Once Upon A Time (8) Winter’s Child

by Cameron Dokey

  She must walk the ways of a Winter Child.

  A Winter Child does not tread the same paths as the rest of us. The touch of the North Wind lingers on a Winter Child long after the wind itself is gone. There is only one way to remove this touch, and so return a Winter Child to her true and original form. She must help to right some great and terrible wrong. She must atone for a sadness that was not of her making.

  This is what it means to be a Winter Child.

  No sooner did the king come to realize all this than he realized he was angry. Angry with the queen, his wife, a mother so intent upon herself that she had failed to see the danger to her daughter, let alone to save her from it.

  And so, still cradling the baby in his arms, the king returned to the castle and climbed all the way to the topmost tower, taking the steps two at a time. He burst into the chamber where the queen still sat, gazing at herself. She had not even noticed that the baby was gone.

  “Look what our daughter has become! Look what you have helped to make her!” the king cried.

  The king held out the baby toward the queen, and finally, the queen looked up from the mirror made of ice. The coldness of the North Wind had utterly failed to catch her attention, but the heat in her husband’s voice turned the queen’s head as if pulled by a cord. Even accustomed as she was to gazing at nothing but her own features, the queen could see at once that something was terribly wrong.

  “But I never—,” the queen began.

  “Yes, I know you never,” the king cried passionately, cutting her off. “You never even noticed our daughter was missing, because you never see anyone but yourself!”

  He advanced into the room, still holding the infant out in front of him, and now the queen could clearly see the changes in her daughter for herself. She felt a fine trembling begin in the pit of her stomach and spread to her limbs. For the first time since coming to the land of ice and snow, the queen felt cold. Cold with the apprehension that something dreadful was about to happen, something that now could not be turned aside.

  “How I curse the mirror that you clasp so tightly!” the king went on. “More tightly than you have ever clasped our child. How I wish your mirror could show you the coldness of your heart. I wish that it could show what lies beneath your beauty. I wish it could expose your flaws.”

  Here, I will give you some important information, so important you may even wish to write it down and keep it somewhere safe. Put it in a place where you can take it out and look at it from time to time. And that important information is this: It is very dangerous to utter a wish and a curse at the same time.

  That’s ridiculous, you may answer. Surely the two would cancel each other out.

  Don’t you believe it. Not for a moment. Instead of canceling each other out, each magnifies the other, giving it more power, until both the wish and the curse have enough power to come true.

  That is precisely what happened in the tower room that day. No sooner had the king finished speaking than the queen uttered a piercing cry. She flung the mirror away with all her strength. It struck the wall, shattering into pieces too numerous to count. Most flew out the window and were borne away by the wind. Only one did not. This icy fragment struck the baby princess and embedded itself deep in her heart.

  The power of a wish and a curse together now had done its work. Each had fed upon the other’s energy, growing in strength, until both were granted at the same time. In that instant, the queen’s mirror had revealed not just her outer beauty, but also her innermost flaw. What she had seen so pained and horrified her that the queen’s heart shattered into pieces too numerous to count, just as the mirror had. She perished on the spot. All that remained of her beauty was her daughter’s pale and serious face.

  Her daughter, the Winter Child, who now had a shard of cursed and icy mirror embedded in her heart.

  The king sank to his knees, still cradling his baby girl in his arms. What his own heart felt in that moment, no living soul will ever know. But now, with cold tears streaming down his cheeks, the king spoke one thing more. He spoke his daughter’s name aloud.

  Deirdre. That was what he called her. Sorrow was the name the king gave to his only child. Then he bowed his head and, at last, his tears grew warm.

  For now the king wept not just for what would be, but for all the things that could be no more. He wept for the fate of his wife, whom he had once loved so deeply, and for that of his young daughter, now forever altered by the North Wind’s touch. As the king rocked her in his arms, dampening her pale face with his tears, he vowed that he would spend the rest of his life trying to prepare his daughter for whatever lay in store for her as a Winter Child.

  But as to what, precisely, that might be ... for that we must move on to another story.

  TWO

  Story the Second

  In Which Grace Takes Up the Tale and Introduces Us to Kai

  I cannot imagine a world without Kai.

  Part of this is simple mathematics. I’ve never known a world without him in it, for he was born three days before me. Part of it is simply love. Except that love is rarely simple, even when you think it is. Or maybe I should say that love is rarely simple in the way you think it is. I’m living proof of that.

  Kai and I grew up together, side by side. We lived at the very tops of two old neighboring buildings that leaned toward each other ever so slightly, like sweethearts who couldn’t bear the thought of being kept apart. The rooftops were so close together we could place a single plank across the gap between them and walk from one rooftop to the other. We did this every summer after Kai was strong enough to put the board in place and our courage was strong enough to carry us across.

  Kai never looked down.

