Hans would have died in Kongenhaavn, the capital port-city of his homeland, if not for the coming of the worst winter the Southern Isles had ever seen. The cerulean sky bleached white like a dying coral reef, seeds refused to germinate in the hardened earth, streams iced over so swiftly you could see fish preserved mid-wriggle beneath the solid surface. There was actually very little snow. Everything just froze up where it lay. Such a thing had never happened in the Southern Isles before.
So unnatural a freeze, everyone knew, could only be a curse from the hands of the Snow Queen, sent to punish Hans Westergaard and all his countrymen for his crimes. When Arendelle sent aid to every nation touched by the winter except the Southern Isles, the theories were practically confirmed. Crown Prince Caleb declared it to be more than an outpouring of hurt royal feelings: it was an act of war, which could only be answered by immediate escalation. Their father had always been able to contain Caleb's volatile nature; but King Jahan's health had suffered in the freeze, and Caleb's fomentation was gaining support. If the winter didn't end soon, or King Jahan didn't get a better hold on his hot-headed eldest son, there could be a confrontation between the Southern Isles and Arendelle. There could even be a war. Everyone knew it, including Hans, which was why he left.
One of Lars's men smuggled Hans onto a ship bound for Corona, a journey of five days. He was within a few footsteps of discovery the whole way, and dared not leave his hiding place even to relieve himself. He ate sparingly of the hardtack Lars had provided him for the journey, collected rainwater in a jug to drink, and voided himself into a jar he found rolling around on deck. This he emptied over the side of the ship, in the dark of night when he was less likely to be spotted. More than once in the heaving inky confusion of a night at sea, light-headed from hunger and thirst, he confused the two containers.
Hans had never fancied being a mere passenger on a ship. Being a stowaway was worse.
Things improved in Corona, where no one was on the lookout for any version of Hans; he doubted even Eugene Fitzherbert, whom he'd sat next to and conversed with several times two years ago in Arendelle, would recognize him now. It was not just the beard or the constellation of scars that now covered his face and arms and neck (his brothers having seen fit to leave their most lasting marks where they would be most humiliatingly apparent). It was not the nose that had been broken several times and set almost straight each time, but not quite. Nor was it that the very shape of him had changed, the sleek and catlike brawn of his earlier days replaced by sinewy hardness, the muscles of his arms and back as tough as boiled shoe leather.
The change was both simpler and more complete than the mere redecorating of his outer shell. Hans did not carry himself like a prince anymore. He was nobody now, and looked it.
Lars had given him a purse filled with coins, with which he purchased passage to Arendelle on the earliest available vessel. Recognizable or not, Hans had no desire to spend the intervening four days on the town, although in another life he would have found much to interest him about Corona's port city. He rented a room at an inn and bartered stable-services for board. Lars's purse was more than sufficient to keep him, but he was more comfortable around horses than people. And anyway, shoveling shit took his mind off the fact that if all went well, in three weeks he would be dead.
The journey to Arendelle took fifteen days. For two weeks, Hans succeeded in not thinking about what he was about to do.
For one day, he thought of nothing else.
He had not told Lars his intention, of course. If nothing else, Lars would have refused to help him sneak off the palace grounds. Likely, he would also have pled with his younger brother, reasoned with him, tried to sway him, gotten Helga to weep on his bosom, that sort of thing, and it might even have worked.
"Caleb doesn't seriously think Queen Elsa is responsible for all— all this," he heard now in Lars's voice. The conversation was imagined, as were most of Hans's conversations these days. "This winter— it is not an act of war. Caleb knows that, deep down. And if it were, how would your death solve it?"
Now, leaning out over the railing of the stout trading ship that carried him every moment closer to his doom, he mentally recited the reasoning behind his journey north.
"This cursed winter is my doing, so I should bear responsibility for ending it. If it is wrath against me that brought the winter, might not vengeance bring about its end? If the winter is not soon lifted, Caleb's desire to attack Arendelle will only gain support. Break the winter, break his plans. And you know my death would please him, too. As soon as our father is dead I expect him to arrange for me to follow anyway; should not my death serve a higher purpose, then, of ending the curse and fostering peace between nations?"
