The Snow Queen · The Original Fairy Tale · 3 Hour Sleep Story to Fall Asleep

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The lamp is lit again.
The same small flame as last night, in the same quiet room at the edge of the world.
The storyteller is already here. She was here before you arrived. She will stay until you sleep.
There is a chair for you. There is a blanket. The night outside is doing all of its slow, dark work, and none of it is yours to carry until morning.
The storyteller opens the old book, and turns past the tales already told, to a page that waits for tonight.
Tonight, she says softly, we go north, all the way north, with a small girl in worn shoes, past a garden where it is always summer, past a palace of dreams and a castle of robbers, behind a reindeer who knows the way, under the burning green lights of the sky, to a hall built of snow where a boy sits beside a frozen lake, trying to spell one word out of ice, and the tale is called The Snow Queen.
And there is no hurry at all as she begins.
Settle in now. Let the chair hold you. Let the blanket be heavy in the good way, the way snow is heavy on a roof that has nothing to do until spring.
Close your eyes, if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way lamplight is near you, the way a warm room is near you when the window shows nothing but winter.
You do not have to follow every word. You do not have to remember any of it in the morning. If you drift, the story will go on without you, quietly, and it will not mind at all. Drifting is not leaving. Drifting is how a listener says thank you.
A word about tonight's tale, before the first page. It is an old one from Denmark, written down almost two hundred years ago by a man named Hans Christian Andersen, a shoemaker's son who understood cold rooms and warm hearts better than anyone who has ever held a pen. He built this tale strangely and wonderfully, in seven small stories, like seven beads on one string, and tonight you will be given all seven, whole, in their old order, the way he left them. There is snow in this story, a great deal of it, but you will be warm the entire time. That is the arrangement. The cold stays on the page. The lamp does the rest.
And nothing in this room will ever startle you. Whatever winters blow through this tale, they blow themselves out well before the end, and every ending here is a soft landing. You can trust this room. That is what it was built for.
The flame leans, and settles.
We begin.
Chapter One.

The Mirror of the Trolls.
Attend, says the storyteller, because this tale begins in an unusual place. It does not begin with the boy, or with the girl, or with the queen of the snow. It begins with a mirror. When we know about the mirror, everything that happens afterward will make a kind of sense, the way a long winter makes sense once you know which wind brought it.
Once upon a time there was a troll. A real one, of the old cold sort, and the old book says plainly that he was the worst troll there ever was, the master of all the rest, and that his favorite thing in all the world was spoiling.
Now this troll, one idle century, made himself a mirror. And it was a very clever piece of work, in the way that bad ideas are often clever. For this mirror had the power to make everything good and beautiful that looked into it shrink down to almost nothing at all, while everything worthless and wrong grew larger, and stronger, and worse.
The loveliest green landscapes looked, in that glass, like boiled spinach. The kindest faces came out crooked, or upside down, or with no middles to them, so that their own mothers would have walked past them in the street. If a person had a single freckle, the mirror spread it over the whole nose and mouth. And if a good, warm thought passed through someone's heart while they stood before it, the mirror showed such a grimace that the troll laughed until his sides ached, which he considered the best use of an afternoon there was.
Everyone who attended the troll school, for he ran a school, told everybody everywhere that a miracle had happened. Now, they said, for the very first time, you could see what the world and the people in it really looked like. And they ran up and down the whole earth with the mirror, until at last there was not one land and not one person that had not been made crooked in it.
Then, because there was nothing left below to spoil, they wanted to fly up to heaven itself, to try the mirror on the angels.
Higher and higher they flew, and the mirror grimaced so hard, and shook so hard with its own cold laughing, that they could scarcely keep hold of it. Higher still they flew, and then the mirror trembled so terribly in its frame that it leapt right out of their hands, and fell back down toward the earth, turning over and over, and there it broke into hundreds of millions of billions of pieces, and more besides.
And this, says the storyteller, is where the trouble truly starts, and where the trolls, if they had understood anything at all, would have been sorry. Because broken, the mirror did far more mischief than whole.
Some of the pieces were hardly as large as a grain of sand, and these flew about in the wide world, and wherever they got into someone's eye, there they stayed. And from then on that person saw everything wrong, or had eyes only for what was worst in a thing, for every little splinter kept the whole power of the whole mirror. Some people even got a splinter right into the heart. And that was the most dreadful of all, quiet as it sounds, for a heart with mirror glass in it turns, little by little, into a lump of ice.
Some pieces were large enough to be made into window panes, but it was not good to look at your friends through those windows. Some became spectacles, and things went badly when people put on those spectacles hoping to see clearly and judge rightly. The troll laughed till he shook, which was the only kind of laughing he knew.
But out in the air, small splinters of glass were still floating.
Hold that thought gently, the way you would hold something with a thin edge. Do not worry over it. Only remember it. Two of those floating splinters matter to us tonight, and only two, and before this night is over, both of them will be gone from the world for good.
Now, says the storyteller, and here her voice warms, the way a room warms when someone opens a stove door, now we shall hear the first of the seven stories proper. And it happens far from trolls, on a rooftop, in summer, between two children and two rose trees.
Chapter Two.

The Roses on the Roof Gutter.
In a great town, where there are so many houses and so many people that there is not room enough for everyone to have even a little garden, and where most folk must content themselves with flowers in pots, there lived two poor children who had a garden somewhat bigger than a flower pot.
They were not brother and sister, but they loved each other as much as if they had been. Their parents lived just opposite one another, in two attic rooms, where the roof of one house leaned against the roof of the next, and the rain gutter ran along between. From each house a little window looked out, one facing the other, and you had only to step across the gutter to get from window to window.
Outside each window the parents had set a great wooden box, and in the boxes grew kitchen herbs, which they used, and in each box grew also a little rose tree, and the rose trees throve wonderfully. Sweet peas hung down over the edges of the boxes, and the rose trees sent out long branches that wound themselves around the windows and leaned across toward each other, until it was almost like an archway of leaves and flowers between the two little rooms, a green triumphal arch a few feet above the street, which nobody down in the street ever noticed, and which was, for all that, one of the loveliest gardens in the world.
The boxes were very high, and the children knew they must not climb about on them. But they were often allowed to step out to each other and sit on their little stools under the roses, and there they played most beautifully, in the smell of leaves and warm tar and summer.
The boy was called Kay. The girl was called Gerda.
In the winter, of course, that pleasure was over. The windows were often frozen quite shut and quite white. But then the children would warm copper pennies on the stove, and press the hot pennies against the frozen pane, and there would come a beautiful round peephole in the frost, and behind each peephole a soft bright eye, one at each window, the little boy and the little girl, looking across at one another through the white.
In summer they could be together with one jump. In winter it was down many stairs and up many stairs, on the inside, while outside the snow came drifting down.
Those are the white bees swarming, said the old grandmother, who sat by the stove with her knitting and knew things.
Do the white bees have a queen too, asked the little boy, for he knew that the real bees have one.
They have, said the grandmother. She flies there, where the swarm hangs thickest. She is the largest of them all, and she never lies still upon the earth. She flies up again into the black cloud. Many a winter night she flies through the streets of the town and peeps in at the windows, and then the panes freeze over in wonderful patterns, like flowers and like castles.
Yes, we have seen that, said both the children, and so they knew that it was true.
Can the Snow Queen come in here, asked the little girl.
Just let her come, said the boy. I will set her on the warm stove, and then she will melt.
But the grandmother smoothed his hair and told other stories, and the evening went on, warm and small and safe, the way evenings by a stove go on.
But that night, when little Kay was at home and half undressed for bed, he climbed up on the chair by the window and peeped out through his little round hole in the frost. A few snowflakes were falling out there, and one of them, the very largest, came to rest on the edge of one of the flower boxes. And the snowflake grew, and grew, and at last it became a whole lady, dressed in the finest white gauze, which seemed to be made of millions of starry flakes. She was beautiful, and fine, and made of ice, of dazzling, gleaming ice, and yet she was alive. Her eyes shone like two clear stars, but there was no rest and no quiet in them. She nodded toward the window, and she beckoned with her hand.
The little boy was frightened, and sprang down from the chair, and then it seemed to him that a great pale bird flew past the window, and was gone.
The next day there was a clear frost. And then came the thaw. And then came the spring. The sun shone, the green peeped out, the swallows built their nests, the windows were opened, and the two children sat once again in their little garden, high up in the roof gutter above all the floors of the two houses.
