Author Notes: This is the finale story for the "Queen Elsa's Councilor" series, and the plot and character development draw heavily from previous stories. If you're new to the series, I suggest reading at least: "Queen Elsa's Councilor," and "Christmas Day in Arendelle" before starting this one. I also wrote a childhood story, "Frozen Lies" in which I wrote Agdar and Idun as bad guys. That matters a lot in this story. (You can read "Frozen Lies" if you want to, but I warn you that it is terribly depressing, probably the saddest thing I've ever written, so skip it if you want. You can pick up the events in that story from this one.)
The cover art was created by nirnaeth12; right now it's a sketch. She's working on a more detailed version, which will also eventually be posted on her website at Deviantart. Search her artist name, Deidale. Full-size versions of all the art she's created for this series can be found there. Many thanks to her for sharing her talent!
Arendelle and the cast of the movie "Frozen" belong to Disney. Thanks Disney!
This first chapter is between two OCs, but they talk about the movie characters, and all subsequent chapters have at least one movie character in them.
Chapter 1 – Ghosts From the Past
Lord Councilor Gustav of Arendelle, the head of foreign relations, gave up pretending to look at the letter on his desk that presented his unsolvable dilemma and went to look out the window instead. The bright scent of a summer day floated into the castle through the open window. His office overlooked the open fjord. While he could hear the waves crashing against the castle island below his window, the angle was wrong to see them. The fjord was steel gray today, under a blue summer sky. The wind whipped whitecaps onto the swell, reaching for the horizon in a pattern that changed so constantly that its variety became monotonous. To his right, Gustav could see the mountains descending into the water with barely a beach at their foot.
It was a beautiful, yet inhospitable, place for a kingdom. With barely enough flat land to grow food for its own inhabitants, Arendelle had never done more than scratch out a decent living. The breadbasket of Europe's flatlands produced enough to make its countries fat with the land's excess. The resources of England produced the industry that was making it rich. France and Easthaven had their military wealth, coupled with the tax burden to support it. Portugal's wealth was boosted by its location on the world's trade currents, a crossroads for merchants from all over the globe. Arendelle was not only the strange cousin of Europe, they were also the poor cousin. Without a tax base strong enough to finance a military, Arendelle relied on its obscurity and its defense alliance treaty with Easthaven to keep invaders at bay. Who would bother a country like Arendelle? There was little to be gained here.
That was why the letter from Prince Dominic of Easthaven made no sense to him. It was a reasonable request, surely he could acknowledge that, and the benefit to be gained was all for Arendelle. He could not decipher Easthaven's motive, other than the one they stated, which was hardly the real reason. As one of Arendelle's senior statesmen, it was his duty to do everything in his power to accommodate Easthaven's civil request for the good of Arendelle. But the father in him rebelled against it. Gustav had never been able to separate the fatherly concern he felt for Arendelle's royal sisters from his duties as statesman. When those roles had conflicted before, the fatherly role always won. But the sisters had grown up, and he couldn't shelter them forever.
There was a knock at the study door and Lord High Councilor Rodmund entered. They'd been friends more than thirty years, and served half that time together in the government.
"You look confused enough that I will hazard a guess that you're trying to decide on either invitations or seating arrangements for Princess Anna's wedding," Rodmund said in lieu of a greeting.
Ah, yes, his other unsolvable dilemma. If only he'd been able to tell himself to appreciate the simplicity of that problem before the messenger ship brought the letter from Easthaven. One only appreciated past difficulties when they were eclipsed by present difficulties.
"I cannot, in good conscience, refuse to let the trolls attend," Gustav said. "Perhaps I would have tried to insist if I hadn't known them. But you'll recall Kristoff kindly volunteered my wife and myself to work with his troll parents in planning the wedding."
Rodmund tried to stifle laughter, but failed. "Realistically, you would have helped plan the wedding if Princess Anna had contracted a more conventional foreign marriage as well. Think of the trolls as Transylvanians. Perhaps that will help."
"At least the Transvylanians are human. Trolls at a wedding will be a foreign relations disaster for Arendelle. We can't afford a second foreign relations disaster only one year after the disaster of Queen Elsa's coronation," Gustav fretted.
"Do you know, Gustav, I believe you're assuming that other countries are as normal as they appear. Certainly, we have an ice queen, trolls, and a future royal husband whom everyone believes to have magical control of a mountain, but how do you know other countries aren't hiding dragons? I've heard rumors about Romania," Rodmund said, amused at Gustav's concern.
"Do the dragons expect to attend a state wedding?" Gustav asked in exasperation. "I've been working since last summer to try and convince the rest of the world that a hard freeze in July was an aberration and Arendelle is usually normal. But if our foreign allies are all invited to Princess Anna's wedding, and we seat them next to a troll, how can we possibly expect them to do business with us? They'll leave faster than they departed after Queen Elsa thawed the harbor."
