The Snow Queen: Story the Third: The Enchanted Flower Garden

In part three we learn that everyone has given Kai up for dead since he rode off with the Snow Queen. Gerda, mourning her lost friend, shares her sorrows with the sun, with the sparrows. But they don’t believe her. They don’t think Kai is dead, and Gerda starts to have doubts, too.

Months have passed by now, and spring has come. Since everyone thinks that Kai’s drowned, Gerda goes to the river to ask for him back, offering her new red shoes in exchange. The waves keep bringing the shoes back to her, so she decides she needs to get farther into the water to drop them in.

Conveniently, someone’s left a boat on the shore, but Gerda doesn’t really know how to operate a boat, and once she’s deposited the shoes in the river, she can’t get back to shore. She continues downstream for quite some time, until a woman with a flowered hat fishes her out.

This woman is an enchantress, and wants to keep Gerda as her own child. She steals her memories, and hides all her rosebushes under the ground, so they won’t remind Gerda of home, and the rosebush she shared with Kai.

(This is one point where my story deviates significantly from the source material—I wanted my Gerda to set off in search of Kai immediately, rather than waiting until spring, so she spends a winter with the enchantress instead of a summer.)

Gerda stays with the enchantress for several months, through the spring and summer, and into the fall. She doesn’t remember Kai. She knows something is missing from the garden, but she doesn’t know what. At last, she spots the one rose the enchantress has forgotten to hide—the one painted on her hat—and all of her memories have returned.

She weeps for Kai, and her tears bring forth the roses the enchantress sent under the ground. They assure her that Kai isn't dead—if he was dead and buried, they would have seen him underground. Which doesn’t totally make since, as he’s supposed to have drowned, but whatever.

The flowers don’t know anything else about Kai.

Realizing that she’s lost months of time to the enchantress, and it’s now autumn, Gerda, now barefoot, sets off again in search of Kai.