Midwinter's always hard for Elsa. The season itches under her palms and presses bare rattling branches behind her eyes, and with her nails she draws scrawls of frost on the windows looking out, never meaning to but always managing it anyway. Late nights in her bed she feels the cold starting low in her belly. She curls herself around it, her knees tucked up and her elbows tucked down, but sometimes by morning her pillow's white where she's bitten it and there's snow on the floor, snow on the sheets, the walls. The floorboards start to warp for the wet. The paint peels. Her parents bring in carpenters to fix it and pay them extra for their quiet, and after they've gone the wind howls through the eaves and the carpets molder too, growing green grimy mildew. The weavers keep busy. Elsa goes through countless rugs.
But contending with her power's not the worst thing about midwinter. No: to Elsa, the worst thing about midwinter's the weak little raspy cough Anna gets, year in and year out, and how she comes running to Elsa's door and she sits down hard, too hard, wheezing, and Elsa hears the whistle in her breath and chest and lungs, the whistle that means the north wind, the whistle that means storms, sickness, and cold, cold, cold.
This year, though, the whistle's gone. Anna comes to her door like usual, fresh from tromping around outside. Elsa can hear the snow falling off her boots. Her steps are slow and stumbling, like maybe she can't feel her feet, but sometimes she forgets to put on two pairs of stockings before she going out so Elsa's not worried, not surprised. Anna sits down. She leans into the door a little and it creaks, and she doesn't say anything, and Elsa looks up from her book and wonders if she has her ear to the frame, or if she's trying to peek through the keyhole again. The blotch of Anna's shadow spreads under the door, unmoving.
"Today I made ten snowmen," Anna announces at last. Her voice is different, somehow thick, somehow syrupy, and Elsa closes her book and sits up straighter, frowning. "Ten, Elsa! Ten whole snowmen, with… with stick arms and little rocks for buttons and eyes and bark for hair, like you showed me that one time." She sucks in a strange, swooping breath. "I put them all in a line and I think if you look from—from your window, if you maybe lean out, you can see them. I made it so some of them wave. Can you see them?"
Elsa slips out of bed. She creeps on silent feet to the window. She learned a long time ago that Anna gets excited, gets hopeful if she can hear her walking around, and hope's a thing that hurts worse than a toe stubbed in the dark. Hope hurts bad. So Elsa keeps to the friendlier floorboards and flips open the window latch with a hand cupped over it to muffle the click, and opens the window in tiny little nudges, watching the snow lump up and tumble off the ledge behind it. It's late evening, almost dark. The sky's all purple with lichens of deeper, darker blue creeping up the crest of it, and the night's first stars are like salt sprinkled low along the horizon, twinkling, twinkling. Right at the fjord's edge Anna's snowmen stand sentinel, silhouettes with long shadows. If Elsa squints she can see them waving like Anna promised, the evening breeze alive in their wooden fingers. Elsa smiles and waves back to them, mouthing good evening and goodnight and when you sleep, sleep tight, tight, tight. It's what she used to tell Anna a long time ago, when their beds were still in the same room and they stood at the same window. Built the same snowmen.
"Elsa," Anna says at the door. She pauses and Elsa pulls the window closed again, listening, and Anna says a second time, "Elsa," and her voice, her voice is wrong, it's too tired. Anna's never tired, not this early, not when the moon's barely up and the night's so new. "Elsa, I don't feel good, I didn't feel good this morning and I thought building the snowmen would help but it didn't, it didn't and I don't feel good at all."
Forgetting the floorboards and how they squeak now, Elsa goes to the door and presses her palms to the wood. "What doesn't feel good, Anna?" she asks, and on the other side of the door her sister gives a little hiccupping sob.
"Elsa, hi," she says, and then, "my head, my head's so heavy and it hurts, Elsa, it hurts like when I bonked it on the stairs"—there's a scar just above her eyebrow from that, but Mama showed her how to brush her hair so it's hidden almost all the time—"and swallowing's hard, and I'm hot, I'm so, so hot. I stayed outside so long but it didn't work, it didn't help, I rubbed snow on my face and put it down my sweater—"
"You'll get sick!" Elsa interrupts, aghast. "Anna!"
But Anna goes on like she hasn't heard. "—and I held it in my sleeves but it just melted, it didn't do anything. I'm so hot. I'm hot. Elsa, please," she says, "Elsa," and then there's a sliding sound, a thump, and the shadow under the door bleeds from a blotch to a puddle.
"Anna?" Elsa takes a step back, staring. There's no answer and the rabbit's run of her pulse hikes to a throb in her neck. Her collar's tight, too tight—she opens her mouth and her voice comes out like thread off an old, old spool. "Anna? Anna, this isn't funny."
Silence still. Elsa tries to convince herself that it's a trick, a mean little trick, but Anna's not mean. She's never been mean. Ice crackles in the carpet underfoot and Elsa's fumbling at the lock before she can stop herself, turning the knob, pulling the door open.
Sometimes she has nightmares about time she hurt Anna three years ago, only in the nightmares the troll king doesn't save her sister. In the nightmares Anna's dead before she hits the floor, frozen, and when she lands she shatters into a hundred, hundred pieces. Or sometimes the nightmare changes a little and Anna's still alive until Elsa turns her over and touches her, and then her eyes fill up with frost and her mouth snaps open and there's frost on her tongue too, creeping up the pink wet flesh like fungus. Or worst of all, the nightmare's the same as what happened before until the very end: Elsa's magic hits Anna and Anna falls, and their parents find them, and they rush out into the night and through the forest and the horses snort and run until they foam and lather, and at last the troll king leans over Anna but it's too late, Anna's gone, Anna's still, Anna's cold.
