I did not tell her how often I glanced at myself in the castle pond; how, when Marit or Lina brought me a bowl of water for washing, I looked with something like hunger into my reflected eyes. I did not tell her what I felt as I thrust my hand into the bowl and erased that girl who was a younger version of my mother.
I had never met the man I was to marry. The Far Isles were a great distance away. To reach our castle, the prince faced a long and arduous journey, across the sea and over wild lands full of unspeakable perils. Our home lay east of the sun and west of the moon, atop a mountain of glass. No wonder he did not come to visit. Nobody came.
On fine days I would watch the geese cross the sky and imagine myself as a crippled bird, left behind when the flock moved on to warmer climes. Though that was wrong. I never had a flock. I had no brothers or sisters. I had no friends. My father died when I was a babe, killed in a conflict my mother refused to talk about. From that great sorrow arose one blessing: she secured as my future husband a man who was not only beautiful, but wealthy beyond measure. How she had done this, she did not say; but she never let me forget the debt I owed her.
A child thinks little about marriage and what it means. My sixteenth birthday seemed as far away as those isles where my future husband lived. Time stretched out in an endless parade of empty days. I had no duties to carry out. The servants were afraid of me; they tended to my needs only because they had no choice. My mother was always busy, and I did not want her company anyway. I feared my mother’s displeasure above all things.
On the matter of visitors to the glass mountain, there was one exception. At midwinter a horde of folk who resembled my mother would come all at once, and there would be a great fire, and whole pigs and sheep roasting on a spit. There would be shouting and singing and things smashing. On those nights I would hide away in my bedchamber with my head under a pillow and my heart pounding. The next day, they would be gone.
“Who are they?” I asked my mother.
“Kinsfolk,” she said. “From the Realm Beneath. Be glad we need tolerate them only once a year.”
I told myself those wild, loud folk with their grinning mouths and mad red eyes could not be the same kind as me. I tried to convince myself that I would never, ever be like them.
The year I turned seven Rune came, and my whole life changed. He climbed up the glass mountain with no trouble at all, using his claws. Rune was a bear. I was at my high window when he came, and as I watched him climb steadily onward, I felt my heart turn over with wonder. If anything in the world was beautiful, he was. His eyes were the blue of a summer sky. His fur was long and soft, with every shade in it from shadow grey to dazzling white. His ears were the shape of flower petals, and his smile… Could a bear smile? It seemed to me that this one could, and although his smile was full of sharp teeth, it, too, was beautiful. There was a sadness in it that went deep down.
There were many grand chambers in our castle; too many to count. Some held only scuttling spiders. Some were furnished with huge ancient beds like squatting monsters and dark hangings that moved strangely in the draughts. When I peered in, I saw ghosts in the shadowy corners, monstrous shapes concealed in the tapestries, awaiting the moment when I should take one step too close. I liked exploring the castle; in the long, lonely hours I had discovered secret passages and hidden stairways, deep cellars and high perches. But I was afraid of those echoing rooms.
I had thought Mother might house Rune there. Instead, she put him in a disused storeroom set underground, with steps linking it to an old walled garden. At the far end of the garden there was a locked gate, where two guards stood at all times. Perhaps my mother thought Rune would turn wild. Perhaps she only wanted to keep him safe.
The walled garden was planted with hardy, small-leaved herbs. Their tiny flowers hid half-under the leaves as if afraid to show their faces. Lichens crusted the walls, clinging hard against the mountain winds. There were two spindly trees. Each winter they bowed down lower.
At first, when Rune came, I was both shy and fascinated. I peered through the bars of the gate, and there he was, looking right back at me. My mother had ordered the guards not to let anyone in.
Perhaps I should have feared the bear, but I was too ignorant to be frightened. I did not even know that in the outside world, bears do not speak as men and women do. I had my own secret route into the garden, behind a row of thorn bushes that grew hard against the wall, then up and through a gap where two stones had fallen away. From within, the hole was concealed by the creepers; from outside, the thorns covered it.
I climbed through, then sidled across the garden and sat down on a bench, in a corner where the guards could not see me. Rune approached me little by little. He settled near me, without a word, and began playing a game with pebbles and sticks. Dexterous with his long claws, he would hop a pebble, roll a stick, glance at me over his shoulder, then go on playing. And almost before I knew it, I was squatting beside him, using a twig to sweep his stones away as the two of us laughed together. When my clumsy fingers knocked something over, he did not snarl or slap me as my mother would have done. He did not scold me when my too-long nails scratched him. He was a bear, and understood such things.
After that I came every day, and if the guards saw me, they made nothing of it. Rune never told me to go away. He never said he was busy or that I was wasting his time. But every day when dusk fell, he retired to the storeroom and closed the door. He told me I was not to visit him by night. I never questioned that. I understood, somehow, that to want more would be to risk losing what I had.
My mother did not come to the garden. Sometimes she called for Rune. The guards took him to the house while I waited alone. Sometimes I heard an argument, my mother’s voice shrill, Rune growling. He would return sombre and silent.
Apart from that, between sunup and sundown he was mine. When I had learned all his games we invented new ones. The guards brought food and the two of us ate it together, enjoying the quiet, watching the birds fly over. I learned to smile. And if I did not quite learn to trust, not so quickly, one thing was certain. Before that first summer was half over, I had given him my heart.
Rune had brought a leather bag with him, slung around his neck. In it he had gifts for me: a wax tablet and a stylus. The tablet was set in a hinged wooden cover, and was small enough for me to hold comfortably. Rune showed me how to write on it, and he showed me that the writing could be erased, the wax smoothed so that the tablet could be used over and over. That summer, he taught me my letters and began to show me how they fitted together to make sounds and words. He said that when I had learned some more, I would discover that those words opened up a whole world of tales. Tales of wonder. Tales of princesses and ogres and giants. Tales of humans turned into creatures and creatures turned into men and women. Tales of quests and adventures and far-away places. If I practised hard, Rune said, then next time he came he would teach me to read. With his claw, he scratched a whole alphabet on the storeroom wall. Then he asked me which words I wanted to learn first. I told him: Kitten. Sky. Free. Bird. Magic. Far. Sea. Beautiful. After he had written all of these, and made pictures of them—for beautiful, he drew a flower—he wrote his name at the bottom.
He left on the last day of summer. When he was gone, I sat huddled on the storeroom floor, filling my tablet with crooked letters. Rune, I wrote. Rune. Rune. Tears ran down my face and splashed onto the wax surface. My mother would have called it foolishness. But I hid the tablet, and I hid the stylus, and she never saw the markings on the wall.