Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [41]
Chapter 15
Now that the lass had unlocked the troll language—and had learned that it was the troll language—she could not stop searching for answers. She scoured the palace for more carvings and embroidery, and then turned to the library. Finding a blank book, she began to record what she had learned about the troll princess, the fauns, herself, and Hans Peter.
She located a Norsk dictionary and marked the troll counterparts to the words in the margins. Doing this made her realize how limited her troll vocabulary was, but she decided that such words as “ambidextrous” and “penultimate” were useless to her anyway.
“Unless I ever meet the second-to-last troll, and he can use both hands equally well,” she mused aloud, with a snicker.
“Pardon me, my lady?”
The lass jumped, slamming the dictionary shut. She turned, guilty at being caught defacing a book, and saw the housekeeper, Mrs. Grey. The gargoyle was standing in the doorway of the library with a long feather duster in one hand. She didn’t appear at all concerned that the lass had been writing in one of the books, and the girl relaxed.
“Hello, Mrs. Grey,” the lass said. She put the book behind her back anyway. “How are you today?” She really wished that people would stop sneaking up on her.
“Very well, thank you, my lady,” Mrs. Grey said. She hovered in the doorway, looking uncertain. “Shall I go to another room, my lady?”
“Not at all.” The lass made an expansive gesture. “I don’t want to stand in the way of your duties.” It had just occurred to her that she had not spoken to the rest of the staff since she had met them.
The lass went over to a chair by the window and sat down. The ice windows were much clearer than the yellowy, bubbly glass that the lass was used to. Unfortunately, the only thing there was to see out of any of them was an endless plain of white snow.
The housekeeper hunched her shoulders self-consciously as she went about the room. At first her dusting efforts were only perfunctory, but as the lass sat humming and writing in the dictionary, Mrs. Grey seemed to relax. Her cleaning became more thorough, and her shoulders unknotted.
The lass struck: “Mrs. Grey, where are you from?”
“Pardon?” The duster clattered onto a side table.
“Where do you come from? You weren’t born here in the palace, I’ll wager.” The lass smiled at her.
“No, I wasn’t.” The housekeeper picked up her duster with a firm grip, like it was a sword.
“Where, then? I’m sure I’ve never seen any . . . person . . . like yourself in the North.”
“I’m from south of there,” Mrs. Grey said primly.
“Where? Danemark?”
“No.”
“Prussia?”
“No.”
“Italia?”
The housekeeper sighed and looked at her. “My lady, if it will end this questioning: I am from France.”
“Really?” The lass put aside her dictionary and sat forward. “What is it like there? Are your . . . kind . . . common in France?”
Mrs. Grey’s eyes misted over. “It’s as different from the North as turnips and oranges,” she said softly. “My people are fairly populous: the French build a great many churches, and we live in the belfries.”
The lass cast aside the rather disconcerting image of being watched at prayer by a family of gray, winged things. “Don’t you want to go back there?” she asked.
Her spine straightening, Mrs. Grey turned back to her work. “That doesn’t matter,” she said. She finished dusting quickly and left without another word.
The lass wondered what it would be like to be from Frankrike, as she had grown up calling it. “Frahnce,” she said aloud, savoring the word the way that Mrs. Grey had. Would it be strange, she thought, to be from France? No stranger than having gray skin and bat wings, she supposed.
“It would be stranger to be under a troll spell, I suppose,”