The roses bloomed that summer as they had never bloomed before. And the little girl had learned a song in which there were roses, and when she sang it she thought of her own, and she sang it to the little boy, and he sang it with her.
Down in the valley the roses grow, and there the Christ child you shall know.
And the two of them held each other by the hand, and kissed the roses, and looked up into the clear sunshine of God, and it seemed to them that the summer would simply go on, that the roses would never leave off blooming, and that nothing at all would ever change.
Remember them there, says the storyteller. Two small heads under an arch of roses, a gutter garden between two attic windows, a whole town below them that has no idea it is holding up paradise. Whatever this tale does next, that rooftop is where it is going home to. Keep one hand on it, and you cannot be lost.
Chapter Three.

The White Sledge.
One day Kay and Gerda sat looking at a picture book full of birds and beasts, and it was just then, as the clock in the great church tower was striking five, that Kay said, oh. Something pricked my heart. And now, something has flown into my eye.
The little girl put her arm around his neck. He blinked and blinked. No, there was nothing at all to be seen.
I think it is gone, he said.
But it was not gone. It was one of those very grains of glass that had sprung from the troll mirror, the wicked glass, you remember it, the glass that made everything great and good that was mirrored in it become small and hateful, while everything mean and wrong stood out plainly, so that every fault in a thing could be noticed at once. And poor Kay, the old book says it as gently as it can be said, poor Kay had gotten a second splinter as well, and that one had gone straight into his heart, and his heart would soon be like a lump of ice.
It did not hurt anymore. But it was there.
Why do you cry, he said to Gerda. It makes you look ugly. There is nothing at all the matter with me. And then, looking about, he said, that rose there is worm eaten. And look, this one is quite crooked. They are ugly roses after all, like the boxes they stand in. And he kicked the box with his foot and pulled off the two roses.
Kay, what are you doing, cried the little girl.
And when he saw how it frightened her, he pulled off yet another rose, and sprang in through his own window, and left dear little Gerda alone under the arch.
After that day, when she came with the picture book, he said it was for babies. When the grandmother told stories, he always came in with a but. And when he could manage it, he would walk behind her, put on her spectacles, and imitate her way of speaking. It was done exactly right, and people laughed at it. Very soon he could mimic the walk and the talk of everyone in their street. Everything that was odd about a person, everything that was unlovely, Kay could do it after them, and folk said, that boy has certainly a remarkable head. But it was the glass that sat in his eye, and the glass that sat cold in his heart, and it was because of the glass that he teased even little Gerda, who loved him with her whole soul.
His games were quite different now from what they had been. They had become so knowing. One winter day, as the snowflakes came drifting down, he brought out a big magnifying glass, and held out the corner of his blue coat, and let the flakes fall on the wool.
Now look through the glass, Gerda, he said.
And every snowflake stood there much larger, and looked like a splendid flower, or like a star with ten points. It was truly wonderful to see.
Do you see how artful, said Kay. It is far more interesting than real flowers. There is not one single fault in them. A snowflake is perfectly exact, as long as it does not melt.
Soon after that, Kay came by with big gloves on his hands and his little sledge on his back, and he shouted right into Gerda's ear, they have given me leave to sledge in the great square where the others play. And off he went.
Out there in the square the boldest boys would often tie their little sledges fast to the farmers' carts, and be pulled along a good way behind. It was the greatest fun. And while their play was at its height, a great sledge came into the square. It was painted white all over, and in it sat a figure wrapped in a rough white fur, with a rough white cap upon its head. The sledge drove twice around the square, and Kay got his little sledge tied on behind it, quick as thinking, and away he drove with it.
Faster and faster it went, straight into the next street. The driver turned and nodded to Kay in the friendliest way, just as if they knew one another. Every time Kay thought of loosening his little sledge, the driver nodded again, and Kay stayed where he was. And so they drove straight out through the gate of the town.
Then the snow began to fall so thick and fast that the little boy could not see his own hand in front of him as they rushed along. He undid the rope in a hurry, to be free of the great sledge, but it made no difference. His little sledge hung on fast, and away they went like the wind. He called out as loudly as he could, but nobody heard him. The snow drifted down and the sledge flew on, and now and then it gave a bound, as though it were flying over hedges and ditches.
He was thoroughly frightened now. He wanted to say his prayer, the evening one, the one he knew by heart. But all that he could remember was the multiplication table.
The snowflakes grew bigger, and bigger, until at last they looked like great white hens. Then, all at once, they flew to either side, the great sledge stopped, and the driver stood up. The fur and the cap were of snow, all of snow, and the driver was a lady, tall and slender, and shining white.
It was the Snow Queen.
We have driven well, said she. But you are nearly frozen. Creep into my bear fur.
And she set him beside her in the great sledge, and drew the fur around him, and it was to him as though he sank into a soft deep snowdrift.
Are you still cold, she asked, and she kissed him on the forehead.
Ah. That kiss was colder than ice. It went straight in to his heart, and his heart was already half a lump of ice. For one moment it was to him as though he were about to die. But only for one moment. Then it was well with him again, and he no longer felt the cold at all.
My sledge, my little sledge, do not forget it. That was his first thought, and someone had thought of it already. It was tied fast to one of the great white hens, and she flew along behind with the little sledge on her back.
Then the Snow Queen kissed Kay once more, and with that kiss he had forgotten little Gerda, and the grandmother, and every soul at home.
Now you get no more kisses, said she, for else I should kiss you to death.
Kay looked at her. She was so beautiful. A wiser face, a lovelier face, he could not have imagined. She did not seem to him now to be made of ice, as she had seemed that night she sat outside his window and beckoned. In his eyes she was perfect, and he was not afraid anymore. He told her that he could do arithmetic in his head, even with fractions, and that he knew how many square miles the country had, and how many people lived in it. And she smiled, and smiled. And then it seemed to him that what he knew was perhaps not so very much after all, and he looked up, into the great wide vault of the night.
And she flew with him. High up on the black cloud she flew, and the storm whistled and sang about them, as though it were singing songs older than any grandmother. Over forests and over lakes they flew, over sea and over land. Below them the cold wind rushed by, the wolves called far off to one another, the snow sparkled, and the black crows flew cawing over the white ground. But high above, the moon shone big and bright and calm, and Kay watched the moon through all that long, long winter night. And in the day, he slept at the feet of the Snow Queen.
The storyteller turns the page here, and the page is as white as the snow it tells of.
For back in the town, at a small attic window between two empty flower boxes, a little girl kept watch on the street where the sledges came home at dusk, one by one, and one of them did not come.
That winter was long. And when the tale goes on, it goes with her.
Chapter Four.

The River and the Cherry Garden.
But how did it fare with little Gerda, when Kay came back no more?
Where could he be? Nobody knew. Nobody could say. The other boys could tell only this much, that they had seen him tie his little sledge to a splendid great one, which had driven into the street and out at the gate of the town. Nobody knew where he was. Many tears were shed, and little Gerda wept long and hard. Then people said that he was dead, that he had been drowned in the river that flowed close by the town. Oh, those were long, dark winter days.
Then came the spring, with warmer sunshine.
Kay is dead and gone, said little Gerda.
I do not believe it, said the sunshine.
He is dead and gone, she said to the swallows.
We do not believe it, they answered. And at last little Gerda did not believe it either.
I will put on my new red shoes, she said one morning, early, the ones Kay has never seen. And then I will go down and ask the river.
It was still quite early. She kissed the old grandmother, who was sleeping, put on the red shoes, and went, quite alone, out at the gate and down to the river.
Is it true that you have taken my little playfellow, she asked the water. I will give you my red shoes if you will give him back to me.
And it seemed to her that the waves nodded, in a strange way. So she took her red shoes, the dearest things she owned in the world, and threw them both out into the river. But they fell close in by the bank, and the small waves carried them straight back to land, to her feet, as if the river would not take the dearest thing she owned, since it did not have little Kay to trade for them.
But Gerda thought only that she had not thrown the shoes far enough out. So she climbed into a boat that lay in the rushes, and went out to the farthest end of it, and threw the shoes from there. The boat, however, was not tied fast, and with the movement of her throwing it slid away from the shore. She felt it going and hurried to get back out, but before she reached the other end, the boat was a good arm's length from the bank, and gliding away, faster and faster.
