The Snow Queen Read Online Free PDF

houses the way they change their Sunday hats?”
    â€œI believe,” said Gerda, fighting back fresh tears, “there must have been some misunderstanding about the dates.”
    â€œSo it would seem,” said the coachman’s aunt. “Are they always as absent-minded as this, your parents?”
    â€œCertainly not,” said Gerda. “They are sensible, churchgoing folk, and I’m sure if my mother were not so busy with all my younger brothers and sisters, she would never have got the dates mixed up.”
    â€œIs she a relation of yours, the Baroness?” asked the coachman’s aunt.
    â€œA second cousin,” said Gerda. “On my mother’s side.”
    How easily the lies came, thought Gerda, once the first one is told.
    â€œWell, perhaps I shouldn’t be saying this, since she’s a connection of yours — but I’ve always been one to speak my mind. That Baroness of yours seemed to me a proud, unfriendly kind of woman, with a cold look in her eye. I don’t know that she’d have made good company for a lively young girl like yourself.”
    â€œYou’ve seen her, then?”
    â€œOh many a time, when she’s driven by my cottage, or passed me on the road.”
    Gerda dared not ask the one question she desperately wanted answered: Was she alone? Was there a young man with her ?
    Instead she said, without much conviction, “My mother has always spoken well of the Baroness.”
    â€œI have no doubt. Folks always speak well of their relatives, if they have a title in front of their name. Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it? We must think what to do next.”
    â€œI will write my family a letter,” said Gerda, “and they will send me money to pay for my keep, and for my journey home.”
    â€œThey needn’t trouble themselves about paying me,” said the coachman’s aunt. “I”m glad of a bit of company, if you want the truth. But yes, you must write them for ticket money, straight away. I’ll see that my nephew posts it.” And she bustled off to her parlour to look for paper and ink.

C HAPTER S EVEN
    T he old woman came to Ritva in the dead of night, wearing a shaman’s robe and carrying a painted drum. Her face was scored and furrowed, burned by the sun and the arctic wind to the colour of dead leaves. Her long hair was grey as ash. She grinned, showing toothless gums, and Ritva cried out, not in fear, but in sudden recognition. This was her grandmother Maija, her mother’s mother, who had died when Ritva was three.
    Ritva knew the old woman’s story. It was Ritva’s story too. When Maija’s only daughter became pregnant by a blonde outsider, a bandit-chief, Maija left the tents of her Saami people and followed her daughter to the bandit’s camp. The women of the camp remembered old Maija, still, with admiration. Like all the women of her line, she possessed the shaman’s gift. But in the soul of Ritva’s mother there was too much passion, too much heat, and her power had curdled like spoiled milk. The power in Maija was like the northern lights — clear and beautiful and without heat.
    â€œDo not be afraid,” said Ritva’s grandmother, who had been dead these fifteen years. “I have come to teach you a song.”
    And she began to beat on her drum, and chant in a cracked and quavering old woman’s voice.
    Who is the hero who will do battle with the Woman of the North?
Who is the shaman who will break the spell
of the Terrible Enchantress,
Drowner of Heroes and Devourer of Men,
she who is mistress of the Dark Land
beyond the Cave of the North Wind
where earth and day end.
Storm and fog and ice
and the cold of eternal darkness
are her weapons.
She has torn the sun and the moon from the sky
and has hidden them away
in the heart of the stone mountain.
Who is the hero who will journey to her kingdom?
Who is the shaman who