Historical note: In 1880, when the story begins, Oslo was officially named Christiania. Norway was ruled by the King of Sweden and was a predominantly rural country, still quite feudal, and the national church was Lutheran Christian. Neither ordinary men, nor women, had yet won the right to vote.
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PROLOGUE

In the year of our Lord 1880, in the springtime, my mother journeyed to Christiania and our lives changed forever. All the days before that spring are like a pleasant dream to me now. Sometimes I find it calming to picture myself back there, in those last days; fourteen-year-old me, safe, warm, and most of all, loved.


CHAPTER ONE

Spring, 1880.

The house where I was born is being painted today. The whiteness of it, still wet, dazzles me in the late afternoon sunshine. I have no chores. I can lie here in the meadow until sunset, if I choose, and no one will miss me.

When their work is done, my father and uncles will drink beer and tiny thimblefuls of fiery aquavit, and eat smelly lutefisk, wrapped in little potato pancakes. Mama is away. Tante Kari, Mama’s sister, has taken her shopping in Christiania. Tante Kari said she would bring me back a dress from a real Christiania dressmaker. I wish I could have gone with them to choose it.

I won’t eat the lutefisk. Women don’t like lutefisk, and I will be a woman soon.

Anyway, I don’t need to go home for middag today; I have my rucksack, I have rye bread and brown cheese. I have water in my flask. I have my cloak, although I won’t need it. The sun is still hot on my face - the light still bright, through the translucent red of my closed eyelids. The grass is soft beneath my back and the earth below will hold onto the day’s warmth a little longer. I could sleep here. I would – I’m not afraid.

Halvor might wake up in the night though. Mama said I should look after my brother while she is away.

“Stina!” I can hear Papa calling me. They must have finished already.

Reluctantly, I open my eyes and raise my head an inch from the ground. Every movement releases a new cocktail of wildflower scents, and sends a thousand tiny creatures scurrying, buzzing, and springing for safety.

Too bad – he’s already seen me.

“Stina, it’s time to come home now. If you stay out, the mountain troll will come and take you for his wife.”

“Oh Papa, don’t be silly,” I say. “Don’t you think I’m getting too old for troll-stories?”

He looks at me, with a soppy, almost sad expression and beckons me to hurry up.

“You? Never,” he says, and bends to kiss my hair as I squeeze through the old stile.

I suspect that the bottle of aquavit has already been opened.

I run down the steep path to the bright, white house. I am sorry to have been disturbed, but eager to inspect the workmanship all the same.

*

Each wooden board, each rail, fascia and spindle, gleams – in stark contrast to the dull red of the barn behind. Even the swing seat on the veranda shines. Mama will be very pleased when she comes home; so will Papa, provided she hasn’t spent too much of his silver, shopping for linens with Tante Kari. We will rub along happily enough without her, until the meals that she has left for us run out, and we have to make do for ourselves. Sometimes I think that she likes to go away, purely to remind us how much we need her.

Inside the house, the odour of paint still strong in my nostrils, I sit on a blanket with Halvor. We pretend that my grease-paper parcels of bread and cheese are a real picnic, and that we are far away in the forests of the North, on some quest or other, weary from many days’ walking.

“What would you do, if you saw a real troll, Stina?” asks Halvor, not for the first time.

“Well, most importantly, I would make sure that he didn’t see me,” I reply.

Halvor, predictably, is not satisfied with my answer.

“Stina,” he whines, “go on, Stina. Tell me.”

“Alright,” I say, “but first, hop into bed.”

We leave the blanket and the crumbs until the morning. It won’t be noticed. Papa and the other men will make more mess than us.

Our bed is the old kind – it is an old building – but we like it. It’s like a cupboard, built into the thick, double walls of the house. You open the shutters and there, at about waist-height, is a cosy space, just big enough for me and Halvor. In the old days, when my great-grandparents bought the land and made it into a farm, this was their bed and everyone else slept on wooden benches out in the main stue. They must have been a lot shorter than me; my feet are already rammed against the far wall and I’m only fourteen years old. Mama says she will speak to my father about partitioning the stue so that I may have a room of my own before the snow comes. She says it isn’t right for me to sleep with Halvor now that my menstruasjon has begun.

The bed isn’t waist-height to Halvor. It’s as high as his shoulders, and he usually needs a shove.

We climb in and I rest our candle, carefully, on the little shelf above our heads. Although it smokes a bit, we close the doors to shut out the laughter of the men.

“Please, Stina,” he begs, “tell me a story.”

“Okay, okay,” I say, and I begin. “Trolls, as everyone knows, are slow and stupid creatures. Nevertheless, they can and will do you harm if you have something they want, or if you get in their way.”

“And how do you recognise them?” he asks, hugging his knees, his small body tensed with excitement, as usual.

“I’m getting to that. Now, be quiet if you want to hear the rest. As I was saying, they are not clever, but a person must keep his wits about him, if he wants to live to tell the tale of his encounter with a Norwegian mountain troll.”