Then little Gerda was very much frightened, and began to cry. But no one heard her except the sparrows, and they could not carry her to land. So they flew along the bank beside her and sang, as if to comfort her, here we are, here we are.
The boat drove on with the stream. Little Gerda sat quite still, in her stocking feet. Her little red shoes floated along behind, but they could not catch up with the boat, which traveled faster than they did.
Beautiful were both banks of that river. Beautiful flowers, old trees, hillsides with sheep and cows. But of people, not one single one to be seen anywhere.
Perhaps the river is carrying me to little Kay, thought Gerda, and at that she grew more cheerful, and stood up in the boat, and watched the lovely green banks go by for hours. The water lapped at the boat, kindly enough. The sun lay warm on her hair. Dragonflies stitched blue threads above the rushes, and stitched them again, as though the seam would not hold, and the river went on with her the way rivers go on, patiently, in no hurry to arrive.
And then she came to a great cherry orchard, and in the orchard stood a little house with strange red and blue windows, and a thatched roof, and outside it two wooden soldiers, who presented arms to everyone who sailed past.
Gerda called out to them. She thought they were alive. But they, quite naturally, did not answer. And the river carried her close in to them, driving the boat toward the land.
Gerda called louder still, and then out of the house came an old, old woman, leaning on a hooked stick. She had a great sun hat upon her head, and the hat was painted all over with the most beautiful flowers.
You poor little child, said the old woman. However did you come to be out on this great rolling river, driven so far into the wide world? And the old woman walked right out into the water, caught the boat fast with her hooked stick, drew it in to land, and lifted little Gerda out.
And Gerda was glad to be on dry ground again, though she was a little afraid of the strange old woman.
Come now, and tell me who you are, said the woman, and how you came here.
And Gerda told her everything. And the old woman shook her head and said, hm, hm. And when Gerda had told it all and asked whether she had not seen little Kay, the woman said that he had not come past yet, but that come he certainly would, and Gerda was not to be sorrowful, but should taste her cherries, and look at her flowers, which were more beautiful than any picture book, for every one of them could tell a whole story.
Then she took Gerda by the hand, and they went into the little house, and the old woman locked the door behind them.
The windows sat very high up, and the panes were red, and blue, and yellow, so that the daylight fell inside most strangely, in all those colors at once. But on the table stood the most delicious cherries, and Gerda ate as many as ever she liked, for that she had leave to do. And while she ate, the old woman combed the little girl's hair with a golden comb, and the hair curled and shone like gold about the small friendly face, which was so round and so soft, like a rose.
I have so long wished for a dear little girl like you, said the old woman. Now you shall see how well we two shall get along.
And as she combed and combed little Gerda's hair, Gerda forgot her playfellow Kay, more with every stroke of the comb. For the old woman was skilled in magic. But a wicked witch she was not. She did only a little magic, for her own pleasure, and what she wanted, in her lonely house among the cherries, was very much to keep little Gerda.
And therefore she went out into her garden, and stretched her hooked stick out toward all the rose trees, and every one of them, in the very fullness of its blooming, sank down into the black earth, so that no one could see where it had stood. For the old woman was afraid that if Gerda saw roses, she would think of her own roses at home, and remember little Kay, and run away from her.
Then she led Gerda out into the flower garden.
Oh, what fragrance was there, and what loveliness. Every flower a person could think of, flowers of every season of the year, stood in that garden in fullest bloom, all at once, all together. No picture book could be brighter or more beautiful. Gerda jumped for joy, and played among the beds until the sun went down behind the tall cherry trees. Then she was given a lovely bed with red silk pillows, and the pillows were stuffed with blue violets, and she slept there, and dreamed as sweetly as a queen on her wedding day.
The next day she played again with the flowers in the warm sunshine. And so many days passed, one exactly as sweet as another. Gerda came to know every flower in the garden by name and by face. But many as they were, it seemed to her always that one was missing, though she could not have said which.
Until one day she sat looking at the old woman's sun hat, the painted one, and the loveliest of all the painted flowers on it was a rose. The old woman had quite forgotten to take it off her hat, that time she made the real roses sink down into the earth. But so it goes, says the old book, when one does not keep one's wits about one.
What, said Gerda, are there no roses here? And she sprang in among the flower beds, and looked, and looked, and there was not one to find. And then she sat down in the middle of the garden and wept.
But her hot tears fell on the very spot where a rose tree had sunk down. And where the warm tears wetted the earth, the tree shot up all at once, as full of bloom as on the day it sank. And Gerda put her arms around it, and kissed the roses, and thought of the lovely roses at home in the roof gutter, and with them, at last, at last, of little Kay.
Oh, how much time I have lost, said the little girl. I was going to find Kay. Do you not know where he is, she asked the roses. Do you believe that he is dead and gone?
Dead he is not, said the roses. For we have been down in the earth, where all the dead are, and Kay was not there.
Thank you, said little Gerda. And she went to the other flowers, and looked into their cups, and asked, do you not know where little Kay is?
But every flower stood in the sunshine dreaming its own dream, its own little story. Gerda got to hear so many of them, so many. But not one flower knew anything at all about Kay, for each of them, as is the way with flowers, knew only its own song.
What did the convolvulus say? It told of an old castle above a narrow mountain road, with evening light on its red walls, and of a lovely maiden who leaned out over the balcony there and looked far down the road, fresher than the freshest rose, and asked the evening, will he not come soon?
What did the buttercup say? It told of a little courtyard, with the warm sun of early spring lying in it, and an old grandmother out in her chair, and her granddaughter, home for a visit, who kissed her. There was gold in that kiss, said the buttercup, heart gold. That is my little story. And it shone with satisfaction and said no more.
And the narcissus? The narcissus said only, I can see myself, I can see myself, and could not be moved off the subject, so Gerda left it admiring its own reflection, which it is doing to this day.
You none of you know anything, said Gerda at last, and she gathered up her skirt and ran, down to the far end of the garden.
The gate was shut fast. But she wriggled the rusty latch until it gave way, and the gate sprang open, and little Gerda ran out, on her bare feet, into the wide world. Three times she looked back as she ran, but no one came after her. At last she could run no more, and she sat down on a big stone to breathe.
And when she looked around her, she saw that the summer was over. It was late in the autumn. Inside the beautiful garden, where there was always sunshine and the flowers of all four seasons at once, a person could never have noticed. But out here the year had gone on without her.
Oh my, how I have lingered, said little Gerda. It is autumn already. There is no time to rest.
And she rose to go on.
Oh, how sore and tired her little feet were. And how cold and raw it looked all around. The long leaves of the willows had gone quite yellow, and the mist dripped from them like slow water, and one leaf fell, and then another. Only the sloe thorn still stood with its fruit on, and that fruit so sour it pulled your whole mouth together.
And it was gray, and it was heavy, out in the wide world. But she went on. That is the whole of Gerda, told in four words, says the storyteller, turning the page. She went on.
Chapter Five.

The Crow Who Knew a Princess.
Gerda had to rest again soon, for little legs go only so far on a cold road. And there on the snow, just in front of where she sat, came hopping a great crow.
The first snow of that early winter was down, thin and fresh, and the crow left neat little stitch marks across it as it came. It had been sitting a good while looking at her, turning its head this way and that way. And now it said, kra, kra. Good day, good day. It said this as well as it was able, for crows speak our language only with effort, and it meant it kindly, and it asked the little girl where she was going, all alone, out in the wide world.
The word alone Gerda understood very well, and felt the whole weight of it. And so she told the crow her whole life, from the roof gutter onward, and asked at the end whether it had not seen Kay.
The crow nodded quite thoughtfully and said, could be. Could be.
What, do you think so, cried the little girl, and she kissed the crow so warmly that she very nearly knocked it over into the snow.
Gently, gently, said the crow. I think, I say I think, it may be little Kay. But if it is, then he has certainly forgotten you by now, for the princess.
Does he live with a princess, asked Gerda.
Yes, listen, said the crow. But it is so hard for me to speak your language. If you understood crow talk I could tell it far better.
I never learned it, said Gerda. My grandmother knew it, though. I wish now I had learned.
No matter, said the crow. I shall tell it as well as I can, which will be badly enough. And it told what it knew.
