The Snow Queen Read Free Page A

asked Katrine. “I never see you together.”
    â€œWhat he does is no business of mine,” said Gerda. She had meant to sound offhand, but the sharpness of her voice betrayed her. Katrine looked round, surprised.
    â€œBut you’ve always been such good friends . . . ”
    â€œPerhaps, when we were children. But now he thinks only of his studies, and we have nothing to say to one another.”
    â€œBoys never say anything interesting, anyway,” observed Katrine, with the superior wisdom of seventeen.
    They skated on, around the bend of the river. The sharp air stung their cheeks, brought tears to their eyes.
    Sleighbells jangled just ahead and they steered closer to the bank, under leafless elder-branches.
    Silver harness trappings gleamed. All along the river skaters wheeled in slow circles, staring, as the sleigh swept by. The team was a matched pair, white as milk. The woman who grasped the reins so carelessly in her pearl-trimmed gloves had hair the colour of winter sunlight.
    â€œThat’s her ,” breathed Katrine. “Kai’s cousin from the north.”
    â€œShe says she’s a cousin,” said Gerda. “I don’t think they know a single thing about her.”
    â€œShe’s very beautiful,” observed Katrine.
    â€œI suppose,” said Gerda, grudgingly.
    â€œShe looks like a princess,” said Katrine, admiring the woman’s ermine-lined cashmere cloak, the silver-blonde hair streaming artlessly over her thrown-back hood. “Her husband, or her father, must be someone very important.”
    But Gerda could not imagine this elegant, free-spirited creature as someone’s daughter, still less as someone’s wife. She seemed to exist outside the bounds of domesticity, answerable to no one but herself.
    A little way downriver the white sleigh glided to a stop. Gerda watched the woman lean down from her seat, laughing. And then she reached out a white-gloved hand to draw someone, a young man, up beside her.
    Gerda put her mittened hand over her mouth to smother a cry. She could not see the young man’s face. At this distance the dark shaggy head in its knitted cap, the narrow back in its nondescript woollen coat, could have belonged to anyone. Yet Gerda knew, with a sick emptiness in her breast, that the boy beside the pale-haired woman was Kai.

    Gerda had spent the morning shopping. When she arrived home, breathless and parcel-laden, she found Kai waiting. He made a great pretence of stamping snow from his boots on his own doorstep, but she knew he had been watching for her. She stepped into her front hall, set her parcels down on a bench, and looked warily at Kai through the open doorway.
    â€œCome in,” she said. “Before I let all the heat out.”
    He nodded absently, and stepped over the sill.
    â€œLet me take your coat.”
    He shook his head. “I’ll not stay. I only came to tell you . . . ”
    Gerda waited, slowly unwinding her scarf, unfastening her mantle, taking off her bonnet. Under all her layers of flannel vests and chemise and stays her heart was thudding against her ribs. She knew, before the words were out, what Kai was going to say.
    â€œGerda, I’m going away for a while.”
    â€œWith her?”
    â€œIf you mean the Lady Aurore, yes, with her. She’s invited me to return with her to her winter home in Sweden. She lives in a great house near Uppsala, where the university is.”
    â€œKai, you can’t be serious! To travel all the way across Sweden, in the dead of winter . . . ”
    â€œWhy not? The winter roads are nothing to her. She says that blizzards are her natural element.”
    â€œBut Kai, who is this woman? What do you know about her?”
    â€œI know that she is a woman of great learning — a Doctor of Philosophy. Learned men come from many countries, to talk with her and consult her library, in which there are many thousands of volumes, on every