The Snow Queen by Eileen Kernaghan

not very hopefully. She picked her way gingerly across the rocks and disappeared beyond a promontory jutting almost to the water’s edge. “Come and look, come and look!” Gerda heard her shouting after a moment. Her voice was shrill with excitement.
    Around the point was another, larger cove; and just offshore, pitching and swaying on the surge of the incoming tide, lay a sloop with furled sails. She was flying the blue Norwegian cross.
    Ritva danced up and down on the rocks. “I told you there’d be a boat!” she shrieked.
    â€œNot a boat, Ritva, a ship! A proper sailing ship.” Gerda could just make out the letters on the hull: the Cecilie .
    On a narrow strip of sand out of reach of the tide a dinghy was beached. Beside it crouched a blonde-bearded man who appeared to be mending a sail.
    Gerda clambered onto a tumble of weed-slimed rocks and waved her arms. “Hallo,” she shouted in Danish, over the clamour of wind and waves. “Hallo! Can you hear me?”
    The man glanced up from his work. At the sight of Gerda, his mouth fell open with such a comical look of surprise that she began to giggle — helplessly, foolishly, out of sheer relief.
    The man got to his feet and strolled toward the two girls. He was a big, burly man, with a leathery wind-tanned face. He looked up at Gerda and Ritva with quizzical blue eyes, and said, in good Danish, “How can I help you, my young friends? If it’s the rest of your herd you’re looking for, I haven’t seen them.”
    At that instant Gerda saw herself, and Ritva, through the sailor’s eyes — two half-grown boys dressed from head to foot in skins and furs, feet big and shapeless in grass-stuffed boots, nothing showing under their caps but chapped lips, windburned cheeks, a few greasy locks of cropped-off hair.
    Gerda hesitated, waiting for Ritva to reply; but Ritva, oddly, was hanging back, looking uncertain and ill at ease. Gerda drew herself up as tall as she could, met the sailor’s bright blue gaze, and said, with all the boldness she could summon, “We’re not looking for our reindeer, we’re looking for work. Do you have work to give us?”
    The man laughed. “Well, we’ve not much need for cabin-boys, unless the cook could use a hand. From the sounds of it you’re Danish-born, like me — and we’re both of us a long haul from Copenhagen. Further still, before this voyage is over — we’re bound for Spitzbergen Island.”
    â€œAs are we,” said Gerda.
    â€œNot for the walrus hunt, I’ll be bound.”
    Gerda shook her head. The best lie, she thought, is the one that lies closest, in most particulars, to the truth.
    â€œI must go to Spitzbergen in search of my elder brother,” she said. “My mother is a widow, and we are her only two sons.”
    â€œAnd what is your brother doing on Spitzbergen? There is nothing there but rock and ice — and walruses.”
    â€œAnd lichen,” said Gerda. “It seems there is also quite a large quantity of that. My brother is a student of botany, and he has gone to Spitzbergen to classify the various sorts of lichen according to Dr. Linnaeus’s rules of taxonomy.”
    â€œI hadn’t heard about that,” said the sailor.
    â€œNo, I dare say you wouldn’t,” said Gerda gravely. “The expedition was privately funded, and the sponsor wished to avoid publicity.”
    â€œYes, I see,” said the sailor, who quite obviously did not.
    â€œFor fear of attracting the attention of rival botanists,” elaborated Gerda, warming to her subject. “But something has gone amiss, we have had no word for months, and we fear that the expedition has come to disaster. My poor mother has been distraught. She can neither eat nor rest. And so I have travelled all the way from Copenhagen in search of my brother.” She paused for effect. “Or his unfortunate