In this kingdom where we two now sit, said the crow, there lives a princess who is so uncommonly clever that she has read all the newspapers there are in the whole world, and, mark this, has forgotten them all again, so clever is she. The other day she was sitting on her throne, which people say is not half so amusing as you would suppose, and she happened to hum a little song, and the song was this one, why should I not be married? Why not indeed, said she, there is something in that song. And so she determined to marry. But she would have a husband who knew how to answer when he was spoken to. A husband who did not simply stand about looking well born and distinguished, for that, she said, is so exceedingly tiresome.
Now you may believe every word of this, said the crow, for I have a tame sweetheart who lives at the palace and goes about there freely, and she has told me the whole of it.
The very next morning the newspapers came out with a border of hearts all around, and the princess's initials inside, and there it stood in print, that any young man of pleasing appearance was free to come up to the palace and speak with the princess. And whichever one of them spoke so that a person could hear he was at his ease there, and spoke the best, him the princess would take for a husband.
Yes, yes, said the crow, you may trust me. It is as true as it is that I sit here.
The people came streaming. There was a crushing and a crowding, a running and a hurrying. But it went well for nobody, not the first day, and not the second. Out in the street, every one of them could talk splendidly. But the moment they came in at the palace gate, and saw the guards standing there in silver, and the footmen all the way up the stairs in gold, and the great halls with all their lights, they lost themselves entirely. And when they stood before the throne where the princess sat, they could think of nothing to say at all, so they said back the last word the princess herself had said, and she had no particular wish to hear that one again.
It was as if a spell fell upon them the moment they were indoors, as if they had been struck sleepy from the carpets up. And the spell lifted only when they were back out in the street, where they could talk again beautifully, which was no use whatever out there. There stood a whole row of them, waiting, from the town gate all the way up to the palace door. I flew in and saw it myself, said the crow. They got hungry, waiting, and they got thirsty, but from the palace they received not so much as a glass of lukewarm water. The cleverest of them, it is true, had brought bread and butter in their pockets. But they did not share with their neighbors, no. Each one thought, only let that fellow beside me look hungry enough, and the princess will never take him.
But Kay, little Kay, said Gerda. When does he come? Was he among all those?
Give me time, give me time, said the crow. We are just now arriving at him. On the third day there came marching cheerfully up to the palace a little person, without horse, without carriage, on his own two feet. His eyes sparkled, the way yours do. He had beautiful long hair. But his clothes were poor.
That was Kay, Gerda rejoiced. Oh, then I have found him. And she clapped her hands.
He had a little knapsack on his back, said the crow.
No, that must surely have been his sledge, said Gerda, for he went away with his sledge.
That may well be, said the crow. I did not look so very closely. But this much I know from my tame sweetheart. When he came in through the palace gate and saw the guards in silver, and the footmen in gold all up the staircase, he was not put out of countenance in the least. He nodded to them and said, it must be dull work, standing about on the stairs. I would rather go in.
The halls blazed with candles. Privy councillors and excellencies were walking about barefoot, so solemn was the place, carrying golden dishes. It was enough to make anybody solemn. And his boots creaked most dreadfully loud, and still he was not afraid.
That is certainly Kay, said Gerda. I know he had new boots. I heard them creaking myself, in grandmother's room.
Creak they certainly did, said the crow. And he walked straight in to the princess, cheerful as morning, and she was sitting on a pearl as big as a spinning wheel. And all the ladies of the court, with their maids, and their maids' maids, and all the cavaliers, with their serving men, and their serving men's serving men, who each kept a boy besides, stood ranged all around. And the nearer they stood to the door, the prouder they looked. The serving men's serving men's boy, who goes always in slippers, one scarcely dares look at at all, so proud is he, standing there in the doorway.
That must be terrible, said little Gerda. And yet Kay won the princess?
If I had not been a crow, said the crow, I should have taken her myself, and never mind that I am promised elsewhere. He spoke, they say, quite as well as I speak when I speak crow language. He was merry, and he was pleasant. He had not come to woo at all, he said, only to hear the princess's wisdom, of which the newspapers had been full. And her wisdom he found good, and she found him good in return.
Yes, of course. That was Kay, said Gerda. He was always so clever. He could do arithmetic in his head, with fractions. Oh, will you not take me in to the palace?
Easily said, said the crow, easily said. But how shall we do it? I shall speak to my tame sweetheart about it. She will know a way. For this I must tell you plainly. A little girl like you, with bare feet, will never in this world get leave to walk in at the front.
Oh yes I shall, said Gerda. When Kay hears that I am here, he will come straight down and fetch me himself.
Wait for me by that stile, said the crow. And it wagged its head, and away it flew.
Chapter Six.

The Prince and the Princess.
Not until the evening had grown quite dark did the crow come back.
Rah, rah, it said. My sweetheart greets you a thousand times. And here is a little loaf of bread for you. She took it from the kitchen. There is bread enough in that kitchen, and you must be hungry.
Now then. It is not possible for you to come into the palace by the front, said the crow. You are barefoot, and the guards in silver and the footmen in gold would never allow it. But do not cry. Up you shall come, all the same. My sweetheart knows of a little back staircase that leads to the sleeping rooms, and she knows where the key is kept.
So they went into the garden, into the great avenue where the leaves were falling one after another, slowly, like small tired hands letting go. And when the lights of the palace had been put out, one by one, window by window, the crow led little Gerda to a back door, which stood ajar.
Oh, how Gerda's heart beat, with fear, and with longing. It was exactly as though she were about to do something wrong, and yet all she wanted in this world was to know whether it was little Kay. Yes, it must be he. She thought so hard of his wise eyes and his long hair that she could see him, see exactly how he used to smile when they sat at home under the roses. Surely he would be glad to see her. Glad to hear what a long way she had come for his sake. Glad to know how they had all grieved at home when he did not come back.
Oh, it was a fear, and it was a joy, and they went up the little back staircase together.
On the stairs a small lamp was burning on a shelf. And in the middle of the floor above stood the tame crow, turning her head on every side, and considering Gerda from all of them, and Gerda curtseyed, the way her grandmother had taught her.
My betrothed has spoken so very charmingly of you, my little lady, said the tame crow. Your history, as one might call it, is most touching. If you will take the lamp, I shall walk before. We go straight along here, and shall meet no one.
It seems to me that someone is coming behind us, said Gerda.
And something did indeed rush past her, like shadows running along the wall. Horses with flying manes and thin legs. Huntsmen. Lords and ladies on horseback, all of shadow, all quite silent, all streaming past and away.
Those are only the dreams, said the tame crow. They come and fetch the fine folks' thoughts out hunting, every night. And a good thing too, for then the fine folk lie the quieter, and one can look at them the better. Only, if you come to honor and high position, mind you keep a grateful heart. That is all I ask.
Why, that goes without saying, said the crow from the woods, a little embarrassed on Gerda's behalf, for Gerda's heart needed no such advice, and everyone present knew it.
Now they came into the first hall. Its walls were covered with rose red satin, worked all over with flowers. And here the dreams came rushing back past them again, but so quickly that Gerda could not get one look at the fine folk whose thoughts they carried. Each hall they passed through was grander than the one before, until a person could well grow dizzy with it. And then they stood in the bedchamber.
The ceiling of that room was made like the crown of a great palm tree, with leaves of glass, of the costliest glass. And in the middle of the floor, hanging from a thick stalk of gold, there were two beds, and each one was shaped like a lily. One lily was white, and in that one lay the princess. The other was red. And in that one Gerda was to look for little Kay.
She bent one of the red leaves aside, and she saw the brown back of a neck. Oh, it was Kay. She cried his name out quite loud, and held the lamp toward him. The dreams on horseback came rushing back into the room like a wind. The sleeper woke, and turned his head.
And it was not little Kay.
The prince was like him only about the neck. But young he was, and handsome. And out of the white lily bed the princess peeped, blinking, and asked what in all the world was happening. And then little Gerda cried, and standing there with the lamp, she told her whole story, all of it, and everything the two crows had done for her.
You poor little thing, said the prince and the princess together.
And they praised the crows, and said they were not in the least angry with them, though it must never happen again. Meanwhile, the crows should have a reward. Would they rather fly free, asked the princess, or would they have a fixed position, as court crows, with rights to everything that fell on the kitchen floor?
And both crows bowed very low, and asked for the fixed position. For they were thinking of their old age, and said, one so likes to have something laid by for the old man, as they put it.