"Tell the trolls they can't attend the wedding," Rodmund suggested in his gravelly voice.
Gustav sighed and gave him an unhappy look. "That will disappoint Kristoff, Princess Anna, and the trolls themselves."
Rodmund's wrinkled face creased into a smile. "And here we come to the real problem: you're much too soft to be a politician, Gustav. If the feelings of individuals matter more to you than Arendelle's standing the world, you don't belong in government."
Gustav nodded at Rodmund's assessment of his character. "If I'd wanted to be that sort of politician, Adele and I would have gone back to France."
"Personally, I'm glad you're here in Arendelle then. We don't need to be like France," Rodmund said. "If you'd care to hear it, I have a string of hypotheticals that eventually become a suggestion."
"I'm listening."
"Perhaps Princess Anna's wedding is not a formal state event requiring attendance from every neighboring nation. Perhaps it is merely the quiet wedding of a younger sister who chose a politically insignificant husband and Arendelle does not want to brag about that fact. Perhaps the fact that most of the world will be invited to the eminently proper marriage of Queen Elsa the following month would mollify them to the fact that they are not invited to Princess Anna's wedding as well," Rodmund said. "Princess Anna and Kristoff's wedding need only be a local celebration, so as to not upstage our monarch's wedding."
Gustav merely raised an eyebrow, but he shut the door to his study before replying. "Have things progressed that far between Queen Elsa and Bern? My observations have turned up only friendship, which is a relief given the frosty distance that prevailed between them before Christmas, but is still only friendship."
"Yes, there is that slight obstacle," Rodmund admitted. "Bern is patient, and while that's part of the reason we chose him, it does seem to be slowing things down."
"Bern may be content to marry sometime in the next decade, but I doubt Kristoff will wait so long," Gustav said drily. "Do you think we should tell Bern the real reason we appointed him to the Council over a dozen candidates with better qualifications?"
"I'm not sure that's necessary yet. I'd rather he think the romance with Queen Elsa was their own idea. Is there another way to light a fire under him?" Rodmund asked.
"There's an entire conflagration coming, Rodmund. Read the letter on my desk," Gustav answered.
Gustav sat down on the window seat and leaned his chin into his hands, stroking his black goatee, while Rodmund picked up the letter sitting in the middle of his desk and read it. The cheer disappeared from Rodmund's eyes, and he suddenly looked as old as he was.
"Did we commit treason, Gustav?" Rodmund asked quietly as he set the letter back down. He sat down on the chair and his head landed in his hands.
"It didn't seem so at the time," Gustav replied, equally quietly. "You can't betray a dead man, and King Agdar was dead by the time we burned Princess Elsa's betrothal agreement. Our loyalty had shifted by then to the Crown Princess and Arendelle itself. I understand King Agdar's thinking, but he was depending on himself to make the alliance work. Once he was gone, that marriage would have been a disaster for Arendelle, and a terrible tragedy for Princess Elsa herself."
"How many lies did we tell?" Rodmund asked.
"You mean how many lies did I tell," Gustav corrected him, looking out the window again at the white capped waves.
"I was here with you when we put every betrothal document that we could find with King Agdar's signature on it into the fire, right over there," Rodmund said, pointing at Gustav's fireplace. The fire had gone out on this warm, early summer afternoon. "If there is any fallout, you won't weather it alone."
"Thank you, my friend," Gustav said, more relieved than he would want to admit. Rodmund was generous to offer to share responsibility, but Gustav was the one who had searched King Agdar's private study, turning up every paper he could find between King Agdar and Prince Dominic of Easthaven and then taking it to Rodmund. After the fact, he'd wished he'd paid more attention to the correspondence between King Agdar and Weselton as well. Weselton had been their closest partner in trade because of King Agdar's policies, and he wished he knew more of that history. But he'd let the opportunity pass him by in the press of other concerns. He supposed the documents were boxed up in a storage room somewhere if he really wanted to find them at this point.
Gustav counted up the lies. "We lied to the other Councilors about how far the betrothal discussions had progressed. We lied to Prince Dominic of Easthaven and all their advisors when we wrote to them that King Agdar experienced a last minute change of heart and refused to sign anything binding before he departed on his fatal voyage. We lied by silence to Crown Princess Elsa. She never asked us about it, Rodmund. Does that mean King Agdar had really never told her he was arranging her marriage? Or was she too afraid to find out what would happen?"
"Based on knowing King Agdar, he never told her," Rodmund replied. "His daughters were only ever told what to do; they were never consulted."
"May he rest in peace," Gustav ground out, his jaw clenched and his eyes bright with anger. He had too many daughters of his own to miss the way King Agdar treated his daughters.
"None of us knew what he was dealing with, Gustav. Surely even you would have been rattled and may have shown poor judgment if one of your five daughters had turned up with powers like Queen Elsa's," Rodmund pointed out.
