West

by Edith Pattou

  Neddy

  AS I WATCHED ROSE BID FAREWELL to Winn, I saw that her eyes were bright with tears. She kissed him on the forehead and reluctantly handed him to Mother. Both Mother and Sara assured her that they would take good care of him, and even Estelle piped up, saying she too would help watch over the bébé.

  Rose hugged the young Fransk girl tightly, saying how much she would miss her. Tears ran freely down Estelle’s cheeks as she hugged Rose back. Then, as Rose went to board the ship, Estelle ran up to her and hugged her one last time, and I could hear her say something about Queen Maraboo. Rose smiled and reached into the inner pocket of her cloak, pulling out the game piece Estelle had given her years before, the last time Rose set off to find the white bear. Tears stung my own eyes as I thought how this time she was setting off to bury him.

  “It is my good luck,” Rose said, holding up Queen Maraboo.

  I had been surprised and secretly pleased that Sib had wanted to accompany Rose and me. The news of Charles had distracted me, made me notice it less, but the sensation of that strange flipping of my heart had lingered. It was an extraordinary thing. Part of me wanted to be near her all the time, yet I also felt awkward, worried perhaps that she would hear that noisy heart of mine.

  In the past both Sara and Rose had teased me about finding a wife, wondering why I was the only one of us who remained unwed. Sara had certainly tried matching me up with local maidens, but for whatever reason, I found I had little interest in pursuing a friendship with any of them. I had certainly never experienced this strange heart-thumping feeling before.

  Another odd thing was that all of a sudden I had developed a strong urge to write poetry, which seemed related to Sib and my unruly heart. I hadn’t thought about writing a poem since I was a young boy, and those early efforts had been so bad that I was sure anyone who remembered them would have been quite alarmed at the thought of me taking it up again. Especially Rose. I remembered that when I read her the poem I’d written about a white bear, she had fallen into paroxysms of laughter so severe that she developed a case of hiccups lasting several hours. That was the last poem I ever wrote.

  No, perhaps it would be better to forget the whole poem writing idea, I told myself.

  Our sea journey to Etretat would take roughly five days. On the second afternoon, I had a conversation with a man from Anglia. He was a friendly sort but was preoccupied with disturbing news of a spreading sickness that had struck many in the city of London as well as the outlying countryside of Anglia. He said it was called the Sweating Sickness. After his business in Fransk, he was due to go back to London and was concerned about what he might find there.

  In my historical researches over the years, I had learned of such deadly illnesses that spread quickly through cities and towns, of course none worse than the horrific plague that almost cut the population of Europa by half back in the fourteenth century.

  And of course it had been just such an epidemic of influenza that had killed my mother’s parents, as well as many inhabitants of Trondheim, leading to the collapse of my grandfather Esbjorn’s mapmaking business. That in turn had led my father to become a farmer, with all the disastrous turns of events that followed for our family.

  Thus I was sympathetic to the man’s concerns and was uneasy to learn about the disturbing news from Anglia. So many ships sailed back and forth between that country and Njord.

  Rose

  I WAS SITTING IN A SUNNY SPOT on deck, working on mending my old cloak. I had to use quite a large needle to baste the lining around both the collar and hem, which were much frayed. As I sewed, I thought about Charles, about the ship he had been on and the soldier named Julien to whom he had given the ring. If there really was such a person and he wasn’t a troll as I suspected, Julien must have been mistaken about the severity of Charles’s wound. The soldier had survived the shipwreck, and so had Charles.

  Sib appeared and sat beside me. I asked where Neddy was, and she said he was with his new friend from Anglia. I continued my sewing while Sib gazed out at the horizon.

  “Why did you come with us, Sib?” I asked, suddenly breaking our silence.

  She looked startled.

  “Is it that you believe as the rest do,” I said, “that Charles is dead? And you wanted to be with me when I learned the news?”

  “No.” She shook her head slowly. “That’s not why.”