And the prince got up out of his bed, and let Gerda sleep in it, in the red lily, and more than that he could not do, and it was a great deal. She folded her small hands and thought, how good they are, people and animals both. And then she closed her eyes, and slept the roundest, deepest sleep of her whole journey. All the dreams came flying back in to look at her, and this time they looked like God's own angels, and they drew a little sledge behind them, and on the sledge sat Kay, and nodded to her. But the whole of it was only dreaming, and so it was gone again the moment she woke.
In the morning she was dressed from head to foot in silk and in velvet. And she was invited to stay at the palace for good, and live in comfort all her days. But Gerda begged for one thing only, a little carriage with one horse before it, and one pair of little boots. Then she would drive out again into the wide world, and find Kay.
And she got the boots, and a muff as well, and she was dressed so beautifully and so warmly. And when she was ready to leave, there at the door stood a new coach of pure gold, with the coat of arms of the prince and the princess shining upon it like a star. Coachman, footmen, and outriders, for there were outriders too, sat in their places with little gold crowns on their heads. The prince and the princess helped her into the coach with their own hands, and wished her all the good fortune in the world.
The forest crow, who was now married, rode along with her for the first three miles. He sat on the seat at her side, for it disagreed with him thoroughly to ride with his back to the horses. The tame crow stood in the gateway and beat her wings. She did not go along, for she had suffered from headaches lately, since receiving her fixed position, and, it must be said, rather too much to eat with it.
Inside, the coach was lined with sugared cakes, and under the seat there were fruits and gingerbread nuts.
Farewell, farewell, called the prince and princess. And little Gerda cried, and the crow cried, and so the first miles went by. Then the crow, too, said farewell, and of all the partings on that road, this one was the heaviest. He flew up into a tree and beat his black wings there as long as he could see the coach at all, as it went away shining, bright as the clear sunshine, in among the darker trees.
Chapter Seven.

The Little Robber Girl.
They drove on through the dark forest. But the coach shone like a torch among the trees, and that, in a forest of that particular sort, was a mistake nobody had thought of in time.
It is gold, it is gold, cried the robbers, and they burst out of the trees and seized the horses by their bridles. The old book is harder on the coachman and the footmen and the outriders than we need to be at this hour. Tonight it is enough to say that they did not stay, and that the forest let them go.
And the robbers pulled little Gerda out of the coach.
She is plump, said the old robber woman, who had a long bristly beard and eyebrows that hung down over her eyes. She is a fine little one. She has been fed on nut kernels, this one. And she looked little Gerda over the way a housewife looks over goods at a market, and Gerda did not care for it at all.
But just then there came a loud yelp, and the old woman got a sharp bite on the ear, for hanging on her back, wild and willful, was her own little daughter, and in that family, you should know, a bite on the ear was a way of saying several things at once, most of them beginning with the word mine.
She shall play with me, said the little robber girl. She shall give me her muff, and her pretty dress, and she shall sleep with me in my bed.
And what the little robber girl wanted, in that camp, the little robber girl received, for she was spoiled through and through, and stubborn as a small oak. She and Gerda got into the coach together, and away they drove, over stumps and stones, deeper into the forest. The little robber girl was as tall as Gerda, but broader in the shoulders, and stronger, with brown skin and black eyes, and the eyes were almost sad, if you looked at them long enough, though nobody was often given the time.
She put her arm around Gerda's waist and said, they shall not touch you, as long as I am not cross with you. You are surely a princess.
No, said little Gerda. And she told her everything, everything that had happened to her, and how very fond she was of little Kay.
The robber girl looked at her quite gravely, nodded a little, and said, they shall not touch you even if I do get cross with you. Then I shall do it myself. And she dried Gerda's eyes with her own two hands, and then put both her hands into the beautiful muff, which was so soft and so warm.
And now the coach stopped. They were in the courtyard of a robber castle. It was cracked from top to bottom. Ravens and crows flew out of the open holes in the walls, and out of the gate came dogs, great dogs, each one looking as though it could swallow a man whole, though not one of them barked, for that was forbidden, and they took the rule seriously, and carried themselves in consequence with the gloomy dignity of large furniture.
In the great old smoke blackened hall, a big fire burned in the middle of the stone floor. The smoke drifted up under the roof and found its own way out, as it had done for a hundred years. A great cauldron of soup was boiling, and hares and rabbits were turning on spits, and the smell of it all was, it must honestly be said, very good.
Tonight you shall sleep with me and all my little animals, said the robber girl.
They got food and drink, and then went off to a corner of the hall, where straw lay deep, with old carpets spread over it. Above the corner, on rails and perches, sat nearly a hundred pigeons, and all of them seemed to be asleep, though they shifted a little, each on her perch, when the two girls came near.
They are all mine, said the little robber girl. And she seized the nearest one by the feet and shook it until it flapped its wings, which was her way of introducing it. Kiss it, she cried, and swung it right into Gerda's face.
Those two there are the wood rabble, she went on, pointing higher up, to a hole in the wall with bars before it, where two wood pigeons sat close together. Wood pigeons, the wild kind. They would be off in a moment if they were not locked in properly.
And this, this is my old sweetheart Bae.
And she pulled forward, by the antler, a reindeer. He wore a bright ring of polished copper around his neck, and he was tied up, and he was large, and patient, and his eyes were dark and mild.
We have to keep hold of him, said the robber girl, or he would run away from us in one leap. Every single evening I show him my little knife, and tell him how sharp it is, and how it is certainly the sharpest little knife in this whole forest. And the reindeer, who was polite, and who had heard this speech perhaps a thousand times, always agreed that it certainly was.
For the little robber girl kept a knife in her belt the way other girls keep a comb, and she was proud of it mostly in the way of whittling, and of showing it to visitors, and of being the kind of person who had one. It slept under her pillow at night, because, she said, you never can know. Nobody in that castle could remember it ever doing anything worse than sharpening sticks and spreading butter, but it had a great reputation, and she saw to it that the reputation was maintained.
Will you have your knife by you even while you sleep, asked Gerda, looking at it a little anxiously.
I always sleep with my knife, said the little robber girl. You never can know what may happen. But now tell me again what you told me before, about little Kay, and why you have gone out like this into the wide world.
And Gerda told it all again, from the very beginning. And the wood pigeons cooed up there behind their bars, and the other pigeons slept.
And then, out of the dark above them, the wood pigeons spoke.
Coo, coo, they said. We have seen little Kay. A white hen carried his sledge. He himself sat in the Snow Queen's sledge, and it drove low over the forest, where we lay in our nest. She breathed on the nests as she passed, and of all our nest only we two were left to remember it. Coo, coo.
What are you saying up there, cried Gerda. Where did the Snow Queen go? Do you know anything about it?
She was surely going to Lapland, said the wood pigeons, for in Lapland there is always snow and ice. Ask the reindeer who stands tied by the rope. He will know.
There is ice and snow there. There it is glorious and good, said the reindeer, and his mild eyes kindled as he said it. There one runs free, and springs about in the great shining valleys. There the Snow Queen has her summer tent. But her strong castle is farther up, toward the North Pole, on the island men call Spitsbergen.
Oh Kay, little Kay, sighed Gerda.
Lie still now, said the robber girl, who was more than half asleep already, or you will wake all my pigeons.
But Gerda lay awake a long while in the straw, listening to the fire settle and the smoke go up, and thinking of a boy at the top of the world.
In the morning Gerda told the robber girl everything the wood pigeons had said. And the little robber girl looked quite serious for once, and nodded her head, and said, no matter, no matter. Do you know where Lapland lies, she asked the reindeer.
Who should know that better than I, said the animal, and his eyes danced in his head. I was born there, and bred there. On the snow fields of Lapland I ran when I was young.
Listen, said the robber girl to Gerda. All our men are away this morning. Only mother is still here, and here she stays. But a little later in the morning she drinks out of the big bottle, and afterward she takes a small sleep. And then, then I shall do something for you.
And when the small sleep had duly arrived, and the hall was full of nothing but its snoring, the robber girl went to the reindeer and took hold of the copper ring.
I could go on keeping you a long time yet, she said to him. You are the most interesting thing in this whole castle, and you know it. But no matter. I will loosen your rope, and help you out, so that you can run home to your Lapland. But you must use those legs of yours properly, and carry this little girl for me to the Snow Queen's castle, where her playfellow is. You have heard every word she told me, for she talked loud enough, and you stood there listening, as you always do.
