by Jessica Daw
“Thank you. Now can I pack?”
“Yes, do. First, though, I have a gift for you. Or, really, three gifts.”
“I don’t need any gifts,” I said, embarrassed at the thought of accepting gifts when Ruth had already done so much for me. She wouldn’t listen to thanks—when I’d thanked her for healing my arm, her only reply had been waving a single knotted hand impatiently and continuing with what she’d been doing before.
“Yes you do.”
She said it so certainly that I asked, “Can you read the future?”
She laughed. “That is only a rumor, Helena—I have only met one man who can see into the future, and it’s an unreliable gift at best. No, but I’ve gotten to know you reasonably well in the past week, and I have very good reason to believe you’ll need these gifts. Besides, I went to all the trouble of making them and would hate to just keep them, worrying all the while that you did, after all, need them.”
Ruth’s need to over-explain everything was something I’d become accustomed to. That didn’t make me much less frustrated to have my argument so utterly thwarted. But what could I do? I sighed. “Then thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. For all you know, I’m giving you moldy potatoes.”
“Are you?”
“I’ll get them,” she said with a mischievous smile, folding her face into even more wrinkles than before. She darted over to her desk, rummaging through the mess, muttering. “Ah, here it is!” She walked back to my side, holding a small polished wooden box, pressing it into my hands. “There.”
“Thank you.”
“You still don’t know what it is! Open it!”
“I will, I will,” I said, then found the latch.
Inside were three eggs, though it seemed wrong to apply to them the same name that belonged to ugly brown things found in dirty nests.
The first was covered in tiny tiles, like a mosaic, with golden bands separating different sections—the top flowery, the next blue, the next curled with ocean waves, the next large with oval-framed trees, repeated to the bottom in shimmering lines.
In the middle of the box lay an emerald green egg, overlaid with thick gold lines in a sort of latticework, and in each gap created by the gold was a delicately-made rose. I dared reach out and touch one and could feel each individual ridge of the petals.
Third was a sapphire blue egg. Gold filigree swirled over it, infinitely precise and impossibly delicate. It should have looked simple after the mosaic egg, but it didn’t. It drew the eye in a different way, having a special grace that I could not define but certainly recognized.
When I finally remembered to look up, Ruth was smiling patiently. “Do you like them?”
“Like them? They’re the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen! Did you make them?”
She nodded proudly. “They are quite lovely, aren’t they?”
I laughed, my eyes inevitably drawn back to them. “They’re amazing. They seem too detailed to be made by human hands.”
“Thank you.”
Then the question I suspected she’d been waiting for me to ask came to me. “But why? Why did you give these to me?”
“First of all, I like you, and I wanted to give you something nice. However, they are not precisely what they appear to be. In fact, the shells are not the gift at all, though I think they’re a fine package. No. These eggs can be opened. Don’t open them!” she said hastily as I made to do just that. “They are not to be opened until you are in the direst need and have no other way to turn, understood?”
“What will happen when I open them?” I asked.
“As to that . . . I’m not precisely sure. You see, I designed what I think is a fairly ingenious spell. Took me ages to figure out, but I’ve used it before, to a reasonable degree of success. The idea is that there is a great deal of power in there, and just a smidge of my own intelligence—not that I am any less intelligent for it! The egg will . . . listen, in a manner of speaking, and when you open it, it will help you do what most needs to be done.”
“Do what most needs to be done,” I echoed, my eyes now riveted to the eggs. A smidge of Ruth’s intelligence? I didn’t think the whole of my intelligence added up to a smidge of hers. “This is an incredible gift,” I said slowly.
“And the best part is that once you’ve used the spell, the egg remains intact! You can keep it forever, though I have no idea what you’d use it for. Decoration, I suppose, or a projectile in a pinch.”
I didn’t really hear her words. “Thank you so much, Ruth. I can’t . . . I can never repay you for this.”
