Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

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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.

The walls of the house are painted blue-green.

It’s safest. White’s too like winter; yellow too like spring.

It drains you—he’s looked sick in it, ever since he came back—but you live with your choices.

She has a red dress. She puts it on (only ever in the house) when she needs to feel color. When she’s alone.

She never wears it long; red makes you remember things.

The first days she was adrift, she fell ill.

The pair of crows had called out when it wasn’t safe to land, and at last Gerda had come ashore where the Lady of Spring kept a greenhouse more than a mile by a mile.

? 38 ?

? Genevieve Valentine ?

As she rested from her fever, the lady taught her to garden; to coax a flower from a seed; to make remedies and poisons.

“You never know what you need,” said the Lady of Spring. “War’s everywhere, and a woman has reasons.”

(She had forgotten some of home, in the fever. But she must have studied, once; she listened to the remedies, and memorized the poisons.)