West

by Edith Pattou

  She gave one of her sweet laughs, wished me luck, and turned to leave.

  But she spun back around. “One last thing about the three cloaks. In order to pass the test, you must be able to actually wear each one.”

  She gave me a little wave and started out the door, but stopped and turned toward me once again, more deliberately this time. Her face wore an uncharacteristically serious expression. “I thought I should tell you, dear Rose, that there is a bit of a time pinch. That is, you don’t have all the time in the world. The pale queen is doing her own brand of weaving. With her arts. Preparing for Aagnorak. So you mustn’t dawdle,” Verendi said, and she couldn’t resist a little laugh. Then she was gone, her silvery laughter hanging in the air.

  So. A weaving time limit. With no less than the fate of the world resting on the outcome. Perfect.

  I turned and looked around the room.

  Like all things with the Morae, I wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was real or not, but the room I found myself in was very similar to my workroom back in Fransk, in the home I had shared with Charles. Of course it didn’t really matter if it was real or not, as long as the loom worked and the food filled my belly.

  The only thing that did matter now was to find a way to accomplish the tasks they had set me.

  As I inspected the materials that were neatly stored on shelves, I knew it was unlikely that I would find a spool of fine thread made of water, a skein of wool made of fire, or a measure of silk made of air. So I would have to figure out another way to weave cloaks of those three materials.

  I turned my attention to the loom. It was a beauty, not unlike my favorite loom in the castle in the mountain.

  I remembered the dresses of gold, silver, and moon thread I had made on it and wondered if the Morae somehow knew of these. They seemed to know most everything. I also remembered the three spools of thread I had taken away with me from the castle in the mountain, and that I still carried with me. How extraordinary that their colors almost coincided with the colors of these three cloaks I must make. I wondered if it truly was a coincidence. Perhaps it was fate. Or maybe Verendi had found this little way of helping me, in the name of true love.

  But I knew I could not get away with merely using thread the colors of flame and seawater and air. The cloaks must be made of actual fire, water, and wind.

  Indeed the tasks that lay before me reminded me of finding a land that lay east of the sun and west of the moon, which, no matter how poetic and lovely it sounded, was basically the equivalent of making a rope of ashes. It was nowhere. A place that didn’t exist, as I had discovered. I had found Niflheim with help from Thor, and even more, from Malmo. I had no one to help me now.

  My mind was blank. It was not possible. None of it was possible. Fire, water, wind. These were the stuff of life, not the material for clothing. I could not build a fire and somehow spin the flames into thread.

  I sat down at a broad wooden table, my hand pressed against my forehead, willing my brain to work. Fire, flame, light. Oil lamps, candles.

  Candle!

  I jumped to my feet and crossed again to my pack. I quickly found the candle, the one my mother had given me so long ago, the troll candle that had ruined everything. Maybe now . . . ?

  Taking the vivid red thread from the castle in the mountain and a spool of a dark orange from the supplies in the house, I sat down at the loom and began casting on. It didn’t take long before I was ready, and I began to weave, my fingers flying.

  I lost track of time as I always did when I was at the loom. It felt good to be there. I hadn’t done any weaving since I’d left home for Trondheim, which felt like a lifetime ago.

  The dark orange wool I had chosen was thick and porous, and it blended perfectly with the red. It did not feel like it took a long time before I had woven enough cloth for a cloak.

  I cut and sewed, and when it was done, I laid the cloak on the worktable.

  I found a small cooking pan, and taking it and the candle, I crossed to the hearth fire, which burned as strongly and steadily as it had since I entered the room.

  Methodically, I shaved off pieces of the candle and dropped them into the pan, over and over, until the candle was reduced to a large heap of wax parings.

  I set the pan in the fire and watched as the wax slowly melted. I stirred it with a stick until it was completely molten. I carried the pan to the table and, using a long, thin needle to guide me, drizzled candle wax in very fine lines up and down the outside of the cloak, working it into the fabric with my fingers. The hot wax burned my fingertips, but it cooled quickly. I had to return the pan to the fire several times during the process to remelt the wax.

  I wasn’t sure there would be enough wax to fill the entire cloak, but by apportioning it prudently, I managed to cover most of it.

  But I wasn’t done. Verendi had told me I was free to move about the island and so, carrying the small pan, I opened the door and went outside. When we had walked from the Morae’s blackhouse to the one I was in now, I had noticed a small outcropping of dwarf pine trees a short distance away. I moved among them and, using my dagger, gathered the amber-colored resin and sap that collected in broken knots and fractures of the tree limbs and trunks. I dug and scraped until my small pan was full.

  I returned to the house and, as I had done with the candle shavings, placed the pan on the fire. It smoked heavily while I stirred it, but soon I had a pan full of viscous melted pitch. I carried it over to the worktable and, using the stick, laced the pitch throughout the material, making sure to cover spots where there was little wax. When the pan was empty, I returned to the loom and wove material for another cloak, this one made of a dense wool, all black.

