by Edith Pattou
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Book One: Oest
Mother
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Neddy
White Bear
Mother
Estelle
Neddy
Mother
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Mother
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Mother
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Mother
Rose
Book Two: Sund
Troll Queen
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Mother
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Mother
Rose
Troll Queen
Neddy
Rose
White Bear
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Mother
White Bear
Neddy
Rose
White Bear
Rose
Neddy
Mother
Rose
White Bear
Mother
Rose
Mother
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Mother
Estelle
Rose
Book Three: Est
Estelle
Mother
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
White Bear
Estelle
Rose
White Bear
Rose
White Bear
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
White Bear
Estelle
Rose
White Bear
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
Rose
White Bear
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Troll Queen
Estelle
Rose
Estelle
Rose
White Bear
Estelle
White Bear
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Book Four: Nord
Estelle
Rose
White Bear
Rose
White Bear
Neddy
Rose
White Bear
Rose
White Bear
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Rose
White Bear
Rose
White Bear
Neddy
Rose
Estelle
Rose
Neddy
White Bear
Book Five: Oest
Rose
Neddy
Rose
Neddy
Mother
Rose
Neddy
Rose
White Bear
Estelle
Glossary
Acknowledgments
More Books from HMH Teen
About the Author
Connect with HMH on Social Media
Copyright © 2018 by Edith Pattou
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
Cover illustration © 2018 by Charlie Bowater
Compass illustration © 2018 by Mike Reagan
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pattou, Edith, author.
Title: West / Edith Pattou.
Description: Boston ; New York : HMH Books for Young Readers, 2018. | Sequel to: East. | Summary: When a sudden storm destroys Charles’ ship and he is presumed dead, Rose believes something sinister is at work and she sets off on a perilous journey, with the fate of the entire world at stake.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007162 | ISBN 9781328773937 (hardback)
Subjects: | CYAC: Fairy tales.
Classification: LCC PZ8.P2815 Wes 2018 | DDC [Fic—dc23]
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007162
eISBN 978-1-328-53071-4
v1.1018
For Vita and
for all the Roses in this world,
who are brave, who are warriors,
and who persevere,
no matter what
Prologue
I HAD PLACED THE BOX, the one etched with runes that contained the story of Rose and her white bear, in a quiet corner of my library. There was a woven cloth on top where my cat would often nap in the late afternoon sun. It was a handsome box with the look of an antique and would get the occasional compliment from visitors.
“From Norway,” I’d say. “It has been in the family for a very long time.”
One afternoon in September, I was seized with a desire to open the box. It had been some time since I had revisited Rose’s story. My cat was ill-pleased to have her nap interrupted and watched me with an annoyed expression as I rummaged through, taking things out and examining them all over again. The maps with their elaborate wind roses, the sheaves of music tied with ribbon, the mouthpiece of a flute, and those impossibly small soft leather boots.
They all told the story of Rose and her journey to the land that lay east of the sun and west of the moon.
The tale began on a desperately poor farmhold in Norway, or Njord as it was called back then, with a daughter who lay on the verge of death. An enormous white bear appeared in the doorway, promising healing as well as riches to the family, if the youngest daughter would come away with him.
This daughter was Rose, a north-born child with a wild and wandering spirit. For just short of a year, Rose lived in a castle carved into a mountain where she wove gowns the color of silver, gold, and moonglow, and fell a little bit in love with the white bear.
But then all was lost, because of trickery and Rose’s own powerful curiosity. And so she set out on that odds-defying journey to make right the wrong she had done.
As she traveled to the land that lay east of the sun and west of the moon, Rose encountered those who helped her—a mother and daughter from France, a drunken sea captain, a wise Inuit shaman, and a young boy troll named Tuki—as well as those who wished to destroy her—a powerful Troll Queen with an all-consuming, destructive love.
When I opened the box, I did not hear the music I’d heard the first time I opened it, which was
both a relief and a disappointment.
But I found something new, something I had not noticed before. It was a key, ivory colored and just larger than a child’s finger. It was sewn, securely and with even stitches, onto a crumpled piece of paper. The paper bore no writing and was brown with age, and the thread seemed ancient and gossamer thin, but it held fast.
