by Jessica Daw
“Firstly, because you call me a troublesome brat and expect me to just—no. I am not going to lose my temper now, I’m exhausted and I haven’t eaten anything but travel squares and a dry fish for the past however many days. I don’t owe you an explanation.”
His expression was hard to read, which shouldn’t have been strange, not being able to read an isbjørn’s face. It was strange, somehow. “It’s not so much a matter of owing me an explanation as helping me know how I can avoid getting fire in my face.”
To my surprise, that made me laugh. “Fine, you make a point.”
“So . . . what do I need to avoid?”
“I don’t want to talk about my parents. Or the Council. Or magic. Or titles. Fair?”
The fur-patches that corresponded with eyebrows twitched up. “For now.”
I swallowed my instinct to fight that. My real, honest motivation for the whole conversation? I was hungry, and the aftertaste of dried fish was still making my mouth taste awful, and I didn’t think I could stand eating another raw-potatoes-and-dirt-flavored traveling square. The shifter had to know how to cook something else, with all that varied food items in the kitchen. If I played nice, maybe he’d help me cook. That was why I apologized. Also it really would be a pain to be angry all the time for the next year.
“Shall we return then?” I suggested brightly.
Non-eyebrows rose again. Too brightly. But I got my way and we returned.
The stable was stocked with much more hay than I thought the isbjørn could possibly have procured alone. “How . . . ?”
“I would have taken you to retrieve the hay if you hadn’t had a fit last night.”
“I said sorry!”
“I was simply explaining why you don’t know how I transported the hay.” I sort of even believed him. He didn’t speak with anger or recrimination, just a statement.
I bit my lip. “Um. About that. I wondered . . . could you teach me how to make bread?”
He began walking back into the courtyard, and I followed. “It’s already evening. It’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
My stomach twisted with disappointment. More accurately, with hunger, but the hunger seemed aware that that refusal would result in many more hours before another meal.
“If you’re hungry, just say so. I’m going to eat, it won’t be too much trouble to prepare you something as well.”
“Teach me how to prepare something.”
He turned back at me, sharp white teeth gleaming in an approximation of a smile. “You’re catching on, Lena.”
The next morning, I met the isbjørn in the kitchen bright and early. I had prepared a simple stew with dried meat and a bit of seasoning with relative success and I was eager to try my hand at bread.
The isbjørn was waiting for me, steaming porridge on the table.
“I thought we were making bread.”
“We are,” he assured me. “It takes a while.”
“How long?”
“Most of the day your first time, but we’ll make enough to last for a week or so. Eat, and then we’ll begin.” I ate quickly, and as soon as I finished, true to his word, we began. He wouldn’t do any of the work for me, instead instructing and watching and criticizing as I did it myself, which I thought should have irritated me, but I didn’t let it, focusing on the task at hand. It wasn’t as difficult as I would have thought, not getting irritated at the isbjørn.
While the fire burned, I made bread dough with rice, flour, salt, oil, and ale barm. When he told me to spoon the foam off the ale, I gave him a look.
“What? How else do you expect the bread to rise?”
“Yeast,” I suggested.
“What do you think the foam is?”
So I obediently kneaded ale barm into my dough.
“Then what?”
“Then we wait for the fire to burn down,” he replied. “Very nice dough, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Do your parents call you Lena? Is that why you dislike it?”
“No,” I said automatically.
“No what?”
“Why do you care?”
“Making conversation.”
I shrugged, attempting to appear and feel nonchalant. “My father used to call me Lena. But I don’t dislike it.”
“Then why don’t you let me call you Lena?” He cocked his head, and for a moment looked remarkably like a confused puppy. It softened me, so I answered that question honestly.
“I prefer being called Lena. Just not by . . . everyone.”
“Oh? By whom, then?”
“People I like,” I said, doing my best not to squirm.
“And you don’t like me?”
