Vinnie answered the phone, and she may have sounded a little drowsy but he couldn’t help that.
“Hi Vinnie. It’s Nataniel. I was wondering if I could ask Tova something.”
“Tova? She’s not at home. She left for Oslo the day before yesterday. She had to visit a friend, she said, and I couldn’t really stop her. She doesn’t have that many friends and she is twenty-two years old now.”
Those weren’t exactly comforting words for Nataniel to hear. As far as he knew, Tova didn’t have any friends, especially not in Oslo.
“And Nataniel,” Vinnie continued. “We are so grateful for what you’ve done for our daughter. The hours she spends with you are the best she’s experienced.”
He muttered something noncommittal in response.
“But I’ll tell her you called,” he heard Vinnie say.
That might be too late, he thought to himself.
“Do you know where she went, Vinnie? Do you have the address of this friend of hers? It’s urgent, you see. I need her help.”
That was far from the truth, but what else could he say? He couldn’t possibly tell the sweet, worried Vinnie about his concerns for Tova.
Tova ... she remained a mystery to most people, including Nataniel. She concealed her thoughts so well that no one had yet been able to grasp the extent of her suffering.
One hundred and fifty years ago the ancestors of the Ice People had decided that the chosen one, Nataniel, was to have an assistant in his battle against Tengel the Evil. That was why the generations had been staggered, so that two chosen members of the Ice People could be born more or less simultaneously. But there was just one flaw in that arrangement: Tova wasn’t one of the chosen; instead she was stricken – seriously stricken.
However, her parents and the other members of the family had had a good influence on her, and her mission had been impressed upon her from the start. That did, of course, have an effect on her. It brought out her gentle, soft side and showed that she was able to feel for those she cared about. She stood up for them and was willing to make sacrifices for them, especially her parents, Rikard and Vinnie Brink.
But like many of the seriously stricken she was also very cunning. She had a completely different side to her, which she never revealed at home or at school. This was the true Tova, daughter of the ice and the darkness, relative of Tengel the Evil.
Her resemblance to the sixteenth-century witch Hanna was striking. They both had physical disadvantages in that they were both small and square, with short, stubby legs and ungainly figures, heads protruding directly from their shoulders, dishevelled, colourless hair and coarse features. They both had small eyes and broad noses, and their faces were covered with pale birthmarks.
Vinnie had cried many a tear over her oldest child, whom she loved so dearly. She had feared sending Tova to school. But the girl, taciturn as she was, had never mentioned anything about being teased by her schoolmates. “Good” Tova had always responded whenever Vinnie had asked how her school day had been.
Neither Vinnie nor anybody else knew what Tova actually did to the children who disassociated themselves from her, shouted abusive words at her, looked down on her or teased her in other unpleasant ways.
Tova took revenge on them. Quietly and cunningly. She was as skilful as a medieval witch at performing magic. Take, for example, her first day at school. Tova wanted to sit by the window in the last row. But another girl was already sitting there. Tova half-shut her eyes and concentrated for a moment, and the girl suddenly raised her hand and said: “There’s a terrible draught here, Miss.”
The teacher immediately went to where she was sitting to see for herself. “Indeed, there is. You can’t sit there. But ... there aren’t any other empty seats ...”
Tova interjected right away, her voice gentle and shy: “I don’t mind sitting there, Miss. A little cold air doesn’t bother me.”
The teacher gave her a perplexed look and then nodded. “How kind of you ... erm, Tova.”
Oddly enough, Tova never felt the draught. She was perfectly content sitting in a spot with such a nice view.
And when it came to the teachers, she also managed to separate the sheep from the goats. The form teacher was nice, but she could be naive and wasn’t always able to grasp things. Tova was left in peace. The headmaster, on the other hand, whose mouth was always distorted in his frowning face, muttered, “Goodness gracious,” the first time he saw Tova. At once he developed acne on his face that wouldn’t go away. Once, at the height of his acne outbreak, Tova passed him in the school yard. “Goodness gracious,” she muttered, in a tone full of loathing and sympathy, whereupon the headmaster blushed deeply.
The handicrafts teacher also fell into disfavour. She had the unfortunate habit of saying, “Poor, poor child” over and over again whenever she caught sight of Tova. Tova took her revenge by touching her hair as she passed her, and the teacher’s hair began to fall out. Soon her pink scalp became visible. “Oh, poor, poor you!” her colleagues would say to her in sympathy. Tova smiled maliciously when she heard them.
She also knew how to handle her stupid, malicious classmates. An extraordinarily large number of students were absent due to sickness, an extraordinary number broke their arms or legs and an extraordinary number of teachers and students suffered fatal diseases. And Tova was behind all the strange events that took place at the school. But who would ever have suspected that?
Her big dream in life was to serve Tengel the Evil. However, she hadn’t yet dared to contact him. The thought of her family – her sweet parents and her other relatives – had held her back.
So everyone assumed that she was on Nataniel’s side and wanted the best for the Ice People family.
Like all other normal children, she grew up, became a teenager and eventually left school. She experienced the pain of unrequited love on several occasions, which resulted in her avenging herself on the pretty girls. And also on the boys, if they acted unpleasantly towards her and said unkind things.
But so far, no one had been able to see through her.
Then she met Olav Nilsen, a drifter from the big city, and immediately fell head over heels in love with him. He actually talked to her. He called her a good companion when she gave him money and got him out of jail.
Which was why it hurt her so terribly when he called her a scarecrow and a dwarf-like witch with the world’s ugliest nose, and told her to go to hell.
She couldn’t even pull herself together to take her revenge on him, she had been much too hurt.
But that episode was over and done with now: it can be read about in the book Silent Voices.
All that spring Nataniel and Tova collaborated as they had agreed to do up in the Valdres Mountains. They tried to empower one another in the areas where they seemed to have weaknesses and would give each other difficult tasks to accomplish.
That is, Nataniel assumed that was what they were doing. But after a while he began to suspect that Tova wasn’t collaborating with him at all. On the contrary, she was making a fool of him.
Once Nataniel came to realize just how much of the evil legacy the poor girl had inherited he knew that she could become very dangerous. It was always she who had the last laugh, making him accomplish the most impossible tasks. He was the one who had to learn to cope with her overwhelming drive, her explicit lack of consideration and her cunning. In return, he needed to provide her with some of his determination to conquer the evil. He was the kinder of the two, the one who spoke of goodness, which was often an ungrateful task. It was easy to come across as preachy, and Tova wasn’t exactly open to preaching.
It was when she had inspired him to write an opinion piece in the newspaper that he realized how dangerous she could be. He should write about the many hard workers in society, she had said, the ones