North Child Read online

  About This Book

  As a North Child, superstition says Rose will travel far from home and meet a lonely, icy death. Unaware of her fate, she makes a bargain with a mysterious white bear and is carried away to a distant castle.

  But once there, Rose unleashes a terrible curse and must embark on an epic journey to save the stranger who has stolen her heart…

  “A wonderful, beautiful book… A joyous epic.” Write Away!

  Praise for North Child

  “This is epic stuff.” The Guardian

  “This is a proper fairy tale… I was spellbound.” Carousel

  “A captivating and epic story… It has the same kind of magical quality and inspires the same feelings I had when I first discovered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I didn’t want it to end.” The Bookseller

  “A rich and rewarding read… Anyone who enjoys a good adventure story will find it hard to escape from North Child until the last page is reached.” Books for Keeps

  “A great example of traditional storytelling, this is a magical tale, beautifully told.” Publishing News

  “A wonderful, beautiful book… A joyous epic.” Write Away!

  “One of the most epic romantic fantasies ever told… North Child will enchant any and all who venture within its pages.” Amazon.com

  To my father, for his love of stories – from Harold and the Purple Crayon to Doctor No

  And to my mother, for her unwavering support

  Contents

  Praise for North Child

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1) Prologue

  Book One: East

  2) Father

  3) Neddy

  4) Rose

  5) Neddy

  6) Father

  7) Neddy

  8) Father

  9) Rose

  10) Father

  11) Troll Queen

  12) White Bear

  13) Neddy

  14) White Bear

  15) Rose

  16) White Bear

  17) Neddy

  18) Rose

  19) White Bear

  20) Neddy

  21) Father

  22) Neddy

  23) Rose

  24) Neddy

  25) Father

  26) Neddy

  Book Two: South

  27) Troll Queen

  28) Rose

  29) Troll Queen

  30) White Bear

  31) Rose

  32) Troll Queen

  33) Neddy

  34) Rose

  35) Troll Queen

  36) Neddy

  37) Rose

  38) Troll Queen

  39) Rose

  40) Father

  41) Rose

  42) White Bear

  43) Neddy

  44) Rose

  45) Neddy

  46) Rose

  47) Neddy

  48) Troll Queen

  49) Rose

  50) White Bear

  51) Rose

  52) Troll Queen

  53) Neddy

  54) Rose

  55) White Bear

  56) Rose

  57) Troll Queen

  58) Rose

  59) Troll Queen

  60) Rose

  Book Three: West

  61) Rose

  62) White Bear

  63) Rose

  64) Troll Queen

  65) Rose

  66) Troll Queen

  67) Rose

  68) Neddy

  69) Rose

  70) Neddy

  71) Rose

  Book Four: North

  72) Rose

  73) Neddy

  74) Rose

  75) Troll Queen

  76) Rose

  77) Neddy

  78) Rose

  79) Troll Queen

  80) Rose

  81) Neddy

  82) Rose

  83) White Bear

  84) Rose

  85) Troll Queen

  86) Rose

  87) Troll Queen

  88) Rose

  89) White Bear

  90) Rose

  91) Troll Queen

  92) Rose

  93) Troll Queen

  94) White Bear

  95) Rose

  96) White Bear

  97) Rose

  98) Troll Queen

  99) Rose

  100) Troll Queen

  101) Rose

  102) Neddy

  103) Rose

  104) White Bear

  Book Five: East

  105) Rose

  106) Neddy

  107) White Bear

  108) Neddy

  109) Rose

  110) White Bear

  111) Rose

  112) White Bear

  113) Rose

  114) White Bear

  115) Rose

  116) Father

  117) Neddy

  About the Author

  Chatting with Edith Pattou

  The Origins of North Child by Edith Pattou

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Prologue

  I found the box in the attic of an old farmhouse in Norway. It was large, the size of a footlocker, and there were markings on it; runes, I learned later.

  When I opened the lid, it looked like the box contained mostly papers, a jumbled mass of them, in several different languages and written in different styles of handwriting. There were diaries, maps, even ships’ logs.

  As I dug deeper, under the papers, I found more: skeins of wool; small boots made of soft leather; sheaves of music tied with faded ribbon; long, thin pieces of wood with maplike markings on them; dried-up mushrooms; woven belts; even a dress the colour of the moon.

  Then I came upon what looked to be the mouthpiece of a very old reed instrument. I held it up towards the light coming through the small attic window. As the late afternoon sun caught it, a most extraordinary thing happened. I heard the clear, high note of a flute.

  And it was coming from inside the trunk.

  Other sounds came then – whispering, muttering, swirling around inside my head. Dogs barking, sleigh bells, the cracking of ice. Voices. Hearing voices – this isn’t good, I thought.

  Still holding the ancient mouthpiece in the palm of my hand, I lifted the top piece of paper out of the trunk. It was a handwritten note.

  They want me to write it all down, though I’m not sure why.

