Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [59]
“Go where?” She could barely speak; a terrible coldness was coming over her.
“To her. I must marry her and live in her palace east of the sun and west of the moon.”
“But isn’t there any other way? Can’t I . . . do . . . something?” The cold was making her face numb, and her hands. She dropped the candle; the flame went out as it fell, plunging the room into darkness once more.
“If you had waited three more months—just three—I would have been free,” the young man said. “We both would have been free.” Then: “She comes!”
“Isbjørn!” The lass called to him as the cold rose up and swallowed her. The wind rushed in her ears. She fainted.
Part 3
The Lassie Who Should
Have Had the Prince
Chapter 23
The lass awoke to Rollo nosing her face and whining. Her head was pillowed on her bulging knapsack, and she was cramped and cold. Blinking the sleep from her eyes, she sat up and looked around.
“Rollo? Where are we?”
“I don’t know, and I couldn’t wake you for hours, and I didn’t dare leave you,” he whimpered. He lowered himself down until his upper half was in her lap, something he had not done since he was a puppy. “What happened?”
What had happened was that the palace had disappeared, the lass thought, looking around. She and her wolf were deep in a forest somewhere. Judging by the thickness of the trees, they were far from the ice plain. Or perhaps they were right in the middle of the ice plain, but the trolls had taken away the palace and replaced it with this forest as part of her punishment.
“I saw him,” the lass told Rollo. “I lit a candle, and I looked at him.”
“Who?” He raised his head and looked at her.
She looked off through the trees, but didn’t really see them. “I think he was a prince. He was so handsome. Our isbjørn. Every day he was an isbjørn, and every night he was human and lay beside me. If I could have gone one year and one day without looking at him, without being curious and asking too many questions, it would have broken the enchantment. But I looked, and now he’s gone.”
Rollo whimpered. “Gone where?”
“To a castle east of the sun and west of the moon,” she said, remembering the words as clearly as if they had been written on the inside of her eyelids. “To marry her.
“Hans Peter did this as well,” she continued after a long silence. “He was an isbjørn, and Tova was the girl who had to lay with him and not look. But she looked, too. I guess we always look.”
“But Hans Peter didn’t marry the troll, did he?”
“I don’t know.” She reached over to her parka, Hans Peter’s parka, which lay to one side of the knapsack. “But I think that Tova did this, this embroidery, to change the spell. She must have found this somewhere and done it, to help him get away.”
Another long silence. The lass was very cold, sitting in the snow in just her nightshift, but didn’t want to move. Finally a shiver took her unawares, and she sneezed. It reminded her of the sneeze last night, the sneeze that had spilled the wax and woken the prince. She got to her feet and shucked off her wet shift.
Rollo scrambled to his feet and stared at her. “What are you doing?”
She opened up her knapsack and pulled out a clean shift, a heavy velvet skirt, and a vest of stiff brocade. “We’re going to find him,” she declared, dressing as quickly as she could.
“I did this,” the lass went on as she fastened the ties of Hans Peter’s parka. “I caused the deaths of Erasmus, Mrs. Grey, and Fiona. I caused the poor isbjørn”—a sob shook her—“my isbjørn, to be taken away, and now he’ll be forced to marry a troll. I caused it, and I’m going to fix it.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I never even knew his name,” she said in a whisper. “I should have asked his name.”
“All right,” Rollo said finally. “Which way do we go?”
“What’s east of the sun and west of the moon?”
“Nothing.”
“If it’s easter than east and wester than west, it must be north,” she reasoned. She was thinking of the globe from the library, the one she had recently hurled through a window. The top of the globe was a white disc of gleaming