A/N: The moment you've been waiting for! The Snow Queen makes her appearance at last!

Two hours later, after they finished the palace tour, Jack and Cecilie were holed up in her room.

"Okay," she said, pulling some books out. "There are two stories about her." She flipped to a marked page in the first book.

She read them aloud to him. Jack thought it was a very strange story. A troll made a mirror that broke, the snow queen kidnapped a little boy, the boy's girlfriend went after him and met all sorts of odd people, and then she found the boy in the snow queen's palace when she wasn't home?

The other one was shorter, but just as odd. Some more trolls threw the Snow Queen's suitors off of cliffs to their deaths. What was up with the trolls, anyway?

"What did you think?" Cecilie asked him.

"Weird."

Cecilie giggled. "No it's not. It's a fairy tale. They're all like that."

"Humph. Still weird." No doubt in his mind now, he had to find out if the Snow Queen was up there. Jack hopped up on the window-sill, preparing to leave.

"Can I come with you?" Cecilie pleaded with him. "I wanna meet the Snow Queen!" Jack considered it for a second, but he had no idea what he was going into, here.

"Sorry, kid," Jack booped her nose. "Maybe after I meet her first and make sure she's nice."

And with that, he leapt out the window, catching a breeze upwards to the mountain.

Jack was sure he was missing something. The ice palace was supposed to be on the North Mountain; he assumed near the bridge. But he'd flown circles all around that peak, and couldn't find a single spire or turret.

He sighed as he perched himself on the handrail of the ice bridge. He'd been so sure that the Snow Queen was real, but maybe she wasn't. He swung his legs in dejection.

An idea suddenly formed in his head. He jumped up, balancing himself perfectly on the icy railing with his bare feet.

"Hey, Snow Queen!" He shouted, facing the peak. "Real nice bridge you got out here!"

In response, the already quiet mountaintop became eerily silent. Some snow shifted off the bank, cascading downwards softly, and Jack watched it carefully. It gathered itself in front of him, whirling upwards in a tiny blizzard, and then fell, revealing the Snow Queen.

The picture in Cecilie's book had shown a woman in all white, covered in a huge white fur coat, and wearing an enormous icy crown. The Snow Queen was nothing like that. Her dress shimmered palest blue, and her cloak, falling gently around her bare, pale arms, looked as if it had been made of snowflakes all strung together somehow. Which, Jack supposed, as this was the Snow Queen, was entirely possible. She did wear a crown, but it was small, and sat delicately in her loose white hair.

She was the most beautiful woman Jack had ever seen. Until she opened her eyes. Jack was the Winter Spirit; he wasn't supposed to feel cold. Her eyes, a sharp, electric blue, should not have made him shiver.

"Who are you?" She demanded. Her voice was like diamond dust. Jack shivered again.

"I'm Jack Frost," he said. Those frozen wintry orbs looked back at him, unyielding.

"The Winter Spirit?" Jack tried again. The Snow Queen frowned up at him.

"I do not know these names," she said. "Why are you here?" He supposed it was fair if she didn't know who he was. He hadn't ever heard of her before, after all.

"Just wanted to say hi," Jack said casually. "I was in the area, heard about you."

The Snow Queen remained unmoved. She made a small gesture with her hand, and a flurry of snow quickly swept around him, and then settled back down on the ground. She shook her head with finality.

"Leave."

"Aw, don't be like that," Jack pleaded. "Don't you want a friend?"

That was apparently the wrong thing to say, because her exquisite face hardened, and with a sweep of her arm, Jack found himself being swept off the mountain. As he fell, he saw her disappear again in a brush of snow.

Jack twirled his staff, flipping mid-air to gain control of the wind. Had she really wanted to kill him, or had she known that he could handle being knocked off an icy mountain? He hoped it was the latter.

The Snow Queen herself was pretty terrifying, but just before he was knocked off the mountain, right after he asked her about wanting a friend, he'd thought she looked sad.

'Diamond dust' refers to a cloud of teensy tiny ice particles-they usually only happen in Antarctica, or similarly cold places.

I swear there's more Snow Queen eventually. I live for your reviews :)