Frostbite Symptoms
Chapter Two;
The Blacksmith's Daughter
The air was sodden with heat.
Kristoff lay against the trunk of a towering oak tree in hopes of diverting the sun's attention and its sluggish heat, a sliver of straw bobbing from his mouth. His hands cushioned his head and he reveled in the quiet shade. While he was not exactly cool, the branches filtered enough sunlight to provide a decent amount of relief from the heat of the sun's angry and expansive stare. Puberty had begun to chisel the roundness from his cheeks and jaw, and a twiggy meadow of scruff had sprouted on his chin. His voice cracked when flustered, though it had mostly taken on a smooth and deep mahogany sort of sound. The muscles of his biceps protruded in a way they hadn't before and he was growing into a broad young man from the lanky boy he had been. Nearly seventeen, he had begun to develop handsomely.
Anna, now fifteen, balanced on a lumpy log that bridged two sides of a freshwater stream. Her hair, while still fiery, had calmed to a light auburn, though her freckles had only multiplied throughout summer like daisies popping from the soil at the slightest hint of sunlight. A splash of them peppered her nose and cheeks, as well as her collar and shoulders. She detested them and longed for smooth, ivory skin that went uninterrupted by such bothersome blemishes. To help ward some of the heat, her hair was pulled away from her face and wrapped in a loose bun that had originally been tied higher, but drooped at the nape of her neck now. She wore a crisp, collared dress that composed of a short-sleeved, mint green blouse and a forest green bodice, the string woven at her chest a wooden color. A pair of worn, flat pumps encased her slight feet. Between the heat and the tight pull of her corset, she fell under frequent dizzy spells in the humid afternoon.
Kristoff wore a simple white tunic and a pair of black trousers that he had severed at the knee and made into shorts. Anna was jealous, even if she'd chosen her clothing poorly on her own.
"You'd better not fall or you're going to ruin your fancy dress," Kristoff murmured around the straw wedged between his teeth.
"I'm not going to fall," Anna said defensively, clenching her jaw in a grimace as her arms reeled in a series of circles until she fully regained her balance.
"'Kay," he answered disinterestedly, eyes closed. "Where'd you get that dress, anyway?"
Anna hopped down from the log, averting her blue eyes even though Kristoff's were closed.
"It was a gift."
One of Kristoff's eyes cracked open in response to the cryptic reply and he saw Anna was turned away from him. She'd been acting aloof all afternoon. Closing his eyes once more, he settled more comfortably against the oak tree.
"A gift from who?"
He heard her spout a quick, mumbled reply.
"Who?" he repeated.
"Itwasagiftfromtheroyalfamily," the words squeezed out of the corner of her mouth in a rapid string of syllables, but he heard enough to understand. He sat up, both eyes open and alert.
"Wait a minute, did Princess Elsa give you that dress?"
Anna's silence and sudden interest in the cloudless sky brought a smirk to his face.
"She totally did."
"She didn't!" Anna spun to face him, the red of her freckles especially pronounced by the pink of her cheeks. "I got a parcel the other day stamped with the royal seal. There was a letter attached to it thanking my father for his services blah, blah, and it said something about thanking me too, I have no idea what for, but it was signed by the king. So I unwrapped the parcel and ta-da," she pinched the sides of the dress's skirt as if she were going to curtsy. "This was inside."
Kristoff scratched his chin in thought.
"Okay, so what I'm getting from that is the princess handpicked a fancy dress for you and had her father write the letter so as to not completely give away the fact that she's in love with the blacksmith's daughter."
"It was sent by the king, Kristoff," Anna huffed, though she secretly wished his theory were true and had to stop herself from daydreaming about such potential. "I doubt Princess Elsa even remembers who I am," she said, wistful and a bit melancholy as she hugged her arms to herself. The Princess of Arendelle was eighteen now, and beautiful and regal as ever. Anna had to squash the fluttering butterflies in her stomach when she recalled how Elsa had looked during the king's most recent appearance. A speech of some sort, his premonition of the year to come and the fertility of the kingdom - Anna had barely heard a word he'd said. She was stricken by the princess's beauty, who remained seated at her father's right hand a few feet behind him. The sharp, aristocratic gaze, her glowing skin, her slender neck encompassed by the high collar of her dress...
"Uh, pretty sure it's not easy to forget the face of the girl who knocks you flat onto the ground in front of the entire kingdom at the introduction of your own birthday festival."
Anna deflated and chewed on the inside of her cheek.
"Yeah, can we maybe not talk about that? It only haunts me every second of my life."
