That was all I could get from the hungover Sig Everhart, but it was enough to give me my first spark of hope in a long while.
In my own mind I had no doubt that what the man had seen was my Rose riding on the back of the white bear. And so I found my way to Rilling Creek and from there headed south.
But days turned to weeks, and I could find no other trace of Rose and the white bear. I combed each village, asking everyone I saw. I roamed the woods, the meadows.
Finally I came to the sea, the farthest south I could go. I had combed the coastland, east and west, asking everyone I met, knocking at the doors to hundreds of strangers' homes. And so I stood by the water's edge and stared over the waves. It had been more than two months since I had left home, and the only clue to Rose's whereabouts had been from a drunken sot. But it was a slender thread of hope and I clung to it like a drowning man.
Rose
I LOOKED IN VAIN for a striker; I could not find even a flint or a bit of iron. I tried fashioning something for myself. But nothing worked. When nighttime came (or at least what could be considered nighttime in the castle), I could find no way to illuminate the utter blackness of my bedroom, no matter what I tried. Candles, oil lamps—all were extinguished the moment before my visitor arrived. Night after night it happened, the unlightable darkness followed by the give in the mattress, and the odd thing was, I grew used to it.
I decided it was an enchantment. And that I wasn't meant to see who, or what, my visitor was.
One night I did try speaking out loud to my visitor, but my tongue felt overlarge in my mouth and my voice came out hoarse and unintelligible. And what was there to say, really? There was such an air of wrongness about it, as if I were violating some sacred code or rule, that I did not try again. At any rate, there was no response to my croaking, not even a rustle of a sheet.
One or two times I was overtaken by the strong desire to reach over across the bed and touch whatever it was, to see if my fingers would encounter skin or fur or ... But that, too, felt strictly forbidden, even more than talking, and somehow I knew I must not risk it.
Yet I never stopped trying to guess who my visitor was. I came to believe that it was the white bear. His smaller size was due to the fact that he had shed his fur for the night, which would also explain the lack of bulk. From riding on his back, I knew just how deep and heavy the bear's coat was. And this theory fit with something I had noticed—that the figure next to me often shivered, pulling the covers up close and tight as if to warm himself. I couldn't imagine just what the bear would look like without fur, but the idea didn't repulse me. Instead it made me feel sympathy for him.
With time, life at the castle took on a routine. I measured my hours by the number of feet of weaving I had accomplished and by the grumblings of my stomach, and I measured my days with a calendar of sorts I made from a piece of fabric. Each day I put one stitch in the fabric. I changed the color of thread when I had counted thirty stitches. For exercise I walked the halls of the castle. I grew to know by heart every doorway, every painting on the wall, every inch of every rug. And one day I discovered something that made my imprisonment in the castle easier to endure.
Behind a dark-hued tapestry at the end of a dimly lit hall on the top floor, I found a door. The door opened onto a small, winding staircase, which was not lit. I went and got a candle, and climbed the stairs. At the top, which must have been the highest point of the castle, I found a tiny window. I could see little through it—just the sky and a lone tree branch—and could open the thick glass pane only about an inch. But the opening gave me the faintest taste of fresh air, as well as a sense of night and day beyond that which was provided by the lamps and candles of the castle. I visited that window nearly every day.
Another place I went each day (other than the weaving room) was the room I called the library. Most of the books were in Fransk, a language I knew because my mother had taught it to me as a child, though I was not fluent.
There were also books in Latin, which I knew very slightly from our family bible, and I even found two books written in Njorden. One of them, to my delight, was a book of the old stories like the ones Neddy used to tell me, the ones with Freya and Thor and Odin and Loki.
The white woman and man kept things in the castle running smoothly. They provided me with delicious, nourishing meals. They kept lamps and fires lit in the rooms I used, and tidied up after me and the white bear (whose only bad quality I could see was his shedding; I'd occasionally come across tufts of white fur stuck to the edges of furniture). They did all this without my seeing them, except for now and then, and those times they would always hurry away. The door to the kitchen was kept locked, and the few times we came face-to-face, the language difference made it impossible to understand each other.
The white bear visited me daily as I worked the loom. Usually it was in the afternoon and he would lie on the rug near me. I took to talking to him, though he rarely responded. I would tell him of my family, of life on our farmhold, and of the places I had explored beyond the farm. I would also tell him stories, both from my memory of the ones Neddy had told me and those from the Njorden book I had found.
I didn't know what he thought of my chatter, but I came to believe he liked the sound of my voice. If I was in a quiet mood, he would raise his head expectantly, as if waiting for me to start talking.
I grew used to his presence, and his sheer immensity no longer distracted me. A wordless communication developed between us. I could read his mood by the way he held his head, the small sounds he made, and even the way his fur lay on his body. Much of what I understood about him I saw in his eyes, those deep, expressive black eyes. I sensed something almost human in him, a thin, wavering strain of thought and feeling that was decidedly nonanimal. I believed it was where his limited ability to speak came from.
I wondered if at one time he had been either all animal or all human, and then those two elements of him were mingled, though clearly the animal in him had become the stronger and that was why words were so difficult.
There were times I sensed he hated that nonanimal flicker inside him, wished he could obliterate it altogether. And there were times I felt he clung to it for dear life. There were also a few times that I felt that this barely perceptible flicker was the only thing that kept him from ripping me to shreds or devouring me whole.
On one occasion I was coming out of my room on my way to the loom. I had just bathed and my face was flushed from the heat of the water I had bathed in. The white bear was standing just outside the door, and I nearly ran into him.
I heard a low growl coming from deep in his throat, and I glanced up into his eyes. To my horror they were blank, almost unrecognizable, with a terrible hunger in them. I stepped back, my heart thudding in my chest. He bared his teeth, something he'd never done before, and the growl grew louder. He took a step forward.
Without thinking I darted backward into the room, slamming the door behind me.
Desperately my hand scrabbled for a key or lock, but there was none. I pressed my back against the door, knowing how futile the effort was, given the enormous strength of the white bear. Batting down a door would be child's play to him. I heard a scratching sound on the door, then a sudden unearthly roar, like that of a creature in indescribable torment.
The roar echoed for a moment, then all was still. I waited a very long time before venturing out of my room again.
After I finished the weaving of the meadow from home, I moved on to a design from one of the stories I'd read in the Njorden book. It was a harsh tale about the trick Loki played on Idun, the guardian of the golden apples that ensured immortality to the gods. My weaving depicted Idun in the place the terrible giant Thiassi had taken her—a cavernous hall lit by columns of fire that burst from the earth.