Winter's Child Read Online Free

that my grandmother and Kai’s mother would tell stories to help pass the time. Kai’s mother had been bornin the south. Her stories were often full of sunshine and warmth. But Oma had been raised in the far, far north. Her tales were comprised of ice and snow. It was she who first told us the tale of a girl forever altered by the North Wind, the tale of the Winter Child.
    “Her name is Deirdre,” my oma would say. “A word for sorrow, for sorrow and the fate of a Winter Child are intertwined.”
    “But why, Oma?” I would always ask, even after I had heard the story of Deirdre the Winter Child many, many times.
    The fact that anybody, even a girl in a story, had a name like Sorrow always struck a strange chord in my heart. I liked my own name, Grace, just fine. But I don’t think my affection for it made me swell-headed. I wasn’t making any particular claim to being graceful because of it, and I certainly wasn’t claiming to be better than anyone else. I can be impatient, and I have a nasty temper. I know these things well enough.
    But my name did make me feel safe, somehow, as if it carved out a particular place for me in the world— even if I didn’t quite know yet what that place would be. Being named Sorrow seemed a terrible fate.
    “A Winter Child is unlike any other child on earth,” my oma went on. “She has been touched by the North Wind, enfolded in its arms.”
    “All of us have felt the touch of the wind,” Kai said. But he shivered, as if the memory of how the North Wind felt on a winter day was enough to make him cold.

    “True,” my oma replied. “But a Winter Child has felt more of the North Wind than either you or I have, Kai. We feel only the brush of its passing. It does not truly see us as it hurries by.
    “But a Winter Child is chosen, swept up in the North Wind’s arms. People are not made to be so close to the forces of nature. They have the power to alter us. Before a Winter Child can be as she was before, she must remove all traces of the North Wind’s touch by righting some great wrong.”
    “That hardly seems fair,” I remarked.
    “Righting a great wrong is not a bad thing,” Kai countered before my grandmother could reply. His eyes were fixed on his sewing, but his voice was stubborn. “I think it’s brave and noble, not a cause for sorrow at all.”
    “Children,” Kai’s mother said chidingly, “let Frue Andersen tell the story.”
    “No, no,” my oma said with a smile. “I don’t mind the interruptions. It is true that righting a great wrong is not a bad thing in and of itself,” my grandmother continued, and I battled back a spurt of irritation that she’d addressed Kai’s objection rather than mine.
    “Though doing so is often very hard. The path is easiest to walk when you choose it for yourself. But such a choice is not granted to a Winter Child.”
    I heard Kai pull in a breath, as if to speak again. I put my foot on top of his and pressed down, hard.
    “What wrong must Deirdre set to right, Oma?” I inquired.
    “The wrong committed by her parents,” my grandmotherreplied. “You remember I told you how, when the queen’s mirror shattered, all the pieces flew out the window and were carried away on the wind, all but the one that pierced her daughter’s heart?”
    I paused to carefully finish a seam before I answered. More than once I had been forced to take out stitches and do work over again after being caught up in one of Oma’s stories.
    “I remember,” I said when the thread was knotted, the end snipped, and the seam done. I gave the sleeve a gentle tug, testing to see how my stitches held.
    “Careful,” Kai teased, as if he were seeking revenge for my stepping on his foot. “You’ll pull it right back out again.”
    I stuck out my tongue.
    “Those pieces flew throughout the world,” my oma went on, “still filled with the magic of a wish and a curse combined. Each and every one found its way into a human heart. The persons so