Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(11)

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The palace of ice was never dark.

Its ceiling was cathedral-high, and its walls were curved and smooth to touch, and the floor was like the river in deepest winter.

(“I can’t keep hold,” he said, for his feet were numb—he’d walked for days behind the sledge. His voice barked back at him until he covered his ears.)

There was nothing in the throne room, not even a chair. When he fell to his knees, nothing impeded him.

(Shadows slithered behind the walls; he saw men he knew, who had been buried under the snow and the ice.) The Snow Queen turned to him. She was dressed not as a sovereign, but as a woman; her hair was soft as new snow, threaded with Lenten roses, and when she knelt, it brushed the ground between them.

Her gown, under her cloak, was thin as a veil, and he felt that if only the shard was pulled from his eye, he could see through it, but somehow it was only her face he saw, bright white, and sharp, and cruel.

“Now, my prince,” she said, in a voice like the wind through silver bells, “are you happy?”

“No,” he said. (The word came back to him—no, no.) When she smiled and reached for him, he realized he felt no cold from her skin; he didn’t feel anything. The little white flowers in her hair were frozen through.

“Then walk out and be free,” she said.

He looked behind him—which way had they come?—but everything reflected light, and there was no way out.

When he turned back, the Queen had vanished.

He was alone, and it was deepest winter everywhere, and when he breathed too quickly the air made a mist as thin as a veil.

For half a summer, Gerda lived in the Sami camp, where the reindeer spent the warm months eating and shoving at one another.

The robber-girl’s name was Meret, and she gave Gerda anything—a ? 41 ?

? The Lenten Rose ?

red tunic embroidered with all the colors of spring, a blue cap lined in fur, a thick sharp knife—except the book of poisons from her time with the Lady of Spring.

“None of the plants you need are here,” Gerda said. “What use is it to you? Give it back.”

“If I do,” Meret said, “you’ll only go.”

Gerda said nothing.

(Underneath the love of poisons and the love of the open, there was a promise she made long ago, under a bower of roses.) At night, in the bed beside Meret, Gerda breathed Kay’s name to the crows, and each morning they said, “We saw tracks in the snow, they are his,” and she thanked them, and fed them suet.

But during the days she looked across the flat wide land, without any curio shops or village squares, and she gathered plants to make remedies, and when the reindeer were herded back at night she saw Meret smiling under her red cap, two dogs running beside her, waving upraised arms to guide them home.

At night they sat by the fire and mended reins side by side, and there was singing, and sometimes the howl of a dog when it was lonely; Meret always laughed and said, “They want for winter.”

She had a face like a white rose, thought Gerda, sometimes, without knowing what she meant.

One night, the crows came back and said, “Gerda, we have seen him, he is in the palace of ice.”

The robber-girl already had a blade to her throat, but when Gerda said, “Meret,” she went still, and moved away the blade, and said, “This way.”

Meret gave her a reindeer, and tied it to a sledge.

“I’m keeping your book as payment,” Meret said, looking at nothing.

“Good,” said Gerda. “Look out for the Lenten rose—the white hellebore—it’s poison.”

? 42 ?

? Genevieve Valentine ?

“I know what poison is,” Meret said. The reins knotted under her hands.

“Make him cry,” Meret said. “That’s the only way the shards will wash away. Then he’ll be as he was.”

Gerda said nothing.

“I don’t care what you do,” said Meret. “It’s just my mother knows, that’s all. She’s a Laplander woman.”

(The robber-girl was a Laplander woman, too; as grown as Gerda, and she had sharp eyes, nimble fingers that tied any knot you asked of her without ever looking.)

Gerda laced the red jacket tight against the cold, remembering, all the way north to the cave of ice.

Mr. Vatanen’s curio shop does business enough that he can afford to stay home, and have Gerda mind the shop.

But the people who come are still wary, and before they touch something they always ask if it belonged to this family, or that one.