  “Then why? Does it have to do with Neddy?” I asked. I had noticed in Neddy an odd awkwardness around Sib during the previous days and wondered what was going on between them.

  “Neddy?” She looked genuinely surprised.

  I worried that I had said something out of turn, but her mind was clearly elsewhere.

  “No,” she said again, then turned to look me in the eyes. “Rose, I do not know if Charles still lives or not, though I believe it is possible. But in either event, I wanted to be with you, to help you in whatever way I can.” She turned away from me then, her eyes again focused on a distant point of the horizon. “There is another smaller reason, and it will perhaps sound odd, but I also came because of the wind, or rather the winds, they spoke of, like none ever seen before.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They puzzle me. I felt them, a little, on our journey to Trondheim. I wanted to come where they were worst, to see for myself.”

  “But they are long gone,” I said. Indeed the weather had been fine, a light brisk breeze just right for propelling the ship toward Fransk.

  “I can still feel them,” she said with a little shrug. “Smell them even.”

  “How do you know so much about wind, Sib?” I asked.

  “You asked me that before.”

  “And as I recall, I got a very unsatisfactory answer,” I replied with a smile.

  “As I said then, I had a teacher, long ago. I was a good student,” she said.

  “How do you learn the winds?” I asked.

  “Each person learns the winds in their own way,” she said, her eyes far away again. “Some experience them as songs, some as stories. It depends on the kind of person you are.”

  “How do you feel them?” I asked.

  “Songs,” she said. “I hear the music in them.” She paused, fiddling with a strand of her silver hair, then spoke again, her voice low and serious. “And when you know the wind well, when you can sing its song or tell its story, you can affect it. Bend it.”

  I looked at her in astonishment. “Are you saying you can do that?”

  Sib gazed at me, at my expression of disbelief, and laughed gently. “There. I’ve said too much. Now you think I’m crazy. Never mind. My ma always said I had a rich imagination,” Sib said with a smile.

  Neddy joined us, saying it was time to go below deck for the evening meal. I quickly stowed my mending, which I hadn’t quite finished, and as I walked with Neddy and Sib, I thought about what she had said. I couldn’t recall her ever mentioning her mother before, but more, I couldn’t fathom the idea of someone being able to bend the wind. The only magic I’d ever seen had been done by the Troll Queen or was a result of troll arts, which I thought of as evil.

  Neddy

  THE FIRST GLIMPSE WE HAD of Etretat was its massive chalk cliffs gleaming alabaster in the morning sun. I had never seen anything like it.

  The coastline was jagged with many outcropping of rocks that jutted out of the water. A challenge for a ship’s captain, even in calm waters. A chill went through me as I pictured those fearsome winds that had driven Charles’s ship across a roiling sea, with this deadly honeycomb of pale rock to navigate through. When the white needle, or aiguille blanche as the Fransk sailors called it, came into sight, I wondered if perhaps it marked the spot where Charles’s ship had foundered. I learned later that the wreck had occurred several leagues south of town and was no longer visible, as the sea and winds had broken it up. What was left was submerged, lying on the sea floor.

  We found lodging at an inn and began our inquiries there. We knew that Father’s mapmaker
friend was no longer in Etretat, having gone back to his home inland. But we hoped, Rose especially, that the soldier Julien would still be in town, recuperating from his injuries.

  The horrific shipwreck was still much on people’s minds. The innkeeper said that he had done a brisk business providing lodging for grieving relatives of those who had lost their lives.

  He told us the little he knew about the survivors, only four or five by his reckoning, and he believed they were still in town, because of their extensive injuries. He thought that perhaps one had died in the past few days.

  A house owned by a local woman with skill in herbs and healing had been used as a makeshift hospital, and as far as the innkeeper knew, at least two of the survivors were still there.

  Many bodies had washed up and were buried in a meadow some distance from town. It was thought that a number of them would never be recovered at all, as there was a strong tide that would have carried them out to sea.