  I always did. This was a difference between us, right from the start, a difference that became more pronounced as time went on. Kai’s eyes sought out nearby things, while my eyes much preferred to search for far-off ones.

  “Grace, don’t,” Kai used to plead when I would stop partway between my rooftop and his to wave at Herre Johannes, the flower merchant, as he pulled his horse and cart up in front of our buildings’ front doors, far below. “Don’t look down. It’s dangerous. You’ll fall.”

  “Of course I won’t fall, silly,” I answered back. I lifted one foot to take a step, then held it poised in midair. This worried Kai most of all.

  “You can’t fall if your feet know where they’re supposed to be.” And with this, I always put my foot back down on the board and continued on my way.

  “Yes, but what if the board has a change of heart about letting you walk on it in the first place?” Kai would query every time he grasped my hand and pulled me to the safety of his rooftop.

  This was our standard discussion, not quite serious enough to be called a true argument. I always insisted that I would be all right in the end if only I knew where to place my feet. Usually, it was as simple and straightforward as putting one in front of the other. Kai was equally insistent that even the most straightforward of paths could turn out to be more complicated than it seemed at first. Which meant, in turn, of course, that even the most carefully placed footsteps could be sent awry entirely without warning.

  Perhaps it will come as a surprise, then, when I tell you that most of the time it was Kai who made the trip from his rooftop to mine. This, despite the fact that he disliked heights. In addition to saving me from potential foolishness and danger, the plain and simple truth was that our rooftop was much more pleasant.

  My grandmother, my oma, had one of the best green thumbs in town. Our rooftop caught the rain just like everybody else’s did, but my oma knew just what to do with the rain that fell on ours. Almost every square inch of our roof was filled with a pot or planter of some kind. Some held fruit and vegetables that we would eat fresh in summer, then preserve to eat during the long winter months. But most of the pots were filled with flowers.

  There were geraniums red as firebrands and marigolds as bright as spun gold. In early spring,
sweet peas fluttered like flocks of tiny purple finches. In the autumn, mums clustered together like schoolchildren in their new winter coats, preparing for the cold.

  The flowers did more than bring us pleasure. They also brought in much-needed income. This money was important, for it was just my oma and me at home. My father, Oma’s son, had been a soldier stationed in a faraway land. He died in a skirmish when I was very young. My mother had loved my father so much that, rather than stay at home in safety after I was born, she had left me behind in Oma’s care and followed her husband and the drum.

  When word of my father’s death was brought to my mother, she left the camp and walked to the edge of the river along whose banks the battle had been fought. There, she filled the pockets of her apron with stones. Then she waded out until the swift current swept her feet from under her and the stones in her pockets pulled her down to the river’s floor. In this way, I lost both my parents on the very same day.

  No doubt you’re waiting for me to say that I missed them, but it would be more truthful to say that I missed the idea of them most of all. They had departed, first our city and then this world, when I was so small as to have had no true memory of either of them. I had only Oma’s memories and her stories of my father as a little boy. Much as I treasured these tales, they were not quite the same as memories I might have created had I known my parents myself.

  I took careful note of the other children’s parents as I grew up, however. Children are always interested in what other children have that they do not. It seemed to me that some of the parents I saw were happy together, but many were not. Happiness can be difficult to hold onto, I think, when your body is weary, your stomach is never quite full, and your hands are cold even in the summertime.

  Take Kai’s parents, for instance. His father worked in the coal mines just outside of town. In the summer, whistles blasted, summoning the miners to work just as the sun came up, but in winter, they did so long before the sun even had its eye on the horizon. Kai’s father walked to work in the dark, and he labored in the dark. In the dark, he walked home. Then he had many flights of stairs to climb before he could take off his boots outside his own front door. To keep the choking dust of his labors out of the house as much as possible, Kai’s mother cleaned out her husband’s boots in the hall.

  On many nights, or so Kai once told me, his father never said a word. He was so weary, it was as if the coal dust had closed up his throat. But sometimes, raised voices lifted themselves into the air and flew from Kai’s building to mine. On those nights, I could hear them, even when it was winter and the windows were tightly closed.

  After those nights, I would awaken to find Kai asleep at the foot of my bed. He would be curled up in the nest of blankets Oma kept for him in the trunk that had once held her trousseau. Kai’s mother would come for him in the morning, her face pale, her mouth pinched so tightly it was a wonder she could drink Oma’s sweet, dark tea. Circles would be inked beneath her eyes.

  Kai and I never spoke about those mornings, just as we never spoke about the nights that preceded them. But when his father died, killed by the very earth itself when a section of the mine collapsed, Kai wept. His mother sobbed so long and hard that she had to be carried home from the burial ground. That was the first time I realized love was not as simple as you might suppose. To me, Kai’s father had seemed a cold, hard man, a man designed to frighten. But why would you weep over the loss of someone you feared?

