Winter's Child (4 page)

My oma paused, looking from me to Kai, and then back to me, as if waiting to see which one of us would figure out this riddle first.

“Fear,” Kai suddenly burst out. “That’s what the piece of mirror adds.”

“Fear, indeed,” my oma said. “You are right, Kai.”

“But wait,” I objected, doing my best not to show how irritated I was that Kai had figured it out first. “I thought the curse of the mirror was that it showed the queen her innermost flaw.”

“You are right as well, Grace,” my grandmother said. “Think about it for a moment. Why did the queen spend so much time at her mirror in the first place?”

“Because she was afraid,” I answered slowly. “Afraid her beauty would fade and the king would stop loving her.” I fell silent for a moment, considering what I could now see was the logical conclusion. “So fear was the queen’s innermost flaw.”

“I think it must have been, don’t you?” my grandmother responded. “I’ve always thought that, when the queen looked in the mirror for that last time, she saw that she was just as beautiful as she had always been. Her face had not changed at all. Her beauty had not diminished, but still the king’s love had fled.

“In that instant, the queen realized what she had done. She had brought the very woe she dreaded upon herself by giving in to her fear and closing off her heart. And her heart, grown smaller by staying so tightly wrapped, could not expand again. It could not contain this bitter knowledge and her fear all at once. Her
heart shattered, just as she had shattered the mirror.”

“And she perished in that same instant,” I murmured, as I remembered what came next.

“She did.” My grandmother nodded. “But she left behind her child and countless others, all with a sliver of ice in their hearts. So the wrong the Winter Child must right also was decided in the instant of her mother’s death.

“To travel the world in search of all those wounded hearts and to mend them, one by one.”

“But that could take forever,” Kai protested.

“It will take as long as it must,” my grandmother replied. “When the Winter Child turned sixteen,” she went on, in a tone of voice that signaled she was returning to her storytelling and would tolerate no more interruptions, “the age when many young heroes begin their quests, the very day she turned sixteen, Deirdre, the Winter Child, set out on her journey.

“She put on a dress of linen, fine as gossamer. Over it she tied a woolen cloak as white as snow. She laced her feet into a pair of crystal boots as sturdy as the stars. She took a staff of pale ash wood into her hand, and she kissed her father the king good-bye. Then she turned and walked away from the palace made of ice, and she left the land of ice and snow behind.

“She did not look back, not even once. Though she must have wanted to, I think, don’t you?”

I sat for a moment, my hands resting on the sewing in my lap, trying to imagine what it must be like to leave your home. Not because you wanted to, but
because you must. Because you must right a wrong not your own.

Oh yes,
I thought.
She must have wanted to look back very, very much.

“She has been traveling the world ever since, seeking out and mending those damaged hearts, one by one. As long as Deirdre is on her journey, the magic of her quest embraces her, just as the arms of the North Wind did, so very long ago. She will never grow a day older, for she cannot continue her own life until her task is done. For most of us, the Winter Child is invisible, for she is not made to be seen by ordinary eyes.

“Even so,” my oma continued in a hushed and reverent tone, “in the silence after a winter storm has ceased to howl, in the soft whisper of a morning snowfall, in the way the moonlight sparkles over new-fallen snow, you can feel when she has been nearby, ever searching. You can sense the presence of the Winter Child.”

“But ...,” Kai said yet again, and with that single word, he broke the storytelling spell.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” I cried. “Why must you always take everything apart to see how it works? Can’t you just close your eyes and enjoy the story?”

“Grace,” my grandmother said softly.

I immediately fell silent, for I knew that tone. All of us have heard some version of it at one time or another from those who love us most: the sound that says,
I am disappointed in you. That was badly done.

“I’m sorry, Oma,” I mumbled.

My grandmother fixed her dark eyes on me, but she said nothing. I gave an inward sigh. I love my oma with all my heart, but there’s no denying her will of iron. She says I am like her in this, but I’m not so sure. For when my will comes up against hers, mine is always the one that bends.

“I’m sorry, Kai,” I said, for my grandmother’s point, of course, was that she was not the one who truly deserved my apology. “Please, go on.”

“I just want to know one more thing,” Kai said, and I could hear him struggling to keep the surliness out of his voice.

“And what is that?” my grandmother asked.

“What about the heart of the Winter Child? Who will mend that?”

At this, Kai’s mother, Frue Holmgren, who had been silent for so long I’d almost forgotten that she was there, made a small sound. She performed a strange gesture, as if trying to snatch Kai’s words right out of the air.

“Ah,” my grandmother said with a sigh. “Now you have come to the heart of the Winter Child’s tale, Kai.

“Even if Deirdre finds all the other wounded hearts and mends them, one by one, dissolving all the slivers of ice, driving out fear so that the hearts may know true love, there is still the matter of who will mend the Winter Child’s own heart.

“Does the task fall to her or to someone else? No telling of the story I have ever heard has answered this question.”

“Then perhaps,” I said, determined not to let Kai outdo me when it came to observation, “the solution lies not in her tale at all, but in someone else’s.”

“Perhaps,” agreed my oma.

There was a moment’s silence. Kai stared down at his sewing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my oma reach out and take Frue Holmgren by the hand. And suddenly, I realized how late it was. The room was close and warm, and I was tired.

“I still think the king gave his daughter the wrong name,” Kai said. “He should not have named her Sorrow.”

Oma squeezed Frue Holmgren’s fingers, and then let them go. “What name would you have chosen?” she inquired.