  I volunteered to take on the unhappy task of reviewing the recorded list of the bodies that had been found and identified, while Rose was determined to go to the house where the survivors were being cared for. Sib said she wanted to go down to the beach near the aiguille blanche.

  “The wind?” Rose said softly to her as we all parted.

  Sib nodded with a smile, and I wondered what they were talking about.

  Rose

  THE WOMAN WHO HAD OPENED her home as a temporary hospital had gingerbread-colored hair and a kind smile. Her name was Hannah, and she looked exhausted but had clearly encountered many others like me.

  She shook her head sadly as I described Charles to her. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice gentle.

  Hannah said she had only two remaining patients, a grizzled older man who had been the ship’s cook and a middle-aged woman who had been traveling to Njord to meet her first grandchild. Hannah said she feared the poor lady would not get the chance to meet the new bairn.

  I asked about the soldier named Julien who had survived. She brightened a little, saying that he had left her house several days ago.

  “Quite a recovery he had,” she said. “When he first came to me, I was certain he wouldn’t survive. But he rebounded in an extraordinary way. Indeed, I thought surely his leg was badly broken, but I must have been mistaken, for he was able to leave, with no splint or crutch or anything except a bit of a limp.”

  She went on to say that he clearly had a strong will and a very appealing way about him, and that he had told her he was taking a room at an inn near the harbor. He was planning to return to his home in Spania as soon as he could book passage.

  She gave me the name of the inn and I turned to go, thanking her profusely, but, on a hunch, turned back.

  “By chance,” I asked, “did this soldier Julien have any visitors while he was here?”

  “Oh, yes, he did,” Hannah replied. “He came early on, shortly after the wreck. Very distinctive man he was. Hard to forget.” She gave an involuntary shudder. “I don’t think I heard his name . . .” She paused, thinking.

  I waited, trying to be patient.

  “No, can’t remember. But he stayed some time with Master Julien. And seeing family must have done him good, because I swear that it was after he left that Julien seemed different. Stronger. He even sat up a bit, which he hadn’t been able to do before. I think he said the fellow was a distant cousin. Though I have to say, they didn’t look a bit alike. Master Julien is quite a nice-looking young man. The cousin—” She cleared her throat. “Well, he had bad skin, scarred I think, and very pale. He was thin, too, like a skeleton.”

  “What was his voice like?” I asked, my heart beating a little faster.

  “Awful sounding, now that you mention it, like he’d had a bad cold or even damage to his throat. Raspy.”

  I had a prickling feeling all along my skin, but I took a deep breath, and after thanking Hannah again, I headed back to town.

  I walked in a daze, barely aware of the path beneath my feet. Pale, rough skin. Raspy voice. Those were the characteristics I remembered so vividly from Urda and Tuki and the Troll Queen herself. Troll characteristics.

  I had been right. If the soldier Julien was not a troll himself, he was clearly in league with at least one of the Huldre people.

  Mother

  ROSE AND NEDDY HAD BEEN GONE a week when Neddy’s good friend Havamal came by to inquire after our family. He had heard the news about Charles and the shipwreck and was wondering if we had heard anything further. I told him it was too soon, but that we weren’t optimistic. He nodded, saying that he had heard the storms had been unprecedented in their ferocity. Havamal was a historian and told us that the last storm to have caused so much damage and loss of life had occurred some seventy years ago.

  Before he left, Havamal also told us the sad news that Farmer Magnus had recently and quite suddenly passed away. Farmer Magnus was a neighbor of Havamal’s, as well as being a prominent resident of Trondheim.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “Some kind of influenza,” he said. “Everyone was surprised because he’d always been such a healthy, strong fellow.”

  I nodded agreement. Farmer Magnus had been only a little older than Arne and me. I felt a tremor of unease. Arne said I worried too much, especially when it came to influenza, but he knew that I came by it honestly, since I had lost both my parents in an epidemic back when Arne and I were first married.

  When Havamal was gone, I quickly collected a few acorns and laid one on each of the windowsills of our house.

