In which Elsa is an only child, a future warrior queen, and Anna a werewolf. Of sorts. Darkish.
On the day Elsa was born, she put a frost on her silver baby rattle so thick it looked like a snowball wrapped around her fist.
On her first birthday, the Princess skated on shaky infant legs across the frozen nursery floor into her mother's arms.
Her fifth year marked the beginning of her lessons. Her father, King Agdar, hired a score of tutors to teach her math, reading, strategy, diplomacy, history, dance, fencing, and everything else necessary to rule a kingdom.
In her sixth year, King Agdar added special lessons on wielding her powers, after her diplomacy tutor stabbed himself through the foot on one of her icicles. Her mother, a gentle soul, wanted Elsa to use her powers creatively for ladylike endeavors, but the King saw her powers as a tool and weapon to leverage against foes. Her parents divided over the disagreement, the Queen moving to a separate wing of the castle where Elsa saw her but rarely.
Elsa's eighth birthday had her joining the pages in the knight's hall, to learn the ways of war from the ground up. For a full month, fear of her royal status kept the other pages' tongues tied, and she learned in peace. When they began tormenting her, tripping her when she brought food to the knights' table so she spilled it and earned a cuff to the ear, ganging up on her in empty hallways, leaving bruises always hidden under her uniform, Elsa was frightened.
She went to her mother, who was horrified. The Queen told Elsa to give up her father's foolish dream of being a warrior queen, to instead apply herself to the more feminine pursuits of poetry and dance, embroidery and art. Elsa could leave the violence to men, she said. The queen said she could marry a warrior, thus removing the need to become one herself.
But Elsa could not deny her duty, nor her desire to be a queen mighty for her own sake, not mighty based on the strength of another. So she went to her father. The King told Elsa to fight back. To fight back openly when her opponents jabbed from shadows, to bring the beatings from deserted hallways to open courtyards where others would see her attackers' cowardice. To use her powers against her foes, so they would fear and respect her.
Elsa obeyed.
On her ninth birthday, she sat at the royal table with her parents, dressed for once as a princess rather than a page, a special treat for her birthday celebration. From there she watched the other pages flutter about the hall, dispersing food and drink. Not a one disturbed her, nor looked her in the eye, nor spoke to her. She turned to her mother, only to see the same look of fear on her face as on theirs.
Consumed by grief and loneliness, Elsa fled into the forests surrounding the castle. She ran until the sun set and her legs gave way beneath her, and slept huddled against a damp, moss-covered old oak.
The morning light found her scratched and bruised, lost and without food. She followed the sound of water to a stream, and bent down to drink.
The light scrabble of nail against stone was the Princess' only warning as instinct and training took over. She jumped back and sent out a shot of air so cold it would freeze anything in its path. The frozen body of her victim hit the ground she'd stood on not even a second prior with a dull thump. Lying there was a wolf.
Its body lay draped across four feet of ground, its height taking up another two and a half feet. The wolf's fur was gray, matted and thick. Fur covered the wolf's entire body, except for the swollen teats visible on its belly, silver-tipped with ice from Elsa's blast. The wolf was a mother.
Elsa felt a moment's guilt for killing the wolf, before she remembered that it had struck first. The Princess moved back to the stream and drank her fill, then crossed to where the wolf had come from. There, beyond the rim of the stream, was its den.
The den had formed when a great wind had toppled a giant pine, its roots pulled from the earth, leaving behind a half-covered gaping hole in the ground adorned with twisting rootlets. Elsa listened for danger as she stepped closer, hands at the ready, but heard nothing threatening.
Inside the den she found the she-wolf's cubs, thirteen furry blobs, most of them black and gray, sleeping in a writhing mass against the dead root system of the pine. The pups looked to be only a few weeks old, a month at most. They were helpless, would die unless the rest of the pack found and chose to care for them. Assuming there was more to their pack than just the pups and the she-wolf.
One of the cubs woke, and squirmed its way out from underneath its siblings. Elsa picked it up. This one's red fur still lay flat against its body in the sleek look of wolfish infancy. It was the runt of the litter. The cub blinked deep blue eyes slowly at her, whined and yawned, its pink tongue curling in its tiny mouth. The pup rooted against Elsa's hand in hopes of finding milk. She stepped out of the den to get a better look at the cub. As she did, a sunbeam fell onto the pup's eyes. It sneezed.
