Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(8)

“You will rule with a dragon’s sense of justice,” Tern said, “which is more than I can expect from the women and men out there who are hungering after a child’s throne.” She handed over the keys of her office.

The dragon’s smile was respectful. “We’ll see.” And, pausing at the threshold: “I won’t forget you.”

The door closed, and Tern was left with the coin and the dragon skin.

It was not until many generations later, when one of the dragon’s descendants braved the second treasury, that Tern learned that she had been given a dragon-name. Not a reign-name, for she was done with that, and not a funeral-name, for she was far from dead. The empire she had ceded was now calling her Devourer-of-Bargains.

After all this time, she had come around to the dragon’s own opinion on this matter. It was a confusing human practice, but she wasn’t in any position to argue.

A number of generations after that, when a different empress ? 29 ?

? The Coin of Heart’s Desire ?

braved the treasury, Tern asked what had become of the Dragon Empress from so many years ago.

The empress said, “According to the records, she disappeared after a sixty-year reign, leaving only a note that said, ‘I’m looking for another coin.’ ”

The empress was looking wistfully at a particularly lovely beryl set in silver filigree. Eventually she returned her attention to Tern, but she kept glancing back at it. The woman’s face looked oddly familiar, but Tern couldn’t place it. Probably a trick of her imagination.

The rest of the conversation was fairly predictable, but Tern contemplated the dragon’s sense of justice once the empress had gone. Time moved differently underwater, after all. She could wait.

for New Orleans

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Yoon Ha Lee’s first collection of short fiction, Conservation of Shadows, was published earlier this year. She lives in Louisiana with her family and has not yet been eaten by gators. She has been fortunate enough to avoid entanglements with dragons. It’s the tigers you really have to watch out for. Or maybe the foxes.

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Fairy tales and folk tales have always been important—as a blueprint for expecting the worst, or as a suggestion that you might make it after all; some wolves can be killed. To look at a tale is to look at the story itself, the hidden stories behind it, the world in which it was written, the ways it’s changed and why. One of the reasons that fairy tales continue to fascinate us is because to examine any aspect of that story is to be retelling it already—asking questions, looking for more.

“The Lenten Rose” is a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” which has always been a favorite of mine, largely for the things it doesn’t tell us, the little dark places waiting for a light.

Particularly, it leaves Kay and Gerda sitting on the balcony as their journey vanishes from their minds, leaving them, the story suggests, essentially unchanged from the children they were when they began it. But of course that’s not how journeys go; that’s where my story starts.

Genevieve Valentine

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The Lenten Rose


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Genevieve Valentine


The roses out on the roof were in full bloom . . . and Kay and Gerda seated themselves each on their own chair, and held each other by the hand, while the cold empty grandeur of the Snow Queen’s palace vanished from their memories like a painful dream . . . And they both sat there, grown up, yet children at heart; and it was summer—warm, beautiful summer.

—“The Snow Queen,” Hans Christian Andersen

Two strangers are living in a house.

It’s summer; warm, beautiful summer.

The house is choked by roses—white, always white, nothing must be red any more.

Every window has heavy curtains. He closes the curtains at the first frost, every year, and doesn’t open them again until the roses bloom.

She’s tried to kill the roses, a hundred times.

When Ensio found Gerda, back on the day when Kay went missing, she was walking home from the shop, across the bridge toward the other side of the river, where her grandmother’s house was pressed in the center of a little row of houses (from her garret window she could see the water until the bend, where the trees closed over it).

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? The Lenten Rose ?