Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(9)

He reached her at the very center of the bridge.

“Kay’s mother’s had a telegram,” he said.

She sat on the wall, and when Ensio tried to hold her she turned so her legs dangled off the edge, and when he asked, “Gerda, what can I do?” she said, “Find my grandmother, she’ll know,” and he set off running like he loved her.

She cried until her jacket split up the back; she cried until her new red shoes fell one by one into the water.

A pair of crows was circling.

She thought, like a dreamer thinks, I can find him if they can’t.

When she dropped, there was an empty boat waiting, pointed north.

In school, when Kay was still a little boy, the teacher showed that Finland was shaped like a woman, arms reaching upward.

She’s beautiful, the teacher promised, the most beautiful woman of all; the guardian of a nation.

It was good to know. Gerda was lovely sometimes, when they were playing in the snow and she looked at him and laughed, but now Kay knew it wasn’t serious.

There was real beauty, somewhere far away. It felt like a brave thing to think.

If Kay saw a face sometimes, when he looked out the window in winter—two lines of frost shining off her high wide cheekbones, lips the color of milk ice, sharp black eyes rimmed just at the edge of the iris with blue—wasn’t it just the Finnish Maiden?

(It was a lie, of course, the sort of lie children tell themselves when they’re trying to be patriots.

Some stories are older than others; those your grandmother tells before any school can reach you.

It was the Snow Queen.

Once, she smiled at him.

He pressed his hands to the glass. Around her white hair, everything was winter and dark.)

? 36 ?

? Genevieve Valentine ?

v

At home, Gerda tended the roses that grew along the garret and the balcony rail. The winters turned them into witch’s fingers, but every spring they bloomed thicker, and by summer they were all awake, deep red, with burn-black centers.

The roses spanned both garret windows together, and on summer nights they sat among the thorns and watched the river, and when Kay asked, “Shall we be always together?” Gerda said, “I promise.”

(He was hers when things were warm and green; why he changed in the cold, she never knew.)

He saw the Snow Queen everywhere, in winter.

The dry flakes blowing across the cobbles got caught in the wind and became her slim, welcoming hands. Frost against the branches in the shadowed forest was the Queen in glittering robes, turning to greet him.

When he saw her, his heart beat faster; when water moved under the ice, it sounded like she was calling him.

He remembers the shards of mirror that entered his heart and his eye.

He thinks that even without them, he would have gone with the Queen.

They were racing home across the bridge, when the mirror shards struck Kay.

It was after school; they always started from the fountain at the square, and ran all the way home.

(That year, the boys had started to tease him about losing to Gerda. Sometimes he started before time, so if they were watching, they’d see him ahead.)

She remembers that as they crossed the bridge he stumbled (he never stumbled), and when she turned back to help him he shoved her hand away, snapped, “I’m fine—my feet got heavy, that’s all. Took you long enough. Trying to win by cheating?”

? 37 ?

? The Lenten Rose ?

“Kay, that’s mean.”

“Stop sniveling,” he said, picking up his schoolbooks. “It doesn’t do you any favors.”

She walked home behind him, watching his back.

She didn’t think that anything was wrong. Boys got this way eventually. His child’s face was gone. He had cheekbones, now, and deep blue eyes, a down-turned mouth the girls in school said marked him as romantic.

The other romantic boys were awful, too.

(She had waited, though, before she doubled back; for those five breaths, she had been running free of him, and her feet had dug sprays of snow from the ground.)

At seventeen, she worked in Mr. Vatanen’s curio shop.

Sometimes Kay waited for her, walked her home.

They took the bridge quietly, moving closer to the tangle of empty thorns around their windows.

One day he said, “I’m too smart to grow old here. I’m joining the army. We’re fighting the Reds, you know.”

As they walked across the open field, dry snow scudded across the path; he looked at it like a man in love.