Summary: Heeding his mother's warning, Robb sends Theon to Arendelle in the Bay of Seals, instead of to the Iron Islands, to woo the Lady Elsa for aid during the War of the Five Kings.
She was so beautiful and delicate, but she was of ice, of dazzling, sparkling ice; yet she lived; her eyes gazed fixedly, like two stars; but there was neither quiet nor repose in them.
- The Snow Queen
Anna of Arendelle hosts the welcoming feast and Theon thinks my, what a beddable wench we have here.
"We married for love," the bridegroom assures him. A good-looking fop, Theon decides of Ser Hans, the youngest in a brood of thirteen from a fecund family in the Riverlands. Pompously he picks up the girl's limp wrist and kisses it. She flinches, a host of emotions playing on her transparent face. "It was love at first sight."
"It was marriage at first sight, certainly," Lady Anna says, without a trace of irony. By right she should rule Arendelle in her sister's absence but her husband seems to have taken over as lord and castellan both. A subtle man, free with his smiles and ruthless in his charm - everything his young wife is not. Courtesy is his armour, Theon decides, amused as he remembers Lady Catelyn's constant admonitions to her daughters.
Under his expansive host and his soft hostess and the generosity of the feasting board, Theon begins to enjoy himself. Her sister can't be so bad after all, he decides, and on the way back I might even have time to give this one a merry night. She'd welcome it. They might have married for love but Theon is willing to wager it was all on the feckless girl's side.
Ser Hans speaks of Arendelle's trade in furs and ice and tin, the goodness of the late Lord Stark of lamented memory and the greatness of his son. On the matter of his reclusive good-sister he is reticent, on the matter of the paucity of men he has delivered to Winterfell even more so.
"You must understand how small Arendelle is and how few able-bodied men we have. I would have led them myself," he says, with a sigh as deep as the Bay of Seals, "but for Lady Anna's condition. I could never leave her alone, certainly not when she carries so heavy a burden." He smiles indulgently, a tender husband, and rests his hand on her stomach. Lady Anna opens her mouth but her husband cuts her off smoothly once again, leaving her looking pettish with her mouth half-open.
"My lady is very young and so fragile. She has never shouldered the yoke of rule - except perhaps in the matter of her little pets." He chuckles and then adds delicately, "If the Lady Elsa chooses to grace our young lord with her presence might not, ahem, concessions be made for Arendelle?"
"King," Theon reminds him. "Robb Stark was crowned at Riverrun."
"Of course," Ser Hans agrees amiably, "my loyalties are not conflicted. King Robb is my only king. My father and brothers – twelve of them, you know – are all loyal bannermen to the Tullys of Riverrun. It is different for Anna and Elsa of course, they have their ties to the Westerlands..."
"Lannister cousins we've never seen, save at my wedding," Anna says, grimacing. "Lady Rapunzel of Corona is my cousin, her mother and mine were sisters."
"About the concessions-" Ser Hans wheedles.
"You'll have them," Theon says curtly and Hans' eyes sparkle like those of a young maid in love. "Your men will be sent back if we can come to arrangements with Lady Elsa."
Arendelle is, as Hans has more than twice pointed out, too small, too meanly equipped with men and arms to be of much strategic importance. The White Witch will more than make up for a hundred odd peasants. That's what his men have taken to calling her - the White Witch who can summon winter storms with the cock of a finger and ice wolves and bears to lie at her feet, a dark sorceress who cut out her heart and offered it to the old gods for powers undreamed of. But young and beautiful for all that, he thinks, why must all dark sorceresses be so scintillating?
Ser Hans relaxes. "That should weigh heavily with my good-sister. She is a gentle soul, truly, for all that men like to say that she is as cold as she is fair."
"Fair?" Theon asks, deciding to turn on his charm. He smiles at his hostess. "Can she be as fair as the Lady Anna?" Two pretty sisters, he thinks, idly wondering if he can bag both of them, one after the other. I've never had two pretty sisters one after the other. Or together, come to think of it.
Lady Anna, the dear, sweet, ignorant girl, turns a pretty shade of pink. Compliments are coin she has seldom been paid in - certainly not through the long years of her lonely girlhood. Certainly not after the short, sweet days of her courtship or her loveless marriage. "You are too kind, Ser Theon," she mumbles, looking down at her feet. "Elsa has always been beautifuller than me. I mean," she says nervously, fiddling with her hair, "more beautiful. More beautiful than me."