The reindeer sprang high into the air for joy.
The robber girl lifted little Gerda up onto his back, and had the good sense to tie her fast there, and even to give her a little cushion to sit upon.
And here are your fur boots, she said, for it will be cold where you are going. The muff I shall keep, it is far too pretty to give away. But you shall not freeze for all that. Look, here are my mother's great mittens. They will reach you right up to the elbows. In you go. Now your hands look exactly like my ugly old mother's, and that is the warmest thing hands can look.
And Gerda wept, for joy, and for all of it.
I cannot bear you to whimper, said the little robber girl. This is the moment to look pleased, if ever there was one. And here, here are two loaves and a ham for you, so you shall not go hungry either.
The loaves and the ham were tied on the reindeer's back. The little robber girl opened the door, called all the great solemn dogs inside, and then cut the rope through with her knife, which was thus given, at the very last, one genuinely important thing to do, and did it well.
Run now, she said to the reindeer. But mind you take good care of the little girl.
And Gerda stretched out both her hands in the enormous mittens toward the robber girl, and said farewell.
And then the reindeer ran. Over bushes and stubble he flew, through the great forest, over marsh and over plain, as fast as ever his legs would go. Far away the wolves said long cold things to one another, and overhead the ravens went home late, complaining, as ravens do. And then, high above, the sky itself began to glow, snap upon snap of red and of green, like great silent fireworks that had forgotten the noise.
There are my old northern lights, said the reindeer. Look at them shining. That is the roof of home.
And he ran on faster still, day and night both, under the burning sky.
The two loaves were eaten. The ham was eaten too, down to the string.
And then they were in Lapland.
Chapter Eight.

The Lapland Woman and the Finland Woman.
They stopped at a little hut, and a poor thing it was. The roof of it went right down to the ground, and the doorway was so low that the family had to creep on their stomachs when they wanted to go in or out.
Nobody was home in the hut but one old Lapland woman, who stood cooking fish over an oil lamp. And the reindeer told her the whole of Gerda's story, but first he told his own, for that one seemed to him a great deal more important. And Gerda herself was so overcome with the cold that she could not speak at all, but only stood steaming gently in the warm, like a small loaf just out of the oven.
Ah, you poor things, said the Lapland woman, then you have a long way to run yet. You must go more than a hundred miles farther, into Finmark, for it is there the Snow Queen is staying in the country now, and she burns her blue lights there every single evening. Listen. I will write a few words for you on a dried codfish, for paper I have none, and you shall carry it up to the Finland woman there. She can give you better directions than I can.
So Gerda was warmed through, and given to eat and to drink. And the Lapland woman wrote a few words on a dried codfish, and told Gerda to take good care of it, and tied her fast on the reindeer's back again, and off he sprang.
All that night the sky above them went snap, snap, and the most beautiful blue northern lights burned overhead the whole way. It was as if the night itself had lit lamps for them, all down the road, the last lamps of the world, hung where there are no more houses.
And then they came to Finmark, and knocked at the Finland woman's chimney, for a door she had none at all.
Inside it was hot, so hot that the Finland woman herself went about half dressed and barefoot. She was small, and rather grubby, and her eyes were the wisest eyes that Gerda had ever been looked at by. She loosened little Gerda's clothes at once, and took off the mittens and the fur boots, for otherwise the heat would have been too much for her, and she laid a piece of ice on the reindeer's head, which is how one is kind to a reindeer in a hot room.
And then she read what was written on the codfish. She read it three times over, until she knew it by heart. And then she put the codfish into the soup pot, for it was still perfectly good to eat, and the Finland woman never wasted anything. That was the first thing a person learned about her, and the wisest people, says the storyteller, are very often like that. Nothing is thrown away. Not fish, and not words, and not children who arrive by reindeer.
Then the reindeer told his own story first, again, and after it little Gerda's. And the Finland woman blinked her wise eyes, and said nothing at all.
You are so clever, said the reindeer. I know it well. You can bind all the winds of the world together with a single thread of sewing cotton. If the sailor loosens one knot of it he gets a fair wind, if he loosens the second it blows hard, and if he loosens the third and the fourth, then there comes such a storm that the forests fall flat. Will you not give this little girl a drink, so that she may have the strength of twelve men, and overcome the Snow Queen?
The strength of twelve men, said the Finland woman. Yes. That would certainly be a great help.
And she went to a shelf, and took down a great rolled hide, and unrolled it. Strange letters were written all over it, and the Finland woman read, and read, till the sweat stood out on her forehead.
But the reindeer begged again, so hard, for the little girl, and little Gerda looked up at the Finland woman with such pleading eyes, all full of tears, that the woman began blinking her own wise eyes again, and drew the reindeer away with her into a corner, where she whispered to him, while she laid fresh ice on his head.
Little Kay is with the Snow Queen, sure enough. And he finds everything there entirely to his liking and his taste, and believes it is the best place in all the world. But that is because he has got a splinter of glass in his heart, and a little grain of glass in his eye. Those must come out of him first. If they do not, he will never be a real human being again, and the Snow Queen will keep her power over him forever.
But can you not give little Gerda something to take, whispered the reindeer, something that will give her power over the whole of it?
I can give her no greater power than she has already, said the Finland woman. Do you not see how great that power is? Do you not see how men and beasts alike must serve her? How she has come on so far in the world, on her two bare feet? She must never learn of her power from us. It sits in her heart. It sits in this, that she is a dear, innocent child. If she cannot come to the Snow Queen by herself, and get the glass out of little Kay by herself, then there is no help that we can give.
Two miles from here the Snow Queen's garden begins. Carry the little girl that far. Set her down by the great bush that stands full of red berries in the snow. And do not stand there gossiping, but hurry back here.
And with that the Finland woman lifted little Gerda up onto the reindeer's back, and he ran off as fast as ever he could.
Oh, I have not got my boots. I have not got my mittens, cried little Gerda, for the burning cold told her so at once. But the reindeer dared not stop. He ran until he came to the great bush with the red berries. And there he set little Gerda down, and he kissed her on the mouth, and great bright tears ran down the animal's cheeks, and then he turned, and ran back again, as fast as ever he could, because he had been told to, and because he could not have borne to watch her walk away.
And there stood little Gerda. No shoes. No mittens. Alone in the middle of Finmark, in the middle of the ice, in the terrible cold, with the northern lights standing over her like the walls of a green cathedral.
She ran forward as well as she could. And then there came toward her a whole regiment of snowflakes.
They did not fall from the sky, for the sky was perfectly clear, all ablaze with the lights of the north. No, these snowflakes ran straight along the ground, and the nearer they came, the bigger they grew. Gerda remembered well how big and how artful the snowflakes had looked that day long ago, under the magnifying glass. But these were big in a different way. These were big, and alive. They were the Snow Queen's outposts, the sentries of her gate, and they had the strangest shapes that ever snow was put to. Some looked like great white hedgehogs, rolled and bristling. Some were like whole knots of white snakes, lifting their heads all together. Some were like small fat bears with every hair on end. All of them gleaming, dazzling white. All of them living snow.
Then little Gerda said her prayer, the Lord's Prayer, the same small prayer that had slipped away from Kay in the flying sledge, and had never once, in all this long road, slipped away from her.
The cold was so great that she could see her own breath, going out of her mouth like white smoke. And the breath grew thicker, and thicker, and it began to take shape. It became little bright angels, that grew larger and larger the moment their feet touched the ground, and every one of them had a helmet on its head, and a spear and a shield in its hands. More of them, and more of them. By the time the prayer was ended, a whole legion stood about her.
They touched their spears to the terrible snowflakes, and the snowflakes came apart, into ordinary snow, harmless and soft and done, a hundred small drifts lying quiet on the ground where a regiment had stood. And little Gerda walked on through them, safe, and undismayed. The angels touched her hands, and touched her feet, and where they touched she felt the cold less, and less.
And so she went, quickly now, toward the palace of the Snow Queen.
But first, says the storyteller, first we must see how it stands with Kay. He was not thinking of little Gerda. That must be said, and it is the last hard thing this tale will say. He was not thinking of her at all. And least of any thought in his head was the thought that at that very hour she stood outside the walls.
Chapter Nine.

The Word Made of Ice.
The walls of the palace were of driven snow, and its windows and its doors were of the cutting winds.