“No, I don’t.” Why that felt like a lie was beyond me. He was an obnoxious, pushy, rude shifter who’d kidnapped me—parental permission or no.
“Not even after teaching you how to make bread?” he wheedled.
“All I’ve made is bread dough. It doesn’t count.”
“You’ll like me when there’s bread, then.”
“No. You don’t like me anyway, so why does it matter?”
His shoulder blades twitched in an approximation of a shrug buried by fur. “I never said I don’t like you.”
“No one likes me.” I surprised myself with my continued honesty.
He blinked. “That’s an absolute statement.”
“It’s true. No one likes me.”
His eyebrows drew together and made a fuzzy ridge that I had a sudden urge to rub. So much for a terrifying predator. “Your family likes you.”
“They love me. They don’t like me. Why would they?”
“Your charming personality, perhaps.”
“Exactly.” I sighed. “I try to be charming, but . . . it feels wrong. I never do it right.” There was a brief pause, and I felt too vulnerable. “You’re not very charming yourself.”
“I can be very charming, or so I’m told.”
“People lie to people they want things from,” I pointed out.
“How very worldly of you, little Lena.”
“Isn’t it time to put the bread in? That fire is dead.”
That, thankfully, ended the conversation. Per the isbjørn’s instructions, I swept out the fireplace and made bread. A week earlier, I would have complained that it was grainy and dark and tough. Today it was the best food I’d ever eaten.
Over the course of the next few days, I spent a lot of time learning how to do this and that from the isbjørn. I quieted my fits of rebellion with thoughts of my inability to fend for myself. Besides which, there was little conversation between us. I rarely allowed talk to stray beyond the task at hand, and he didn’t seem to want to chat much either. As long as I focused on what we were doing, I could control myself. I released my magic into my armor nightly, figuring the stupid suit would be more prepared to guard me than I could possibly need with so much energy charging its runes.
That wasn’t a foolproof solution, though.
One day we were making candles. We used a vat of liquefied animal fat simmering on a fire, which smelled atrocious—I told the isbjørn it smelled just like him when he was wet, which earned me a barb about how I ought to use the fat to dress my hair, as it would likely be an improvement—and dipped long strings attached to a wooden rod into it at intervals. What started as wax-coated strings became thick candles with patience.
The only problem was that I proved to be an absolute clod pole when it came to not dripping the boiling fat on myself. Not eager to earn further barbs, I ignored the drips and kept working. I’d learned how to wash my own clothes and was confident I could get the wax out.
I waited until the next morning, rising early and drawing water, filling my washbasin, feeling like I was finally catching the rhythm of this new life. I even had calluses on my palms from drawing water and cleaning the stable and starting to scrub down the rest of the castle. That was at my own insistence—the is
bjørn was happy to live in filthiness.
I’d washed a few articles of clothing and thought I could figure it out without assistance this time. I began scrubbing. And scrubbing. And scrubbing. My fingers were starting to feel raw and numb, my shoulders aching. Raw and numb and aching was becoming my accustomed state, engaging in near-constant physical labor as I was now, for the first time in my life, but usually by the time my back began aching the clothes were beginning to look cleaner. The wax spots did not seem a bit smaller.
I redoubled my efforts, scrubbing with twice the vigor. I tore the fabric of the skirt, and the wax hadn’t given at all. I let out a frustrated, “Bah!” when the fabric ripped, and my hands lit on fire, which made me yell again, dropping the fabric. It was already singed.
“You’ll never get your skirt cleaned that way.” The isbjørn’s growling voice from behind me made me whirl.
“Thank you, Sir Helpful! Does your use, perhaps, extend to explaining how I can get my skirt cleaned, or simply pointing out that my current method won’t work?”
His gray eyes sat on me, weighing me if I wasn’t mistaken. When I was about to burst, he said, “I enchanted the wax to burn longer. It won’t be removed without magic.”
My already-tense shoulders tightened defensively. “Oh.”