Lars of course would argue that Caleb didn't want his youngest brother's head on an icicle, not really, not anymore, though neither of them would believe it. To avoid the whole debate Hans had withheld his true motive for sneaking out of the Southern Isles. He had merely said that he could not live there any longer. Lars had hugged him and looked sad and given him clothes and food and a purse full of money, and that was that.
One thing galled Hans more than the knowledge that most of his brothers wanted him dead, and that all of this might really be his fault: if Elsa had sent winter to the Southern Isles, she had sent it knowing it would kill the weak, the poor, the infirm, long before it killed even an outcast member of the royal family. Such cruelty he would not have expected of her. How had the last two years changed her?
Years ago, Hans had stood in the snow and wind on the side of a mountain and begged her not to give in to the violent urges that grow up in the dark corners of the mind. His entreaty had been completely sincere, and he had felt much more sympathy for her than he ever had toward himself. Even now he wondered how much of it had been addressed to her, how much to himself.
"Do not become the monster they fear you are," a younger Hans had implored a younger Queen Elsa. His entreaty had seemed to work, at least for a little while.
What kind of monster had she become, to punish a whole country for one man's crime?
Hans did not have any particularly bright plan for gaining an audience with the Queen. He simply walked through the capitol city of Arenby, always toward the castle, until a guard stopped him and asked him his business.
"I am Hans of the Southern Isles. The Queen of Arendelle wishes to see me." Or will, as soon as she realizes I just broke exile.
The guard looked as if he did not know whether to laugh at this or shout for reinforcements. Reinforcements came anyway: another guard had recognized Hans through the scars and nose and wiry frame and beard, and he was dragged with surprising swiftness and discretion to a prison cell.
It occurred to Hans during the six hours he waited in that cell that the Queen might decide not to see him at all. Dying of starvation in a chilly cell in Arendelle wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but he had hung his hopes on at least warning her of Caleb's plans to make a show of force.
He spent most of those six hours standing on tiptoe in a corner, peering through the only window the bare cell afforded, trying to absorb just a little more sunlight before he died. There hadn't been sunlight in the Southern Isles in months, not really. By pure numbers even a harsh winter in the South was probably nothing in the North, and Hans was physically colder in this cell than he'd been in his stable back home. But this winter had not overpowered the people of Arendelle as it had in his country. To them it was just another season. There was a naturalness to what little he saw through this unglazed window, a cheeriness. There were sounds of life and activity, smells of food and resinous burning woods, the sun was clear and fine. Hans felt almost as if he were on holiday.
Yes, there were worse places to die.
Hans sensed her coming a few hours past sunset. First there was a bustle of guards, protests from some advisor silenced with a single word in that painfully familiar voice. He felt the temperature in his cell drop several degrees, saw his breath steam in the air, smelled snow, and then she was there, dismissing her escorts.
"But your Majesty— " her advisor tried once more.
"Thank you, Kai," she said firmly. "That will be all." She did not have to add, What can he possibly do to me now? Hans heard it loud and clear.
He dropped to his knees facing her, eyes respectfully downcast, and listened to her breathing, and waited to be addressed. When she finally spoke (one hundred and seventeen breaths, that was how many it took her to master herself) her voice was quiet and even and deadly.
"Why have you broken exile?"
Hans said, as he'd rehearsed so many times in his mind, "I have come to ask Your Majesty to lift the curse on the Southern Isles. In exchange for the ending of the winter, I offer you my life."
Sixteen breaths followed. Then, "You come alone, without guards or messengers or so much as a note from the King of the Southern Isles. Did not His Majesty fear his oblate would simply disappear into the world and live free?"
"My father is too ill to know what goes on outside his sick chamber. My brother, who has the ruling of the Southern Isles while my father convalesces, does not know I am here," said Hans. He still had not looked on her face, though he was becoming quite intimately familiar with the hem of her gown. It was steely grey, slightly metallic, like the plating on a warship.
After another twenty-eight breaths, Elsa said in a voice of silky disbelief, "Then why have you come, if you were not sent?"
Hans counted his own breaths. It only took him ten to say, "I am here to grovel on my knees, your Majesty, and to offer you my life. Lift the curse. Kill me instead, but please, please, lift the curse from my people. They will not last much longer; my evil was not their doing. They should not bear the punishment for it." The words came out broken and ugly.
