Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [55]
Chapter 21
After Mrs. Grey was taken, the lass did as her brother and the isbjørn had pleaded. She stopped asking questions. She stopped begging Hans Peter for information. Having been rejected by her mother at birth, the lass wasn’t all that frightened by the threat that she would regret she had been born. But she was sickened by the thought that Erasmus and Mrs. Grey had suffered because of her.
And yet the lass couldn’t just sit there, day after day, idle. She asked Fiona if she couldn’t have some new cloth to sew clothes for herself. She refused to wear the troll gowns, and she had ruined her best skirt by kneeling in the puddle of ink. Tova’s clothes (for she had decided that they were Tova’s) would fit her with a little alteration, but somehow it seemed sacrilegious. Fiona nodded, and the next day the sitting room was filled with bolts of silk and velvet, fine linen, and spools of silk thread.
With a self-deprecating laugh, the lass made herself the kind of clothing she was used to, rather than the kind she had been wearing. Fiona removed the troll gowns, and the wardrobe slowly filled with long bell-shaped skirts, tight vests, and shifts with gathered sleeves such as any farmgirl of the North would wear. Not that the farmgirls of the North had ever worn skirts of rich blue velvet and vests of peacock green satin.
Sewing kept the lass’s hands busy, and even her mouth. When she sewed, she pursed her lips, or chewed them, or stuck her tongue out. Her siblings had always made fun of her for this, but no matter how she tried she couldn’t break the habit. She decided that it was a good thing, now, for it prevented her from asking questions. But her rage over the troll princess caused her fingers to fumble or move too fast. She sliced through the fabric with reckless abandon and angrily threw great lengths of cloth into the fire when she couldn’t get the seams straight.
Once she was done with the new wardrobe, she found her resolution not to ask questions waning. The trouble was that servants avoided her now, and so did the isbjørn, except for dinnertime. Even the salamanders, those chatty little cooks who had enlivened her early days in the palace, were monosyllabic when she visited the kitchens.
The lass had searched the palace top to bottom already. But now she did it again, determined to gather information without endangering anyone else. She turned the strange rooms upside down, rummaging in piles of carding combs, overturning butter churns, and sorting through spindles, spinning wheels, and looms. She even managed to push over every anvil in a room full of metal-working tools, to see if there was anything written or carved underneath, but there was nothing.
She did ask the isbjørn about the rooms full of household tools. She didn’t think it could hurt, just to ask why there was a room in a palace full of old butter churns.
He shook his head, equally puzzled, and told her that there was just something about the tools that attracted them. He didn’t need to say which “them” he meant. The lass knew: trolls. The silent, never-seen rulers of this strange kingdom of barren ice.
“It’s like Rolf Simonson’s spoon,” Rollo said, looking up from his dinner.
The lass and the isbjørn exchanged confused looks.
“Rolf Simonson’s Fransk silver spoon,” Rollo explained. “You remember: it sat on the mantelpiece, and everyone admired it, but no one actually ate with it, because it was foreign.”
“Oh, of course!” The lass nodded. “One of his sons traded two reindeer for it, in Christiania. It was very elegant.” She wrinkled her nose and looked at the spoon she was eating with. “Although not as fine as this.”
“Hmm,” the isbjørn rumbled. “Perhaps Rollo is correct. Perhaps such things attract them because they are foreign.”
Fiona the selkie was serving dinner during this discussion. She looked sharply from the bear to the girl as they talked, and cringed when the bear spoke of “them.” The lass had never seen the tall, proud seal-woman cringe before. As she carried out the dinner tray, she did it awkwardly one-handed; her other