Suddenly her face became very serious, eyes intent on me. “I don’t want payment. You can be a great force for good, Helena Nordskov. That is why I give this to you, though I do like you very well and want you to succeed for that reason as well. I give this to you because I believe that these little eggs could prove to be vitally important in your hands. You can change the world, I’m sure of it. I only hope I’ve helped you along the way.”
Her words touched me, and to my surprise, tears sprang to my eyes. She believed I could change the world, and I knew the words were not idle. Could I? The Useless Princess with No Magic Talents but a Pretty Enough Face to Compensate in Men’s Eyes?
I could, I realized, because I wasn’t useless anymore. I had come all this way. Me. And I would save Kristian, but more than that, I would change the world, whether Kristian chose me or not. Me. Even if, I realized, I could not regain my throne. I would find a way to make a difference.
Closing the box of eggs and clutching it tightly to my chest, I threw my other arm around Ruth. “Thank you so much, Ruth. That means a lot to me.”
She hugged me back. “It’s only the truth. Now pack. You have to leave at first light, if I recall correctly.”
I laughed, and I was happier than I’d been in ages. I would save Kristian. And then, together, we would change the world. Fine—I was still planning on Kristian choosing me, however much I told myself I was giving him a choice and his future and all that noble mish-mash.
The world was still swathed in blue when I rode away from Ruth’s cottage the next morning. She’d given me (as if she hadn’t given me more than anyone had ever given me in my entire life) a horse.
Even with all my newfound strength and confidence, I had been rendered painfully speechless at the sight of the horse. It looked nothing like Rune. Rune was huge and black and beautiful, and this horse was small—a mare—and tawny with a white forelock.
“I can’t,” I said thickly after staring for a protracted moment, everything dim and silent in the dark minutes before predawn.
“Take it, Helena. Without it you most certainly will never make it. And this is a good little horse. Her name is Gerda and she is much faster than she appears to be.”
I had to make a decision, in that moment. Either I could overcome Rune’s loss or I couldn’t. I was backing out or I wasn’t. “Thank you, then,” I said, steeling myself and taking Gerda’s reins from Ruth’s hand.
As we trotted away, Gerda didn’t impress me with her speed. She wasn’t slow, exactly, but only just faster than I would have expected of a little mare. She went slow enough that I twisted around to watch Ruth’s cottage recede into the distance.
In the same instant that the cottage disappeared behind a stump of a hill, Gerda charged ahead, faster than I had known a horse could travel. I had to scramble to stop from sliding off her back. “Whoa, girl!” Gerda ignored me, running on. I continued attempting to control her as she sped on, faster even than Kristian had run as an isbjørn, but nothing I did made the slightest difference in how she moved us forward.
Finally, I gave up, hoping that Gerda really did know her way.
We rode on, Gerda maintaining her incredible speed throughout the day. We stopped only a few times, to let Gerda drink and eat some of the hay Ruth had sent me with until I reached warmer climates. “Which you’ll have to do, Helena,” she told me. “The east wind does not make his home in co
ld places.”
I had to trust that Gerda knew the way and would take me there without mishap. There wasn’t much else to do. Finding the east wind was my last chance.
Ruth had explained it all to me. “You have an unusual ability to bend the elements to your will. I wouldn’t suggest this route to anyone else, but because of that ability, and because of your uncommon courage, I think this will work.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Each wind has a . . . sentient base. It isn’t precisely that every gust of wind is from some being blowing as hard as it can, but the four winds—east, west, south, and north—are rooted in a sentient being. Like a god, but not exactly. They are more elemental than that. Communicating with them is difficult at best for mortals. I have rarely done it myself, to be honest. Usually only the north wind blows strongly enough here for me to speak to it, and he is the least human of them. That’s why I send you to the east wind. He’s the most human, though he’s weakest of the four brothers, so to speak.
“You must understand that they are not human. But they still can feel some human emotions. It is a complicated thing, and not something I can explain easily, not even something I claim to understand myself. Your best chance is to show no fear, as the winds do not feel fear and cannot sympathize with it. Be brave, be strong, as I know you are, and you may convince them to help you.”