Despite Anna's brash entrance to the royal festival on Princess Elsa's fourteenth birthday, the king had regarded her warmly as well as Elsa herself. They were known to be a kind family, but experiencing their generosity firsthand was overwhelming. Between stutters and the nervousness clogged in her throat, Anna had managed to hold a handful of memorable conversations with the princess and they had spent a decent amount of the party in one another's company before Elsa had been swept away by her own royal duties as the guest of honor.
Anna specifically remembered the way Elsa had lingered when they were forced to part ways, the princess holding onto Anna's hand as they bid one another farewell.
Anna remembered even more specifically how she had bounded after Elsa once the older girl had turned her back and begun to walk away, tugging her into a tight embrace that expanded the whites of Elsa's eyes as a light blush dusted her pale skin.
"It was so nice to meet you," little Anna had whispered, eyes squeezed shut, and once the initial shock ebbed away, Elsa hugged her in return.
Anna remembered that was the warmest she'd ever been. A pleasant warmth – nothing like this drenching and miserable heat.
Regretfully, Princess Elsa had not hosted a public celebration of her birthday since then and had become quite recluse as time passed. Never particularly fond of throwing herself into the eyes of the public in the first place, the princess' mysterious absence was a gradual one. There had been a period of time in which the queen had ceased appearing in public as well, and she would not be seen again. The king was the only member of the royal family the kingdom saw for months. When Anna was thirteen, the queen suddenly and tragically passed away, leaving a grieving daughter and husband behind.
That resonated within her deeply and she felt a connection with the princess. She remembered with a pained clarity the day of the queen's death and she longed to reach out to Elsa even if they'd only met once. She understood her grief.
"It's not like she was mad," Kristoff reasoned, tugging Anna from her memories. "I mean, you wanted her to notice you, so technically you got what you wanted."
"I didn't want to end up on top of her –" Kristoff raised a brow. "Oh, stop looking at me like that, I was eleven!" She didn't bother defending her current age and that she was still very, very young. Certain thoughts had occurred in her mind by now and she was hideously embarrassed by all of them.
He held up his hands in surrender.
"I didn't say anything."
Anna sighed, dropping to the ground at Kristoff's side, leaning her back against his shoulder rather than the tree so that she sat perpendicular to him. She blew her fringe out of her eyes and rested her chin on her knees.
When she didn't pick up on where their banter had left off, he murmured a quiet, "Sorry."
She cast him a small, sad smile over her shoulder. Silence settled over them and rather than the usual, comfortable quiet that they mutually enjoyed in one another's presence due to years and years of close friendship, it was suffocating and tense. The trickle of the stream was suddenly a roaring river and the tweeting birds were an eerie scraping of metal against metal. Anna was typically the most bubbly person he knew. Her optimism and kindness was almost disgusting, she didn't have a rotten bone in her body and she smiled so much Kristoff would have sworn that was simply the default state of her face. She'd been acting strangely today in particular and he didn't want to push her, but the foreign sadness that emanated from her was bothersome.
"What's up, Anna?" he finally said.
Anna shrugged and the silence carried on a few moments further before she confessed, "Papa's going up to the mountains tomorrow."
Kristoff, if not already sobered by Anna's uncharacteristic and mellow behavior, dropped all thoughts of banter and teasing and his eyebrows branched toward the middle of his face. Guilt rippled within him. How had he forgotten?
"Are you going to go with him?"
"No," Anna shook her head. "I think he needs it, I think he needs to go on his own. He's asked to bring me before, but it wouldn't feel right." She hugged her knees to her chest and Kristoff laid the palm of his hand at the top of her spine.
"You lost her too, Anna," he reminded her gently.
"I know, I know that," her vision dulled and blurred as tears brimmed her eyes. "I can't help but think that he has a better reason to grieve, that he must miss her more. I hardly remember her."
Kristoff's frown carved deeper lines into his face and he looked away for a moment. To watch a bright spirit like Anna's break and fade in front of him was more painful than he'd like to admit. Even if he'd watched her crumble underneath this same fist many times before.
"It's not a competition of who misses her more. You lost your mother and you guys have to take care of each other, be there for each other. He invites you along because it can help both of you heal. You can help each other heal."
Anna smiled, a small and quiet smile, and wiped the tears from her eyes. She drew a shaken breath and bit her lip.
"He deserves that time with her. I'd feel awkward. He shared all those years with her and I can't even remember her voice."
Kristoff sighed and pulled Anna flush against his side. It only took her a few moments to situate herself and tuck her head beneath his chin. His protruding adam's apple still seemed strange to her and it sparked a longing for her childhood. She longed for the past and she longed for her mother. Briefly, she wondered if the princess ever felt this way, if she gave into her own weakness and cried for what she'd lost. She wondered who's arms Elsa would cry in and she wondered if she was lonely up in the palace all the time. It didn't help her feel any better and she tried to stop wondering altogether.
