The Snow Queen: Story the Second: A Little Boy and a Little Girl

 So part two is where things really get going. It’s where we meet Kai, Gerda, the grandmother, and the Snow Queen. This is the only section that really focuses on Kai, before he spends the next four sections missing.

I did take a lot of inspiration from this section for my book—the snow bees, the shared garden with the rose bush, the houses right close together. The emphasis, moving forward, on roses or bees. Kai’s skill for mimicry and mathematics.

This section opens by introducing us to Kai and Gerda. Then it introduces us to the idea of the Snow Queen, in a story that comes from Kai’s grandmother. She’s telling the children about snowflakes, describing them as snow bees, and Kai asks if they have a queen, like real bees. Grandma tells him that they do—the Snow Queen.

It’s important to note the grandmother doesn’t describe the Snow Queen as a villain or a threat—just the queen of the snow bees.

It’s unclear why Kai threatens to melt her on the stove—he doesn’t have the mirror shard to make him cruel yet, and she isn't described as someone who needs to be done away with. Maybe it’s just him being a little boy; they can be jerks sometimes.

Kai sees the Snow Queen in his window that night, and the next day, spring comes. In the spring, the shards of our evil, enchanted mirror from part one fly into Kai—one in his eye, one in his heart. These instantly distort the way Kai sees the world, and make him cruel. They also, oddly, instill in him a love for snowflakes.

When the winter comes again, Kai is taken by the Snow Queen. For a given value of “taken.”

She rides through the town square on her sleigh, and Kai hooks his sled (Gerda’s, actually—he borrowed it) onto the back. He doesn’t ask for permission to do this. He doesn’t interact with her at all until she’s ridden back out of town, pulling him along. At this point he considers unhooking himself, but she signals that he should stay, so he does.

At one point, he becomes afraid, and tries to pray, but he can’t remember how. He can only remember math.

Eventually, the Snow Queen brings him up into her sleigh. She kisses him, which completes the process, already started by the mirror, of freezing his heart. Then she stops kissing him, saying any more would kill him--apparently your heart can only freeze so much before it’s unsafe.

I don’t think this is, like, creepy. The kisses aren’t…inappropriate. We aren’t meant to read anything into them. Especially taking into account the equally non-romantic kisses we’ll see in part seven. These kisses are just the method by which the ice is spread.

Kai’s gotten over his gear by this point, and he no longer feels cold. We close out part two on him bragging to the Snow Queen about all the math he can do, as they ride off into the winter together.