This is the whole tale, the same ten pages it runs in Pillowbook on the phone. Read it here tonight if that is easier. Nothing is cut, nothing asks you to sign up, and every picture was painted for this book.
Reading time is about five minutes at an unhurried pace, one page every thirty seconds or so. The longest of the twelve and the coldest in mood. Kai is distant for a while before Gerda finds him.
Gerda and Kai lived in two attics with one gutter running between them, and in the gutter they grew roses in wooden boxes. In summer you could step across from her window to his without once touching the ground, and they did that most days. They ate their bread up there. From the roof you could see the whole town and about a mile of the river.Somewhere far off a mirror got broken — one of those mirrors that only ever shows you the worst of a thing — and the wind carried the pieces about for years afterwards. One August evening a splinter of it went into Kai's eye. He rubbed it and said he was perfectly fine. Then he looked at the roses and said they were shabby, and that he had never liked them much.After that he was cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. He studied snowflakes through a magnifying glass and said they were better made than any flower. In December a tall white sledge came round the square, with a woman in it as pale as the inside of ice, and she said he might sit beside her. He went. Nobody saw the sledge leave.Gerda waited for the river to thaw and then went to look for him in a red coat and fur-trimmed boots. She asked the river, which said nothing useful. An old woman with a garden kept her a whole summer and combed her hair until she had nearly forgotten what she came for. Then she saw a rose, and remembered all of it at once, and left that same afternoon.Autumn caught her in a wood full of robbers, and one of them was a girl her own age in a patchwork coat, who kept doves in the roof and a reindeer tied up in the yard. The robber girl liked her at once, in an alarming way, and would not let her go for three days. On the fourth she cut the reindeer loose and said to take him and be quick.They went north for a week. The reindeer knew the way and did not need telling. At night the sky came out in long green curtains that moved with no wind behind them at all, and Gerda lay back against his shoulder and watched until she slept. He carried her over the last of the snow and stopped at the edge of it, because that was as far as he would go.The palace was made of snow and lit by the sky. There were rooms in it that had never had anybody in them. In the middle lay a frozen lake broken into a thousand flat pieces, and Kai sat on it moving them about, trying to make them spell a word he could not quite remember. He was not unhappy. He was not really anything at all.The queen was there, tall and quiet, looking out of a window at nothing in particular. Gerda walked straight past her, because she had come a very long way and had stopped being frightened somewhere around the reindeer. She put both arms round Kai and held on. He was extremely cold. She cried into his collar, which by then was the only thing left to do.The tears went in and the splinter came out. Kai looked up, said her name, and then cried himself, so hard that the last of it washed away. The lake creaked. Water started somewhere above them and did not stop. The queen watched the ceiling drip for a while, and then said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, that she supposed it was time, and let the whole thing go.They walked home through the whole of spring, and spring stayed ahead of them the entire way, so they never once had to be cold. The robber girl saw them past the wood. The reindeer went as far as the trees. And when at last they came up their own stairs, the roses in the gutter were out, and the two windows were exactly where they had left them.
The end.
Read any of the 12 tonight, free
12 classic fairy tales, ten painted pages each, one story an evening. No sign-up before you can read.
Yes. All ten pages of The Snow Queen are on this page, each with the illustration that belongs to it. Nothing is held back for the app.
Is it suitable for a three year old?
It is written for children between three and eight. The longest of the twelve and the coldest in mood. Kai is distant for a while before Gerda finds him.
How long does it take to read aloud?
About five minutes at an unhurried pace, which is roughly one page every thirty seconds.
Where do the pictures come from?
They were painted for Pillowbook, one plate per page, in a single visual voice shared across all 12 tales. They are not stock illustrations.
Can I read the other tales here?
Yes. All 12 are on this site in full, free and without an account. The app is for reading them at bedtime — offline, no advertising, one page to a screen — and for the tale it writes about your own child.