The isbjørn sat, a look in his eyes I was beginning to recognize meant he was going to push a point. “Do you wish to learn to work magic?”
Swallowing, I tried to tamp down my first instinct to lash out. Over the course of the past few days, I’d learned that the isbjørn had a temper but had never resorted to violence, even when I’d spat at him or lit him on fire. He was well-educated and perceptive, seeming to catch on to my desire to not talk about personal things—enough so that he clearly knew he was crossing a line with that question. “I thought we agreed not to discuss magic.” I sounded terse, but not furious like I felt.
“If you intend on living here, you’ll need to perform at least some magic. Do you refuse to do that?”
“I can do a little magic,” I said reluctantly.
“What can you do?”
That stupid question. “A little.” I sounded a bit more furious that time. Despite the absence of the cuffs, I was reluctant to do anything more than siphon my energy into my armor and leave it at that.
“Why?”
I’d been asked that before, only a few times. I’d never answered it honestly. The prospect of doing so made me feel exposed, vulnerable—the Council had not restricted my magic without reason. I didn’t trust the isbjørn not to take advantage of that. “Why do you care?”
“Your hands light on fire when you’re angry, a clear sign of not being able to control your magic. It’s dangerous to be out of control. I’m going to spend a year around you.”
Viable point. “I’ve never learned to control my magic, whether I’m trying to access it or not.”
“Have you tried to access it, intentionally?”
The truth was that I felt like trying to access my magic would be like trying to take a live coal from a furnace with bare hands. In the flood of new experiences, I hadn’t given much thought to my freed magic. “Not . . . exactly,” I said in a small voice.
“Something happened. A mistake, an accident. You were upset,” he guessed.
I felt like a child, squirming, about to be caught for breaking a lamp.
“Tell me.”
“Why? What’s the use? It happened a long time ago and has nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t really care about your past or what you’ve done, but I want you to be able to use magic so I don’t have to do everything for you, and whatever happened is keeping you from using magic. If I don’t know what it is, I can’t help you get over it.”
I had most certainly deduced that the isbjørn did not care particularly about me one way or the other, beyond what he was Bound to do for me and what someone who had a quarter of a claim to being a gentleman was obliged to do. I sat on the cold stone floor, toying with my wet, ruined skirt, eyes on the fabric. “I was seven. I was good at magic then, advanced for my age, even though I had a hard time controlling it. Mother and I argued, often, at that point in my life. I don’t even remember what she wanted me to do that time.
“She was pregnant, six or seven months along. My mother has a hard time bearing children. Father used to call me their miracle child because they’d been trying for so long before me. And she was pregnant again, and they were hoping for a son, a better heir than me.
“Anyway, I was arguing with Mother, and I got really mad, and I kept yelling at her to go away but she wouldn’t . . . then there was this huge gust of wind, stronger than any wind I’d felt before, and I . . . pushed it, towards her. I hadn’t realized how close she was standing to the stairs.” I’d started crying, even though I hadn’t looked up and was trying not to think about it, telling this story aloud for the first time since I was seven. Still, I pressed on and finished the tale. “She miscarried, was never able to conceive again. Blames me—she should, who else’s fault is it? I didn’t know . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” I took a deep, shuddering breath. “The Council informed me that anyone else would have been executed, but due to my age and status, they simply revoked my magic.”
Finally I looked up. I expected to see horror or disgust but couldn’t read the isbjørn's face. “I’ve never told anyone that,” I said, not sure why. I felt like I was a criminal in court, finally admitting to a crime, awaiting a sentence.
“Lena. You were seven.”
“Old enough to know how to control my magic.” I bit my cheek, eyes back on the fabric I was twisting through my fingers. “I wanted to punish her. I wanted to do anything to make her leave me alone. It wasn’t just a mistake.” The words burned, the confession as much meant for me as for him. I had never been able to honestly confront the fact that I had wanted to hurt Mother, I had wanted to do something. It wasn’t just a childish outburst, and I’d known it all along. More tears fell down my cheeks.
