Authors: Susan Palwick
For she was always distracted, in all seasons. In the days after the first snowfall, her hunger for the mountains was palpable, and when it wore off, a dull indifference replaced it. My mother was beautiful: tall and pale, thin and white as an alder tree and every bit as graceful, with long glimmering hair that swayed with her movements. Everything she did looked like dancing. I spent my childhood trying to learn to move like that, and I always failed. Perhaps I failed because she took no more notice of me than she did of my father or my brothers, although I was the oldest and the only girl. The other girls I knew, the girls who lived in the village ten miles distant, and with whom I studied on the scattered days when school convened, had mothers who spoiled them, mothers who gave them ribbons and sewed pretty frocks for them. We lived in a hard place, rocky land pinched between steep slopes, the soil nearly as miserly as the rocks themselves, but other mothers still managed to concoct treats for their girl-children. That mine did not was a constant pain to me.
She was dutiful enough, certainly. She cooked and cleaned, made simple clothing for us neatly and well, cared tenderly for the animals and just as tenderly for all of us, especially when we were ill. Sometimes at night as we sat by the fire, sewing or mending or listening to father’s impossible stories about magical animals and plotting wizards and frost giants, she seemed almost content. I scorned my father’s tales as nonsense, silliness for my rapt brothers, for I had the serious business of my mother’s illness to occupy me, and it left no room for fancy. But on those evenings, after my father and brothers had gone to bed, I would sometimes hear her humming snatches of eerie tunes, utterly unlike the hearty ballads I learned from my friends at school. I could never remember my mother’s songs afterwards: they faded out of memory like snowflakes on warm glass, leaving only an ache of loss.
Only once did I ask her to teach me the song I had heard her singing the night before. “There was no song,” she answered gently. “You were dreaming.” But tears filled her eyes as she spoke, and there was such sorrow in her voice that I felt as desolate as if I had struck her.
“I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
“You never make me sad,” she told me, but I knew she was lying.
Summer was the only generous time in the country where we lived, the time when berries grew for the picking and flowers sprung up in crannies and fields, the time when birdsong filled our ears, instead of howling wind. Everyone else loved summer, but I could not, because summer was when my mother grew sickest. She hid indoors from the sun, which burned her beet-red if she ventured out only for a moment, and she wilted in the heat, stooping and sweating. She wept almost unceasingly, as if she were melting. Her breath came in shallow gasps. Every day I stayed inside as long as I could, to fan her and bring her cool water and help her with the chores she was too weak to do herself, and every day when at last I fled outside, into the glorious sunshine and welcome breeze, I felt as if I had been released from a cage. And so I came to hate both the house, where I felt trapped, and the outdoors, where I felt guilty.
The summer I turned ten, I begged my father to fetch a healer, but he only sighed and shook his head. “No, Marja, healers have seen her, scores of healers, and there is nothing they can do. We must be grateful that she can manage as much as she does.”
“I don’t remember any healers coming here.”
“No, you don’t remember. You were too young then.”
The summer I turned eleven, I begged my father to move the family further north, where my mother would surely be happier; her energy always began to return in the fall, peaking with her overnight journey into the first snowfall. She needed a land even bleaker than ours, clearly. But my father only sighed and shook his head. “No, Marja, for the rest of us would suffer too much from the cold and the wind, and we could not grow enough to feed ourselves and the livestock there; why, we can barely make do where we are.”
“I don’t care about the cold. I’ll wear my warmest clothing! And I’ll make warmer clothing for you and the boys, Father. I can sew almost as well as Mama can.”
“Ah, but Marja, we don’t have the money to buy even a scrap of all the wool we would need to make that much clothing; and we don’t have enough sheep to grow that much wool ourselves, nor enough money to buy more sheep.”
The summer I turned twelve, I begged my mother to run away with me to the north. If Father refused to move the entire family, then he and the boys could stay here. Mama and I would live in the cold places, where she would once again grow bright-eyed and light-footed. Father and the boys would simply have to learn to cook and sew for themselves. But my mother only sighed and shook her head. “No, Marja, I must stay here. This is my home, and it would kill me to leave it.”