  Satisfied with my work, I hung both cloaks on one of the three hooks that Verendi had pointed out to me when she showed me my workspace.

  Fire. Done. Now to water.

  White Bear

  I had been swimming.

  A long time.

  Such a deep hunger

  I ate fish, whole and raw.

  * * *

  I was a white bear again.

  Familiar,

  like a nightmare,

  one that recurs,

  over and over.

  * * *

  I remembered well

  the struggle

  between man and animal.

  * * *

  I needed to hold on to the man.

  Everything depended on it.

  But it was not easy.

  * * *

  I would have died by now,

  had I been a man.

  But I was a white bear, strong,

  a sure, graceful swimmer.

  I could catch fish

  (even though I longed for seal!)

  and eat them raw.

  But the hunger was constant.

  Insatiable.

  * * *

  Keep swimming.

  Find the lady Nyamh.

  And my son.

  I must find my son,

  save him from the one

  who had taken so much already.

  The Troll Queen.

  Rose

  AFTER EATING BREAD AND CHEESE and meat and washing it down with pear cider from a jug, I went outside, this time taking a large basket with me. I headed down to the shoreline and began walking along it. Immediately I saw what I was looking for and began collecting long tendrils of seaweed. I stowed them carefully in the basket. Every so often, I would spot a seashell in the shape I liked and would scoop that up as well.

  When my basket was full, I returned to the blackhouse and emptied it out. I made many such scavenging trips, and the sun had set by the time I was done.

  One day gone. I tried to push away thoughts of the Troll Queen and Aagnorak. I needed to concentrate on completing my task.

  I had collected one particular type of seaweed. It had long strands with a striking variety of coloration, ranging from purple to yellow to orange to green, and there were clusters of pods alo
ng each vine.

  I didn’t use the loom for this cloak. Instead, I gently laid the long strands of seaweed on the worktable and began to weave them together by hand, going up and over, down and through. It was almost like weaving a basket, except that the material was much more fragile and I had to be very careful and delicate as I worked. And I deliberately wove it so that there were long loops of the seaweed hanging at regular intervals.

  I tried to keep the pods intact, but occasionally they would burst open with a watery pop, and often a little phosphorescent sea worm would wriggle out. I left them there in the strands.

  I wove in sections and, using the blue-purple thread from the castle in the mountain, bound the sections together. I trimmed as I went so that the edges were uniform.

  When I had roughly the shape of a cloak, I took the small shells I had collected and painstakingly made tiny holes in each one with a sharp needle. I sewed them onto the cloak in a wavelike pattern. Then I fashioned ties at the neck with another kind of seaweed, one that was sturdy and pliant.

  It was laborious, time-consuming work, though as usual I lost track of time and only my rumbling belly reminded me that I must stop and eat.

  But finally I was done.

  I held it up and gazed upon my creation. It was beautiful, I decided, with its rippling, glistening texture and all those luminous colors. The shells made satisfying little rhythmic sounds when I moved the material.

  I hung the seaweed cloak on the second hook.

  Two days gone. Or was it three? My breath went shallow for a moment as I thought about the time slipping away. Aagnorak. Winn.

  Steadying myself, I deliberately turned my thoughts to the wind. How I wished I had Sib with me. With all her knowledge of the wind, I was sure she would be able to solve this task.

  I cast my mind back to what she had told me, of wind music and of the lists of winds throughout the world. At first my memory was dim, but I closed my eyes and pictured us there on board the ship traveling between Trondheim and La Rochelle, where she had given me my first wind lesson.

  I remembered the desert winds first because they were the most colorful. Bist roz, which was known to bury villages. Harmattan, or sea of darkness, which blew red dust across the Sahara. I remembered too begiak zabalik, a persistent fierce wind that roared through the Pyrennes.

  There was that Skottish wind she had told me of at the very beginning. In fact, she had introduced me to it, curling it around me and bidding me to listen closely. It had been one of her favorites, she said. A western wind, and I had named my horse after it: ciuin.

  I also remembered another Skottish wind Sib had told me about that was named for a bird, because when it blew, you felt like you were being caught up in a rush of flying seabirds. Faoileag, it was called.

  Birds, seabirds. Ideas began to flicker in my mind, but nothing that took any real shape, so I jumped up and exited the house, making my way to the shoreline. Perhaps if I could feel the sea wind on my skin I would be able to think more clearly.

  I found a rock to sit on and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of the waves and the calling of seabirds. I remembered Sib telling me that early people had thought the wind was caused by a giant bird and the flapping of its giant wings. I opened my eyes and saw a bird winging over the water, a petrel, I thought. I watched as it soared high, then dipped down to the water with an easy grace, skimming the surface.

