Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(13)

? 45 ?

? The Lenten Rose ?

The silence grew, and grew, and soon they were under the shadow of the trees, and it was too late.

For those five breaths, deep in the cave with Kay pleading not to go, she had closed her eyes, thought about the plants that make a poison.

The night they reached home, after Kay was sleeping, Gerda crawled out the garret window to cut the roses out at the root.

But though the vines that wrapped the terrace were the same, the red roses were gone.

They had bled all their color. They were white as hellebore, now; white as a palace of ice.

He never asked her what she had done. Maybe he had forgotten the roses. It was just as well.

Red makes you remember things.

When he looks out the kitchen window in the mornings he seems a decade older, but even with a face made of edges, his profile is kinder than it was.

(The Laplander woman had promised; as he wept, the shards of mirror had washed away.)

Gerda had thought his heart would close again, and be whole, but that was her own foolishness. Some things leave hollows behind them no plant in the world will heal, the center burned black.

They let it be.

This is home, and autumn is already going; nothing can be done about it now.

Gerda never saw the Snow Queen. When she reached him, Kay had been a long time alone in the cave of ice.

(She had hoped; she had wanted to see the Queen. It would be worse if he had only dreamed her.)

She’d had to take her sturdy Lapland knife and smash the ice that had wrapped his ankles, before she could even speak to him, before ? 46 ?

? Genevieve Valentine ?

she could ask him to stand, before she could take his hand and lead him home.

He doesn’t remember it, she thinks. She doesn’t know. It would mean asking him.

What’s one more lie, in a gardenful?

They had passed the greenhouse garden, too, as they came home— bursting in its late-summer dress of bright golds and purples and reds.

The Lady of Spring had been working behind the glass, up to her elbows in dirt, picking flowers for a poison.

She was happy. She never raised her eyes from the ground.

Gerda took her hands off the pony’s bridle, clenched them in her lap as if around a little book, until they were well clear.

Kay looked at her, said nothing.

Soon the river turned, and she saw the bridge, and the wisps of smoke from the town, and soon, soon, soon, they were home.

He waits on the main road, off the square.

(He met her at the shop, once; too many mirrors.) When she appears he leans in and kisses her, lips cold as winter brushing her cheek.

They walk, a little apart, over the bridge.

He looks at the faces the frost makes in the trees; she looks at the bend in the river, like an outstretched arm reaching north.

Ahead of them is the little house; white roses; the rest of a year.

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Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique, won the 2012

Crawford Award and was a Nebula nominee. Her second novel is forthcoming from Atria/Simon & Schuster. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, the anthologies Federations, After, Teeth, and more. Valentine’s ? 47 ?

? The Lenten Rose ?

nonfiction has appeared at NPR.org, The AV Club, Strange Horizons, io9.com, and Weird Tales, and she’s a co-author of pop-culture book Geek Wisdom (Quirk). Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on genevievevalentine.com.

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? 48 ?



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Why fairy tales? She was bitten by that bug early, having devoured the Andrew Lang color fairy books as an impressionable girl.

It is why, when asked to give the Andrew Lang lecture in 2012, (past lecturers had included J. R. R. Tolkien, who gave the “On Fairie-Stories” lecture, as well as John Buchan!) she hesitated until told that—as the twenty-second lecturer since 1927, she would be the first woman to do so. At that point she signed on. They had to bring in about a hundred more seats as the hall filled up.

One of the things Jane Yolen enjoys doing is retelling a familiar story from the point of view of an unfamiliar narrator, and “The Spindle’s Tale” is no exception. Here an innocent is coerced into doing an evil deed, and pays the price instead of the powerful enchanter.

One might wish to ask if this is meant as a political fable, but Yolen always says, “I tell the story. I leave commentary and exegesis to academics and critics. And if you think I am being disingenuous, then you don’t know me very well! As I wrote at the end of a recent poem: ‘After the soldiers leave the field/Truth stays on, under its own banner.’ ”