Of a Little Boy and a Little Girl

In a small town near a different forest lived a little girl, who desperately wanted a garden but had no place to put it. Her father had little land, so he planted his fields almost up to their doorstep, and the path to their house was sheltered in the summer by the tall corn. There was another path out the back-door that the little girl used to go out to play in the trees.

It was while she was out playing that she met a little boy, with strange silver hair and red eyes, who pulled her hair and teased her almost constantly. She almost despaired of him completely, until one day as she played, she ran afoul of a lone wolf, who was starving and desperate for its next meal. The little girl had nothing to defend herself with except a small stick, and was sure she would be eaten, when the strange boy leaped in front of her and killed the wolf with the knife he carried. He turned to her immediately, picked her up off the ground and asked, "Are you alright?"

"I could have saved myself," she said, looking at him with her wide green eyes. "You didn't have to kill it."

The boy laughed loudly at this, and said, "If I hadn't, it would have been in pain for days, and tried to eat some other little girl." She shrugged, because she hadn't thought of it that way, and then blinked at him as he held out a hand. "I'm Gilbert."

"My name is Elizabeta," she said, and when she took his hand and squeezed it as hard as she could, he grinned. "Thank you for saving me."

He laughed at her thanks, pulled her brown ponytail again, and helped her home, and from that day on she knew his teasing was not out of spite but out of love.

Elizabeta went out into the forest every day with Gilbert. They would play as knights, or great heroes when Gilbert wanted, and sometimes Elizabeta even let him win their play fights. He helped her plant a small garden of wild flowers in a sunny corner of a clearing, and tended it with her more gently than she expected him to. Sometimes she brought books with her, and they would sit under a tree and read and look at the pictures.

One day, they were laying in the sun after a long morning of running about defending their kingdom, and Elizabeta started singing the lullaby her grandmother sang to her when it stormed. It was a simple melody, and told of the coming spring, and Gilbert could only smile at it, even though her voice wavered and went a bit off pitch. A few days later, when she was tired from staying up with her grandmother to help with the mending, Gilbert sang the same song to her, and tucked one of her wildflowers behind her ear while she fell asleep with her head in his lap.

"Where do you live, Gilbert?" Elizabeta asked on a different day. "And why do you always come here to play with me?"

"My grandfather is teaching my baby brother to talk," Gilbert said. "When he is older, I will bring him with me, but for now grandfather does not have time for both of us and his work. So I come here."

When the first snow fell that winter, Elizabeta's grandmother told her she could not go out to play, and the girl fought and fought to get to the door. She was not allowed out, but only a few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Grandmother opened it to find a cold and snow-covered Gilbert on the step, and bundled him inside without a word. Elizabeta wrapped him in her favorite blanket, and grandmother made them both hot chocolate, and they sat together in front of the fire, looking out the window at the snow.

"They are the snow bees, who swarm in the cold and make ice for their honey," grandmother said as she put a tray of cookies into the oven.

"Do they choose a queen, like the bees of the forest?" Gilbert asked, for he had stolen honey from many bees in his short life, and knew their habits well.

The old grandmother smiled and nodded, and Gilbert grinned widely back at her. "She is the largest, and stays in the thickest of swarms. She has never been welcomed on the earth, but sometimes she likes to peep in the windows and see what we people do. And when she leaves, the windows are frozen with beautiful pictures."

"She sounds so lonely," Elizabeta said, peering again out the window. "Can we let her in?"

"Oh, don't. She has frozen me today," Gilbert told his friend spitefully. "If she comes inside, I'll put her on the stove and melt her."

Elizabeta just hugged him, ignoring the pink flush that bloomed on his cheeks, and grandmother smiled ant told another story.

He came by every day of that winter. "Why do you not stay home, Gilbert?" Elizabeta asked him one day. "Would you not be warm there?"

"My grandfather is teaching by baby brother to read," Gilbert said. "He has work to do as well, and has no time to take care of me."

"Does your brother not miss you?" Elizabeta asked him, for she had no brothers or sisters and did not know.

"I go home to him every night, and tell him the stories that your grandmother tells us," he said, smiling fondly at the old woman as she flipped the pancakes he had requested yet again. "He knows that I love him, and you would miss me if I didn't come."

Elizabeta shoved him lightly, but didn't argue, and they curled up together by the fire to hear another tale.

A few years later, when they were allowed to go out and play in the snow, a storm blew up unexpectedly. Gilbert and Elizabeta clung desperately to one another, for they could not see to find their way through the snow, and curled up to try to stay warm. But Snow Queen had looked in their windows, and she wanted them to come and live with her instead, so she could always hear their laughter.

It was Gilbert who first recognized her, with her long white hair and dress, and her ice blue eyes. He stared back at her, holding Elizabeta even closer, and called out, "What do you want with us?"

"I only want you to come home with me," she said, her smile deceptively sweet. She was a cold, with only a bit of ice for a heart, and did not understand why they would not want to go with her. "You will likely die if you don't."

Elizabeta shivered to hear her voice, and whispered up into Gilbert's ear, "Don't go. She'll freeze you to death if you go."

He leaned down and kissed her cheek, just once, before he let her go and stepped towards the Snow Queen. "I will go with you," he said, "As long as you let Elizabeta go home safely." The wind snatched his words away from him, so that Elizabeta could not hear, but the Snow Queen heard. She nodded once, and guided Gilbert to her silver sleigh.

Elizabeta was left alone in the snow, tired and mournful and confused, and barely made it back to the edge of her father's field before she collapsed from the cold.

She woke in the home of the town's doctor, with his son Roderich beside her bed holding a bowl of soup for her. He blinked owlishly at her for a moment from behind his spectacles, and she couldn't help but wish to herself that his violet eyes were the bright red ones she was used to.

