A/N: Warnings: There is abuse of animals in this chapter. It's not graphic, but I wanted to warn you. Warning also for implication of suicidal thoughts in this chapter and onward.
And of course, the disclaimer that's sort of a given: None of these characters are mine. Snow Queen characters are in the public domaine; Frozen and Tangled characters are the property of Disney. Many elements of my story, including the scene coming up, are inspired by fanart or other people's headcanons. You can find them reblogged on my tumblr (butterflydrming).
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Elsa cast him a pleasant smile, intended to mollify. Without turning away from him, because eye contact was important for making a person feel acknowledged, she began, "Your horse seems good natured. What's his na- " Her question was interrupted by the noisy crows. Loudly scolding, a crow swooped in through the doorway and aimed at the boy's head. It overshot into the stable and doubled back to harass the boy again.
The boy yelled in anger and leaped at the bird, vainly trying to catch it. He ran back outside after it without giving Elsa another glance.
She followed. Sometime the crows nested too close in the nearby trees, and they would defend their offspring with bravery, but it was too late in the year for fledglings. The crows around the castle were generally quite tame, also.
The crow had flown up to the edge of the roof, where it hollered its rough diatribe at the boy. The boy picked up a handful of small stones and pitched them at the crow in fast succession. One of the rocks hit the bird, clearly hurting it. It fluttered up to a higher part of the roof, still cawing, and did not fly away.
A second crow lay on the ground. Elsa gasped when she saw twine tied around its legs. The other end of the twine wrapped around a rock. The bound crow tried in vain to fly when the boy approached. The flapping of its black wings was tired and desperate.
The boy aimed at the crow on the ground with one of his stones. He was flushed across cheeks and forehead with excitement or rage. Elsa could not tell which.
Elsa screamed at him, "What are you doing!"
He turned to face her. His expression was an ugly one. He turned away again, threw the remaining stones all at once at the crow on the roof, then looked back at Elsa with a cruel expression. He looked at the crow on the ground, then pointedly looked back at Elsa.
"Stop!" Elsa entreated. "Why are you hurting it?"
"It attacked me," he stated, seeming to savor the anticipation of revenge, "for no reason at all. And that one," he pointed at the crow on the roof, "keeps swooping at me." He studied the crow on the ground. "I'm teaching it a lesson. I think I'll cut off its legs." His hand went to the dagger hanging on his belt.
"You can't! You'll be punished if you do!"
"I can, you peasant girl," the boy sneered. "I'm prince Hans of the Southern Isles. What are you going to do, tell someone? Who would believe you?" He stepped toward the tethered crow. The crow thrashed in the dirt. Hans began to draw the dagger out of its sheath, his motion slow and contemplative. He was tormenting the outraged witness as much as he had abused the crow. "Who would even listen?" he added.
When he moved with sudden speed, flipping the dagger over and lunging down toward the bird, Elsa reacted. She dashed toward him. When her body slammed into his, it was not an accident. She didn't know how to fight this way, but she had seen how town boys fought. She ended on the ground, too, herself. If she hadn't been instructed in the variety of athletics her Aunt Primrose had required, she would have done worse than give herself a bruise from the hard landing.
The boy prince sprawled across the ground. His face had scraped in the packed dirt. He uprighted himself in an instant. A snarl contorting his face, he threw himself at Elsa. He pinned her down and put a hard knee into her stomach.
This is what she had been afraid of when the bandits chased her. They, however, were large men, while prince Hans was closer to Elsa's size. She fought to throw him off, fighting at the same time against her coiling power. The painful pressure of his knee created a pressure in her ice magic to strike him with a blast of ice, and she was afraid of her power's violence. Elsa's freezing hands grabbed around his coat sleeve as she tried to push him away without letting the force of ice escape.
He yelled at the sudden cold that wrapped his arm. He jumped away. Rubbing his arm from wrist to shoulder, he stared at her, but only for a moment. Then he tried to kick her face with his booted foot.