  It seems enough that Father and Neddy wrote down their parts. Especially Neddy; he was always the storyteller in the family. I am not a storyteller, not really. It takes more patience than I’ve got – or rather, than I used to have. I guess I did learn a little bit about patience in the course of the journey. But even so, I’d much rather set the story down in cloth. Well, actually I have. Hangs on the north wall in the great room, and the whole story is there. But words are easier to understand for most people. So I will try.

  It isn’t easy for me to walk the path back to the beginning of the story, even to know where the true beginning is. And telling a story, I suppose, is like winding a skein of spun yarn – you sometimes lose track of the beginning.

  All I intended to do, when I began the journey, was to set things right. They say losing someone you love is like losing a part of your own body. An eye or a leg. But it is far worse – especially when it is your fault.

  But already I’m getting ahead of myself. It all began with a pair of soft boots.

  Ebba Rose was the name of our last-born child. Except it was a lie. Her name should have been Nyamh Rose. But everyone called her Rose rather than Ebba, so the lie didn’t matter. At least, that is what I told myself.

  The Rose part of her name came from the symbol that lies a
t the centre of the wind rose – which is fitting because she was lodged at the very centre of my heart.

  I loved each of her seven brothers and sisters, but I will admit there was always something that set Rose apart from the others. And it wasn’t just the way she looked.

  She was the hardest to know of my children, and that was because she would not stay still. Every time I held her as a babe, she would look up at me, intent, smiling with her bright purple eyes. But soon, and always, those eyes would stray past my shoulder, seeking the window and what lay beyond.

  Rose’s first gift was a small pair of soft boots made of reindeer hide. They were brought by Torsk, a neighbour, and as he fastened them on Rose’s tiny feet with his large calloused hands, I saw my wife, Eugenia, frown. She tried to hide it, turning her face away.

  Torsk did not see the frown but looked up at us, beaming. He was a widower with grown sons and a gift for leatherwork. Eager to show off his handiwork and unmindful of the difficult circumstances of Eugenia’s recent birthing, he had been the first to show up on our doorstep.

  Most of our neighbours were well aware of how superstitious Eugenia was. They also knew that a baby’s first gift was laden with meaning. But cheerful, large-handed Torsk paid no heed to this. He just gazed down at the small soft boots on Rose’s feet and looked ready to burst with pride.

  “The fit is good,” he observed with a wide smile.

  I nodded and then said, with a vague thought of warning him, “’Tis Rose’s first gift.”

  His smile grew even wider. “Ah, this is good.” Then a thought penetrated his head. “She will be a traveller, an explorer!” he said with enthusiasm. So he did know of the first-gift superstition after all.

  This time Eugenia did not attempt to hide the frown that creased her face, and I tensed, fearing what she might say. Instead she reached down and straightened one of the boot ties. “Thank you, neighbour Torsk,” she said through stiff lips. Her voice was cold, and a puzzled look passed over the big man’s face.

  I stepped forwards and, muttering something about Eugenia still being weak, ushered Torsk to the door.

  “Was there something wrong with the boots?” he asked, bewildered.

  “No, no,” I reassured him. “They are wonderful. Eugenia is tired, that is all. And you know mothers – they like to keep their babes close. She’s not quite ready for the notion of little Rose wandering the countryside.”

  Nor would she ever be. Though I did not say that to neighbour Torsk.

  That night after we had pried Neddy from Rose’s basket and gotten all the children to sleep, Eugenia said to me, “Didn’t Widow Hautzig bring over a crock of butter for the baby?”

  “She was only returning what you loaned her,” I said.

  “No, it was for Ebba Rose. Her first gift, I’m quite sure.” Her voice was definite.

  Eugenia did like to keep her children close, but it turned out she wanted to keep Rose closest of all. And that had everything to do with the circumstances of Rose’s birth.

  Our family wasn’t always poor. My grandfather Esbjorn Lavrans had a well-respected mapmaking business, and my father’s father was a prosperous farmer. But Father had a falling-out with his family when he went to Bergen to be an apprentice to the mapmaker Esbjorn. My mother, Eugenia, was Esbjorn’s daughter, which is how Father met her.

  Father and Mother had eight children. Rose was the last-born and I was second to last, four years old when they brought Rose home from Askoy Forest. Some would say four is too young to remember, but I definitely have memories. Lots of them. I remember her smell, like warm milk and soft green moss. I remember the noises she’d make – gurgling like the creek we later took to calling Rosie’s Creek because she fell into it so often; the clicking she made with her tongue, like a wren pecking at our chimney; the howls of frustration when she kept toppling over while learning to walk. Not that it took her long. She was running around on her short legs at just five months.

  I also remember clearly the evening Mother and Father came home from an afternoon of herb hunting, and instead of herbs they were carrying a lumpy bundle that made funny noises.

  My older brothers and sisters had been worried about Mother and Father because there had been a storm and they were much later than usual returning. I told everyone not to worry, that they had gone out to bring home the baby and that’s why they were so late getting home.