Now feels like a whole new kind of nightmare to Elsa, because Anna's stretched out prone behind the door like she was that night three years ago, the braid with the pale streak through it a limp curl on her shoulder. All the strength goes out of Elsa's legs. She hits the floor and manages a wobbly knee-walk over to her sister, already crying. The tears freeze on her face and she forgets herself, she can't help it, she reaches out. Frost films Anna's sleeve as Elsa turns her over.
Anna's eyes are open but rolled up to the whites, almost, and her mouth's open too and her tongue's a red, red dart against her teeth. Elsa cups her cheek, unthinking still. Ice creeps over Anna's skin only to melt again on the instant, running wet down into her ear's scarlet shell. She's hot, she's so hot, she's burning up.
"Mama!" screams Elsa, gathering Anna into her arms, clutching her. "Mama, Papa!" She feels their footsteps and soon they're with her, kneeling down, pulling Anna away like they did before, like they do in her nightmares, and this time it's not her fault but she's afraid, more afraid than she's ever been, and ice a handspan thick grows up the palace walls like glass.
The fever keeps Anna in bed for days. On the first day the physician tweaks his moustache placatingly and tells the king, "It's a common childhood illness, there's nothing to worry about," but on the second day Anna can't drink anything, her throat's too tight. Elsa hovers behind the door and hears her coughing when the servants try to have her sip water. They give her ice to suck and that's worse, she chokes on it, and Elsa looks in horror through the gap in the hinges and sees them turning Anna on her side, sees Anna's face all red and pinched, her mouth a dark, desperate O. She doesn't go in, she can't, she won't: Papa tries to usher her into Anna's room that evening to visit but she thinks of the ice, thinks of it and Anna's face and her dark, desperate mouth, and she digs in her heels and shakes her head. Papa frowns. He leaves her in the hall, though, and closes the door behind him.
The third day Anna cries from morning to midafternoon. After that she's out of tears, out of noise. The physician goes into her room and comes back outside too quick, his boots clicking on the floorboards. His glasses slide low down his nose. He talks to Mama and Papa. He doesn't tweak his moustache. He speaks to them in a low, quiet voice and Mama clutches at Papa, and Papa puts his hand over his face and his shoulders go twitch, twitch. Elsa thinks open your eyes and see your room and your pillow and the sky through the window, but she can't because this, no, it's not a nightmare. Not this time.
The fourth day, Anna won't wake up.
Shock and snow blanket the palace together. The staff move through the halls like mourners, stiff and shadowed, and Mama and Papa huddle at Anna's bedside and they talk to her, tell her stories, hold her hands. Elsa sits with her back to Anna's door. She stares out the windows off the hallway, numb. The moon's gone somewhere to hide and the sky's dark, dark until little licks of bright light start up where the stars like to shine, unfolding in green ribbons, blue, purple.
Elsa stands. She turns and pushes open Anna's door, and Mama and Papa start and stare at her from either side of her sister's bed.
"I want to talk to her," she says, "please," and they understand. They go, quiet as mice.
Anna's small in the swaddled sheets and pillows and pale coverlets. Her breath's got the whistle Elsa hates so much, only it's dimmed down to a whisper, and Anna's cheeks are spotty with a bright red rash and her mouth's cracked and blistered and dry. Elsa creeps up to stand next to her. She looks down at her a long time, watching her breathe, seeing the changes that were there even before Anna got sick: she's taller, a little. She has more freckles than Elsa remembers. Her hair's long.
"Anna," Elsa says, and waits, and leans over and whispers, like it's a secret, "Anna, the sky's awake. So you should be too. Remember? Anna, please."
Nothing. Anna's chest rises, jitters, falls. No more.
Elsa hovers her hands over Anna's face, her throat. She can feel the heat in both, burning, boiling, and she closes her eyes against the dark snowy raging cold blooming deep her in chest, her belly. When she speaks again it's not to Anna.
"Get out," she says, and she's pulling her gloves off, the pretty blue gloves Papa gave her for her birthday. "Get out"—she drops the gloves, reaches for Anna, cups Anna's scalding face—"get out, get out of her, she's my sister. You can't stay, you can't have her, she's only eight and she belongs here and she's mine, my sister, my little sister, get out—"
Anna's mouth works. There's ice in her hair and on her cheeks, bumpy atop the rash, wet ice but not done, not gone, not melting. Elsa runs a trembling hand over Anna's poor blistered lips and Anna sucks at them feebly, tossing her head on her pillow. She licks Elsa's palm, licks the stippled ice there, opens dull, glazed eyes and husks out, "Elsa," just once. She's shivering.
"Oh, oh ssshh," says Elsa, because Anna's crying and she's crying too. "Ssssh, Anna, ssshh, I'm here, I've got you, see? Ssssh." She clambers into the bed alongside Anna, fits her knees to Anna's hip and peppers her face with kisses, every new freckle. She holds her half in her lap, watching the frost bud on her fingers and watching it melt, watching Anna's red, red tongue catch the droplets. "Sshhh, I'll get you water, I'll get you something better than that," she promises, and she calls for Mama then, calls for Papa, and Anna threads hot little fingers through her sleeve and clutches it tight, tight, tight.
But: the winter weather lingers long after the season passes. The harvest suffers. The stable buckles and three horses and a groom suffocate under the snow before the diggers reach them. Summer comes but it comes late, comes like it's shy, comes like it's scared. Elsa closes herself in her room and pulls the gloves back on, and when Anna sits at her door and says in a croak, "I dreamed you were there, Elsa, I dreamed you chased away the fever, I dreamed you saved me," Elsa pretends not to hear her, and at long last the sun slips out to shine again.