So off I rode to commune with the east wind.
Days blurred together as we rode—had it been three days? Four? The first day I developed awful saddle sores that worsened. I measured time by their progress. Opening, scabbing over, ripping, scarring. Despite my years of riding, my clothes were wrong for it, and I’d never ridden a horse astride for so long, though it had long been my preferred method. “Proper ladies do not ride astride,” Dagmar would tell me. If I saw her again I’d light her dress on fire.
Gerda never slowed. She didn’t even seem to tire as she ran on, first through ice and snow, then over mountains, through forests, across plains, until we reached a desert.
The moon hung pale in the sky, as dusty as everything else. The air was dusty, the water, my hair, my throat, Gerda’s white forelock. It was all shades of tan and ugly pale brown. My lips were cracked as they’d never been before, my skin grimy, streaked with sweat and mud. In that state, I received a scrying request from Magdalena.
I waited to respond until we stopped for the night. The temperature had been burning during the day, forcing me to strip to a single layer, enough only to protect my skin from the scorching rays of the sun, past caring about modesty—not that I’d seen a living soul for three or four days. But during the night, it plunged into a bitter cold. I wasn’t sure that it would be measured as colder than what I’d experienced in the north of Tryllejor, but drenched with sweat and sunburnt and entirely lacking any means of fire-building, it was more brutal.
It was this bundled, weather-beaten version of myself that I presented to Magdalena. I hardly knew how to scry, but my little book of spells explained well enough. I found energy to be pleased with how easily I managed it, though I was on the requested end and that was an easy spell by anyone’s standards.
The sight of Magdalena’s clean face, her styled hair, her snowy-white dress, was like a dream. Did a place still exist where people bathed and dressed with no expectation of their clothes being torn and dirtied and stiff with sweat by the end of the day? Where the world was clean enough that that was a reasonable expectation? Where enough energy existed for something as superfluous as scrying?
I couldn’t find my voice right away.
“Princess Helena? Is that you?” I saw concern in her brown eyes, and a hint of doubt.
I’d spend a moment staring at myself before I’d replied to the request. My face had changed. It was no longer the face of a girl, no longer a face entirely unaware of loss and the depth of the pain it caused. The planes of it had always been strong and angular, but now they were almost shockingly defined, making my dark eyes appear inhumanly large. I doubted that I could be called beautiful, especially filthy as I was, but I found I liked my face. It was distinctly mine, never again to be mistaken for that of a useless princess.
My throat felt like it was flaking away, but I managed to say, “Yes.” Endless days of silence made me forget that social laws disliked these silent spaces between words. But my mind couldn’t summon anything to say.
She shook her head in some amazement. “You are not what I expected you to be.”
Not sure how to respond to that, I said. “I found Ruth.”
“Yes, she contacted me,” she confessed.
She had? “Good.”
She cleared her throat. “And where are you?”
It took me a moment to work up the will to speak. “I don’t know. East.”
“East? And you’re trying to find the east wind?”
“Yes.”
She studied me, cocking her head slightly. I thought maybe I should say something but nothing came to mind. “You remind me of Kristian. He gets so stubbornly set on finishing a task once he’s started that it’s impossible to reason with him.” Magdalena paused, then asked, “You miss him?”
“I’ve lived ten lifetimes since I lost him,” I replied with a twitch of a shrug. I could not explain how much I missed Kristian with other words.
“I can’t imagine,” she murmured, eyes still intent on me. “And you’ll find him in time?”
“I hope so. What day is it?”
“December twenty-first, I think.”
The month hadn’t ended. How many days did I have left? Eight? Including today? A week from tomorrow, Kristian would marry the Sikken princess. If the east wind couldn’t take me . . . I was further from Sikuvok than ever.
