Screams echoed all around. Balconies teeming with trolls fell through the air. Death was everywhere.
A strong arm grabbed my waist and dragged me out from under the ice. I was pulled along until I found myself in a tiny cavelike space. And the man who had been a white bear held me tightly. He was looking into my eyes. "Rose," he said urgently.
"Yes," I said groggily. Relief showed in his face.
We were lodged under a great slab of ice, part of the ceiling that had fallen at an angle, knifing sideways into the floor like an immense white sword. It was so thick and strong that it protected us as the ice palace crashed down around us.
I knew as I huddled there, the arms of the man who had been a white bear tight around me, that I would never forget the sound. It went on a long, long time—the cracking, grinding, slamming of fallen ice, and the screams of the dying.
I must have lost consciousness, for I suddenly became aware of his voice again saying, "Rose," in that same urgent tone, as if he was afraid I would not answer.
"Yes?" I said weakly.
"It's over, I think," he said.
We were crammed into a tiny space, only slightly bigger than our two bodies. And everything was silent except for an occasional cracking sound. The entire wreckage of the ice palace lay on top of us. I clutched at his purple waistcoat.
Then I remembered my mother's words as she'd told me the prophecy of the skjebne-soke. "Any north child I had would die—crushed by an avalanche of snow and ice."
Neddy
THE SHIP CALLED Rose was a fine one, the crew excellent. Father and I were kept busy learning all aspects of navigating the high seas. And Soren bustled about, consulting sea charts, an astrolabe, and cross-staff, and other familiar instruments of navigation. But he was most excited about a brand-new compass he'd gotten for the journey. It was a splendid instrument using an iron needle suspended in a small box, with a wind rose beneath the needle to indicate direction. He was as happy as I'd ever seen him, and I hoped Sara was prepared for a husband with an advanced case of wanderlust. (Surely Mother would have found out if he were a north-born!)
We had good luck with the weather, and the winds were favorable. It was early spring and we had more hours of daylight, even though we were heading north. And yet despite all the good omens, I was restless and uneasy.
On the seventh night of our voyage, I felt Rose again, beside me. I was by myself, on deck, gazing out at the sea, and again she laid her hand on my arm. All I could see around her was white. Immense and frozen, the whiteness seemed to be pressing down on her. She looked terrified.
I prayed that we would reach her in time.
Rose
SOMEHOW HE DUG us out. I don't know how. I helped as much as I could, but it was his strength and his will that saved us. I wondered if he still had a little of the power of a white bear in his body.
He had had a knife in his pocket and, when the ice palace had collapsed, had grabbed up his flauto. We used both to tunnel out. (The flauto was badly damaged, but he did not seem to care.) The ice slab we had sheltered under had fallen near the doorway from the banquet hall to the kitchen, and once we had dug our way to the kitchen, we found a clear passage. Then came more digging, upward, toward a faint light. Finally we broke through the ice above us and climbed up onto the roof of the kitchen.
Around us was a scene of utter devastation. The glittering, magnificent ice palace had collapsed in on itself and onto many of the buildings adjoining it. We were surrounded by an immense jagged pile of icy rubble. As I peered outward I saw that some outlying buildings, mostly servants' quarters, had escaped with only slight damage. And the stables, being the farthest from the palace, hadn't been affected at all.
We could not stop to gaze long, for neither of us wore any outer clothing and the freezing wind chilled us to the bone. I grabbed his hand and ran toward the building where my quarters had been. We entered without difficulty and I led the way to my room, where I retrieved my coat, boots, and other belongings. I gave him several fur-skins to wrap himself with. He looked around silently at the small place where I had lived for the past few months.
After leaving my room, we found a storage area with extra fur-skins and coats. He picked out a coat of thick white fur. As he bundled into it, he gave me a lopsided smile. And I was struck by the fact that the man before me, with his gold hair and sad eyes, was still a white bear to me. I knew of nothing else to call him. He could not be "Myk," for that had been the pale queen's name for him. White bear was mine, and so in my head, anyway, I continued to call him white bear. We dug around and eventually found mittens, boots, and other necessary items.
Then we set out to search for survivors. Gazing at the wreckage, I knew it was impossible that Tuki was alive. And yet I could not accept that. Tears freezing on my face, I began digging blindly into the icy ruins, but the white bear gently pulled me back.
"It's no use," he said.
And I knew he was right.
We circled the wreckage and looked for signs of life. We did not find a single living troll. If any had survived the destruction, they had long since fled.
We did find some forty or fifty humans in the outlying servants' quarters. They were all in their small rooms, passively waiting for their morning slank. Several had been injured by the collapsing palace. I'm not sure if either the white bear or I spoke it out loud; it just became a given that, somehow, we would take them with us, all of them, out of Niflheim.
The humans were, for the most part, dazed and unresponsive, but they were as docile as always and followed our pantomimed instructions without question or protest. First we made sure they were all outfitted with warm clothing, then we led them to the stables.
We rounded up eight sleighs, hitching five reindeer to each. Vaettur was in my sleigh's team. We set free those reindeer that we did not need, and they immediately galloped off. We stocked the sleighs with as much in the way of provisions as we were able to salvage. The kitchen had been completely destroyed, but we did find a cache of undoctored slank that we took with us. And we set out before the sun went down that night.
The white bear and I each commanded a sleigh, and we selected several of the most alert of the surviving humans to drive the remaining sleighs, telling them to follow our lead. The reindeer did the rest.
***
More than twenty-five of the humans perished on the journey out of Niflheim. Some succumbed to the cold, a few to their injuries, but most died because of the slank—or, I should say, of withdrawal from the slank doctored with rauha. Those who had been at the palace for years and had been fed a daily diet of it were not able to adjust to life without slank. The withdrawal was a terrible thing, causing a violent trembling of the entire body, vomiting, and eventually an abrupt halt of breathing. We left the dead in shallow, unmarked graves, and even that cost us valuable time and energy. Our only hope to survive was to keep moving.
By the time we reached the ice bridge, we were down to three sleighs. I had been dreading the bridge, thinking pessimistically that it mattered little if we survived getting there because we would be unlikely to be able to cross the cursed thing. But it turned out I needn't have worried. The reindeer navigated it with ease (I still don't know how), though there was a heart-stopping moment when one of the sleighs swayed dangerously close to the edge.
It was an enormous relief to be out of Niflheim, away from that unceasing wind. The sun shone in an icy-blue cloudless sky. The survivors of troll servitude were coming out of their stupor with a dazed sense of wonder; they had the blurry, blank-eyed look of newborn calves. Most had little or no memory of their life in the ice palace and were completely bewildered as to why they were in sleighs traveling through a frozen land.