“It’s killing you to stay! Every summer, I think you’re going to die. How can you love this place when it makes you so sick?”
“Marja,” she said, the sorrow thick as smoke in her voice, “oh, Marja, this place doesn’t make me sick. It’s all that keeps me alive. You must never ask me to go anywhere else.”
“But you do go somewhere else!” I was crying then, torn between rage and utter despair. “Every year you go somewhere else, when the first snow falls! You set out for the mountains at sundown, without even a cloak, and you don’t come back again until morning!”
“What?” My mother looked at me as if one of us were speaking in a dream, a smile curling her lips. “What are you talking about? How could I stay outside in the snow all night without a cloak? I’d freeze to death.”
“But you don’t freeze! You come back happier and stronger! Mama, take me with you. Let me go too, the next time you go there. I want to go.”
“Marja,” she said, and now she was frowning, “I never go anywhere. You’ve been telling yourself tales.”
I gasped and then gulped, telling myself I must not cry anymore, I could not cry anymore, I would not. That would only convince her that I was still a child, when I was almost old enough to marry and have children of my own. She’d lied when she said that I never made her sad, but she’d told that lie to protect me. This one hurt: this one shut me out and made a fool of me.
I was tired of being shut out.
And so the next autumn, the fall before I turned thirteen, I waited and watched, and on the evening of the first snowfall, I was ready. I had told lies of my own, to match my mother’s. Minding the herds that summer, I had kept one lamb aside, fed it and hidden it. I told Father a wolf must have gotten it, and he cursed the loss, Father who scarcely seemed to care that Mama was dying, although he stroked her hair so softly when she lay ill in bed. On one of the hottest days, when Father and the boys were in the fields and Mama lay useless in the house, I told them I was going to town to find medicine; and I put the ewe lamb over my pony’s saddle and rode the ten miles to the village and sold the lamb, and took the money to the healer’s house. There I bought a strengthening powder I knew would do nothing for Mama—for by then I had tried any number of the healer’s remedies—but also other powders, darker and more costly.
My heart pounded the whole way home, for surely my deception would be discovered. Someone would say something to Father the next time he went to town; he would learn that I had been there selling a lamb, or that I had bought extra potions at the healer’s house.
But evidently my doings meant even less in the village than they did to my mother, for Father never learned what I had done. The heat of summer wore into autumn, and on the evening of the first snowfall, my father and brothers huddled around the fire even more insensibly than usual, because I had put sleeping powder in their supper.
My pony was already saddled in the barn: I had dressed in my warmest things, but I knew I must ride after Mama rather than walk, because I could never move as quickly in my heavy clothing as she could in her shift and slippers. I was afraid to carry a lantern, but luck was with me, for the moon was full, and gave light even through the swirling snow. And so at last I followed my mother into the forest at the foot of the mountains.
The way grew darker and harder when we entered the shelter of the trees, for although the branches protected us from the snow, they also kept out the moonlight, and my pony was too wide to follow Mama between and around the tree trunks. Desperate to keep up with her, at last I dismounted and tethered the pony to a tree. Floundering on foot, Mama a dim shadow ahead, I quickly grew tired and very cold, and then I was glad she had not agreed to run away with me to the north, for what gave her health would surely have killed me.
We went on like that for an hour, maybe, or maybe three; often I thought I had lost her, but always I caught sight of her again. If she knew I was there, she gave no sign, for she never slowed or looked back. And at last, just when I thought I could go no further, I saw more light ahead, and stumbled to the edge of a clearing, a circle of moonlight. My mother was dancing there, whirling with her arms outstretched and her shift clinging to the lively, lovely lines of her body—and she was not alone.
