Weekly News from the Wacky World of Fairy Tales. The Once Upon A Times keeps you up to date with all the goings-on in the fairy tale lands, from the Pleasant Kingdoms to the Seven Seas of Despair.
Sister Rescues Brother from Freezing North--and Freezing Heart
Greenrose House, Pleasant Kingdoms - With peace settling over the world--along with the first snows of the year--The Once Upon A Times is still digging out fresh stories of remarkable character that went unreported during the war.
Kai Rosling, 14, signed up to fight for the Pleasant Kingdoms. As he was underage, he saw no action on the front, and was instead sent far north to the palace of Queen Snow for work as a codebreaker. "I was always good at arithmetic," Kai says, "and at Queen Snow's palace, she has a big lake of ice where we rearrange the fragments in different patterns to compute intercepted goblin codes." Far from the heat of battle, Kai found his heart icing over. "I sort of... lost myself. It was easy to treat the codes like puzzles to solve--purely rational--and forget that what I was doing was costing lives--goblin or otherwise."
His sister, Gerda, could tell something was wrong from his letters. "He was always so happy before. There was just something wrong... something frosty about his tone. When the recruitment office here in Greenrose wouldn't reassign him, I decided to go bring him back myself."
Gerda's odyssey lasted weeks. "There were dead ends everywhere. The Pleasant Army loaned me some maps but they weren't accurate at all! First, I ended up in a garden full of gossiping flowers--well, they didn't know anything useful. Then, I went to the wrong palace altogether. Honestly, if I hadn't befriended that talking reindeer, I never would have made it to Queen Snow's."
Through dogged determination--and increasing knowledge of reindeer vocabulary--Gerda made it north and returned to Greenrose with her brother, just as the armistice was signed.
"I never want to feel that cold-hearted again," Kai says. "It was like I was under some spell. It blinded me to everything I used to hold dear and made me little more than a machine."
How do the siblings plan on spending peace-time? "Well, the Pleasant Army wants Kai to train others in codebreaking, in case the war starts up again," says Gerda. "And they want me to train reindeer cavalry, but neither of us want anything to do with war. For now, we just want to sit in our greenhouse, stay warm, and smell the roses... I wouldn't mind teaching a class on reindeer language though."
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tale, The Snow Queen, first published in 1844.
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