  Later in the afternoon, Arne found one of them and brought it to me with a suspicious look on his face.

  “What have you gotten in your head now, Eugenia?” he said.

  “’Tis nothing,” I said. “Just a bit of good luck for the home.”

  I’m not sure he believed me, but he just shook his head and put the acorn back where he found it.

  “Is Estelle out walking?” he asked. I nodded.

  Estelle had gotten into the habit of taking Winn out for a walk during the hour before dinner. I suspected part of her reason was to avoid kitchen duty, but I encouraged her, seeing that it made her feel important, and I’ll admit it was a relief to have the two of them out from underfoot while I was cooking.

  “Dinner will be ready soon,” I said.

  But before going back to the kitchen, I went to fetch two sprigs of mugwort from the garden shed. Tying them together with red thread, I nailed the bundle to the top of our front doorway.

  I knew Arne would shake his head at me, but I have always believed it is better to err on the side of caution.

  Rose

  I LOOKED CALM ON THE OUTSIDE, but my mind was reeling. If it was true that the man who claimed to have seen my white bear die had had a troll visitor, what did it mean?

  When the pale queen destroyed the ice palace, I had seen all those trolls die with my own eyes. Charles later told me he understood that nearly all the trolls in the Huldre kingdom had been assembled to see their queen wed.

  These past years, we had thought they were all gone, perished when the Troll Queen unleashed her rage at Tuki and obliterated her beautiful palace.

  We two alone had survived, along with a number of softskin slaves who had been shut up in the servants’ quarters, far away from the main building of the palace. We had found no sign of surviving trolls in the quiet desolation of the ruins.

  But were there trolls who still lived? Who either had not been at the wedding or had somehow escaped? And who perhaps sought revenge on the softskin prince who had chosen me above their queen?

  I had thought the Troll Queen’s arts were without equal, but now I wondered if there were other trolls who had similar power, strong enough to cause a storm on the sea unlike any seen before.

  Could the soldier Julien in fact be a troll that had shape-shifted into the guise of a human?

  I found the inn where Hannah said Julien was staying. It was near the docks, in a different, rougher part o
f Etretat than the lodgings we had found. When I inquired of a tired-looking woman who was sweeping the front stoop about the soldier, Julien, who was staying there, she told me he wasn’t in, but that I’d most likely find him at the public house down the road.

  I found the establishment she described and entered. The room was dark and smelled of burnt malt. It was mostly empty at this early hour, and I approached a man who stood behind the bar, drying and stacking tankards.

  “Is there a soldier by the name of Julien here?” I asked.

  He frowned at me, then gestured with a nod to a table in the far corner of the room. A man was sitting there, leaning back in his chair, looking like he was dozing. A half-empty pint of lager sat in front of him.

  Cautiously, I approached. “Excuse me?” I said, coming up to the table.

  His eyes blinked open. In the dim light I could see that he was still a young man, though he bore scars on his face that looked old. The scars made his skin look ridged.

  “Are you the soldier called Julien?” I asked, keeping my voice as steady as I could.

  “Si,” he replied with a grin. “Quién es esta hermosa dama con ojos de color violeta?”

  I took a deep breath. His voice was normal, no hint of the raspy cadence of a troll. And he did indeed seem to be from Spania.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know much Spanien. Do you speak Njorden or Fransk?”

  “Both,” he said in Njorden. “And yes, I am the soldier Julien. Unless you have come to conscript me back into the army. If that is the case, lovely lady with the violet eyes, I am someone else entirely,” he went on, his grin growing broader.

  “You are the man who was with my husband when he died?” I said, deliberately, my eyes locked on his.

  His face froze, the grin still in place but its previous warmth had disappeared. He reached for his pint and drained the remaining lager. Then he set it down, swallowing hard, and took a deep breath. “Please, sit,” he said. “Would you like something to drink? Or eat? Their boiled beef stew isn’t entirely inedible.”