Kai looked up, his eyes fierce as they stared at my grandmother’s face. “Hope,” he said. “That’s really what she brings, isn’t it? So that’s what her father should have named her.”

My grandmother’s expression softened. But as she leaned to place the palm of one hand against Kai’s cheek, I was astonished to see that tears had risen in her eyes.

“Your true love will be fortunate in your heart, I think,” she said. “For it is strong and whole. So will your love be, when you choose to give it.”

With that, Oma leaned back and took up her sewing, and none of us said anything more.

T
HREE

My grandmother told us many stories, but somehow, it was always the tale of the Winter Child that Kai and I loved best of all. Awakening in the morning, we imagined we saw the flare of her gossamer skirts in the patterns the ice formed outside our windows overnight. We heard the sound of her crystal boots in the noise the ice made as it scoured the walls and roof through the long, dark winter nights. Somehow, these flights of fancy helped to make our own winters more bearable.

Winter is not just a passing fancy in the land of my birth. It comes early and stays late. It can be beautiful, but it is also fierce and cunning, not to be ignored. Looking for traces of the Winter Child, wondering how many hearts she would mend that year, kept Kai and me busy until spring returned and we could be outdoors.

Even then, however, Kai always seemed to take the story more seriously than I did. It was as if, in his own heart, he didn’t think of it as a made-up tale at all. Even as he used his sharp eyes to look closely at the world and so discover how it worked, Kai kept this one flight of fancy: He believed in the Winter Child.

As time went on, of course, we had less and less time for stories. We were both growing up. All too soon, our next birthdays would bring us to sixteen, the same age as the Winter Child herself. Kai had long since grown too old for staying at home. At twelve, he’d been apprenticed to Herre Lindstrom, who made and repaired clocks and watches.

Spending hour after hour hunched over all of those intricate pieces—springs so small and fine that if you dropped one it would disappear into the carpet and never be seen again, cogs with teeth and gaps between them designed to fit together in just one way and no other, even holding the tiny tools for such delicate work in my hands would have made me want to run screaming from the room. But Kai loved his hours in the watchmaker’s shop.

“Everything makes sense, Grace,” he said one afternoon, as we were walking together. Most days, when my sewing was done, I would leave home a little early to meet Kai, and we would walk home from Herre Lindstrom’s shop. It was one of the few times when we were alone. There were not as many opportunities for Kai and me to spend time together, now that we were growing up.

“A clock, a watch, can only work one way. If you can
see what that way is, you can fix anything if it breaks.”

“I’m glad you like it so much,” I said in perfect honesty. “It would make my head hurt and my eyes water.”

Kai smiled. He turned his head to look at me, and then his eyes narrowed ever so slightly, as if I was blurry and he was trying to bring me into focus. Lately, I had caught him doing this more and more. There was always an expression in his eyes I couldn’t quite decipher.

“I thought you said the sewing already did that,” he said at last.

I gave a snort. “You’re right. It does.”

Over the years, my oma’s eyesight had begun to fade. As a result, the fine handiwork that used to fall to her eyes and fingers now fell to mine. The curious thing was that the more I disliked the work, the tinier and more even my stitches had become, until at last I became somewhat famous as a seamstress. Even the ladies in the finest part of town desired my sewing.

Slowly, I had begun to earn enough money so that Oma and I could have moved into a nicer flat, or at least to one on a lower floor. But, by mutual consent, neither Oma nor I ever spoke of such a thing. She did not want to leave her rooftop garden, and I did not want to leave Kai.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” Kai said quietly.

Because we knew each other so well, he understood how, as my hands grew more proficient, my spirit struggled. As if the stitches I placed in other
people’s garments somehow all conspired together to bind me to a life that wasn’t what I wanted. Not that I knew what I
did
want, mind you. It’s often easier to see what you don’t want than what you do. This is a fact of life that I’m hardly the first to have noticed.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” I answered as we rounded a corner, leaving the shop district behind. We were entering the poorer quarter now, the place where we lived.

“It’s not as if it’s your fault,” I went on. “I’m happy that you like your work, Kai. Honestly, I am.”

“I know you are,” Kai said. “It’s just—”

“I know,” I said, cutting him off.

The fact that Kai spent his days doing something that matched his temperament so well, while I did something that matched mine so little, genuinely distressed him. I told myself that this was why he watched me in that close and quiet way of his.

“You could try something else,” he suggested now.

“Oh yes?” I answered, my tone short in spite of my best effort. We crossed the street, careful to avoid the horses.

“And just what did you have in mind, taking in laundry or scrubbing floors? Girls don’t get apprenticed like boys do, Kai, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s not as if I have a lot of options.”

I could read and write, which was unusual for a girl from a poor family, but I did not possess any of the other skills that might have made me eligible to
work as a governess or a teacher, even if that had been what I’d wanted.

Perhaps if I had seen a clearer vision for my handiwork, I might have dreamed of opening up a shop, of paying others to stitch clothes that I had designed. But I did not. I didn’t know quite
what
I wanted. I just knew I was tired of sitting still. There were days when it felt as if my whole body itched to be in motion.

So I headed to the rooftop as often as possible. Even in the dead of winter when I had to bundle up in so many layers that I looked like one of the snowmen the children dressed in cast-off clothes, I went. First thing in the morning, last thing before I went to bed at night, I climbed the stairs from the rooms I shared with my grandmother and clambered out onto the roof.

On the rooftop I could breathe. I could stand in one place and turn in a circle, catching a glimpse of at least some portion of the horizon in whichever direction I sent my eyes. At night, when I could no longer see the shapes of the world around me, I could tilt my gaze upward toward the stars.