The Snow Maiden- from the Way of the Fae

The Snow Maiden

So this little man comes, and spends the deepest part of winter with me, the time when the sun does not shine for days upon days. He puffs his chest and says he is putting together the history of all the fae of all the lands. Then he let me read it, and I scoff at him. 

He is all caught up in the courts and the civilized tradition where everyone is shining and honorable and noble.

I told him to bugger that, to keep his cute and fluffy bunny fae prancing around, he was not telling the story of my people.

Out here, there’s no civilization, no courts, no code of honor. There is the long dark night where you look into the blackness and it looks back at you, the hunt with blood spilled out on the snow, the warm place by the fire for the teller of tales. To survive in this place takes a different view of life, and that has shaped us as fae. Maybe, once, long ago, we did celebrate the light.

Now, we wrap ourselves in the true nature of our home. There is a story we tell the children that they understand, that I now pass to you.

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful spirit maiden, made all of snow. Born of an affair between Father Frost and Spring Beauty, her eyes were the deepest blue, her hair so pale it was white, and her skin pale and smooth like ice. Her form was perfect, and to see her was to fall in love with the idea of a woman so exquisitely formed.

It is hard on a girl to be brought up by a crusty, cranky old man like Father Frost, but for most of the year, they made a good home for each other. And in the months that Spring Beauty joined them, how they made the rafters ring with their joy and mirth in one another so that just passing by you could feel the warmth of their love for family.

But even though the little Snow Maiden loved her father very much, without her mother would grow lonesome, and sometimes went down to the river to see and hear the young people playing. 

As different as this place is, the one thing that I think is the same anywhere is young people showing off for one another to try to find a mate. Boys butt heads to show how strong and tough they are, girls watch the boys and laugh that twittering little laugh. Boys and girls join in the hunt, to show what capable providers they are. Then they show off their skills by using all the parts of their kills to make clothes and tools. And when they get tired of doing all of that (or they are no good at doing that), the boys start to sing.

And for reasons I will never understand, girls like to listen to them sing.

The Snow Maiden was no different. During the searing bright days when the air was so cold only fools and children went out in it, she would be perched and watching the far side of the river, straining her ears to hear. And why not? What was cold to a maiden such as she?

In time, Father Frost realized where his daughter went, and his heart was grieved for it. Not just for the loss of her company, but that he knew his child was not like the ones on the other side of the river, and never would be. He knew, as she did not, that they were children of mere flesh and blood. He thought and thought about how to make her understand that while they may look like her, and sound like her, and play the way that she wanted to play, that they were as different from her as the wolf is from the boar.

For a long time, he ignored where his daughter wandered, and his daughter pretended that she was looking to gather things that could not be gathered beneath the snow. They both got used to these not quite lies with each other, and secrets grew in their hearts.

Then, a man and his wife that had no children came into the little village and built their house on Father Frost’s side of the river. When the days were bright, the wife brought her mending out, so she could see it better, she said. But really, she was watching the children as they butted heads and hunted and proved they were the most desired mates while wishing for a child of her own. And always she noticed this beautiful girl that did not play, but merely watched from their side of the river.

For many days, the Snow Maiden fled whenever the wife came close. But the wife had once been a hunter too, and she stalked her prey most carefully. She noticed that the Snow Maiden yearned closest to the river’s banks when the boy named Lel sang. And she did not blame her, for it seemed to her that Lel’s voice was a silver horn blown across the ice and snow.

There is no accounting for the tastes of women.

So the wife began to sing, and while she did not have the silvery voice of Lel, she put all the longing of her heart into her songs. They were songs of a mother to her child, filled with warmth and comfort and love. The Snow Maiden heard them, and longed for her own mother, absent for so many dark months of the year.

That longing led her to talk to the wife in all the ways that she could not talk to Father Frost. Day after day, week after week she came back to the little cottage when she wasn’t listening to the children across the river. The man and his wife created a second home for the Snow Maiden and treated her like a daughter, not understanding that she was a child of spirit, not of flesh as they were.

During a very long, cold year in which Spring Beauty could not come at all, the Snow Maiden finally begged her father to let her go and live with the man and wife by the river all of the time. His heart was sore, both with the thought of losing his unlikely child and with his lack of words to make her see that she would not have the happiness she sought.

“My child,” he tried one last time, “I know that you think you want this thing, that you think living in the town is what you are supposed to do. But I tell you that those people are too different from you, from us. You can live as one of them for a thousand thousand winters, and you will not be any more like them than you are now. I am sorry for your loneliness, my daughter, but this is not the answer.”

I have said the Snow Maiden was made of snow. When snow becomes older, it turns to ice. And it was that ice that she showed to Frost Father when words failed to win her cause, and he was sorry to see it. He had hoped that by having a child with Spring Beauty, she would be more like her mother than him. 

In sorrow, he gave his blessing to the Snow Maidens adoption by the man and his wife. For the first time, she was a part of the little village.

The townsfolk marveled at her absolute perfection, and all praised her tranquility and stillness, like the frozen pond. She was warmly welcomed, and for her part, the Snow Maiden enjoyed feeling a part of all of the life and activity that she had watched from across the river for so long. Sometimes she was tempted to speak of Father Frost that the villagers might know him, too, but it seemed disloyal to the man and his wife that had made her a part of this wider world.

And now she could hear every word Lel sang. For all that the other boys of the town butted heads and hunted and sang their throats raw to impress her, she only heard Lel.

And Lel saw her not at all.

Lel sang only for Kupava.

Now every gathering of people has a girl like Kupava among them– she is a huntress not of prey but of hearts, and makes it her reason for being. Kupava was not at all pleased with the arrival of the Snow Maiden, and it did not matter a bit that Lel sang only for her.

