Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [79]
The centaur rolled him onto the bed, bowed to the lass, and left again. She tried to stop the centaur, to ask him what was going on, and even dared to touch his arm and then his horselike flank, but he would not look at her. His eyes straight ahead, he paced out of the room, shutting the door and bolting it despite her pleas.
“Well! No help there,” she said to Rollo. She remembered the compassion in the centaur’s eyes from the night before, though. “Probably under threat of death if he talks to me,” she reasoned.
She and Rollo spent another night trying to wake the prince. They pulled his hair, and the lass slapped him as hard as she could, although it brought tears to her eyes to do it. He did not respond, and for their last hour together, the lass simply lay beside him and reveled in the familiar sound of his breath.
The troll princess came to fetch them at dawn, her smile even broader. The lass was too exhausted and out of sorts to remember the spindle until she had been shut out of the palace. She and Rollo went to their nest, but neither could sleep. They had only one more night.
After a restless hour the lass got up, stripped, and scrubbed herself with snow. Her hands and feet were blue and her joints ached with cold by the time she was done, but she did it all the same. She put on the cleanest of her shifts and stockings, her favorite blue skirt and scarlet vest, and then put the parka over it all. She brushed her hair until it shone, and plaited it in a four-strand braid that Tordis had taught her. Leaving her pack with Rollo, who thought she was crazy, she took the gold spindle and the hank of wool she had carded the day before and went to sit under Indæll’s window.
She scraped the hard snow flat to give her a place to drop the spindle. Then she rolled a large snowball for a seat. Arranging her skirts neatly, she took the wool and began to spin.
The window behind her creaked open a few minutes later, but the lass didn’t turn around. She forced herself to keep on spinning, and even hummed a little.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?”
The voice was female and speaking Norsk, but it was not Princess Indæll’s. It sounded human, and young. Surprised, the lass stopped spinning and turned around.
Dressed in blue livery with an embroidered scarlet ribbon at her neck, a young woman leaned out the window of the princess’s chambers. Hair so fair it was almost white was braided into a coronet around her head, and she had the milky skin and rosy cheeks of the North. Her wide blue eyes held a touch of humor, and her mouth was caught between gaping and smiling.
“Oh, no! You too?” she said when she got a good look at the lass.
“Tova?” The lass gasped. “Is it really you?”
The blue eyes widened even farther. “How did you know my name?” Then her eyes fixed on the white parka that the lass wore, and the roses disappeared from her cheeks. “Where did you get that parka?”
“It belongs to my brother, Hans Peter.”
“Are you—why, you must be the youngest, the little pika!”
Tova hoisted herself up and over the windowsill and half fell into the lass’s arms. They hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks and cried.
“I feel as though I know you,” they both said at the same time.
This set them to laughing and crying again. Tova demanded to know where Hans Peter was and how he fared; the lass wanted to know why Tova was working at the palace.
Sobered by the question, and by the news that Hans Peter was safely at home but still haunted by his enchantment, Tova sank down on the snow beside the lass. She reached out and fingered the embroidery on the white parka.
“I changed the embroidery to make it so that Hans Peter could escape from her,” Tova said. “But I’d never done magic before and didn’t think that it had worked. I came here, looking for him, and was caught.” She shrugged. “I thought, too, that I might be able to break the hold on your brother completely.” She pointed to