"Do you want to go? Just you and me? I could take you up there and give you your space, or stick with you the whole time – whatever you wanted to do."
"Thank you, Kristoff," Anna said, grateful for him and his kindness. As sarcastic as they were with one another, as many bruises she had left on him as a child, he was her friend - more her brother, really - and her soul ached for him. She truly didn't know what she would do without him. "But not now. Maybe another time?"
"Another time, then," Kristoff murmured, holding her to his chest.
- - x - -
Hardegin was to return in three days.
He had departed far before the rise of the sun and woken Anna before he left. A batch of weapons was to be delivered to the castle's royal guard the next day; he had already loaded his wooden merchant's cart with the cargo and asked that Anna request Kristoff to haul it the following morning. A guard by the name of Leofrick would greet her at the castle gates and arrange the payment. With this information, he'd pressed a scratchy kiss to his daughter's forehead.
"I love you, Papa," she'd whispered as she touched his sandpaper cheek.
He'd always said Anna was truly the image of her late mother. She'd wondered if he saw his wife rather than his daughter that morning as his deep green eyes smiled sadly in return, his giant paw of a hand laying over Anna's on his cheek.
"I love you, child," his gravel voice rumbled gently. "Be safe and I will return soon."
Anna was sleeping once more before he'd even closed her bedroom door.
- - x - -
Arendelle was a relatively safe kingdom and with that said, even the safest of places had their share of danger. Thieves existed, she knew, but she'd never known someone to steal something so trivial as wooden wheels. She'd woken on the morning the royal guard's delivery was to be made and she was bound and determined to make such a delivery on her own. Her father had requested that she ask Kristoff to haul the heavy load to the palace, but she wanted to prove to herself she could do it without her best friend's help and so she'd never told him about it.
Upon approaching the connected extension of her cottage that was used as Hardegin's blacksmithing shop, she saw that the front entrance had been tampered with. Her heart rate instantly climbed to an alarming speed and her breath caught in her throat. She quickly swiped a small mallet from the work table at her side and held it behind her back, eyes scanning the workshop for any sign of an intruder.
"Hello?" she called naively.
Silence.
"If anyone's there, I'm not afraid to use this!" she swung the mallet from behind her back and braced her knees, holding it in an offensive stance. Her eyes continued to sway left and right. She began inching further into the room, turning in a continuous circle as she walked. As she came upon the merchant cart, she pulled back the sheet that covered it and was relieved to find the neatly arranged weapons still inside: swords with varnished sheaths that had beautiful carvings climbing up the length of them, heavy, squared war hammers, the curved twin blades of battle axes, spiked maces, metal and wooden shields alike, sheathed daggers. Her father must have been working on this batch for several months. The craftsmanship was beautiful and although Anna knew little about the technicalities of his work as a blacksmith, his passion was clearly reflected in the molded metal before her. She felt a fondness for her father and smiled to herself before it fully occurred to her how many weapons there were. There were more of them than she had predicted there would be and she felt an anxious nag at the back of her mind that she may not be able to pull this on her own.
That nagging grew into a full-blown panic as Anna stepped back and realized the wheels of the cart had been dismantled and stolen.
She dropped the mallet in her hand in surprise and narrowly avoided crushing her foot as it landed densely on the dirt floor. It was highly suspicious that someone had stolen something so obscure, but there were a pair of young twin boys that lived next door to Kristoff who had a tendency to wreak havoc in the village. She reasoned that they must have known her father would be gone and broke in for no other reason than to cause the chaos they so thrived on. It wasn't a solid theory, but it helped ease her worry that she had been, or was currently in any danger. The entire job had been done quite carelessly and upon closer inspection, she noticed a stampede of small footprints surrounding the cart.
"Ugh!" she groaned, taking a step back with her hand on her hips. How was she going to get this to the castle? She thought she'd have trouble pulling the cart there when it had wheels, how was she to do it now?
- - x - -
"Is that the entire delivery?"
The Royal Seal of Arendelle glared Anna in the face, much like the guard's dark, oaken eyes. A well-trimmed dust of charcoal sheathed his jaw. He spat his words distastefully, looking down upon her past the length of his nose at the single war hammer Anna had dumped at his feet. So Leofrick wasn't the most welcoming of people. Anna regretfully wished she'd asked for Kristoff's help.
"No! No, that's all I could carry, actually, uh, I plan on delivering the entire order to the castle personally, yessir, it might take me all day, but I'll be darn-tootin' if I don't get those swords and spiky mallets to you guys before the day is gone!" she swung her fist in a go-get-'em manner and laughed awkwardly. She was fighting to remain casual, but in reality she was dying to lay flat on the stone ground and swallow large gulps of air until she was able to catch her breath again. The muscles of her tiny arms pulsed with a growing ache. In her defense, the war hammer she'd brought along was the largest of the batch and it nearly surpassed the length of her own body.