How long had it been since I’d seen Kristian? Was it only three weeks? How could three weeks transform me into someone I hardly recognized? And how could the worst three weeks of my life leave me feeling stronger than I’d ever felt before? Not physically, really, but me.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” Magdalena asked.
“Tell my mother she’ll get her wish if I have anything to do with it,” I said suddenly.
Her eyebrows rose, and I saw she was intrigued. “What do you mean?”
I met her eyes. “By the new year, I’ll be married.”
“To Kristian?” Magdalena’s expression was caught between amusement and surprise at my boldness.
“Yes. I’ll give him a choice, but . . . I think he’ll choose me. He’d be a fool not to.”
She smiled. “I completely agree. And next time I speak with Queen Ester, I’ll tell her. I think she’ll be proud of you—I hardly know her, but she’d be a fool not to.” She grinned at her own clever repetition of my words. I couldn’t manage an answering grin.
Abruptly it was ridiculous. Why I was having this insane conversation with Lady Magdalena of Tryllejor, of all people, was beyond me. “Thank you, Magdalena, for . . . checking in on me.”
“Kristian would have my hide if he thought I’d let you go off on your own without any assistance whatsoever.”
I knew I needed to end the conversation, save my energy, but I had to ask. “Do you think he knows I’m coming for him?”
Magdalena’s face was serious then, strikingly similar to paintings of the most austere rulers that decorated the halls of the palace in Edeleste, paintings I’d always admired but that had always intimidated me. “I doubt it.”
I nodded, not sure how to feel about that. I had no further words to say. “Goodbye, Magdalena.” I swiped my hand through the water I’d been using to scry Magdalena, the image immediately disappearing.
The sun was a white-hot hole in the top of the sky when Gerda stopped the next day. By then I knew Gerda too well to believe that my horse had stopped without reason. I had no idea how Ruth had trained the little mare, but I didn’t question it.
I swung down from her back, pulling my pack off her and onto my own back. I wore a thin camisole that had once bee
n white and my lightest-weight skirt, a torn-up skirt wrapped around my head with my hair caught up in it. My former peers in Edeleste would have cut me heartlessly if they’d seen me dressed so, despite my status as a princess, especially with my skin browned by sun and caked with mud. If I’d had any friends, would they have treated me the same?
Kristian wouldn’t care if I looked like this. I wouldn’t love him if he did.
Surveying the land around me, all I saw was sand. None of the sporadic, spindly plants I’d seen in the past day broke the horizon.
I would have swallowed, but my water had run out the night before and my mouth was full of dust. “Bye, then,” I said to Gerda, and flicked her behind her ear, as per Ruth’s instructions. Gerda rubbed her face against mine, then trotted away at normal horse speed, making the journey home alone.
I could not go home yet. I turned away from Gerda. “East wind!” I tried to shout, but my voice cracked dreadfully with disuse and lack of water. The faintest gust was my only answer. “East wind, I would speak with you!” My voice was steadier this time, louder.
Ruth had told me that it was different to work with the actual sentient personalities of the wind than to control stray gusts far from their bases of power. She’d been pleased when I’d shown her how I could control the wind, but said that I could not expect this experience to be the same. I’d have to be strong enough to stay on, which I hadn’t understood at the time she told me and she’d been too enigmatic to explain.
A breeze began, and then built, picking up tiny grains of sand and flinging them against my skin, the sting starting as something I’d grown accustomed to then escalating until I had to close my eyes and shield my face. Even so, I made sure to stand straight and unafraid. I am not afraid.
Abruptly, the wind died back down to a breeze. My eyes flew open.
In front of me stood a wolf, dun and tan and brown, insubstantial—sand, moving restlessly, forming and reforming. It was much larger than a living wolf, nearly as large as Gerda, standing as high as my chest.
“What do you want?” His voice was a hiss, the sound sand made when it rushed in the wind, dry and slithering and tumbling. The mouth of the wolf did not move, though he paced, back and forth and around, surveying me from every angle.