  My older sister Selme laughed. “Mother is still more than a month away from her lying-in time,” she said. “And besides, everyone knows you can’t just go pluck babies out of Askoy Forest,” she added with a superior look.

  But it turned out I was right after all.

  When they finally came through the door, Mother looked very pale and sat down as soon as she could, holding the noisy thing on her lap. The others crowded around, but I hung back, waiting. When they’d all looked long enough, Father led me to Mother’s side. When I gazed at the little scrunched-up face, I felt a peculiar glow of pride. Like I’d done something good. I knew it was Mother who’d brought this baby into the world (and she certainly looked worn out from doing it), but from that moment I felt like the wild little brown-haired baby was my very own gift – and that it would be my job to watch over her.

  If I had known just how wild a thing she would turn out to be, I might have thought twice about taking her on. It’s a funny thing. I think it was Mother and I who had the hardest time with Rose’s wandering ways. But we both had different ways of living with it. Mother tried always to reel her in. To keep her close by. But for me, I knew it couldn’t be done, so I just ached and felt sorry for myself when she’d disappear. That’s the trouble with loving a wild thing: you’re always left watching the door.

  But you also get kind of used to it.

  I could say that I felt guilty and ashamed about the trouble I was always getting into when I was a child, driving my mother to her wits’ end on a daily basis. But the truth is I never did feel either of those things.

  I don’t think it’s because I was selfish or unfeeling. I just couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. What was a little spilled blood or a broken bone now and then?

  I never set out to be disobedient. I just couldn’t keep my thoughts, and then my feet, still. I’d see something – the azure flash of a butterfly’s wing, a formation of clouds like a ship’s mast and sails, a ripe yellow apple perched high in a tree – and I’d be off after it without a second thought.

  Exploring ran in my blood. My grandfather Esbjorn was a mapmaker as well as an explorer. And my great-great-grandfather was one of the first Njordens to travel to Constantinople.

  The only thing that gave me the slightest twinge of sadness was Neddy, with his exasperated, sorry-for-himself look when he found me after yet another time I’d run off without telling anyone.

  “But I saw this rabbit with a tail so white it glowed,” I’d try to explain (when I was old enough to put words to my feelings).

  Neddy would just sigh and say that Mother wanted me in the kitchen straight away.

  “I’m sorry, Neddy,” I’d say, wrapping my arms around his legs, watching the corners of his mouth for the smile I always managed to squeeze out of him. And then I’d go to the kitchen and Mother would scold me yet again.

  To say that my mother was superstitious would be like saying the great blizzard of 1539 was naught but a light snowfall.

  Every single thing a body did in our house was charged with meaning. To sweep dust out the front door was to sweep away all your good luck. To sing while baking bread was to guarantee the arrival of ill fortune. To have an itch on the left side of your body meant certain disaster. And if you sneezed on a Wednesday, you would surely receive a letter – good news if you were facing east and bad if facing north.

  Father liked to tell the story of how he first learned of Mother’s “birth-direction” superstition.

  When Father and Mother announced their engagement to her family, the first words to come out of his future
mother-in-law’s mouth were “But Arne, we don’t even know what your birth direction is!”

  Father said that he gaped at her, totally bewildered.

  “Yes, Arne, we must know right away, before you and Eugenia make any more plans.”

  “Oh, I’m quite certain he’s a south, or a southeast,” Mother said reassuringly.

  “But we must know for sure,” said her mother.

  Father said he started to laugh then, thinking they were having some elaborate joke with him. But they weren’t.

  And Father would have us all doubled over with laughter as he described the pilgrimage to my grandparents’ farm to interrogate them regarding the direction my father’s mother was facing when she gave birth to him. It turned out that the direction his mother was facing when Father was born was southeast, which was a good thing according to Mother.

  What wasn’t such a good thing is that this turned out to be the last time Father saw his family. There had already been ill feeling between them that Father had hoped to heal during the visit. But if anything, the strange line of questioning from the “city folk” Father was marrying into seemed to make matters worse, and they parted with bad blood.

  My Eugenia’s fervent belief in the birth-direction superstition was unusual to say the least. I have never come across anything like it during the course of my life, but it had apparently been handed down through many generations of Eugenia’s family.

  They believed that birth direction was of overwhelming importance. Not the alignment of the stars, nor the position of the moon, nor the movement of the tides, nor even the traits handed down from parent to child.

  My theory was that this strange notion sprang from their preoccupation with mapmaking.

  “And every child born in our family,” Eugenia explained to me, “is given a name that begins with the first letter of their birth direction. So a north-facing baby might be called Nathaniel; a southwest-facing child, Sarah Wilhelmina; and so on. I myself was an east-facing baby.”

  “And what are the attributes of an east-facing baby?” I asked.

  “Well, among other things, that I am tidy, a sound sleeper, and somewhat superstitious.”

  “Somewhat?” I countered with a grin.

  It turned out that Eugenia went a little further with the birth-direction superstition than any of her forebears. On the night after we were wed, she announced to me that she wanted to have seven children.