North Child (39 page)

I have therefore mandated that Tuki may serve Myk, but only if he agrees never to speak to Myk of the castle or of what transpired there. Urda has been told that if Tuki disobeys this order, he will immediately be put to death.

I will inform Myk of the new arrangements this evening.

My plan was working – so far anyway.

Thanks to his mother, Urda, Tuki had been appointed as a sort of companion to “Myk”. When the Troll Queen was a child, Urda was her nursemaid – and since then the older woman had continued to hold a position of trust to the queen.

Tuki learned that Myk had a large cup of slank each night before bedtime. For a week Tuki had managed to substitute plain slank for the kind with the powder. I have some idea he switched his own slank, unpowdered, for Myk's, which he poured away. Tuki had also contrived to smuggle in several bundles of clothing that were crucial to my plan. And in between orders for dresses, I sneaked in time to do my own sewing.

There were only a handful of days until the wedding.

I am glad my queen assigned the troll Tuki as companion to me during these days before the wedding. I like him very much. He listens while I practise my flauto, and I see tears come into his bright, eager eyes when I play. And he nearly falls off his chair clapping when I finish. If the other trolls like my music even half as much, I shall consider my performance a great success.

He is good company, too. He likes to play games, especially a game in which I teach him words of my old language by pointing to things and saying the word, and then he tells me the troll word for each. I have learned much of the troll language from my queen, but Tuki has helped me learn even more. I want to assist my queen in any way I can when I rule at her side, and she is well pleased at my interest in the language of her people.

I have been feeling somewhat odd of late. Not ill or unhappy. Just a little different, like my sight is clearer, or my thoughts. Or perhaps it is that I feel more awake; I certainly rise in the morning feeling more alert. I can't quite figure it out, but I am glad of it.

I have even had brief memories of the time before I came to the ice palace. Even before I became a white bear. They are fleeting but pleasant.

Just today I recalled being a child and playing on a field of the greenest grass, with many bright yellow flowers poking through the green. There were other children and we were all laughing together at something. It was very enjoyable, the memory.

I have not told my queen because she does not care for mention of the past. And I do not wish to upset her, especially when she is so busy preparing for our future happiness.

Tuki managed to smuggle some of the plain slank to me, which was wonderful. Despite my increased status as seamstress and weaver, I still received only the most meagre of meals, presumably because most of my nutrition should have come from the doctored slank, which I continued to pour away. (The hole under my bed had grown quite large.) I was becoming painfully thin and worried the trolls would notice. They never did, though. Softskins were viewed as a herd, not worth taking note of individually. Our function was to provide service to the trolls until our bodies wore out. Then we were replaced.

It was Tuki who told me that when that happened, when softskins became too old or too ill to work, they were taken to something called
kentta murha.
When I asked what
kentta murha
was, Tuki turned very white and silent. I could not get any words of sense from him after that, and finally he left me, still upset.

I continued with my tasks. The wedding feast would be the day after next, and there were still several gowns to be completed. I barely slept at all, so hard was I being worked. I felt fortunate that Tuki had gotten me the unpowdered slank, or I might well have collapsed from the lack of sleep and food. But the slank gave me energy and strength. And I needed all my wits about me for what lay ahead.

Finally the day has arrived. I am extremely pleased to see that all my preparations are coming together, just as I had planned. The feast tonight will be the largest and grandest gathering in the history of our people. For the very first time the trolls from the bottom of the world have journeyed north to my kingdom. Even my father, in his prime, created nothing of this magnitude. It is extraordinary.

With my arts I myself made the gown I will wear. I will outshine the northern sun in radiance, which is not surprising in that I borrowed some of the sun's brilliance to create the fabric.

Simka has surpassed herself in the kitchen. And I am even pleased with Urda. Tuki has, somewhat to my surprise, been a great success as a companion to Myk. Myk has asked me to allow Tuki to attend him during the ceremony, and I have agreed. Urda is terribly pleased and has been bragging about it all over the palace. I hope the little fool does not make any stupid mistakes that will mar the splendour of the proceedings.