I realized then, with a shock of dread, that my father’s stories had never been nonsense, for my mother danced in the clearing with shimmering columns of snow, luminous creatures with swirling faces and massive, graceful limbs: the frost giants of my father’s tales. And I remembered the story about the snow-maiden kept captive by the cruel giants, the maiden rescued by a kindly woodcutter, who loved her and bound her in human form that he might marry her, and that she might live all year round and revel in flowers and sunshine, rather than taking shape only in the hardest winter weather. But every year, at midnight of the winter solstice, it was her doom to return to the giants’ den until dawn, there to be tormented by them: her pain their price for not destroying the gentle woodcutter and every human habitation within reach.
Of course it was the same story. Why had I not recognized it? Why had I not been able to see what was right in front of my nose, what indeed obsessed me?
Because the maiden in the story loved her human form, loved to revel in flowers and sunshine, when Mama so clearly did not.
Because the woodcutter loved the snow-maiden so dearly and risked all for her, when my father seemed to pay no attention at all to Mama’s plight.
Because the giants in my father’s story wanted the maiden only to torture her, and she always went to them with dread and loathing, when this one evening—I knew now—was the only time Mama was truly happy.
For I was not watching torture: I was watching utter joy, an enraptured reunion. Mama and the frost giants twirled and bowed and glided, flowing and reaching, every movement they made so beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes, until my cheeks were covered with ice. I crouched there, throat aching and skin burning, in the trees at the edge of the clearing, knowing that Mama would never love me as much as she loved her dancing partners, even though the enchantment that held her would not allow her to remember the dance clearly tomorrow morning. I knew that she had told the truth when she told me that she could never move farther north, for the frost giants were creatures of place, and she could only be reunited with them here. And I knew that my father was not the kindly woodcutter of his own telling, but rather the plotting wizard who had somehow entrapped and enslaved her.
I watched that beautiful dance until I was stupefied with cold. Part of me wanted to die there, I think, to lie down in the snow and simply sleep. I have never known how or why I managed to rouse myself: perhaps only because witnessing my mother’s joyous movement, and being unable to join it, grew too painful. Whatever the reason, at last I stood on numb feet and stumbled back the way I had come. Surely it was miracle or magic that guided me back through the maze of the trees to my pony, to the poor beast half dead with cold herself, and surely nothing else that led us limping home.
Soon enough we had a beacon, the amber glow of flames flickering against the sky; and then life returned to my limbs and I fairly flew, dragging the exhausted pony with me, for I knew what had happened. I had left my father and brothers snoring around a fire they could not tend. I had thought only of my mother, not of them.
I ran back home, blinded by shame and grief. Trying to save my mother, I had killed the others, who were more kin to me than she was, for all that I was indeed her child.
But by miracle or magic, they were safe. Perhaps I had drugged them more lightly than I had thought. The house was ruined, but I found my father putting out the fire with armfuls of snow, having settled the three boys safely in the barn. I helped him, carrying armful after armful, knowing that it was Mama’s body I used to quench the flames. Again and again we ran back into the searing heat, into smoke that scorched our nostrils and sucked the breath out of our bodies, bearing burdens that burned our arms with cold.
He never asked me where I had been; indeed, we did not speak at all. When we had put out the fire, he carried me to the barn—for I had collapsed at last at his feet—and when I woke, feverish and aching, it was daylight, and Mama was bending over me, wiping the sweat from my brow and murmuring a lullaby. Bright-eyed and light-footed, lovely as starlight, she nursed me through that illness; and I told myself that maybe she was healed for good this time, that maybe she would not sicken with summer.
But she did, of course. It has been five years since then: the house is rebuilt, and my brothers are on the verge of manhood, and still I have found no one to marry. None of us have ever spoken of the fire. I do not think I can, for whenever I think of it, my throat fills with choking ash. Nearly every night I dream of my mother dancing with the frost giants in the moonlit grove; and nearly every morning—especially in the heat of summer, when she suffers so—I vow that I will confront my father. I will learn how he ensnared her, and I will set her free: I will release her from this house and this family. I will be brave. I will let her return to the ones she truly loves.