Tova could cry with relief, but she holds it back. She can’t waste even one moment. She has to keep Merewyn warm, but how? Should she try to get the fire going again? How long will that take?
Beorn would know what to do. She wishes he were here.
But he isn’t, she chides herself. No amount of wishing is going to make him appear. If she’s to help her lady, she must do it on her own.
Think.
She lies down next to Merewyn, pressing herself close, hugging her lady like she might a little child, while at the same time murmuring reassuring words in her ear, hoping that Merewyn might still be able to hear her. She can’t remember ever seeing her look so fragile, so young and so small. Behind those pale eyelids and that serene expression, is she as afraid as Tova?
She keeps talking to her, talking about the past, about Heldeby before the war, before Orm, while Skalpi was still alive. The happy times they shared, when they were less like lady and servant and more like sisters. All the while hoping that Merewyn will hear her and come back to her.
She asks, ‘You remember, don’t you, that day last spring when we rode together to the market at Skardaborg?’
It was the first time Tova had ever seen the sea. How she marvelled at the way it fragmented the light into a thousand tiny suns, and at the ships with their striped sails skipping across its surface. Men clambering ashore to drag the hulls up over the sand. Nets filled with writhing, silvery fish. Wicker cages into which were crammed strange many-legged creatures that Merewyn called crabs. More people than Tova had ever seen in one place before, dressed in bright clothes, speaking in many tongues. Blue-eyed fair-haired folk who’d sailed from the northern lands, the lands of Skalpi’s ancestors, barking orders to their crewmen on the wharves, calling out prices and holding up their wares for all to see.
And then there were the stalls, with their canopies to shield them from the weather. While Merewyn bought cinnamon and pepper from the spicer, Tova went exploring, thrilled and nervous at the same time, picking her way through the thronged streets, past the fleshmongers and wine merchants. Past the carvers with their tables stacked with wooden bowls and spoons, some plain and others painted with intricate patterns. Past the pedlars with their scraps of cloth laid out on the ground and on them trinkets and charms, bracelets and necklaces of pewter and amber, pendants of jet and cheaper wooden amulets inscribed with runes. A thin-faced merchant with rolls of fine linen and dyed wool, and ribbons that he said came all the way from the eastern empire: lengths of silk as long as her arm, in green as dark as holly, and other colours as well – black and red and white – but it was the green that Tova thought most beautiful. They shone and shimmered in the light like butterfly wings.
‘I wanted one of those ribbons so badly,’ Tova says. ‘I wanted one like I’d never wanted anything before. I suppose I was thinking I could wear it in my hair on special days. For Christmas, maybe, or whenever we had a feast.’
The trader, though, wanted five pennies for each one, and that wasn’t just all the money Tova had with her, it was all the money she had in the world. She tried to bargain with him, but he said with a sneer that if she couldn’t afford his prices then she should take her grubby fingers away and waste someone else’s time. Tova replied indignantly that her fingers weren’t grubby, but he wasn’t listening. He came out from behind his stall and tried to shoo her away like a calf that had strayed into the wrong field, but Merewyn came and told the man curtly that the ribbon was meant for her. She’d sent her maidservant to buy it on her behalf, she said, but having seen how he treated his customers, she’d changed her mind.
She bade him good day and turned to leave. At once the merchant, red-faced, called after her, stumbling over his words, saying he hadn’t known, that he’d been rash and presumptuous, and that if the lady would reconsider he would ask only four pennies for the ribbon. Merewyn offered three and the trader hesitated, but she made to walk away again, and the man gave in. He watched avidly as she counted out the coins from the pouch she kept inside her sleeve.
‘You turned to me and asked me which one I thought was best,’ Tova says. ‘I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say, but I pointed to the green one. You picked it up, and he said that was a wise choice, but then you handed it to me and said it was a gift and I should look after it. I was so grateful I think I just nodded. He was furious, do you remember? He thought we’d set out to trick him, and made a fuss, or tried to, but the other traders just turned their backs.
‘And I looked after it, just like you said,’ she whispers. ‘That night, when you came and said we had to leave, I couldn’t go without it.’