Rune was silent for a long time. Then he said, “You should ask your mother to tell you the truth, Hulde. Ask her about your father. About what happened.”
My father? What had he to do with this? I was afraid to ask my mother; afraid of her sour tongue and her quick, sharp-nailed hand. “Why can’t you tell me?”
“You must ask her.” Oh, he sounded weary; as weary as those oxen after they had laboured up the mountain. I crept away without another word.
Later, I gathered myself and went to my mother. She was hanging her smallest whip back on its hook.
“Wretched woman,” she muttered. “One would think that after fifteen years in my service, she would know how to fold a gown without creasing it.”
It was not the best of times to ask a question, but if I did not ask now, I would lose my courage. I wanted the truth, good or bad.
“Mother, it is only three years now until I’m to be married.”
She looked me up and down, brows raised. I saw in her eyes that she thought me still a child, and a tiresome one at that. “So?”
“Will you explain what the agreement was with the Prince of the Far Isles? How did it come about?”
“Have you been deaf all these years, Hulde? When you turn sixteen, you wed the prince. That is the agreement. There is no more to be said about it.” In defiance of her own words, she went on. “Remember one thing only: your intended is wealthy beyond imagining. We will be able to restore this place to its original grandeur. Think, Daughter! Farewell forever to leaking roofs and holes in the walls! The treasure room once again awash with gold!”
What could she mean? “But… will I not be living in the Far Isles once I am wed?”
“Are you so desperate to run away? Who will be Queen of the Mountain after me, if not my own flesh and blood?” A darkness entered her eyes; her hand reached out toward the coiled whip.
I had words ready, but they dried up in my mouth. Faithful Solvej would have stood strong and asked the questions that should be asked. It seemed I was not as brave as I’d thought.
Still later, when I was in my chamber alone, I heard her and Rune arguing. She was shouting, stamping about, thumping her fist on something. His answers were quieter; I could not hear what he was saying. I caught a few of Mother’s words: …owe me… gave your word… don’t think you can get out of this… I could make no sense of it, so I held my pillow over my head to block out the sound, and thought instead about what she had said earlier. Had she really meant that the Prince of the Far Isles would move here when we married? That I would stay on the glass mountain my whole life? Surely not. Why would anyone want to come and live here, trapped with the silent servants and Mother’s rages and my clumsiness? And where did Rune fit in?
Nobody to ask. Nobody to explain. Soon enough, Rune was gone and three more years of waiting began. I studied the books he had brought me, in particular the book of maps. Some of the maps had tracks marked on them, paths I thought might lead to the bright and wondrous places spoken of in the stories. Birch forests inhabited by slender fey folk. Broad rivers on which barges floated up and down, visiting settlements where as many languages were spoken as there were stars in the sky. Lakes and rivers. Valleys and grazing fields. The sea. If a person could keep walking long enough she could reach all of those. I looked again at the Far Isles on the map. Why would the prince come to live here if he could be there? Who would look after his castle and his people?
By my sixteenth year I was growing desperate for answers. Though she had never admitted it, I knew that my mother was capable of working magic. Not grand, powerful magic of the kind that conjures dragons and makes whole cities fall. Hers was a small, cruel kind of spellcraft. She used it sometimes to punish the servants. One of the women might find her nose lengthened threefold for a day, or her feet turned into a horse’s hooves, or her garments rendered transparent. Sometimes Mother grew so angry that magic seemed to burst out of her. I had seen her hurl a chair the full distance of the reception chamber. When it hit the wall it shattered, not into splinters of wood as I might have expected, but into a cloud of tiny buzzing insects that flew madly about until she waved a hand and they dropped dead onto the floor tiles. She made her maid gather them up one by one. I did not think I possessed the same gift, if gift it could be called. I was surely too clumsy to work even the simplest of spells. But I went searching for mirrors again, no longer frightened of the shadows in the empty chambers. It was easy enough to avoid Mother’s notice. Between tormenting the servants and counting our store of gold coins over and over, she was occupied all day. She had never shown much interest in how I occupied myself, and that had not changed now I was older. I wondered how she expected me to be the next Queen of the Mountain, if she never taught me what a queen should do. Perhaps she believed she would live forever.
I made a plan, as Faithful Solvej might do, and set about carrying it out. I ordered my maidservants to stay out of my sight all day; they backed away, looking relieved. I began a search of the empty bedchambers. I left no corner unvisited, no mouse-hole untouched. My hair was veiled in cobwebs; my gown turned grey with dust.
As a child, I’d wanted a mirror so I could see what I was not. I’d hoped its reflective surface would show me someone beautiful; a girl who could match up to the Prince of the Far Isles. At fifteen and a half, I knew I was no such girl. I knew I was my mother’s daughter, and no amount of wishing could change that. But Rune had said I could make my story any way I chose. There was a story in my mind about a girl who found a magic mirror: a mirror that could change the future. A mirror that would give her choices. Who was to say I could not make that story come true?
So I hunted until my hands were raw and my back ached and my nose streamed. I hunted for days and days, as the season passed and my sixteenth birthday drew closer and closer. I hunted on the day Rune should have arrived for his summer visit; the day when he did not come. I searched on the days that followed, hoping the magic mirror, when I found it, would offer an explanation for his absence. Would he not want to be at my wedding? A gown was being sewn, a feast was being planned, though I could not imagine whom we would invite other than Rune and our quarrelsome kinsfolk from the Realm Beneath. But maybe the Prince of the Far Isles would bring a whole retinue of courtiers. His family. His own mother. How would they get up the mountain?
With thirty days left until midsummer, I found it. It was not in any of the echoing bedchambers, but in Rune’s empty storeroom. I was looking for somewhere safer to hide away my books, and when I stuck my hand into a crack between the stones, there was the mirror. It was small enough to fit on my palm, and simple, with a tarnished metal frame and a surface that reflected the chamber dimly, as if through a mist. The moment I touched it I knew it was the one I needed. I made the mirror vanish into my pocket. Then I went straight to my own quarters and closed the door. Mother was busy overseeing the wedding preparations. Too busy, I hoped, to bother with me. My gown was ready, a stiff, awkward thing encrusted with gems. It hung on my bedchamber wall, mocking me.
I drew the little mirror out and held it before me as carefully as if it were a new-laid egg. My heart was doing its best to escape from my body.
“Show me,” I whispered. “Show me the story.” And it seemed to me the spiders in the corners and the scuttling things in the walls and even the creaking boards under my feet echoed my words back to me. There was magic everywhere.