Where once Elsa had been holding a red-furred wolf cub, she now held a naked, red-haired girl-child. She dropped it. Startled and hurt, the child took in a deep breath and wailed. Elsa gaped.
The girl had stick-thin limbs and a bulging belly that spoke of parasites and poor nutrition. She was tiny, no larger than most two-year-olds, but probably much older than her size indicated given her starved appearance. Her skin was freckled and deeply tan, with callouses on her feet and knees. Her eyes were the same deep blue they'd been as a wolf cub.
Elsa crouched down to pat the girl hesitantly on the back.
"There, there, I'm sorry for dropping you. It's okay, I won't hurt you anymore."
The Princess removed her cloak and wrapped it around the girl, who had stopped crying and was now sitting with her legs splayed, body crouched forward toward Elsa, cheeks puffed out and eyes narrowed as the stared at the Princess.
Suddenly she perked up, a huge smile brightening her face as she leapt at Elsa, hands and legs wrapping around her neck and waist.
"Rrrrr." The girl growled. She bit the collar of Elsa's dress and tugged, like a puppy play fighting with its pack-mate. Elsa pulled her off and sat her back on the ground. Before she could scold the girl, she sneezed again, and Elsa was once more faced with a red-furred wolf cub, this time wrapped in a short purple cloak.
The pup went right back to tearing joyfully at Elsa's dress, though she had much less success, her puppy milk teeth reaching just barely to Elsa's mid-shin. She switched to the Princess' ankle.
"Ouch!"
She picked the up the cub, cloak and all, and very gently swatted its nose with her finger.
"No."
As she stood there holding the wolf-child, the small hairs at the back of her neck tingled. The rest of the pups had woken up and were mewling for their mother, who would never come. Howling sounded in the not-so-distant distance. The rest of the pack was coming to the rescue.
For the second time in as many days, Elsa fled.
The Princess ran, the cub held securely in both arms, still wrapped in the cloak. She would never be able to outrun the wolves; they could run as fast as she could, but ceaselessly, where she would be exhausted within the hour. Elsa shifted the cub to her right arm. With her left she froze the stream, conjuring skates for her feet as she transitioned from running parallel to the stream to skating upon it, racing down the ice away from the wolves.
Gradually the trees thinned out, and when Elsa saw the tallest spire of the castle come into view, she felt relief sweep through her. She slowed, then stopped as they neared the castle walls. With a wave of her hand she vanished the skates on her feet and walked toward the front gate.
The guards let her enter without question; no one had yet noticed her absence.
In the safety of her chambers, Elsa gently set her bundled guest on her bed. The pup had thankfully stayed a wolf throughout their journey, and now lay curled, nose to tail, in the center of Elsa's bed.
She watched as over the course of several hours the wolf turned again into a girl, never waking, later returning to wolf form. The Princess could determine no reason for why the girl turned; the shifts seemed to be random.
The hour grew late, and Elsa's stomach groaned with hunger. She exercised her royal privileges to request food for herself to be brought to her room, along with some milk and oatmeal. When the servant brought in their meals, Elsa stopped him from leaving immediately.
"How do you go about deworming someone?"
The servant, a blond-haired boy no older than she, thought a moment and replied, "Well, they have these pills you can take, or sometimes there's a powder you sprinkle on their food. That's what I use for Sven, my reindeer."
She asked him to bring her some, and gave him a coin from her quarterly allowance for his trouble.
Elsa sprinkled the powder on the oatmeal, stirring a fair amount of milk in as well, and set it on her nightstand. She reached out and woke the pup, who promptly turned into a girl.
"You know," she said as the girl snapped her teeth awkwardly around a spoonful of milky oatmeal, "If you're going to stay here with me you really ought to have a name." Elsa refilled the spoon and offered it back to the girl, who accepted it more carefully. This continued until the girl figured out how to grasp the spoon herself and eat with it.
"I'll call you Anna. It means favor, or grace. You will be my favored one, the favorite of the heir apparent."
She would go to her father in the morning, request permission to hire a girl to take care of her new wolf hybrid. That should quell questions about Anna as either person or canine.
"My tutors can teach you as well, what's mine shall be yours, Anna, if you stay with me."
Anna had her face in the oatmeal bowl. After she licked it clean the girl yawned and sprawled herself across the whole of Elsa's bed before curling up around Elsa's seated form. A few minutes later, she was a wolf cub tucked into Elsa's side.
Elsa took that for a maybe.