For the boy she had decided was good enough to marry was Mizgir, and she had been almost ready to tell him so when the man and his wife brought the Snow Maiden to the village.

I say almost because she had been waiting for the next crop of boys to become old enough to butt heads over her charms. Truly, my friends, I tell you that the hearts of hunting women like Kupava are a bottomless pit of want.

The situation gave the town something to talk about all through that winter, with the older women who had been huntress in their turn admiring Kupava’s tactics, while the men just wished earnestly that both Kupava and the Snow Maiden would make their choices and retire honorably from the field of battle.

As for Mizgir, he saw no one but the Snow Maiden. He hunted the white ermine in the darkest part of the winter and laid their pelts at her feet that her garments may be trimmed as befit a queen. He carved charms of stone and ivory by firelight in the long winter nights of waking dreams to garland about her neck. He wrote songs of his own and sang them in praise of her.

Coolly, she thanked him for his gifts and songs, but still turned her face to Lel when he sang and would not be distracted from him.

Kupava turned this over and over in her head. When you got right down to it, all of the possible mates were mostly the same… maybe one was slightly faster in bringing down prey, or one sang more clearly. It would be prettier to say that the Snow Maiden’s marked attention to Lel had raised him in Kupava’s eyes. It would be pettier, but true, to say that Kupava took Lel to keep the Snow Maiden from having him in revenge for taking the boy she had picked out for herself.

Truly, a woman’s mind is a dark and twisty place.

On the first day of spring, It all fell to. It was a day in which, cunningly, Kupava lured Lel into going hunting with her. If only he’d known that he was the prey! And yet, both of them found fortune that day, for that very special gift that too few of us find was bestowed upon Lel and Kupava out in those snowy woods.

They found they truly loved each other. 

Now I have lived a long time, and I will go on living a great deal more and believe me when I tell you that this kind of love that they had, it comes maybe once, twice in a hundred years. And when you see it, it lights up the lovers from the inside, as though they were candles that burn only for one another. For some, that light sparks warmth and wonder, and a desire to see everyone with whatever portion of that happiness they can find for themselves. And even if what they find is but a thousandth part of that love, they are content.

Others– it kindled something different.

When Lel and Kupava returned to the village that evening, their hands clasped, aglow with all the wondrousness of true love, the Snow Maiden was troubled.

For her heart was of ice, she could not feel what it was that had the townsfolk turning to one another, all smiles. And with all the bite and hunger of an icy blast of wind from the north, she wanted to feel what Lel and Kupava felt, to have what they had.

Alone in her bed that night, the vision of them and all the village rejoicing with them burned into her mind. She thought of Mizgir in this new light, and knew that she could not feel for him what Kupava felt for Lel. 

She crept from her bed, her heart feeling smaller and colder than ever before. Tears streaked her lovely smooth face, and she wondered if the pain of wanting so much would cause her icy heart to crack. 

Halfway back to Father Frost’s house she had gone, perhaps with dawning realization upon her of what he had tried to warn her from, perhaps because at the end of all things, all little girls want to believe in their fathers to cure the ills of their worlds.

Spring Beauty, denied past her time, was abroad in the land, and heard her daughter’s cries. Embracing her child, she paused in her labors to hear the tale of woe.

With a heavy heart and sadness in her eyes, she gave the daughter the gift she begged for. A garland about her neck that would warm her heart to love was her gift, but it came with a price. The Snow Maiden was, after all, a creature of the cold, it was her nature and could not be spurned. To be warmed from the inside and the outside at the same time would be her undoing. So Spring Beauty admonished her to shelter herself in the shadows of the trees and not to go out into the bright sunshine that would soon spread across the land.

Laughing with joy, the Snow Maiden clasped her mother to her heart. Over and over she thanked her and danced back across the snows with new life, finding all that her eye touched to be beautiful by the grace of love.

All the way back to the village she ran, keeping to the safety of the forest and marveling at all the things she never seen or understood before. She wanted to creep and she wanted to fly to Mizgir’s arms and tell him all the love of her heart.

Now, you remember that I just told you that true love happens maybe twice in a hundred years? Well, when Mizgir laid his eyes upon the Snow Maiden and hers on him, that was the second time in a hundred years that true love blossomed right there in the little village. They ran to each other and embraced in the middle of the town square, that all could see how they felt, and rejoice with them. The power of the moment was so strong, that all the town poured from their cottages to see it. 

Old men smiled at their wives, and the wives reached out their hands.

Young men reached out to touch their wives and their children, remembering the fruits love brings forth.

Children looked on in awe, hoping to one day be so lucky as to find something so special.

Even the sun was charmed, breaking through the clouds to beam down its approval.

In the arms of her beloved, the Snow Maiden forgot all her mother’s warnings. She was so consumed by the power of this love, she ignored her own nature and melted away into nothingness in Mizgir’s arms. No longer constrained to a shape, her spirit swept into the skies, spreading the warmth of passion that had been her death, and the Snow Maiden became Spring Wind.

As for Mirgiz, he never recovered from holding all that he had wanted with all the fire of youth in his arms and watching it slip away. On midsummer’s eve, he chased the Spring Wind into a lake and drowned.

You ask me about the Spring Wind? Oh, she is still here, living with her mother and not realizing that her form is gone. Is it a blessing, that she is always at that moment of perfect beauty in her lover’s arms? Sometimes I think both ways– that she traded a frozen heart for being frozen in a moment in time.

But what a moment in time!

So you see, not all the stories have princesses and happy endings and riches and joy. But still they must be told, that we know of our natures, that we feed them lest we become something that we are not.

If you are not happier for hearing my tale, perhaps you are wiser. It is enough.

Excerpt from the Way of the Fae by Arian Telia Wellman. All rights reserved, blah blah.

Don’t steal my shit.