“But how…?” he interrupts.

“Ssh, or I won’t tell it.”

Halvor clamps his hand across his mouth, as though it is the only way he can prevent the words from bubbling out.

“Trolls wear many disguises,” I continue, “because their true appearance is terrible to behold. They may be as small as a man or as tall as the pine trees, but their heads are large, and the weight of them causes the trolls to hunch, like this.” I let my chin slump to my chest, rounding my shoulders, while my little brother’s eyes glitter in the candlelight, with terror and delight.

“Their eyes are as big as pewter plates and their noses are as long as a poker. They use them for stirring their soup.”

Halvor squeals through his fingers and, for once, I am glad of the noise of the men. It is at this point in the tale that Mama raps on the doors and tells us to blow out the candle and go to sleep. Tonight though, we won’t have to whisper.

“The teeth of a troll are long and yellow, like the fangs of an old wolf, and his breath stinks so bad, it’s like poison. Their eyes are small and squinty,” I screw up my eyes, “and some just have one – right in the middle of their foreheads. With a one-eyed troll, if you stand perfectly still, he won’t be able to see you. That is one way to escape a troll.”

“What else?” asks Halvor, snuggling down under the covers.

“A small troll will have no need of disguises,” I say, quieter now, as he is growing sleepy, “as long as he can keep his tail hidden. They tie them around their britches, to keep them from falling down.”

He always laughs at this point, and Mama knocks on our shutters a second time. Three times – and there will be extra chores in the morning. But not this time.

“Oh yes, you must always look very carefully at the belt of a stranger, if he approaches you or offers you food. You must never take food from a troll, by the way. If you eat his food you will forget who you are, and be in thrall to him forever and a day. Do you remember what Askeladden did?”

“He pretended to eat the porridge, but really he was spooning it into a bag hidden underneath his shirt.”

“That’s right. And then what did he do?” I ask.

“Askeladden said that he could eat more than the troll could. He slit open his shirt and the bag too, with a silver knife, and let the porridge pour out, so that he could eat some more.”

“Trolls can never resist a challenge. That is another way to beat a troll. Askeladden’s father had taught him well. The troll took his knife and slit open his own belly, and turned to stone, right there in the wood.”

“Is it still there? Askeladden’s stone troll?” asks Halvor.

“Of course,” I say. “There are many stone trolls in the forests of Norway. There are those that were outwitted by some clever boy or other, and there are those that simply got caught out by the sunrise, when they should have been safely back inside their caves. There are some whose hearts have been found and destroyed, and who had no idea that death was coming for them.”

“Their hearts?” he asks, in horror. This is a new story for him – virgin territory.

“Yes, didn’t I tell you? They sometimes hide them. It makes them almost invincible.” I can tell he is impressed. “There was once a very ugly, unusually clever troll, who had stolen a princess. The prince, to whom she was betrothed, came looking for her. After many adventures, he finally found her but she begged him not to fight her captor. She had heard the troll boast many times of the ingenuity of his hiding place, and was determined to find it out.”

“Over the next few days, the princess flattered the troll, who had not hurt her. He had only stolen her in order to soothe the fearful headaches, to which all trolls are prone. To have one’s brow stroked by a princess is the only cure for a troll-sized headache.”

Halvor looks at me, perhaps seeking traces of amusement, but I succeed in remaining deadly serious. “Day by day, the princess told the troll how she admired his cunning and was in awe of his genius. Day by day, the troll let a little more of secret slip. And all the time, the prince was listening.”

“Where was the heart?” asks Halvor, in an awe-struck whisper. Only his wide eyes are visible over the top of the blanket. He doesn’t seem quite sure he really wants to know.

“Inside an egg.” I say.

“Inside an egg?” He sounds disappointed.

“Yes, inside an egg… inside a duck.” I smile.

“It wasn’t laid yet? I suppose that is quite clever,” he concedes.

“You haven’t heard the half of it,” I say. “The troll’s heart was inside an egg, inside a duck, at the bottom of a well, in a church, on an island, in the middle of a vast lake, in a faraway land, through many valleys and over many mountains.”

“And did the prince find it? Did he marry the princess and live happily ever after?”

“Eventually, yes, although it took him a year and a day, and he faced many dangers on the way. He found the egg and he squeezed it and, at that exact moment, hundreds of miles away, the troll turned to stone and shattered into a thousand tiny splinters.”

“What dangers did he face?”

“That is a story for another day, my kjaere.”

“And the princess was free?” he asks, with a sigh and a yawn, and the small, comfortable snuffling sound he has made ever since he was a baby. He turns over and winds himself tighter into the covers.

I kiss him goodnight, and blow out the candle. “Yes kjaere, she was free.” And the story ends, as all Norwegian stories do, “Snip, snap, snout. Now the story’s out.”

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Thanks for reading.

This is a work in progress, I only have two more chapters so far. I'll upload them over the next week or so, but leave them unattached for the time being.