Part One: I am high above the tree line

Morning arrives clear and calm, the mountain slopes awash in coral hues painted bright by the rising sun. Last night's howling winds, now abated, remain evident only in the form of towering snow drifts piled against the rocks.

This was a bad idea, Krista thinks as she tries to concentrate on the sensation of fresh powder crunching beneath her boots. A very, very bad idea.

At her back, following in her footsteps, a certain princess has launched breathlessly from one childhood story – "…and they never did get the stains out!" – to another, "Ooh, did I tell you how much Elsa liked ice skating? I was never very good at it, but there's this pond on the castle grounds…"

There was a reason Krista didn't take people places, least of all pretty girls (not that she'd been looking at Anna that way, come on). She still hasn't forgotten the last time she did, still stings from the memory of finding out how wrong her assumptions could be, how the farmer's daughter with the doe eyes and vivacious laugh, who showered her with compliments and Sven with sweet-talk, really was interested in little more than the sleigh rides Krista had so willingly given her to Arendelle's marketplace whenever she passed through the village.

Blinded by infatuation and wishful thinking, spurred on by the naivety of youth, she'd been stupid enough to profess her feelings one day while dropping off that girl at the square. Her stumbling confession was met with chilly indifference and a hasty goodbye. Krista stopped by the farm the following week, apology on her tongue and dread in her chest, only to be chased off by the girl's shouting father, "Keep your filth away from here!" ringing in her ears.

She avoided girls altogether after that, not trusting herself to behave appropriately and deciding the best approach was none at all.

Which is why her current situation has bad news written all over it – Anna isn't just any girl, she's a princess. Who is engaged to a prince. And whose sister is the Queen with powerful ice magic.

"Krista? Hello?"

Oops – said princess must've asked her something and Krista has no idea what. She turns around, continuing to walk backwards, and raises an eyebrow at her.

"Huh?" Krista asks.

"Really Krista, you could've at least pretended to be listening while I rambled," Anna says with a huff. Sven pokes his head over her shoulder and wags his antlers side to side in mock reproach.

"Sorry, I was just…" Krista searches for a plausible explanation, fails, and flaps her arms in a broad shrug instead. "You were saying?"

"I said, what would you be doing now if I hadn't bumped into you at the trading post?"

"Heading south, probably," she replies. "The winter has to stop somewhere, right? I figured Sven and I'd go down the coast until we found warmer places to sell off our harvest. With weather like this, we could cover ten, fifteen leagues a day, easy."

"Oh," says Anna, chin tucked, looking up at Krista through her lashes. "Well, I appreciate you going out of your way to help me find my sister."

"Don't mention it." Krista thinks of her pride and joy smoldering in a heap at the bottom of a chasm. She grimaces. "Really, don't."

"Sorry about your sled," Anna adds as if reading her mind, "and for ruining your plans." She fidgets with the end of a braid. "I seem to be doing that a lot lately."

They've stopped walking and Anna is starting to look so dejected that Krista feels a twinge of regret over her choice of words. Before she can think better of it, she reaches out and touches Anna's elbow.

"Hey. Stop that," Krista says. "You shouldn't dwell on the past; it just… it weighs you down. Better to focus on what you can do now."

Anna brightens – her smile like sunshine coming out from behind a cloud, directed so fully and so radiantly at Krista that her heart skips a beat – and declares, "You're right! That's the best advice I've heard all day!"

Krista rolls her eyes. "That's the only–" but Anna's gone already, bounding past her left side in a flurry of woolen purple and blue, Sven kicking up mounds of snow as he scampers after her like an eager puppy.

Bad idea, Krista reminds herself as she turns and follows after them.

By nightfall, Krista has changed her mind: this wasn't a bad idea. This was a full blown disaster.

Just when she thinks the day can't get any worse, that nothing could possibly top getting thrown out of Elsa's ice palace, chased by an angry snow golem and falling two hundred feet after having her head dashed against the unrelenting cliffside, it does. It gets much, much worse.

She's brought Anna to the valley, painfully aware of her every shake and shiver, mentally cursing her inability to help in the slightest. Grand Pabbie will know what to do, she tells herself to quell the mounting worry. He'll fix this.

But Grand Pabbie is sleeping, and the rest of her family has other ideas. Mortifying ideas.

"Krista's home!" they shout, swarming her in droves. They notice Anna hovering back at the edge of the clearing and blink in unison once, twice, "And she's brought a girl!"

Everyone stares at each other for a beat – Anna looks at Krista in confusion, Krista looks at the trolls in horror, the trolls look to and fro between them both with wide-mouthed glee – and then there's an explosion of mass cavorting and hand-waving. "A GIRL!"

Krista's adoptive mother pushes her way to the front of the throng. "Of course!" Bulda croons, palms open and outstretched. "Why didn't you tell us sooner that's the way you felt, dearie?"

"What? No! Pleasestoptalking," Krista yells in alarm.

"Oh, we're not–" Anna attempts.

It's a lost cause. The trolls have started singing about love, ignoring their protests, shoving them into traditional wedding attire and Krista is pretty sure she would rather be at the bottom of the chasm, on fire, than right here at this moment.

And yet.

And yet she looks over at Anna, smiling despite her confusion, positively glowing beneath the aurora borealis and the elemental crystals crowning her head, and Krista has never seen anything more beautiful in her life.

From across the clearing, Anna looks back, locks eyes with her. She must look ridiculous, because Anna bursts into a fit of giggles and claps a mitten over her mouth. Krista feels a tingling jolt that starts in her heart, races through her veins and makes her weak at the knees. She might have fallen down if the trolls weren't already carrying her into an altar in the ground.

"Do you, Anna, take Krista to be your trollfully wedded-"

"Wait, what?"

And then the farce is over as suddenly as it had begun.

The lights in the valley fade, just like the tentative, nameless hope that had started to whisper inside of Krista.

Anna's life is in peril.

Krista looks down at the girl collapsed in her arms, cold seeping through even her thick winter sleeves, and knows what she has to do.

It's not really giving something up, Krista decides, when it was never yours to begin with.