Thirty-one. "It is an attractive offer," she said, in a voice that was suddenly not quite her own. Hans raised his head, not to her face but to her waist, which was about on eye-level anyway. With a sudden movement she plucked a shard of ice from thin air and held it in her ungloved hand.
"I kill you, my wrath is satisfied, I lift the curse and your kingdom is saved," she said. She ran the tip of the shard down his cheek. It was so sharp that he barely felt it but, a moment later, several drops of warm blood welled up where it had cut him. A few wisps of shorn beard sprinkled to the stone floor.
"And why should I not think this more trickery on your part?" she said. "Perhaps you wish to incite war. I'll not have my kingdom bound up in a blood feud."
"It is a war I am here to avert," said Hans. He began to talk quickly, to get every word out exactly as he had recited it. "My brother Caleb has long viewed Arendelle as a potential territory of the Southern Isles, an outpost for his navy in the North, that he might have dominion over the Skalding Sea. This has always been a fever dream of his, ever since the death of the King of Arendelle sent your navy into decline. It is only recently, with our father ailing and your winter inciting anti-Arendelle sentiment among his supporters, that Caleb's dream begins to seem possible. Unchecked, he will attempt invasion and redress. Every day that the winter persists, his power grows."
"Power?" Elsa scoffed. "You come to warn me of your brother's lust for power? Thank you, scum, for giving me a laugh today."
"It is true," Hans said, trying to speak past the shame that ebbed and flowed through him, relentless as the tides. "If you would lift the winter before more harm is done, Majesty, what support my brother has for military action would almost certainly falter. While the Isles remain iced over, more and more in my father's cabinet turn desperate. The people of the Isles know only fishing, trade and naval combat. Prevented by your winter from the first two, what is left but the third?"
"How exceedingly good of you to come warn me of this," said the Queen. "And I will of course take you entirely at your word; there is certainly no chance that the royal family of the Southern Isles will take exception to my killing one of their own."
"I am no longer one of their own," corrected Hans. "There is no natural affection between my brothers and me, and I was stripped of first-class citizenship after the— my attempted assassination of the Princess. My brother has always had his eye on Arendelle, and might indeed seek to politicize my death; but without the winter, there will be no one to support him. If you will satisfy yourself with my death and lift the curse from my kingdom, war can perhaps be averted."
"The idea has merit," she said thoughtfully. "I do not deny that I have many times imagined gutting you. Tell me, do you think I won't do it?"
"I'm praying you will," said Hans. "Please, your Majesty, torture me, kill me, do as you like with me, only spare my people. If not for them, then for Arendelle. Even hampered by ice and famine, my brother's navy is a force to be reckoned with. I am afraid of what he might do if this winter is prolonged. He is on a hair-trigger as it is."
"Why should I do anything you ask?" She pressed the blade against his throat. "Am I your servant, to take orders from you?" Her voice, so silky-smooth up till now, grew shrill.
"No, Your Majesty! Forgive me, I didn't mean—"
"Forgive you? There will be no forgiving you, Hans! My sister, you miserable maggot, she's my sister! You deserve no forgiveness, no mercy— you deserve—"
"Then give me what I deserve!" he begged, near tears now, "only let my people live, please! They're dying, Elsa!"
One breath later, she was screaming at him never to address her by that name again. One breath later, she was summoning a storm of hailstones to batter him black and blue. One breath later, she was turning on her heel and sweeping from the cell, the door clanging shut behind her.
Hans barely noticed the passing of time, or his surroundings, so enmeshed was he in his own sense of dread.
She will not do it, he thought. She will not lift the curse. She will punish them all, and Caleb will garner what remaining support he needs. Thousands will die or more, it will be a war no one can win, and no one but yourself to blame.
Or he might think, If there is still a kernel of the old Elsa, the Elsa who had such love in her heart for a sister she barely knew, she will not let this happen. She will lift the curse, if only for Anna's sake. If there is any of that Elsa left...if you did not damage her beyond repair…
And back and forth his thoughts would swing. The only thought that did not change was his conviction that it was all his fault.
On the third day, the Queen reappeared in Hans's cell.
"What happened to the provisions I sent to Kongenhaavn?" she demanded.