I found the key jammed into a bottom corner of the box and, when I pulled it loose, was astonished to discover a false bottom to the wooden box. Yes, a false bottom. I had thought such things only existed in dime novels. But there it was, and what I found inside was that Rose’s story had not ended where I thought it had. Not by a long shot.
Of course stories never do. There are always thousands of details, small and meaningful, that follow a happy ending, or what one believes to be a happy ending.
Rose herself said much the same thing, but she said it better.
I have already told the story of my white bear and me. I told it in words, which didn’t come easily, and also in cloth, which did. If I had to do it again, I think I would make a map of it. I am not a mapmaker like my father, but it runs deep in my blood.
And these are the bearings of that story, the north, south, east, and west of it:
A meadow in Fransk where a prince played with a red ball. A farmhold in Njord where a girl learned about the lies parents will tell to keep their children safe. A doorway in that farmhold where an enchanted white bear asked the girl to come away with him to save her family. Njordsjoen, the sea under which that same girl was carried, swaddled in sealskin and enchantment. A castle carved into a mountain where all was lost because of a candle, and then, because of a name written in a book of music, all was gained. An ice ballroom where a girl wearing a mask and a moon dress had her heart broken. Kentta murha, the killing field of the trolls, where they sent their human servants to freeze and die. Tatke Fjord where the ship called Rose came and rescued those “softskin” servants who had survived. And finally the front parlor of the farmhold where the enchanted white bear, no longer a prince but human once again, finally slipped the Valois ring onto the girl’s thumb and made her his wife.
That is the map of what came before, the map of then.
But now there is a different map, with different bearings.
Stories often end with a marriage and those expected words happily ever after. Stories should be like that perhaps, but life is not. In truth, my story with the white bear was very far from being over after we got married.
A new map, with new bearings.
There were times when I wished I somehow could have frozen that day, the day in the front parlor when Charles and I were married. That we could have stayed in that moment forever. Or even better, the moments afterward, when we snuck off, just the two of us, finding a quiet spot overlooking the Trondheim harbor. We drank fresh apple juice, ate warm brown bread, and watched stars flickering in the not quite dark summer sky. And we both knew we were where we truly belonged, with each other.
But of course if we had stayed frozen in that moment, I would not have known the joy of bringing a bairn into the world, that squalling, red-faced, miraculous being who completed my heart.
I don’t know why we had trouble naming our bairn, but we did. First we thought we would name him after Tuki, the brave young troll who died so that we might survive. But then we thought that our firstborn should be named Charles, should be given the name his father had reclaimed after so long an ordeal.
We went back and forth.
One day Estelle, a dear and much loved part of our family, cried out that when the bairn was squalling he looked exactly like the West Wind in a drawing in one of her storybooks. She called him vent de l’ouest, and from that point on we took to calling him Winn, short for wind. We thought of it as a temporary name, that his true name would come clear to us as he grew older.
And so it was we had a new map, a map of now. A map of home and love and music and family.
Then it all changed. And all of our north, south, east, and west bearings were gone. In the blink of an eye.
Book One
OEST
They were lost in the waves, on wind-tossed ship.
—The Edda
Mother
I HAD NEVER BEEN ONE TO DREAM. This irked me much in my youth because dreams were rich with portents and guideposts for one’s life. I sorely envied those who dreamed, even though Arne always said it was for the best, that I was far too susceptible to being swayed by superstitions as it was.
At any rate, I had resigned myself to the fact that I was the dreamless kind and would always remain so, until that night in late spring when I had the dream about Rose.
I woke up drenched with sweat, clutching Arne’s arm so hard that he had marks on his forearm for days afterward.
“Eugenia!” he was saying, half in pain and half in concern. He told me later that my eyes had been crazed, wide with terror.
“Arne,” I gasped, barely able to breathe.
“What was it, my dear? A nightmare?” Arne asked, reaching out his arms to pull me to him, to comfort me, but I jerked back, holding him away with a hand on his chest.
“It was horrible. Horrible,” I moaned, and began to shake.
“Tell me,” Arne said.
“It was Rose,” I cried. “I dreamed . . . Oh, Arne!” And with that, I began to sob.
He held me and kept me close until the tears eased and I could breathe again.
Rose was the youngest of our seven children, and she was always the one who had given me the most anguish over the years. Indeed, little more than three years earlier, we had come close to losing her forever when she set out on her quest to find Charles after he had been taken by the Troll Queen.
