Winter's Child Read Online Free Page A

wounded have been changed forever in a terrible way: They are incapable of seeing with the eyes of true love.”
    There was a momentary silence while both Kai and I considered this.
    “But ...,” he said.
    “How?” I asked at precisely the same time.
    My oma smiled. “A heart that carries a sliver of that icy mirror is not what it was before,” she explained. “It now contains both less and more. But the more that it contains is what creates the less , and so such a heart is at war with itself.”

    My oma paused, looking from me to Kai, and then back to me, as if waiting to see which one of us would figure out this riddle first.
    “Fear,” Kai suddenly burst out. “That’s what the piece of mirror adds.”
    “Fear, indeed,” my oma said. “You are right, Kai.”
    “But wait,” I objected, doing my best not to show how irritated I was that Kai had figured it out first. “I thought the curse of the mirror was that it showed the queen her innermost flaw.”
    “You are right as well, Grace,” my grandmother said. “Think about it for a moment. Why did the queen spend so much time at her mirror in the first place?”
    “Because she was afraid,” I answered slowly. “Afraid her beauty would fade and the king would stop loving her.” I fell silent for a moment, considering what I could now see was the logical conclusion. “So fear was the queen’s innermost flaw.”
    “I think it must have been, don’t you?” my grandmother responded. “I’ve always thought that, when the queen looked in the mirror for that last time, she saw that she was just as beautiful as she had always been. Her face had not changed at all. Her beauty had not diminished, but still the king’s love had fled.
    “In that instant, the queen realized what she had done. She had brought the very woe she dreaded upon herself by giving in to her fear and closing off her heart. And her heart, grown smaller by staying so tightly wrapped, could not expand again. It could not contain this bitter knowledge and her fear all at once. Herheart shattered, just as she had shattered the mirror.”
    “And she perished in that same instant,” I murmured, as I remembered what came next.
    “She did.” My grandmother nodded. “But she left behind her child and countless others, all with a sliver of ice in their hearts. So the wrong the Winter Child must right also was decided in the instant of her mother’s death.
    “To travel the world in search of all those wounded hearts and to mend them, one by one.”
    “But that could take forever,” Kai protested.
    “It will take as long as it must,” my grandmother replied. “When the Winter Child turned sixteen,” she went on, in a tone of voice that signaled she was returning to her storytelling and would tolerate no more interruptions, “the age when many young heroes begin their quests, the very day she turned sixteen, Deirdre, the Winter Child, set out on her journey.
    “She put on a dress of linen, fine as gossamer. Over it she tied a woolen cloak as white as snow. She laced her feet into a pair of crystal boots as sturdy as the stars. She took a staff of pale ash wood into her hand, and she kissed her father the king good-bye. Then she turned and walked away from the palace made of ice, and she left the land of ice and snow behind.
    “She did not look back, not even once. Though she must have wanted to, I think, don’t you?”
    I sat for a moment, my hands resting on the sewing in my lap, trying to imagine what it must be like to leave your home. Not because you wanted to, butbecause you must. Because you must right a wrong not your own.
    Oh yes, I thought. She must have wanted to look back very, very much.
    “She has been traveling the world ever since, seeking out and mending those damaged hearts, one by one. As long as Deirdre is on her journey, the magic of her quest embraces her, just as the arms of the North Wind did, so very long ago. She will never grow a day older, for she