Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow - Jessica Day George [82]
“Very well.” The troll queen waved one hand. The spindle sprang from the lass’s grasp and flew to the queen. “Present yourself at the front doors at sunset.” Then she held up one finger in warning. “This will be the last time I allow such a thing, you understand. Tomorrow my daughter and the prince will be wed, and there will be no more dallying with human maids.”
“Of course. Your Majesty is very kind.” The lass curtsied again, and the window shut with a slam.
“Quick, back to our cave,” the lass said to Rollo.
“What? Why?”
The lass hiked up her skirts and started off at a run without seeing if he followed. “I don’t want the princess to see me standing there. She might demand that I give her something else, and I have nothing left but dirty shifts and snagged stockings. The last thing we need is for her to be angry at us tonight.”
“All right, but then will you tell me what happened while I was asleep?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll tell you everything. And then I need to try and sleep. It’s going to be another long night.”
Chapter 31
Dressed in the best that she had left, the lass followed the queen and her daughter through the halls of the golden palace. They both smirked at her when they left her in his rooms, alone save for Rollo, but she smiled back. This is going to work, she told herself.
Again she was too nervous to read, and Rollo paced with her. After no more than an hour, Tova stuck her head into the sitting room, grinned at the lass, and told her that she had given him the note.
“And if he didn’t read it,” she whispered, “I may have found the antidote to the sleeping potion.”
“Thank you!”
“I have to go.” Tova winked and ducked back out of the room, closing the door behind her without a sound.
The lass’s heart sank when the centaur servant brought the limp prince into the room, just as he had the last two nights. But when he rolled the prince onto the bed, the centaur winked at the lass just as Tova had. He even reached down and patted Rollo’s head as he went out.
“Your Highness?” The lass shook the prince’s shoulder gently.
His eyes popped open, making the lass gasp. He grinned up at her. “Hello there, my lass.”
Without thinking, the lass threw herself into his arms. He caught her easily and they embraced. He kissed her cheeks and then her mouth, and she clung to him, laughing and crying as she had earlier with Tova. But this was very different.
“I can’t believe that you’re my isbjørn,” she said at last.
“I can’t believe that you came all this way,” he said. “How did you get here?”
“I rode on horses loaned to me by three old women who had also loved and lost the princess’s isbjørner. Then I rode the backs of the winds, east, west, south, then north, to reach this place.” She gasped, out of breath when she finished her recitation.
He squeezed her tightly. “Thank you a thousand times for coming so far. It’s more than I had hoped to be able to see you and speak to you as a man.” Then his dark brows drew together, his expression clouding. “But tomorrow I must marry Indæll.”
“There has to be a way out.”
He shook his head, his mouth a thin line. He shifted her so that she was sitting more comfortably on his lap, and she put her arm around his broad shoulders. “We’ll never get past the guards, even if we make it out of the palace. And there’s no way off the island.”
“We have to think of something. There must be a way out for us. And Tova.”
“Tova, the human chambermaid?”
“Yes. When my brother Hans Peter was the isbjørn who lived in the palace of ice, Tova was the girl who lived with him. She followed him here, but he had escaped.”
The prince’s eyebrows shot up. “How?”
“Tova altered the embroidery on his parka. I’ll show you.” She hopped off his lap and hurried into the other room, grabbing her parka off the chair where she had left it. The prince lit more candles in the bedchamber, and studied