Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(12)

No one wants a thing from a family who has parted with it on ill terms, or the cursed effects of a doomed soul who died badly.

Sometimes Gerda says, “I don’t know who it belonged to first,” and the old man who was asking will look up at her with narrowed eyes, saying, “It’s not good for a shopgirl to lie, she risks losing her place.”

She’ll say nothing; think about the book of poisons.

She freed the reindeer, tied the unstrung reins to a boulder, held one end down the slope of ice as it twisted downward, to the cave.

It was bright, even here, and scarred in patches, white and ridged and curling in like the edges of the Lenten rose.

In the center was Kay, with a knife frozen in his hand. He had tried to dig himself out through the ground; he sat in a nest of ice.

His shins were raw and bloody.

His face was all bone, and his eyes were pale and wide. He looked like no one she knew.

(She was glad; she worried, if she remembered who he had been.) ? 43 ?

? The Lenten Rose ?

But she knelt in front of him, and said, “Kay, it’s Gerda. I’ve come to take you home.”

“I don’t know you,” he said, his eyes moving always just past her face.

She flinched, said, “You do, Kay. I’ve come to take you home. I made you a promise.”

He looked her up and down. She shivered.

“I remember you tended the roses,” he said, like she was a servant in a fairy tale.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, and I loved you there, once.”

“I—” he stopped, as if his breath had given out. “I’m waiting for the Snow Queen. I love her. She wants me for her prince, and I’ll have my reward if I can only walk out and meet her.”

“Then come along, if you love her. Let me take you to her. Just stand up with me.”

“No,” he said, and tears were already spil ing, large gasps that sounded like something breaking. “No, I don’t want to go. I can’t go back.”

“I know,” she said, after five full breaths, in and out. “But winter comes any minute, and then it will never be light here again. We have to run.”

“I can’t run,” he said, fresh tears running over tears that had already frozen. “I’ve tried, my feet are too heavy.”

“I’ve cut you free.”

He was calmer, now. He wiped his eyes.

He blinked twice, hard, said, “Something is gone.”

“I know,” she said, after too long; held out a hand.

(She understands him, sometimes, more than he thinks.

He might think he’s a coward for ever being there, for wanting to die there rather than go on.

But she hadn’t known there would be a boat, when she jumped from the bridge; just that her feet were too heavy to carry her, and she was burning all over from grief.

She wanted the water. The rest was accident.) ? 44 ?

? Genevieve Valentine ?

v

It isn’t that he wanted to go to the winter palace and belong to the Snow Queen.

(She was beautiful, beautiful as she had been the first time she came to his window, and if she’d only loved him he’d have left the shards in his heart, stayed clever and cruel until he rotted around them.)

He was frightened of her, and of the place she led him to. When she was gone, he screamed at the ice, and dreamed of her, and lost all sense of cold, and decided that to die wasn’t such a sacrifice. Maybe, long after this, the Queen would cut the shard from his heart, place it on her tongue until it bled white.

It isn’t that he wanted to stay in the palace.

It’s just that he had no hopes of coming home. You forget what you have no hope of.

He recognized Gerda as soon as he saw her.

(She was in a bright jacket; he remembered, all at once, a trellis of red roses.) He pretended not to, as long he could.

Once, she was quiet for five full breaths, and he waited to see what it meant.

He’d hoped she would leave him behind.

She didn’t let go of his hand, all the long trip home.

(They walked along the reindeer trails for days, Gerda looking at every profile for Meret. Gerda never saw her, but at the village, Meret’s mother, the Laplander woman, had two ponies waiting.) As they went south, it turned slowly back to summer.

Kay said little, and whenever she took his hand he looked down, as if surprised her skin was warm.

His eyes had lost their color, in the winter palace; now they were pale as glacier ice, and he hardly brought them up to look around the plains where the reindeer had crossed it, to mark the turning season.