fair). But Torst liked pulling the youngest girl’s braids and teasing her, while Hans Peter was soft-spoken and kind. He had learned some of the language of the Englanders on his travels, and he called the youngest girl “lass.” It still meant nothing more than “girl,” but it sounded prettier than “pika.”
“Aye, lass,” he would say, holding up a piece of wood he had been carving, to show her the strange, angular marks upon it. “This is ‘bear.’ And this here”—pointing to another—“is ‘whale.’” And then he would cast the wood into the fire. And the lass would nod solemnly and snuggle close to listen to one of his rare stories about the life of men at sea.
Jorunn, who, as the eldest girl, had the charge of teaching the younger children their letters, scoffed at the lass when she insisted that Hans Peter’s carvings were a sort of language. “It’s not the language of England, that’s for sure,” she retorted, tossing another one of the carvings into the fire and using a bit of charred stick to write the alphabet on the scrubbed table. “For the priest says that every Christian land uses the same letters. And the priest went to school in Christiania.” Her words carried a solemn weight: Christiania was the capital, and the priest was the only person for miles around who had been there.
But Hans Peter continued to show his little lass the carvings, and she continued to study them with big, solemn eyes. Of all the children, she alone had dark brown eyes, though her hair was more reddish than gold, which was not uncommon in that family. Before it went gray, Jarl had boasted the same color hair, and four of the nine children had inherited it.
When the lass was eleven, Jorunn married a farmer’s son who was too poor himself to expect much in the way of dowry, and they moved into an extra room in his father’s house. That same year, Hans Peter traded some of his more commonplace carvings to a tinker from the south, so the family got the flour and salt they would need to last another winter. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed making wooden bowls and spoons, but the patterns of fish and birds he had carved around the edges of the bowls had made the lass clap her hands with pleasure.
Frida was marginally appeased, and a little of Jarl’s burden was eased. And the lass grew, and Hans Peter carved. And the winter continued, without sign of spring.
Chapter 2
In the North, they say that the third son is the lucky son. He is the one who will travel far, and see magic done. The third son of King Olav Hawknose had ridden the north wind into battle and returned home victorious, weighted down with gold and married to a foreign princess. In tales the third son is called the ash lad, or Askeladden, and he is both clever and lucky.
Hoping to inspire her own third son to such heights, Frida had named the boy Askeladden. The woodcutter’s wife dreamed of one day going to live in the palace her own ash lad would build for her with the gold he found in a hollow log. Then he would save an enchanted princess and bring her to the palace to live with him and his doting mother.
Askeladden Jarlson was not the hero of legend and tale, however, and everyone but his mother knew it. He preferred drinking the raw ale of the mountains and dodging work to living off the land or his wits. And, as he told the young lass with a wink and a nudge, he much preferred saucy farmers