Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(10)

The walls of the house are painted blue-green.

It’s safest. White’s too like winter; yellow too like spring.

It drains you—he’s looked sick in it, ever since he came back—but you live with your choices.

She has a red dress. She puts it on (only ever in the house) when she needs to feel color. When she’s alone.

She never wears it long; red makes you remember things.

The first days she was adrift, she fell ill.

The pair of crows had called out when it wasn’t safe to land, and at last Gerda had come ashore where the Lady of Spring kept a greenhouse more than a mile by a mile.

? 38 ?

? Genevieve Valentine ?

As she rested from her fever, the lady taught her to garden; to coax a flower from a seed; to make remedies and poisons.

“You never know what you need,” said the Lady of Spring. “War’s everywhere, and a woman has reasons.”

(She had forgotten some of home, in the fever. But she must have studied, once; she listened to the remedies, and memorized the poisons.)

“Is there a red flower missing?” she asked once. She was picking blooms from a patch of the Lenten rose—its true name was hellebore, she knew now, and it could poison you through.

The Lady said, “A flower missing! Well, I never. What’s one flower in a gardenful? Come inside, and I’ll teach you another trick with those.”

“All right,” said Gerda, so bright the Lady laughed.

It was weeks before Gerda was well enough to walk the greenhouse alone, all the way to the far wall, a footstep from the bank of the river where a little boat was.

That was when she found the barren ground, and overturned the earth, and found the rose.

He was on watch, when the Snow Queen came.

His fellows were asleep, huddled trying not to freeze to death before morning, and Kay had been staring at the snow and thinking how it could bury a man so you would never find him again.

(When the Snow Queen came, he thought for a moment that the dead were rising.)

The white reindeer that drew her sledge were quiet as dreams, and inside she was sitting with the same cloak drawn about her he remembered from a dozen winters.

She wore a diadem of ice, end to end across her white brow.

When she turned to look at him, her face was like the frost in the shadowed trees, her eyes deep as the water under the river ice.

She held out her hand to him.

? 39 ?

? The Lenten Rose ?

“A boy as clever as you shouldn’t be here,” she said, in a voice like the wind through silver bells.

She was right—clever boys had fallen by the hundreds and the hundreds as they all fought for nothing in the wild, but the shard of mirror had poisoned his heart to hope, and he only called, “And where should I be, then?”

“Beside me,” said the queen, “and a prince in my palace of ice.”

It had been a long war, and an awful war; he was doomed to die, and it’s easy to be poison-hearted when your stomach’s empty.

And though he didn’t love the Snow Queen (he didn’t love anyone, his heart had frozen through), he walked out to meet her, and when she drew him into her arms and pressed her lips to his lips, he hardly felt the cold.

Well past the towering trees, when the river grew too fast and Gerda clung to the boat prepared to drown, a Laplander woman on a reindeer crashed through the water and pulled her to shore.

Gerda was brought near the fire and wrapped up warm in a red jacket, and a cap was put onto her head. Someone was taking her book of poisons from her hands; the Laplander woman’s face appeared as she knelt and said, “What dragged you so far, Southlander?”

Not a woman, Gerda thought, a girl, a girl my age. Am I still a girl?

I’ve been on this river so long.

“I’m looking for Kay,” she said. “He got lost in the snow, away from his soldiers. Crows have been calling. They told me he passed this way.”

And the little robber girl said, after too long, “You had best rest here a while, then. The north is no place for the weary.”

They sleep on opposite sides of the bed.

They try, sometimes, to rest in one another’s arms, but it never lasts (there’s not much rest to go around).

She sleeps turned to the window, looking out at the bend in the river. He sleeps nearer the fire, under extra quilts; he’s never been warm, since they came home.

? 40 ?

? Genevieve Valentine ?