“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
The Lenten Rose
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).
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.)
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?”
“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.
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.)
“Is there a red flower missing?” she asked once. She was picking blooms from a patch of the Lenten rose—its true name was hellebore, she knew now, and it could poison you through.
The Lady said, “A flower missing! Well, I never. What’s one flower in a gardenful? Come inside, and I’ll teach you another trick with those.”
“All right,” said Gerda, so bright the Lady laughed.
It was weeks before Gerda was well enough to walk the greenhouse alone, all the way to the far wall, a footstep from the bank of the river where a little boat was.
That was when she found the barren ground, and overturned the earth, and found the rose.
He was on watch, when the Snow Queen came.
His fellows were asleep, huddled trying not to freeze to death before morn
ing, and Kay had been staring at the snow and thinking how it could bury a man so you would never find him again.
(When the Snow Queen came, he thought for a moment that the dead were rising.)
The white reindeer that drew her sledge were quiet as dreams, and inside she was sitting with the same cloak drawn about her he remembered from a dozen winters.
She wore a diadem of ice, end to end across her white brow.
When she turned to look at him, her face was like the frost in the shadowed trees, her eyes deep as the water under the river ice.
She held out her hand to him.
“A boy as clever as you shouldn’t be here,” she said, in a voice like the wind through silver bells.
She was right—clever boys had fallen by the hundreds and the hundreds as they all fought for nothing in the wild, but the shard of mirror had poisoned his heart to hope, and he only called, “And where should I be, then?”
“Beside me,” said the queen, “and a prince in my palace of ice.”
It had been a long war, and an awful war; he was doomed to die, and it’s easy to be poison-hearted when your stomach’s empty.
And though he didn’t love the Snow Queen (he didn’t love anyone, his heart had frozen through), he walked out to meet her, and when she drew him into her arms and pressed her lips to his lips, he hardly felt the cold.
Well past the towering trees, when the river grew too fast and Gerda clung to the boat prepared to drown, a Laplander woman on a reindeer crashed through the water and pulled her to shore.
Gerda was brought near the fire and wrapped up warm in a red jacket, and a cap was put onto her head. Someone was taking her book of poisons from her hands; the Laplander woman’s face appeared as she knelt and said, “What dragged you so far, Southlander?”
Not a woman, Gerda thought, a girl, a girl my age. Am I still a girl? I’ve been on this river so long.
“I’m looking for Kay,” she said. “He got lost in the snow, away from his soldiers. Crows have been calling. They told me he passed this way.”
And the little robber girl said, after too long, “You had best rest here a while, then. The north is no place for the weary.”
They sleep on opposite sides of the bed.
They try, sometimes, to rest in one another’s arms, but it never lasts (there’s not much rest to go around).
She sleeps turned to the window, looking out at the bend in the river. He sleeps nearer the fire, under extra quilts; he’s never been warm, since they came home.
The palace of ice was never dark.
Its ceiling was cathedral-high, and its walls were curved and smooth to touch, and the floor was like the river in deepest winter.
(“I can’t keep hold,” he said, for his feet were numb—he’d walked for days behind the sledge. His voice barked back at him until he covered his ears.)
There was nothing in the throne room, not even a chair. When he fell to his knees, nothing impeded him.
(Shadows slithered behind the walls; he saw men he knew, who had been buried under the snow and the ice.)
The Snow Queen turned to him. She was dressed not as a sovereign, but as a woman; her hair was soft as new snow, threaded with Lenten roses, and when she knelt, it brushed the ground between them.
Her gown, under her cloak, was thin as a veil, and he felt that if only the shard was pulled from his eye, he could see through it, but somehow it was only her face he saw, bright white, and sharp, and cruel.
“Now, my prince,” she said, in a voice like the wind through silver bells, “are you happy?”
“No,” he said. (The word came back to him—no, no.)
When she smiled and reached for him, he realized he felt no cold from her skin; he didn’t feel anything. The little white flowers in her hair were frozen through.
“Then walk out and be free,” she said.
He looked behind him—which way had they come?—but everything reflected light, and there was no way out.
When he turned back, the Queen had vanished.
He was alone, and it was deepest winter everywhere, and when he breathed too quickly the air made a mist as thin as a veil.
For half a summer, Gerda lived in the Sami camp, where the reindeer spent the warm months eating and shoving at one another.
The robber-girl’s name was Meret, and she gave Gerda anything—a red tunic embroidered with all the colors of spring, a blue cap lined in fur, a thick sharp knife—except the book of poisons from her time with the Lady of Spring.
“None of the plants you need are here,” Gerda said. “What use is it to you? Give it back.”
“If I do,” Meret said, “you’ll only go.”
Gerda said nothing.
(Underneath the love of poisons and the love of the open, there was a promise she made long ago, under a bower of roses.)
At night, in the bed beside Meret, Gerda breathed Kay’s name to the crows, and each morning they said, “We saw tracks in the snow, they are his,” and she thanked them, and fed them suet.
But during the days she looked across the flat wide land, without any curio shops or village squares, and she gathered plants to make remedies, and when the reindeer were herded back at night she saw Meret smiling under her red cap, two dogs running beside her, waving upraised arms to guide them home.
At night they sat by the fire and mended reins side by side, and there was singing, and sometimes the howl of a dog when it was lonely; Meret always laughed and said, “They want for winter.”
She had a face like a white rose, thought Gerda, sometimes, without knowing what she meant.
One night, the crows came back and said, “Gerda, we have seen him, he is in the palace of ice.”
The robber-girl already had a blade to her throat, but when Gerda said, “Meret,” she went still, and moved away the blade, and said, “This way.”
Meret gave her a reindeer, and tied it to a sledge.
“I’m keeping your book as payment,” Meret said, looking at nothing.
“Good,” said Gerda. “Look out for the Lenten rose—the white hellebore—it’s poison.”
“I know what poison is,” Meret said. The reins knotted under her hands.
“Make him cry,” Meret said. “That’s the only way the shards will wash away. Then he’ll be as he was.”
Gerda said nothing.
“I don’t care what you do,” said Meret. “It’s just my mother knows, that’s all. She’s a Laplander woman.”
(The robber-girl was a Laplander woman, too; as grown as Gerda, and she had sharp eyes, nimble fingers that tied any knot you asked of her without ever looking.)
Gerda laced the red jacket tight against the cold, remembering, all the way north to the cave of ice.
Mr. Vatanen’s curio shop does business enough that he can afford to stay home, and have Gerda mind the shop.
But the people who come are still wary, and before they touch something they always ask if it belonged to this family, or that one. 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.)
But she k
nelt 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 spilling, 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.)
It isn’t that he wanted to go to the winter palace and belong to the Snow Queen.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 3