"By all the gods, Anna," Hans says sharply, his facade cracking by a sliver. He tucks her hair firmly behind her ear and shoots a cold look at Theon. A warning. "Stop fidgeting like a child." But behind her husband's back, Theon shoots her a smile – a secret smile that causes her to start violently and put her elbow in the butter dish.
The other woman's smile faded. "What we are is what you made us. On Bear Island every child learns to fear krakens rising from the sea."
- A Dance with Dragons
Two sisters, little girls from the village, play in the snow. Their castles are chest-high, their knights armed with sticks, armored in stones. The older girl, with her carrot-colored braids, lies down in a fresh patch and spreads her arms and legs to trace out a winged fairy. But her little sister, her hair a softer rose-gold, kneels and carefully cobbles a snowball together, just as she has been taught. Elsa knows all about them, all about the candied apples that Merium sneaks from her mother's pantry and the velvet hood that little Elsa loves but is only allowed to wear on feast-days and name-days. Little Elsa, named for her.
"Ellie, put on your mittens," the older one says, "Mama'll be mad at me if you catch a cold."
Five-year-old Ellie pokes her tongue out. "Shan't." Her mitts hang from a cord on her neck - warm new ones of red wool, as red as her plump cheeks.
"Lady Elsa sent them specially for all of us," Mirrie reminds her, sitting up and scraping snow off her hair. "What if she's looking down from her castle right now, watching us? You wouldn't want to make her cross, would you?"
"Mirrie," little Ellie wails but with a quick glance at the castle looming behind her, she slips her mittens over her hands again. Fear was the only way Anna ever did her duty either, Elsa thinks and it saddens her to remember that the last time she and her sister were so carefree they were no older than Mirrie and Ellie.
She turns slowly to her own duty. "I shall be pleased to bid welcome to Theon Greyjoy," she tells the messenger smoothly. Hans has sent him to her on his swiftest horse, hours before the rest of the Greyjoy party straggling from the castle. He is shivering in his stained furs and taking pity on him, she says, "You will want to warm and refresh yourself before you leave, no doubt. Go down to the village - you can see the children playing behind the cottages, yes? - and tell them that the Lady Elsa has sent you."
"My thanks, Your Ladyship." He bows and adds, "Meaning no offense, m'lady, but its beastly cold here."
She smiles faintly at him. "Yes, I suppose it must be," she acknowledges, "for my part, I have never felt the cold."
He lingers and unbidden, voices an opinion of his own. Others may say what they will of the Lady of Arendelle, her own people have never been one to slander her, nor fear her unduly either. "Them krakens," he says and spits, to make his opinion plain. "Never up to any demned good, are they?"
"No," she agrees. From a thousand years and more, the folk of the Drowned God and the folk who follow the old ways, have been at war. Every child from Bear Island to Arendelle to White Harbor has known to dread and despair of the krakens. In that, Elsa is not alone.
"I hope my lady will deal with them as they deserve." Squirming, the man adds in a low voice as though fearing a reprimand, "Ser Hans and my Lady Anna seemed mighty friendly with the Greyjoy."
"They would," Elsa murmurs. Anna was always too sweet and trusting, Hans a convivial fox. "But you may be sure that I will deal with them as they deserve." He doffs his cap to her, grinning, and she waves him away.
When she turns back to the window again, the children have slipped back home. Perhaps it is for the best. By the time Stark's men and his foster brother reach her, the sun is at its highest point in the sky. She watches them from her frosted window, leaving their horses at the foot of the sweeping stairs that lead into her palace, too slippery to be taken save on foot. Stout and sturdy northmen all, as like to her own people that she would never be able to tell the twain apart.
Their leader though, the pretty lordling in his black plate and mail... A boy off the Iron Islands, she thinks darkly. And we all know what those are made of. Salt and seaweed and sin. The wolves at her feet seem to sense her agitation. When the men pass through the open doors to her hall, they rouse and snarl, fangs bared.
"The White Witch," she hears one say, quite distinctly. When she turns her eye on him, he is the first to drop to his knees and whimper. For mercy or his mother's milk, who can say? Others follow, those fierce mailed men toppling like the ninepins she and Anna used to play with, when struck by the weighted lead ball. And in the end, it is only the pretty lordling with his dancing black eyes who still stands before her. He flashes her a white smile, a knowing smile and she thinks that if ever a face was made for laughing, his was.
"Lady Elsa," he says, sweeping her a courtly bow. "I am Theon Greyjoy, son to Lord Balon Greyjoy and heir to the Iron Islands, foster brother and ambassador to His Grace, Robb Stark, the King in the North."