  And suddenly I had an idea of how to make a cloak of wind.

  White Bear

  I had no direction.

  North south east west.

  But I pointed my nose

  toward the place the sun set.

  * * *

  West,

  though I didn’t know why.

  * * *

  I swam and

  I swam,

  riding the ribbons of foam.

  Feeling the run of the sea current beneath me.

  * * *

  One night the sky lit up with color.

  Green.

  Yellow.

  Red.

  Purple.

  Great swaths of color,

  pulsing, shimmering across the sky.

  Astonishing.

  * * *

  Like the bursts

  I had in my mind, before.

  Colors instead of memories.

  * * *

  Pulses of purple

  reminded me of Nyamh’s violet eyes.

  Familiar,

  but not familiar.

  Rose

  AS I HAD DONE WITH THE SEAWEED, so I did with feathers. I took my basket down to the coast and walked along the water’s edge, searching for the feathers of seabirds.

  At first I picked up any I could find, for unlike seaweed, feathers were not plentiful. I circled the island, which took several hours, and circled it again, this time zigzagging inland periodically, and by the end of the day, my basket was half full.

  As I searched, I thought about wind, about the wind magic Sib had taught me. I had not practiced much, but one thing I had learned from her lesson was to be more attuned to the wind, like the wild, shifting wind that had preceded the Blood Rain, and the foehn wind in the Alpes that Ben had spoken of.

  I concentrated on the wind that blew off the sea, listening closely to it. At first I heard nothing except the thrumming of my own heartbeat and the sound of the waves, but over the time I spent circling the island searching for feathers, I began to hear some faint sound. Not exactly music, but something that resembled it.

  By the following day, my basket was almost full, but by then I had decided I wanted only white or very light-colored feathers. In the castle in the mountain, I had made a shirt for my white bear out of white thread spun from tufts of his fur. That shirt had helped undo the enchantment the Troll King had cast, and I had a superstitious feeling that this cloak should match my white bear. So I had to discard some of the feathers I had already found.

  My back hurt and the muscles in my legs ached from bending and crouching to pick up feathers, but on the afternoon of the third day of feather hunting, when I was beginning to fear I would never find enough, I had a stroke of good luck. I came across a wide swath of white feathers on a little hillock overlooking the sea, apparently left by a migrating mass of gannets, a mostly white sea bird. I actually saw a few gannets winging their way on the tail end of the migration, hurrying to catch up.

  When my basket could hold no more, I headed back to the workroom. I laid all the white feathers on the worktable to dry and, seeing them spread out, thought I had collected a sufficient amount. I hoped so, anyway, since I didn’t think my back or legs could bear any more feather hunting.

  I set up the loom with the translucent silvery thread from the castle in the mountain, and I began to weave. More than before, I was reminded of being back in the castle, weaving the cloth that would become the nightshirt for my nightly visitor. I closed my eyes and let myself picture the white bear there before me, and I found myself speaking, as if I was telling him the tale of the Maid of the North. As it had in the castle, the telling of the tale made the time pass faster, and matched the rhythm of my fingers as they moved back and forth.

  When I finished the tale, I went to the window of the workroom and threw it open. The wind was cold, but I wanted to listen to it, feel it on my skin, as I wove.

  Feeling faintly foolish, I concentrated very hard and tried calling the wind into my fingers. At first I felt nothing, but I kept breathing slowly and listening and concentrating. I may have been imagining it, but it felt like the ends of my fingers vibrated slightly, almost as if they were humming.

  Finally I was done. I took the fabric I had woven off the loom and laid it over a chair. I checked on the feathers and found them to be dry. Then I gathered them into a box and laid the translucent cloth out on the table.

  I cut and hemmed until I had the shape of the cloak ready.

  Using fine white silk thread and a sharp needle, I began sewing the white feathers onto the fabri
c. As I sewed, I thought of the times I had searched for my white bear after the Troll Queen had taken him from me. There had been so many moments when I thought I would never find him again, or that even if I did, it would be too late.

  But not this time. He was alive; Verendi had told me so. He might even have been somewhere near, and perhaps this time he would find me.

  There were hundreds of feathers. I didn’t count them, I just sewed. The work was even more laborious than the candle wax or the seaweed and shells. I wanted to cover every inch of the fabric with feathers, like it was the body of a living seabird, so they had to be layered densely, overlapping.

  By the end of the first day of sewing feathers, I was frazzled, ill-tempered, and beginning to think this was all a ridiculous waste of time. I pricked my finger with the sharp little needle more than once and had to stop and wash the blood from the white feathers it dripped on. At one point, my fingers raw and my head buzzing, I was ready to throw the whole thing out the door. It was taking too long. Let Aagnorak come, I thought grimly.