There were more than a hundred halls in it, all of them just as the drifting snow had blown them, and the greatest of them stretched for miles. All were lit by the strong northern lights. And all of them were vast, and empty, and glassily glittering, and cold to the very heart of the ice.
No merriment ever came into those halls. Never so much as a little dance for the bears, with the storm to blow the music while the polar bears walked on their hind legs and showed their fine manners. Never a little game party by the fire, with slapping of paws. Never so much as a small coffee gathering for the white fox ladies, with gossip worth carrying home. Empty, enormous, and cold were the halls of the Snow Queen, every one.
The northern lights flared and faded up there so exactly, so regularly, that you could reckon to the moment when they would stand highest and when lowest. A person could have set a clock by that ceiling, if there had been a person, or a clock, or anyone in all that whiteness who cared what time it was.
And in the middle of the endless empty hall of snow there lay a frozen lake.
It was cracked into a thousand pieces, and every piece was so exactly the shape of every other piece that the whole of it looked like a work of the highest art. And in the very middle of the lake sat the Snow Queen, when she was at home. And then she would say that she sat in the Mirror of Reason, and that this mirror was the best and finest thing in all the world.
Little Kay was blue with the cold. Indeed he was very nearly black with it. But he did not notice, for she had kissed the shiver out of him long ago, and his heart, as you know, was as good as a lump of ice.
He went to and fro across the lake, dragging sharp flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in every possible pattern, this way, and that way, trying to make something out of them. It was like the game we play at home with little flat pieces of wood, arranging them into figures. Kay made figures too, and his were of the most artful kind imaginable. In his own eyes those figures were remarkable, and important beyond anything on the earth, and this was the little grain of glass telling him so. He laid out whole written words made of ice. But there was one word he could never manage to lay, try as he would, and that word was, Eternity.
For the Snow Queen had said to him, when you can lay out that word for me, that one, then you shall be your own master. And I shall make you a present of the whole world, and a pair of new skates.
But he could not do it.
Now I am flying away to the warm lands, said the Snow Queen, on the day this tale has been traveling toward all night. I shall go and look into the black cauldrons. She meant the burning mountains, the ones men call Etna and Vesuvius. I shall whiten them a little. It is expected of me. And it does them good, after all those lemons and grapes.
And away flew the Snow Queen. And Kay sat all alone in the empty hall of ice, miles wide, and looked at his pieces of ice, and thought, and thought, until it fairly creaked in him. Stiff and still he sat there. You would have said he was frozen through.
It was then that little Gerda came into the palace, through the great gate, which was a biting wind. But she said her evening prayer once more, and at the sound of it the winds lay down, all together, as though they had suddenly wanted to sleep. And she stepped forward, small and warm, into the great cold empty hall.
And then she saw him.
She knew him at once. She flew at him, and threw her arms around his neck, and held him fast, so fast, and cried out, Kay. Dear little Kay. So I have found you at last.
But he sat quite still. Stiff, and cold, and looking at his ice.
Then little Gerda wept hot tears, and they fell upon his chest, and they sank in to his heart, and there they thawed the lump of ice, and burned away the little splinter of mirror inside it, till it was gone, entirely gone, one of the two splinters this tale has been watching all night, gone the only way such glass can go, in warmth.
He looked at her. And she sang, through her tears, the old song, the one from the roof gutter, the one they had learned under the arch of roses.
Down in the valley the roses grow, and there the Christ child you shall know.
Then Kay burst into tears. He wept, and he wept, and he wept so hard that the little grain of glass swam right out of his eye with the weeping, and that was the last the troll mirror ever had to do with these two children, its glass washed out and away by nothing more than crying at a song.
And then he knew her.
Gerda, he cried out. Dear little Gerda. Where have you been, all this long time? And where, where have I been? And he looked around himself, at the miles of it. How cold it is here, he said. How empty it all is, and how vast.
And he held on to Gerda, and she laughed, and wept for joy, and neither one of them could have told you where the laughing ended and the weeping began, and there was no need.
And it was all so blessed, so glad, that even the pieces of ice felt it, and began to dance. The flat sharp pieces danced about the two children on the frozen lake, for joy, plainly for joy. And when the pieces grew tired, and lay themselves down again, they lay down, of themselves, in the exact letters of the one word the Snow Queen had asked of him. The word he could never build by thinking. It had built itself the moment he was loved. Eternity, said the lake, in letters of shining ice, to nobody, perfectly.
So Kay was his own master now, by her own royal word. And the whole world was owed him, and a pair of new skates besides, and the Snow Queen might come home whenever she pleased. She would find her halls just as clean, and the word standing written on her Mirror of Reason, and a bargain, says the old book, is a bargain, even at the top of the world.
And Gerda kissed his cheeks, and they grew rosy. She kissed his eyes, and they shone like her own. She kissed his hands and his feet, and he was hale, and warm, and himself, down to the ground.
Then they took each other by the hand, the way they had held hands under the roses, and they walked together out of that great palace of snow. And they talked, as they went, about the grandmother, and about the roses up in the roof gutter, small talk, home talk, the very best kind. And wherever they walked, the winds lay still behind them, and the sun came through.
And when they reached the great bush with the red berries, standing like a lamp of its own in all that white, the reindeer was already there, waiting.
Chapter Ten.

The Road Home Runs Through Spring.
He had not come alone, the reindeer. He had brought with him a young reindeer mother, whose udder was full, and she gave the two children her warm milk to drink, there in the snow, and nuzzled them on the mouth as they drank. Warm milk at the edge of the world, says the storyteller. There have been grander feasts. There have not been many better ones.
Then the two reindeer carried Kay and Gerda away from that place, first to the Finland woman's hot little room, where the children warmed themselves through and through, and were given exact directions for the journey home. Then on to the Lapland woman, who had sewn them both new clothes while the north was busy, and had made her sledge ready besides, for that is what such women do. They mend what will be needed before anyone knows it will be needed.
And both reindeer ran alongside the sledge, and followed with them all the way to the border of that country, to the very line where the first green leaves of the year come peeping out of the ground. And there they parted, from the reindeer, and from the Lapland woman.
Farewell, said everyone to everyone, and meant it.
And the first little birds of the year began to twitter. The forest stood full of green young buds, everything just beginning, everything just barely, newly, certainly alive. And out of that forest, riding toward them on a splendid horse, which Gerda knew at once, for it had once been harnessed to a coach of pure gold, came a young girl with a shining red cap on her head and her old knife in her belt, riding the way people ride who have never once in their lives asked permission for anything.
It was the little robber girl.
She had grown weary of sitting at home in the robber castle, and had set out, riding north first, with a mind to try some other part of the world afterward, whichever direction looked least sensible from wherever she happened to be standing. She knew Gerda in an instant, and Gerda knew her, and there was great rejoicing on that road.
You are a fine fellow, I must say, she said to little Kay, looking him up and down. Gadding off to the end of the earth. I should very much like to know whether you deserve to have somebody run to the end of the world for your sake.
But Gerda patted her cheek, and asked after the prince and the princess.
Gone traveling, in foreign countries, said the robber girl. The pair of them. With trunks.
And the crow, asked Gerda.
Ah. The old crow of the woods is dead, said the robber girl, more gently. His tame sweetheart is a widow now, and wears a little end of black wool wound about her leg, and mourns him most properly, and complains more than ever, which with her is the very same thing as mourning. But that is how it goes. Now you tell me how it went with you, and how you got hold of him after all.
And Gerda and Kay both told her, the whole story, all of it, taking turns and interrupting each other, from the codfish to the dancing ice.
And the little robber girl listened to it all with her chin on her fist, and nodded at the end, and said, in her own way, which was as near as she ever came to a blessing, snip, snap, snurre, basselurre. It all came out even.
And she took them both by the hands, and promised that if she ever rode through their town, she would come up the stairs and pay them a visit. And then she rode away, out into the wide world, sitting her splendid horse like a small red flag going somewhere important, and the forest took her, and the tale, having loved her dearly, lets her go there, at a gallop, forever.
But Kay and Gerda walked on, hand in hand.
And as they walked, it became spring around them in earnest, the deep true spring, warm, green, with flowers standing up in the ditches and the smell of turned earth on the wind. The winter behind them seemed already like something read in a book, long ago, by lamplight.
They walked, and the roads became more traveled. Carts passed them, and church folk in their good clothes, and children driving geese. The fields were being worked. Somewhere a dog barked twice at nothing, importantly, and was satisfied. And then, on the wind, they heard bells.