She curls her hands around the armrests in her throne. "Be welcome, Theon Greyjoy," she says curtly, "and state your business plainly. It does not please me to have visitors linger. It is only as a favor to my good-brother that I receive you at all."
"But surely you owe it to your liege lord to receive an envoy, Lady Elsa."
"He is my liege lord in name alone," she says frostily. "Arendelle is small and self-contained, we have always kept to ourselves and Winterfell has been content to ignore us. So it has been for a hundred years and more. Why now does Winterfell seek out Arendelle? We have sent off our men so that the boy king can play at his southron wars - what more would you ask of us?"
As she speaks she cannot help but become agitated at the presumption of this Ironborn boy and his spoilt little lord. The wolves at her feet stir and growl menacingly and the snowflakes on her cloak seem to dance.
"King Robb is only avenging his father's murder, as is meet."
"A dutiful son then. Should I then seek to avenge my father and mother by making war on the sea?"
The boy's lip curls in disdain. "The sea is a force of nature."
"So is Tywin Lannister, by all accounts," she points out dryly. "Robb Stark is a fool and a proud, vengeful fool at that."
"They call him the Young Wolf for good reason. I have fought beside him in every battle, he has not yet lost one," Theon says defensively.
"A handful of battles does not win a war," she says softly, her eyes narrowing. The gods know if I know nothing, this much I know. Visions flicker behind her half-closed eyelids – iron bangles, frost cracking steel mittens, the slow burn of a whip against bare skin and her sister, a limp rag doll, a trickle of blood from the side of her mouth. With a mighty effort, she holds herself in place and opens her eyes wider, forcing them to meet the mockery in his. She will not yield. She will not. "State your business, Theon Greyjoy, and then be gone."
So he begins, spinning out a courtier's words and at the end she cocks her head to the side and says, "The boy king might wear the crown but I see that it is Catelyn Tully who holds the scepter. I see that I am summoned south like an errant kitchenmaid. Why should I come with you for a cause I do not believe in, for a king I expect will soon fall? I am content here, I am safe here." And you do not have the wherewithal to drag me where I will not be sent, she thinks with satisfaction. And for a moment, the power she has dreaded and feared for years is sweet to savor.
"There will be concessions for Arendelle, your people will be sent back to their homes-"
"Do you think me such a soft-hearted fool as to fall for that?" The answer is plainly yes. She tries to look cold and forbidding but her face twists in guilt. A woman's heart after all.
He says nothing. Instead, he takes a step closer to her and involuntarily she curls back against her throne. Her wolves rise, fur prickling and fangs bared, but he takes another step and another until he is but a foot away from the dais. Her fierce defenders circle him and she knows the cold must cut through to his skin, past even layers of steel and boiled leather. But they cannot defend her from herself. What a comely face he has, she thinks in spite of herself. So… warm.
"Content." He slides the word like a skinning knife through flesh and smiles. "A beautiful woman like you? Tell me, my lady, when was the last time you set foot outside Arendelle? When was the last time a man paid court to you as you were meant to be courted?"
"You are presumptuous, Greyjoy." She sucks in her lower lip and then, remembering that she is not a little girl, frowns coldly at him.
"So I have been told, and often. Are you never lonely?"
"Never." Always. "This is my sanctuary."
"Say rather your cell." His voice is pitched so low that it does not go beyond them. "I had one too, my lady, since I was a boy of nine."
"And are you your own man now?" she asks dryly. "No, I think not."
His eyes flash in resentment for a moment, before he captures himself. "Not today," he says lightly. "But soon. Open your eyes, sorceress. The world is changing."
"But not fast enough," she blurts out.
His eyes burn a hole through hers, as though they could peel past silk and skin and sinew to her shivering, naked heart. "How will you know if you never dare see?" He bows and steps back.
"I need time," she says fretfully, her voice loud enough to carry back to his men. "I will not be pressed into such a grave undertaking."
"Certainly, my lady," he says, the soul of politeness. "Perhaps we might discuss it over a meal?"
She almost laughs at his presumption. "I think not, Ser," she says coolly. "I believe that you shall be pleased to take your men and make your way back to my sister and good-brother. I believe that you shall then be delighted to wait before I am ready to make my answer to you. Or else-" she adds, smoothing her gown and smiling wolfishly, "I believe that there might be repercussions that you would be ill equipped to face. In the meantime, I invite yourselves to enjoy all the hospitality that Arendelle can offer."