Last night Myk had one of his nightmares, the first in some time. I attribute it to wedding-night jitters and am not unduly concerned. He was very agitated, though, and I had to give him double the portion of the powdered slank. It was very peaceful, holding him in my arms as he settled down to sleep, his golden head resting on my shoulder. How I love him. It is why I have done all that I have done.

The guests for the feast will begin to arrive this afternoon, and the rooms have been made ready. Every room in the palace will be full. Most of the guests will be fatigued when they arrive, having travelled great distances, but there will be little rest for them tonight.

We will begin with the feast. Twenty courses of the greatest delicacies in Huldre. And then will come the dancing, which will last well into the night. And then tomorrow at midday, after Myk plays his flauto, we will be joined together…for ever.

I was kept busy until the very last minute, putting final touches on the troll ladies' gowns – letting out a seam here, adding a silk rose there. The noise was horrible, each troll lady stridently demanding something in a rasping voice. At times I felt I was attending a flock of cawing, brightly coloured crows. My head ached and my fingers were numb.

And then finally I was left alone. I was instructed to clean up the mess of the sewing room and then return to my quarters. As had become usual, no one stayed to supervise me. Every available serving troll was needed in the kitchen, banquet hall, or stables. I breathed a great sigh of relief, for this was one element in my plan that I had no control over. Though it seemed likely the trolls would treat me as they had for the past several weeks, leaving me alone to clean up, still there had been no guarantee.

I had brought all I needed with me to the sewing room. And when the last troll had gone and I had given my dull-eyed acceptance to their final orders, I set to work.

First I pulled out my leather wallet from where it had been concealed under my clothing. Though I knew the gold and the silver dresses had not been adversely affected by being folded up in the wallet for so long, I was still anxious that the moon dress might have been damaged. After all, it had been through a storm at sea as well as the inhumanly freezing conditions of my trek northward. My fingers trembling slightly, I removed the dress from the wallet and shook it out.

I needn't have worried. There was not so much as a wrinkle in the exquisite fabric, and I marvelled all over again at its breathtaking beauty, unbelieving as before that I had actually created such a wonder.

I set the dress aside for a moment and quickly pulled on an undergarment I had fashioned for myself in stolen moments. To protect myself from the cold (I would not be able to wear a reindeer-skin parka to the wedding feast or my duck-feather underwear), I had stitched together several layers of very fine silk into a full-length suit that fitted close to my skin.

Then I put on the dress.

I crossed to a large oval mirror that the troll ladies had been using earlier to admire themselves in their gowns. It was the first time I had seen myself in a mirror since leaving the white bear's castle, and I was shocked to see my face. It was much thinner and paler, and there was a threadlike white scar on my right cheekbone, a souvenir of my brush with the bear in the ice forest. I also looked different in other ways – how I held my head, the expression in my eyes. I was not the same Rose who had left home almost two years before on the back of a white bear.

Anyway, it didn't matter how my face looked. I went to a corner of the room, and from under a pile of little-used cloths, I retrieved a small bundle. Carefully I unwrapped it, revealing a mask. I had been working on this mask secretly for the past several weeks. It was made of fabric, though I had stiffened the material somewhat with a thin paste I had made of flour and water. It had been an immense task, and I had used every bit of skill I possessed for working with cloth. But the result was an extraordinarily lifelike mask of a troll woman's face. Or rather my face, if I had had the white, ridged skin of a troll.

I put the mask on, fastening the ties under my hair, and once again gazed at myself in the mirror. It was amazing. I had been transformed into a young troll woman, if not as beautiful as the queen at least passably pretty. My mask would not have borne very close inspection under human eyes, but I was counting on the trolls' poor eyesight to keep them from seeing through my disguise.