"Where is the blacksmith?" Leofrick asked, irritated. His lip curled back as he spoke.
The uncomfortable smile fell from Anna's face and she wrung her hands.
"Oh...my papa, he's gone on a trip. He won't be back for a few days."
Leofrick laughed once.
"You expect us to accept this sort of service? One item at a time?" he advanced on her and Anna shrunk backward, her heel catching on a cobblestone behind her. She stumbled, but didn't entirely lose her footing. "You realize this was a highly important order made by the king? This is not a case of the captain doing inventory checks, you foolish, weak girl -"
"That's enough." A chilled voice silenced him and when Anna looked up, it felt as though the very core of her heart had been bitten with frost and she halted her own breath.
Anna could have cried. With relief or fear, she wasn't certain.
The princess stood behind Leofrick, an imposing and powerful presence at the gates of the castle. Her icy blue eyes bore into Anna's and she stood frozen to the stone beneath her feet. Leofrick turned and dropped to a bow on his knee with a 'clank' of his armor, his gaze trained with shame on the princess's dainty feet. Princess Elsa regarded him coolly, the feline quality of her eyes seeming to narrow them even further.
"Leofrick," she began. "I'll not have any member of this kingdom harassed at my doorstep."
"No, of course not, Your Royal Highness," he agreed with haste.
"Then I'm certain you wouldn't mind explaining the sort of exchange that was happening upon my arrival?"
"Certainly," he lifted his head and met his princess's eyes out of respect. "Your father sent for the blacksmith several months ago, very high priority, and it was to arrive this morning. This girl...dropped a single hammer at my feet, the blacksmith nowhere to be seen. Then I'm told he's out of town on such an important morning. You must understand, Princess, the urgency in which the king requested this order be delivered. It was a tremendous workload for a single man to take on and your father knew it would be months before it was finished, but to be met with this? It's an insult to the king!"
Elsa looked to the hammer behind the bowed guard, then to the girl that stood petrified across from her. If it had been such an important delivery, Anna thought, why had her father left it in her hands?
"That girl is Hardigan's daughter," Elsa informed him evenly. Anna felt her head swim at the fact that the princess knew her father by name. "The blacksmith has been an important asset to Arendelle for a number of years and under my watch he and his family will be treated with respect."
"Your Highness, I understand, but this manner of delivery is unspeakable -"
"Then you will retrieve it."
Leofrick looked up to her in disbelief.
"That way, it's ensured to be in capable hands," she reasoned thinly and Leofrick's head dropped once more.
"Yes, of course."
Anna felt as though she had been watching the exchange happen from the bird's-eye view of a dream, her presence a floating and translucent one. Her heart had been lodged at the front of her throat since Elsa had spoken and she truthfully wasn't sure she was capable of speaking herself. She could hardly breathe. Not to mention her father had never said his assembly of weapons were of such high importance. She felt incredibly foolish and uninformed.
"The blacksmith's workshop is an easy one to locate, he'll fetch the weapons with no trouble."
Elsa's voice, cool and calm a second earlier, had taken on a softer sound. Still she held an air of authority while she spoke, but the edge was gone and her icy eyes had melted to a warmer degree. Anna was heavily delayed in realizing the princess was speaking to her and her saucer eyes latched onto Elsa dumbly, her lips parted in wonder. It took her a moment to understand that she was trying to placate her in telling her that Leofrick could retrieve the order on his own and she wouldn't have to worry over it any longer. She hadn't even noticed that Leofrick had gone.
"Are you alright?" Elsa had begun to approach her more closely and Anna swore she nearly fainted.
The question hurled her into a moment from the past, when she had found herself anchoring this beautiful woman to the snow covered ground on her birthday. Anna's mind was swimming away from the shore of the present and she felt herself beginning to drown.
"Anna?"
Suddenly she broke the surface of the water.
And nearly suffered an attack of some sort - whether one of the heart or born of panic she couldn't decipher - when the princess spoke her name. Elsa had hardly appeared in public for years and Anna hadn't spoken to her since she was eleven years old, merely a child. The gorgeous young woman that stood in front of her was an entirely different person. Same silken platinum blonde hair, same poise, same beauty, same air of calm and collected authority, but all of it had refined with age and Anna quite literally could not handle her presence so near to her. It was too much, far too much, and finally Anna gave into the darkness that fogged her vision and her mind. A soft noise expelled from her lips and her eyelids came down as she fainted, a pair of cool arms catching her. The last she remembered was the sensation of a body behind her own and chilled breath against her ear that carried the sound of her name again and again.