"It would be an honor to wait on the word of so fair a lady," he says gracefully, "And while I wait, I am sure I can find something to occupy myself with. Or someone."
'Spring has forgotten this garden,' they cried, 'so we will live here all the year round.' The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver.
- The Selfish Giant
"Take me with you."
She lies still in bed, a whispering little china doll. Red-gold hair fans out on the sheets, in the candlelight the freckles on her nose stand out starker than ever. He knots the ties at the neck of his fine linen shirt and pretends not to hear. But then she tugs on his elbow with small, insistent fingers and it is harder to ignore her.
"Theon, please, take me with you. Elsa won't mind and Hans-" an edge of hysteria, the kind he has a healthy experience and dread of from chance encounters with virgins, creeps into her voice. "I loathe him! I don't want him, I don't want his baby! This was all a mistake, I never thought, I was a child and I thought I was in love, I-"
He gathers her in his arms, tumbled hair and clinging sheets, and wishes that she were a peasant girl he could toss a coin to in lieu of her lost maidenhead. But for all her savory innocence, Anna of Arendelle is no maiden, she is another man's wife and soon to be a mother. But that had only served to make her even more delicious when he first saw her, a tart challenge.
Now Theon curses his cocky arrogance and prays that he can soothe her before she can make a scene and wake up the whole castle. "Shh, sweetling," he whispers, rubbing her back, "you know how much I love you, how much these days have meant to me-"
She looks up at him with trusting blue eyes as he continues in this vein. For a moment he marvels at how much she reminds him of Sansa, sweet, pretty, little Sansa whom he had once thought he might marry.
"But I can't," he whispers, "we both can't. We have our duty – you to Arendelle and your unborn child and I to my king."
"Will I never see you again?" she sniffles as he kisses her forehead. She curls around him even tighter, like a vine around the trunk of a tree and he think it'll be beastly long and hard to get her to unwind herself. But I can deal with it, he thinks, just as long as she behaves herself tomorrow at the docks.
"Of course you will, pet," he assures her smoothly. "Dry your tears now. This war will soon be over and I'll be back with her sister and then – who knows? Anything could be possible when Robb is our king."
"I love you," she whispers. "Oh Theon, you have no idea how much."
Hardly flattering. You seem to love everyone. "And I love you," he says, "I have never seen a more beautiful woman." Except your sister, a small, traitorous voice says.
"Not even Elsa?" A little jealousy creeps into her voice. He can understand – he has had older brothers too. Before Ned Stark killed them, of course.
"No, not even Elsa," he lies blithely. It takes a good deal of nuzzling, a few dozen kisses and teary promises, but finally she lets him go, blessedly an hour before daybreak.
They fly the kraken and the direwolf aboard The Merry Maid, but in the morning they have set up new flags as well. The green-and-purple pennants of Arendelle, with the profile of a crowned woman embossed in gold.
Lady Elsa watches the shore and the silver palace recede from the deck, a small frown knitting her brows. "I have never been anywhere else," she confesses, with a small catch in her voice.
He nods and suppresses a yawn behind his fingers.
"I did not sleep much either, last night," she murmurs, giving him a wan smile. They call her the White Witch but when Theon looks at her, he sees a child, as innocent and trusting as her sister.
"You must be cold, my lady," he says, offering her an arm. "Would you not rather wear a cloak?"
She shrugs. "It is all the same to me," she said, "I have never felt the cold. The Targaryens were said to never feel heat either," she adds resentfully when he raises his eyebrows at her either. "I do not see why it should surprise you so. We are descended in an unbroken line from the First Men, just as they are of Valyria. Some say we are even older than they, that we are come from the Children of the Forest." Or the White Walkers, she thinks with a small shiver. There have been so many tales told of the sorcerers of Arendelle that she finds it hard to keep them all straight.
"Yes, my lady," he says, seeming suitably chastised. "But as I remember, Targaryens can burn. And the Children of the Forest can freeze."
Conceal it.
Don't feel it.
Don't let it show.
- Frozen
A poor sort of king, she thinks when introduced to Robb Stark. Barely fifteen and still growing, she towers over him. He's growing an innocuous peach fuzz on his cheeks, the ghost of a beard, and she thinks that his men would do better to laugh at him and turn back home. But that is before she hears him speak.
She curls her toes inside her boots and thinks what a child she must seem next to him, petulant and tongue-tied and whispery-voiced. She was never forward or demonstrative as a child, that was always Anna, and after her first outburst she was taught to be even more withdrawn, more recalcitrant. What did you think would happen to me, Father? she thinks with a flare of resentment, not for the first time. Did you think you could lock me away forever? Did you ever think that you might die and leave me alone? Did you think at all, outside your fear?