"I've shown poor judgment, Rodmund. There's no question that a man who raises children is going to show poor judgment more often than he would like. But I did not pursue that poor judgment for ten years, refusing to evaluate the consequences of my bad decision and lacking the courage to admit I'd done the wrong thing. I can forgive King Agdar for his initial decision to lock away his own daughter and estrange her from her sister. What I can't forgive is the fact that it continued for ten years! And by the end of those ten years, he'd crushed Princess Elsa's spirit so thoroughly that even after he was dead, she stayed in hiding for three more years. Three years, Rodmund! And he wasn't even around to enforce her isolation anymore! She was so afraid of his memory that she stayed away from us, away from her sister, away from anyone that could help her.
"Do you know how badly you have to frighten a girl to break her trust with everyone around her? Do you know how badly you have to frighten a girl so that when she does reveal her secret, she runs away to the mountains, planning to live alone for the rest of her life, rather than believe anyone would possibly help her? Queen Elsa wouldn't be nearly as terrified of herself if her father hadn't taught her that she was a terrible monster, unfit to associate with other humans, Rodmund!" Gustav had gotten up to pace, his anger too much to let him hold still.
Rodmund had heard this rant before, on more than one occasion. "At least we were able to save her from the marriage he'd arranged for her," Rodmund said.
Gustav stabbed his finger towards the letter on his desk. "And now he's coming anyway! It's been four years – Prince Dominic was supposed to have married someone else by now. He'll come to our shores with the drafts of the betrothal arrangements that had already gone to Easthaven and all the arguments that persuaded King Agdar that a marriage between Arendelle and Easthaven could benefit Arendelle. Do you really think Queen Elsa wouldn't sacrifice her own happiness if she thought it would benefit her kingdom? How long has she done that already? We saved her from that marriage, but this time she'll have to save herself and quite frankly, I'm not sure she'll do it."
"Another silent queen," Rodmund said. "She's got her father's intelligence, but her mother's quiet personality. If she marries Prince Dominic, Arendelle will become nothing more than a tributary of Easthaven. And Queen Elsa will become like her mother, the queen who never speaks for fear of arguing with her husband. She's been trained for a marriage like that by her parents' example."
"But at least we'll have the military protection we can't afford to provide for ourselves," Gustav said bitterly, repeating the argument that King Agdar had used.
"What is his motive? Why does Prince Dominic want to court Queen Elsa? The advantage is all one-sided. We never did find out what King Agdar had promised to Easthaven to bring about the match," Rodmund said.
"You saw the letter – he's heard of her beauty," Gustav replied with a dismissive laugh.
Rodmund didn't even bother with that one. "Why does Easthaven want to absorb Arendelle? What do we have that they could possibly want? We already ship them lumber as part of our defense alliance treaty for building their navy. We don't have anything else that could tempt them."
Gustav shook his head. "I don't know. But I would dearly love to greet him with news of Queen Elsa's legally binding betrothal to Bern by the time he arrives. We could present him with a wedding invitation at the dock and an apology that he wasted his time sailing here."
Rodmund nodded. "We chose Bern for Queen Elsa because he is so gentle and patient, but perhaps we do need to find a way to hurry him along."
Gustav heaved a long sigh. "I must tell Queen Elsa of Prince Dominic's request for an audience with her to present his suit. We've had an understanding in the past that I was to turn down prospective suitors without bringing each one to her attention, but now that she is crowned and of age, I need more specific instruction about her wishes."
"Have you gotten many of those letters since her coronation?" Rodmund asked.
"This is the first," Gustav said. He gave Rodmund a wicked grin. "There was a veritable flood of courtship requests in the year leading up to her coronation, and then for some odd reason, suitors made themselves scarce."
"Yet another benefit of being the strange cousins of Europe," Rodmund commented.
"After the council meeting, let's have a talk with Bern about his intentions towards Queen Elsa. We may not need to tell him about the betrothal that never was if we find out that they've already come to a private agreement and are holding back a public announcement to allow Princess Anna her time in the spotlight," Gustav said.
"You're as good as Princess Anna at making up happy endings to fairy tales," Rodmund told him.
"Yes, I am. After we talk to Bern, we'll tell Queen Elsa about this letter from Easthaven. Come then, let's get to the council meeting. I understand Bern has submitted four items to the agenda about the economy," Gustav said.
"He has," Rodmund confirmed.
"There's nothing like a long morning discussing economics to damp down fears about foreign relations," Gustav said.
"It will give us the opportunity to discern Queen Elsa's feelings for Bern," Rodmund pointed out as he got the door.
Gustav raised his eyebrows in a question.
"If she can remain awake and attentive through hours of listening to Bern talk about the economy, we'll know she's passionately in love with him," Rodmund said. "If she dozes off, we'll start worrying."
Chapters will be posted on Tuesdays and Fridays. Reviews are appreciated.