Church bells. Their own. For there, rising over the last green hill, they saw the high towers of the great town, and it was their town, the very one, with its many houses and its many people and, in one particular street, two particular attic windows facing one another across a rain gutter.
They went in at the gate. The streets ran just as they had always run. The doors stood where doors had always stood. It was all so exactly itself, so unchanged, that changing so much on the way to it felt suddenly very strange in their two chests.
And they came to the grandmother's door, and it was open, and the stairs went up the way stairs do in the houses of our childhood, each one a note in a song that the feet have never once forgotten.
Up they went, the two of them, hand in hand still.
The stairwell smelled of wood, and of soap, and faintly, from far up under the roof, of roses.
Chapter Eleven.

The Roses in Bloom.
And they went into the room.
Everything stood exactly where it had stood before. Nothing had been moved. The clock on the wall said tick, tock, and its hands went round the way they had always gone round.
But as they passed through the doorway, in that one step, they perceived that they had become grown people.
It had happened somewhere on the road, quietly, the way the year turns, without one single day standing up and taking the credit for it. They were tall now. Their hands, still joined, were grown hands. The little room fit them the way a beloved coat fits after many years, which is to say differently, and perfectly, both at once.
The roses in the roof gutter were in bloom, blooming right in at the open window. The two rose trees had grown old and thick at the stem, and they still leaned toward each other across the gutter, and their arch still held, tended all these years, you may be sure, by the grandmother, who had kept every green thing living, and every lamp filled, the whole time, for she had never once believed that nobody was coming home to them.
And there beneath the window stood the little children's stools.
Kay and Gerda sat down, each on their own. Grown as they were, they sat down on the little stools under the roses, and they held each other by the hands. And the cold, empty splendor of the Snow Queen's palace slipped out of their memory like a heavy dream at morning, the kind you cannot hold even when you try, the kind that leaves nothing behind but gladness that you woke.
The grandmother sat in God's clear sunshine, in her chair, and she read aloud from the great book, and what she read was this. Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God.
And Kay and Gerda looked into each other's eyes.
And all at once they understood the old song, the whole of it, the one they had sung as children without understanding and had sung ever since without forgetting.
Down in the valley the roses grow, and there the Christ child you shall know.
There they sat, the two of them. Grown up, and yet children. Children at heart. And it was summer. Warm, blessed, generous summer.
And that, says the storyteller, is the end of the seventh story, and of the whole tale of the Snow Queen. But you and I will stay in that room a little while longer, if you please. The old book allows it. There is no law that says a listener must leave the moment the tale is done, and on a summer evening like this one, nobody ever wants to.
So stay. The evening is coming on, slow and gold.
The sun goes down the way it does in the north in high summer, reluctantly, at an angle, taking half the night about it, and the light turns the color of honey, and then the color of quince, and lies along the rooftops of the town like something poured.
Below in the street, the day is being folded up and put away. Shutters are drawn in, unhurried. A shopkeeper stands in his doorway a moment, looking at the sky, deciding it was a good day, before he goes in. Children are called home by name, one street over, each name sung twice, and the second singing softer, because the child has already come.
The swifts are up in the last of the light, sewing their fast black stitches over the chimneys, and then, at some signal nobody has ever caught, they are done, and the sky belongs to the first bats, who fly like the swifts' shy cousins, and after them, to the stars.
The grandmother lights the lamp.
She has done it ten thousand evenings, and it takes her no thought at all. The small flame stands up, and the room turns gold, and the roses at the window turn from red to something deeper and quieter than red, the color roses keep for after dark, which only lamplit rooms and sleeping gardens ever see.
Kay sits by the window. If you asked him now what he remembers of the palace of snow, he would think for a long moment, and say, mostly the cold. And that there was a word I could not spell, however hard I thought. And that it spelled itself, the moment I was loved. And then he would laugh, softly, because grown or not, his laugh had come home with him, whole.
And Gerda. Gerda says nothing at all. She sits with her hand in his, and watches the lamp flame lean, and settle, and she is not thinking of robbers, or of talking flowers, or of a legion of small bright angels standing about her in the snow, though all of that is hers now, and always will be. She is thinking what the truly brave always think when the road is over, which is nothing, nothing at all, only warm, only here, only home.
The clock says tick, tock. The hands go round.
The grandmother reads a while longer, her lips moving with the good old words. And the summer night comes up the stairs of the town like a tide made of quiet, filling the streets, filling the rooms, rising past the windows of every house until the whole town floats in it, dark and safe, anchored by lamplight at a hundred small golden points.
And the roses breathe at the window, in, and out.
And the evening becomes the night, the good kind, the kind with nothing in it but rest.
Chapter Twelve.

Goodnight. And the Lamp at the Edge of Morning.
The room at the edge of the world is very quiet now.
The storyteller sits with the old book open before her at the last page of the tale, but she is not reading anymore. Her hand rests on the page, flat and light, the way a hand rests on the shoulder of a sleeping friend.
On the shelf at the edge of the lamplight, where the tales keep their belongings, something small has been settled tonight.
There is a velvet bag there, you may remember it, a little bag where this room keeps whatever splinters of a certain mirror the tales manage to bring home, and for the longest time the two it wanted most were still out in the world, one splinter loose in the world in a boy's eye, and one in a boy's heart. The bag does not need counting anymore. Those two splinters are gone for good, and they came to no harm and did no more harm, one wept away, one melted, both of them undone by the only two things that ever could, which are tears, and warmth. The bag lies quiet. The world is lighter by exactly two grains of unkindness, and nights like this one are how it happens.
And beside the bag, a pressed rose from a roof gutter in the far north lies where it has always lain, between its two little panes of window ice. It can rest now. The boy and the girl found each other. It took more than a winter. It took seven stories. But the finding held, and it holds still, and it will go on holding, which is what that word made of ice was trying to say all along, out on the frozen lake, to nobody, perfectly.
Far to the north, all the rooms of this tale are going to sleep.
The reindeer sleeps on the snow fields of Lapland, folded neat as a knife in its sheath, home, free, the copper ring long gone green and buried in a drift somewhere, missed by no one.
The robber castle sleeps, its fire banked, its hundred pigeons murmuring down to nothing on their perches, its great solemn dogs dreaming in a heap by the door, honorably off duty. Somewhere out in the wide world its daughter sleeps too, in her red cap, under a hedge she has entirely approved of, her horse standing over her, her knife under her ear, both of them perfectly safe, because the night has better sense than to bother her.
The little hot room in Finmark sleeps, and the wise woman in it, and the soup pot with one codfish message in it, savored long ago, wasted never.
The garden of the old woman who wanted a little girl sleeps under its own private summer, every flower folded, dreaming its one story, and there are roses in that garden now, whole beds of them, allowed home again, for even lonely magic softens in the end.
And the palace at the top of the world stands empty, and shining, and harmless, mile upon mile of moonlit snow with nobody in it at all. On the frozen lake the letters of ice still lie where joy left them, spelling their one long word to the northern lights. It is the quietest room on the earth. Nothing sad lives there. It is only cold. And cold, in its right place, with everyone safely home out of it, is just another kind of stillness, the stillness snow is made of, the stillness this whole night is wrapped in, yours included.
The Snow Queen herself is far away, whitening the shoulders of the burning mountains, which is her proper work, and not a wicked one, for someone must bring the snow, and someone must end the summers so that the summers can be missed, and she will do no harm this night. No white sledge will pass under any window of yours. Over your roof there is only the ordinary dark, doing its slow kind work, and the storyteller keeping her lamp against it.
The flame is the size of an almond now. It leans, and rights itself, and goes on.
The roses at that far window have all closed. The clock says tick, tock, to an empty room, and is content. The grandmother's book lies shut on the table with her spectacles asleep on top of it. And the two who sat on the children's stools have long since said their goodnights, in the oldest and shortest of all the old songs, and gone to their rest, grown, and children, and safe, all three at once.
You can let the tale set you down now, the way the boat set Gerda down, gently, on a green bank, in a kind country.
You do not have to hold anything. The story is holding it. The story was always holding it.
The storyteller closes the book, but slowly, the way a door is closed on a sleeping house.
The lamp is turned low.
Whatever became of them after, they are safe now, and so are you.
The lantern will be lit again. There are more tales in the old book than there are nights in a year.
Goodnight.