  This was also the first time I wondered whether or not Kai’s eyes, so good at seeing what was near, could see things invisible to mine.

  Both before and after Kai’s father’s death, his mother took in sewing. Oma and I had done this as well, starting when I was old enough to use a needle without poking myself. During the winter months the three of us often worked together. We took turns: one week in front of the stove at our house and the next week in front of the one at Kai’s. That way, we weren’t heating two houses at once.

  I hate to sew.

  I think it’s one of the reasons my feet itch to take to the road and my eyes want nothing better than to be fixed on the horizon line. Sewing requires you to sit still, to look only at what is close to you. Even if you’re setting a sleeve into an armhole, so that you are stitching around in a circle, sewing is all about that which is straight. Straight stitches, straight seams, straight lines. Kai sewed with us until he became old enough to be apprenticed to Herre Lindstrom, the watchmaker. He was always much better at it than I was.

  The one good thing about sewing, however, was that my grandmother and Kai’s mother would tell stories to help pass the time. Kai’s mother had been born in the south. Her stories were often full of sunshine and warmth. But Oma had been raised in the far, far north. Her tales were comprised of ice and snow. It was she who first told us the tale of a girl forever altered by the North Wind, the tale of the Winter Child.

  “Her name is Deirdre,” my oma would say. “A word for sorrow, for sorrow and the fate of a Winter Child are intertwined.”

  “But why, Oma?” I would always ask, even after I had heard the story of Deirdre the Winter Child many, many times.

  The fact that anybody, even a girl in a story, had a name like Sorrow always struck a strange chord in my heart. I liked my own name, Grace, just fine. But I don’t think my affection for it made me swell-headed. I wasn’t making any particular claim to being graceful because of it, and I certainly wasn’t claiming to be better than anyone else. I can be impatient, and I have a nasty temper. I know these things well enough.

  But my name did make me feel safe, somehow, as if it carved out a particular place for me in the world— even if I didn’t quite know yet what that place would be. Being named Sorrow seemed a terrible fate.

  “A Winter Child is unlike any other child on earth,” my oma went on. “She has been touched by the North Wind, enfolded in its arms.”

  “All of us have felt the touch of the wind,” Kai said. But he shivered, as if the memory of how the North Wind felt on a winter day was enough to make him cold.

  “True,” my oma replied. “But a Winter Child has felt more of the North Wind than either you or I have, Kai. We feel only the brush of its passing. It does not truly see us as it hurries by.

  “But a Winter Child is chosen, swept up in the North Wind’s arms. People are not made to be so close to the forces of nature. They have the power to alter us. Before a Winter Child can be as she was before, she must remove all traces of the North Wind’s touch by righting some great wrong.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” I remarked.

  “Righting a great wrong is not a bad thing,” Kai countered before my grandmother could reply. His eyes were fixed on his sewing, but his voice was stubborn. “I think it’s brave and noble, not a cause for sorrow at all.”

  “Children,” Kai’s mother said chidingly, “let Frue Andersen tell the story.”

  “No, no,” my oma said with a smile. “I don’t mind the interruptions. It is true that righting a great wrong is not a bad thing in and of itself,” my grandmother continued, and I battled back a spurt of irritation that she’d addressed Kai’s objection rather than mine.

  “Though doing so is often very hard. The path is easiest to walk when you choose it for yourself. But such a choice is not granted to a Winter Child.”

  I heard Kai pull in a breath, as if to speak again. I put my foot on top of his and pressed down, hard.

  “What wrong must Deirdre set to right, Oma?” I inquired.

  “The wrong committed by her parents,” my grandmother replied. “You remember I told you how, when the queen’s mirror shattered, all the pieces flew out the window and were carried away on the wind, all but the one that pierced her daughter’s heart?”

  I paused to carefully finish a seam before I answered. More than once I had been forced to take out stitches and do work over again after being caught up in one of Oma’s stories.

  “I remember,” I said when the thread was knotted, the end s
nipped, and the seam done. I gave the sleeve a gentle tug, testing to see how my stitches held.

  “Careful,” Kai teased, as if he were seeking revenge for my stepping on his foot. “You’ll pull it right back out again.”

  I stuck out my tongue.

  “Those pieces flew throughout the world,” my oma went on, “still filled with the magic of a wish and a curse combined. Each and every one found its way into a human heart. The persons so wounded have been changed forever in a terrible way: They are incapable of seeing with the eyes of true love.”

  There was a momentary silence while both Kai and I considered this.

  “But ...,” he said.

  “How?” I asked at precisely the same time.

  My oma smiled. “A heart that carries a sliver of that icy mirror is not what it was before,” she explained. “It now contains both less and more. But the more that it contains is what creates the less, and so such a heart is at war with itself.”

  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.”