“Don’t cry.” I choked out a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob. The isbjørn sounded nervous, telling me not to cry.
“You made me tell the story,” I said with another sob-laugh. Fingers shaking, I tried to wipe my cheeks dry, but my hands were still wet from the skirt I was holding. “Every time I imagine actually using my magic, intentionally, all I hear are Mother’s screams as she fell. She’s never been the same, sick, always sick. No life left in her.”
He ignored the last addendum to my comment. “You still hear that?” His growling voice was almost . . . sweet. Apparently I just needed to be a vulnerable mess to get the isbjørn to be nice to me. Nice to know.
I nodded.
“Lena. The only way you’ll rid yourself of that fear is by learning to control your magic.”
The words felt like a punch to my gut, but I nodded again, unable to meet his eyes. “I know.”
“Try, then.”
“Now?” I asked, looking up in surprise. His face was perfectly serious, expectant. Years of barriers I’d placed around my inner well of magic seemed like rows of briar patches, tall and daunting. “Um . . . I’m not sure I can.”
“It’s practically boiling over, your hands light on fire regularly because there’s so much magic in you. Besides which, the only person you could hurt here is me, and you’ve already thrown fire at my face. Try.”
My heart began pounding.
“Melt the wax. That’s how you get it out, melting it, with this incantation.” He repeated a phrase in Nyputian that I couldn’t translate, but it was short enough that I could reproduce it without too much trouble.
Without my permission, my fingers found a patch of wax, smooth and unyielding despite my scrubbing. “How?” I asked, though he’d just explained.
“It’s not a complex spell, and you have enough magic energy to burn. Just reach in and . . . do it.” I heard, rather than saw, his shrug on the last two words. My eyes were focused on the wax spot.
&n
bsp; How much had I already done, already faced? In the last few weeks, I’d lost the love of my life, I’d lost my title, I’d lost my social standing, if I’d ever had one. I was still breathing. I was still fighting. What was one more fear to face?
Inside, I started letting down the barriers, the years of fear and worry and self-hatred, relaxing as best as I could. I am not a monster, I told myself. What’s done is done. All I can do now is look forward. If I want to lose the title the Council never thought I was worthy to have, then I don’t try, I stay out my year here and live on the country estate for the rest of my life, old and lonely and pointless. Or I try now.
My hands had been on fire a few minutes ago. But I didn’t want to light the dress on fire, I wanted to melt the wax. I ran the tips of my fingers over the cool wax, tracing circles on it. “Go away,” I whispered, reaching inside me, after repeating the Nyputian phrase.
Power surged through me as I accessed that spring within, like taking a deep breath after being underwater too long. I felt awake, alert, alive.
“And it’s on fire,” the isbjørn said, but I heard surprise and a hint of impressed under the sarcasm.
“Oh!” I said, dropping the fabric. I’d burned a hole where the wax had been. “Oops.”
“Good for your first try. Try again.”
I wanted to savor the moment, bask in the feeling of coming home, but I couldn’t let that challenge stand. Reaching inside of myself, I imagined the thinnest thread of electric blue—it seemed like the appropriate color for the energy living within me—and drew it from my core and down my arm, to my hand and up to the tip of my finger. I touched my finger ever so lightly to the next wax patch and traced circles.
The wax was melting. A triumphant smile began to grow on my face.
“A little hotter,” the isbjørn instructed, ruining my concentration and I burned a hole. Annoyed, I looked up and flicked my fingers at him—and a little fireball, no larger than a thimble, flew at his face.
I laughed, then, using sternness to cover how thrilled I was, said, “Don’t interrupt.” Trying again, I drew that same thread of magic to my fingertip, tracing my finger over another wax patch. It melted, slowly but surely, until . . . it was gone. The dress was clean. “Ha!” Well, the tiny patch of dress was clean—the holes remained where I’d burned through.
