The Snow Queen

This is the whole tale, the same ten pages it runs in Pillowbook on the phone. Not a word is cut, and nothing asks you to sign up. The first three pages carry the paintings they were given; the rest of the plates are in the app, where the book is read one page to a screen.

Reading time is about five minutes at an unhurried pace, one page every thirty seconds or so. The longest on the shelf and the coldest in mood. Kai is distant for a while before Gerda finds him.

She 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.

The walk home took 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.