"You must be proud of your son, my lady," she tells Lady Catelyn, in a feeble attempt at small talk.
The proud woman's blue eyes flash. "Yes," she says, "I have always been proud of Robb." She is as wary as all the southroners are around Elsa. Arendelle is to the North and the Iron Islands what Dorne was to the Targaryens, she thinks, but we are a part of the North and they of us and we have a truce, an understanding, no matter how uneasy. But we might as well be snarks and grumkins so far as these Andals are concerned.
The maester who they bring to her wears a collar with dozens of colored links and one among them is Valyrian steel. "We do not have much use for maesters in Arendelle," she tells him to his face. "We never have, for such southron ways."
"Far be it for me to question the old ways," he says gracefully. "Herbalists and midwives can serve as well as a maester in many cases, but in the manner of the more arcane arts-"
She stands up abruptly, knocking against the table and sending a dozen frail scrolls scattering. "You are trying to study me," she says flatly, "that was not in our agreement."
Theon finds her hours later in the godswood, her rage simmering down into a sulk. He skirts carefully around the iced path that she has frozen into being (accidentally, of course) and says dryly, "You know, if I wanted to be alone I'd not make myself so easy to find. A trail of breadcrumbs could not be less subtle."
If she had anyone else in the world she could trust - a family servant, her sister, gods, even Hans - she would have sent Greyjoy away. But in the midst of a war camp, in the south, she is alone and he is the only one she has even the faintest connection to, so she lets him stay. For a kraken he is not so bad, she has had to acknowledge. But then he is only half a kraken, half a northman. Sometimes he can even make her laugh - though she does not make a habit of doing it in front of him.
She plays with the end of her braid, slipping loose from the twisted bun she usually wears it in. "I will not be made a fool of," she says quietly. "My father knew well how to deal with those grey rats when they came scampering and sneaking around and I can too."
He perches on a flat rock at her feet. "Well, I suppose he was curious."
"Him and all the rest of them, ever since there was a Citadel." She chews on a hangnail. "And possibly before. To know a secret is to make it your own."
"And is your magic a secret?"
"It's in my blood," she says simply. "It was in my father's and his before him since there ever was an island in the Bay of Seals. The power of ice and snow." But not in Anna's blood. "It cannot be explained or reasoned away."
"The maesters say magic fled the world after the dragons died," he remarks absently.
"The fire wyverns and worms from the south," she says, curling her hands in her lap. She is clad only in the lightest of silks, yet the heat of the southron autumn is almost oppressive. This is not my place. "Perhaps there are still dragons left. Ice dragons. When I was a little girl, in happier days, my father would tell me stories about them, dragons north of the Wall that The Children tamed and rode."
"And yet he hid you away for years," Theon says idly. "His pretty heiress. Such a shame that was."
He feared me, she thinks but it is not something she can say aloud. Perhaps he was jealous of me. "Mine were... unusually strong," she says. "Too strong for a child to handle. He did it to spare me, to make my life easier."
"And can you handle them now?"
No. Why else would I turn tail and flee from my sister? "Yes," she says, more bravely than she feels. She knows what he is thinking, what they have all thought of her - that she is half-mad, a danger to herself and others, a hermit, a hysterical girl. Half-weak, half-crazed. Pitiful and dreadful.
Unbidden, he takes her hand from her lap, turning it over and pressing a kiss in her palm before curling her fingers over it like a keepsake. It is a presumption, but a pleasant one and she has not the heart to pull away. "Oh are you not the most perfect chevalier," she says coolly, with some sad attempt at mockery. It does not seem to work for he flashes a smile up at her as if her reaction pleases him.
"In the face of such beauty, yes. You will find me less... chivalrous if I am roused." For a moment they sit quite still and then she untangles her hand from his and sits up straighter, priming her mouth into a thin, stubborn line. But before she can say anything he says quietly, "But my lady, I would advise you not to fear. We are in the midst of a war."
"Of course I know-"
"-and so there is nothing to handle," he says, flashing her a mocking smile. "There is no need to wind yourself up so tightly, like the coils on a mangonel. Let loose. Teach them who you are. Show them what you are."
A/N: Well I've been planning to write a Frozen/Game of Thrones crossover (and especially an Elsa/Theon pairing!) for a long time, so this has been in the works for quite a while with constant editing and retouching and generally being forgotten and rewarmed at unperiodic intervals. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed it!