"What provisions, Your Majesty?"
"I sent a ship," said Elsa sternly, as if Hans was personally responsible for the unaccounted-for vessel. "She carried rations, such as we could spare. She has returned, empty, reporting her cargo duly remanded to your royal warehouses." She hesitated a moment. "It was not much. We had an excess of lutefisk, and the reindeer herds gave bountifully of their milk and meat and hides this year. We sent what we could, to the Southern Isles and to every other country that applied to us for aid."
Hans could not respond for several moments; he could barely even think.
Why would the Queen offer relief for a curse of her own sending? Of course she could be lying about the provisions. Caleb claimed she had not sent any; Elsa claimed she had.
Hans knew without having to think which of the two he believed.
"Setting aside for a moment the question of provisions," the Queen said, visibly annoyed at Hans's long silence, "why have you come here?"
Hans blinked four times in succession. He thought he'd made it clear. She'd given every indication of understanding when she whipped a knife out of nothingness and held it to his throat.
"I came to exchange my life for the lives of my countrymen," he finally said. "There was a belief, especially when provisions from Arendelle arrived in every port but ours, that the winter must be...must be..."
"Must be my doing?" She sounded furious again. "I didn't realize that was what you were dancing around the other day. And when I did realize it, I couldn't believe it. You think I cursed a whole country?"
Hans hung his head still lower. Now he could only see the bottom six inches of her skirt and the toes of two gleaming white boots. "No sane person would blame you if you did, Your Majesty."
"Well, I didn't," she snapped, and the skirt twirled and swept toward the cell door.
"I know," he said, so quietly he didn't think she heard, and perhaps she didn't, though the boots faltered just a fraction of a step before clicking away down the hall.
Whatever else she might be, Queen Elsa was not the villain here. He had not the guilt of that on his conscience, whatever else he might be responsible for.
The dread, of course, was for what would happen next. He might believe her when she said she'd not sent the curse, but the starving people of the Southern Isles certainly wouldn't. If Elsa had not cursed the Southern Isles she could not very well uncurse them. Caleb's campaign would continue to grow. By the time their father had recovered enough to resume the throne, enough of his cabinet might support retaliation that he would have no choice but to acquiesce.
Any invasion attempt would be doomed to fail. Hans knew, as so few did, the true extent of Elsa's power. But before his inevitable defeat, Caleb would drag the Southern Isles and Arendelle and who knew what other hapless countries into a new era of bloodshed and hardship.
So much for what might happen back in Kongenhaavn; what might Elsa do?
She might still decide to kill Hans. Caleb might be so relieved to have that burden outsourced that he went no further with his plans. This, Hans decided, would be the best possible outcome for everyone, and also the most fantastically unlikely. As much as Caleb wanted Hans dead, he wanted Arendelle more. He'd be more likely to use Hans's death as a bogus excuse to attack. Had not Queen Elsa herself suspected it?
Instead of executing him she might release him to Caleb, who would kill him as soon as their father was dead. For some reason this possibility bothered Hans more than any others. He wanted his death to mean something, which was stupid, he knew. Why should his death mean something when his life did not? Still, he hoped he would die not by Caleb's hand but by Elsa's. It was only fair.
Then again, she might just let him languish in this cell till he died of old age. That possibility was not without its attractions, Hans reflected as he stared out at the portion of bay visible from the window of his cell. Nothing could hurt him in here; he could hurt nothing.
Barring some unexpected natural intervention, such as a sudden warm spring in the Southern Isles or a lucky plague that carried off Caleb and his creeping son, these were the futures that Hans foresaw. They occupied his mind morning, noon and night. The anxiety they produced turned his gut to churning so that it was no difficulty to push away the bowls of gruel the guard shoved into his cell every day.
His only source of comfort was in knowing that the Queen had not cursed his country. How much simpler if she had! But the old Elsa, the one who would rather exile herself than risk hurting a lot of citizens who had just turned on her, lived still. He could not have said why exactly he was so certain she was telling the truth; lord knew his judgment in nearly all other things was laughably fallible. But his belief in her innocence was as unwavering as his belief in his own guilt.
A/N: I wrote this like three years ago and it's still sort of not finished. Hopefully beginning posting will light the requisite fire under my ass.