"Your father brought you here after he found you," Roderich told her, "And my father will make you well again. But your fingers and toes were so frozen that it will take some time. You're lucky to be alive at all." Elizabeta nodded, and let him feed her when she discovered her own fingers were too stiff to hold a spoon. For the next few days, Roderich and his father took care of her, and she became friends with the boy.

It was different than her friendship with Gilbert, for Roderich was polite and never spoke even a joking word against her. He did not hug her as the other boy had, but when she cried for her lost friend, he always had comforting words and a kind smile for her. She told him about her wildflowers in the forest and he immediately spoke to his father, who gave her a small bit of their land on which to grow a proper garden. Roderich played his piano while she tended it, and her rosebushes grew tall and strong. He taught her how to be a proper lady like his mother, who Elizabeta admired greatly, and how to play the little lullaby she had grown to love so much on his piano. He brought her gifts as they grew older, and she came to love him very much.

When she reached the age of twenty, he asked her to be his wife, and she accepted with a wide smile. They planned to be married the following spring, and Elizabeta's grandmother smiled at the news, though there was still a small shadow in her old eyes, as she heard the north wind blow cold past the window.

It was only a few days afterwards that, while they were out walking together, Roderich stopped for a moment and put a hand to his eye, which had gone quite red behind his spectacles. "What is it?" Elizabeta asked in a worried voice, "Are you hurt?"

"A piece of dust must have blown into my eye," he said, blinking a few times before looking down at her. "It is gone now." A moment later, though he said nothing of it, he felt a sharp pain in his chest as well.

He pushed Elizabeta away from him, and walked back to his home alone. When she went to see what was the matter, his father said that he did not appear to be ill, but he had been playing the piano ever since he came home.

The good doctor was wrong, for something was very much amiss with his son, but it was not his fault. It was a piece of the magic mirror that had blown into his eye, and another had found its way into his heart, freezing it to ice. Elizabeta and the doctor listened as Roderich played every note of a complicated sonata perfectly, but without any emotion whatsoever, and sighed.

The next day, in the few moments he took away from his music, he came outside and told Elizabeta that her roses were infested with insects, and that they were not all that lovely anyway. When the pair joined his mother for tea, he criticized her manner and made condescending remarks about her father until even his mother told him sharply to hold his tongue. Elizabeta merely looked away, wondering what she had done to displease him so.

"It is not you, my darling," her grandmother told her. "You are just as wonderful as ever."

"But then what else could it be?" Elizabeta asked, and her grandmother had no answer for her, only a sad smile.

When winter came Roderich was much the same. He would play the piano until his fingers hurt, then eat alone, unless someone was willing to sit with him and endure his biting remarks. This was most often Elizabeta, who still loved him despite his cruel words.

One day, she found him in the window during tea time, looking at snowflakes through a magnifying glass. "Look at them, Elizabeta," he said, though he did not offer her the glass. "Are they not beautiful? They would be perfection, if they didn't melt. If only the whole world could be like these snowflakes."

After that, he took to walking by himself during their mealtimes, and eating at odd hours, and sleeping very little. He would go out into storms even when Elizabeta begged him not to, and ignored her attempts to warm him when he came back. When the worst storm of the winter came, he still put on his coat and went out walking, though again his fiancée begged him to stay inside with her.

On this walk, he happened upon a young woman in a fur coat of perfect white, with long white hair tied in a white bow, standing next to a beautiful sleigh. "Are you in need of assistance, madam?" he asked, for she was the first beautiful thing he had seen in quite some time, and he was eager to make a good impression.

"My sleigh is stuck," she said with a small smile. "I need someone strong and clever to help me free it."

"I may not be as strong as some," Roderich replied with a small bow, "But I am as clever as they come and at your service."

The Snow Queen, for that was who she was, smiled as she saw his frozen heart. She accepted his help and together they pushed her sleigh out of the snowdrift it had been caught in. She thanked him for his help, which she had not really needed, and he bowed once more to her before turning towards home.

"Wait," she said, calling his attention back. "Are you cold, Roderich?"

He did not question how she knew his name, though he might have at any other time. Instead, he nodded, and stepped into her embrace when she held out her arms. The fur of her coat was warm around him, but he still felt cold on the inside, so he continued to shiver. The Snow Queen wrapped her arms tighter around him, and when he still didn't stop, pressed a kiss to his lips.

In the moment that she kissed him, Roderich felt as cold as ice all through his body and a strange silence in his soul, and was certain he was going to die. But then she let him go, and her eyes met his, and suddenly he felt no more bite in the wind, and no more chill in the snow. He shook his head slowly, and smiled just a bit.

"Come with me," she said. "I can take you to a place where even you will find only beauty." She held out a hand, and Roderich hesitated only a moment before taking it, and following her into the sleigh. As the snowflakes lifted the sleigh off the ground and away into the sky, she leaned over and kissed him again, and in that moment he forgot his family, and Elizabeta, and everyone in the town.

When she pulled away, he looked at her with shining eyes, only to be told, "Now, you may have no more kisses. Any more and I might kiss you to death."

He nodded, even though he did not understand, and turned to watch the scenery below them fly by. When he saw nothing as lovely as the Snow Queen there, he looked up instead at the bright moon, which was now visible as they flew above the storm, and found it pleasing enough. And so he sat in the Snow Queen's sleigh, watching the silver moon until he fell asleep.

Elizabeta waited all night for him to return, and it wasn't until the clock struck midnight that she began to cry. At that moment, she knew in her heart that he would not come back, and as she cried the north wind wailed with her, whipping around the house until the storm blew itself out.