“’Twas only a dream,” Arne said softly, trying to comfort me. But all I could do was shake my head in despair.
He led me into the kitchen and made me a cup of chamomile tea. While it cooled, I tried to sort myself out. Part of me did not want to tell Arne the dream. I worried that giving it voice might somehow make it come true.
Arne tried his best to reassure me, pointing out that the night before I had eaten rather more onions than usual with the roasted beef, which wasn’t a bit true.
Finally he said, “Tell me the dream, Eugenia.” And I did. I could not keep it bottled up inside me any longer.
“The dream began,” I said, “with Rose wandering alone through a forest. And I was there too, following behind, but she could not see me. As Rose wended her way through the trees, she came upon an overlarge gray raven perched on a low-hanging branch. Instead of giving it a wide berth, as I would have had her do, Rose made straight for it. And the raven swooped toward her. She froze in place, and as the bird hurtled at her, cawing loudly, Rose suddenly faded to a dull gray color, and I realized with horror that she had turned to ash.”
“Ash?” Arne said, making sure he had heard me correctly.
“Yes, ash,” I said, “and then the bird flew up into the sky, its powerful wings beating the air, which caused the ash-Rose to fly up as well. But all at once, she was no longer recognizable as a person, was instead a swirling, spiraling pattern of gray. Abruptly the bird disappeared and the air was still. The ashes dispersed and separated and fell softly to the ground, blanketing the forest floor, as if with a dusting of gray snow.”
Arne was staring at me, his mouth slightly open.
“Something terrible is going to happen to Rose,” I cried out, my voice shrill.
We had not seen Rose and Charles for more than a year, but they were due to visit us in two weeks’ time. Rose was coming with her bairn from their home near La Rochelle in Fransk, while Charles was returning from a recent stay in Stockholm, Sverige, where he had been commissioned by King Gustav himself to play his flauto in the royal orchestra and to share his expertise and refinements on the orchestra’s wind instruments.
Arne shut his mouth and sat up straighter. “Nonsense,” he said briskly. “’Twas only the onions you ate.”
“But Arne—” I cried.
“There are no ravens on ships,” he said. “You’ll see, Eugenia. Rose and her bairn will be with us soon, safe and sound.”
I prayed that he was right.
Rose
“’TIS A NORTH WIND,” came a voice beside me.
“Is it?” I said.
“Yes,” said Sib, “with a bit of west mixed in.”
I turned to smile at Sib, who had come to stand beside me at the ship’s railing. Sib was one of the so-called “softskin” servants who had escaped Niflheim after the destruction of the Troll Queen’s ice palace. Three years had passed since she came to live with Charles and me in Fransk. We had become fast friends, and in many ways, I was closer to her than to any of my siblings, except my brother Neddy, of course. Her true name was Sibhoirdeas, but she said that most who had known her called her Sib.
“That’s Neddy’s direction,” I said with a smile. “Northwest.”
Sib returned my smile, for she knew all about the unusual birth direction superstition of my mother’s family, which had been so much a part of my growing up in Njord, that the direction a woman faced when giving birth shaped the personality of the child. My mother never wanted a north-facing bairn, who would be wild and headstrong with a love for adventuring, but that’s exactly what I had been. Mother, however, had refused to accept this and was determined that I should be an east-born child. I didn’t learn of my true north nature until I was older.
“This northwest wind suits you,” Sib said. “Though perhaps not as well as a pure north wind. But you look happy, Rose.”
I nodded. It was our sixth day on the ship called Guillemot, which was taking us to Trondheim. It was my first visit home since Winn’s birth and only the second since Charles and I had been married.
“I will be seeing my family soon,” I said. “And Winn will meet his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.”
I smiled down on the sleeping face of my bairn, who was swaddled in a sling over my shoulders. It still made me catch my breath, looking at those almost translucent eyelids lined with golden lashes.
I gazed out over the expanse of Njordsjoen again. It was choppy, a deep blue almost to blackness, but this too made me catch my breath. The open sea. I had missed it, the salty wind in my face, the call of the gulls.
These past three years had been happy ones for my white bear and me, carving out a life for ourselves in Fransk. Yet there were moments now and then when that old restlessness would overtake me, and I would be driven to strap on my boots and go wandering through the countryside.