Without thinking it through, Elsa slapped hand against the ground. A skid of ice shot under Hans's feet. He went off balance in the motion of kicking and fell. He stared at Elsa with shock while she scrambled to her feet. When Hans tried to stand up, she stomped and glazed the ground all around him with slick ice.
This was bad. He had seen her sorcery; that was bad enough. But the magic pulsed like her racing heartbeat, and she remembered the vicious blades of ice that she had thrown at the bandits and how violent her magic was when out of her control. She pushed the power down. The castle guard would return soon. They could deal with Prince Hans.
She stayed wary of him while she used his dropped dagger to cut the bound crow loose. The poor animal was too weary to peck at her. It made pathetic rasps while the crow on the roof bellowed anxious responses. She carefully cut the knots around the bird's feet until it was free. It lay on the ground for a heartbeat longer. Then, suddenly energized, it sprang into the air and landed the short distance away near its partner.
Elsa considered pitching the dagger into the distance. Instead, she tied it with the cut twine to her apron strings.
"That's mine!" Hans yelled. He made another attempt to stand but could only get to his knees. "Return it, you thief!"
Furious, Elsa stepped toward him. She blew untidy hair out her face and took a moment to assess her opponent. Her hands tingled so badly that she had to let puffs of snow out to ease the tingling. The ice storm inside her fought for release. She looked him over as if he were something rotten at the bottom of a jar.
He reacted to the look with escalating anger of his own. He tried to knock her off her feet again by yanking at her ankles. She stepped back out of his reach.
"You're doing magic!" Hans accused her. "You can't do that!" He paused. A calculating look crawled over his face.
"Yes. I can," answered Elsa. It gave her a frisson of cold from head to foot to admit it aloud. It felt like cold lightning crackling out from the storm still raging in her center.
She recalled that the youngest of the Southern Isles princes was more than a year older than she. If this boy was Prince Hans, he was small for fourteen years. Adding in to account his handed-down clothing, it was a sad appearance for a prince, but she would have been able to forgive him those things if he had not entertained himself by torturing a smaller creature. She silently chastised herself for lowering herself to the level of a brawler, not to mention that she now had the problem of Hans as a witness to her secret.
She was starting to feel the shaky feeling that followed a threat, and with it a fear crawled over her. Three Fjord horses, in all: she remembered Hans saying that his brothers were in the castle. And the guard were due to return. She had to get her magic under complete control and hidden again before anyone else saw it.
Hans started to get to his feet, achieving success by using slow, careful movements. "Sorcery is evil," he said.
Elsa tensed because his words were too close to her thoughts.
His voice had gone as smooth and sweet as honey. "However… we could make a deal," he started. "You're pretty enough. A girl like you shouldn't get locked up in a dungeon, or worse. No one has to know you're a monster. No one has to find out. If I don't tell them… "
"How dare you call me a monster," Elsa growled. "How dare you… you think... that you can offer me allegiance?" Hans wore a soft expression, she saw, that transformed his face into a handsome one. The sneering, cruel nature was concealed with the guise of Prince Charming. "Or maybe you were thinking that I would go weak in the knees for you b-because you're a prince?" That sensation of being pulled in multiple directions at once, trapping her in place, came over her again.
Hans continued to smile. He even laughed, lightly, as if she had said something amusing. "Come now, don't be like that," he said. He lifted an open hand toward her. "It can be our secret. Nothing bad has to happen to you."
The sensation of paralysis snapped, like a string pulled too tightly. Her skin prickled all over as if she were touching pins. She felt as if her ice power would spew out of her. She could no more stop it than she could have stopped her stomach heaving if physically sick.
She cried out at the terrible feeling of the power escaping through channels newly cracked open. She was trying to pull it back in, trying to keep it from flowing out. She curled into a crouch with her bare hands pressed against her middle and her shoulders curled in. If she made herself small, the ice might shrink down, too.
Don't. Feel.
"I… can't!" she cried out, not to Hans, but to the magic pouring out of her that urged her to let it go.
An answering howl sounded at her back. She could feel the gargantuan, cold presence of the creature. It was so familiar. It as the rage of the storm inside her, the familiar other, made solid in the world. It cast a real shadow she could see over her and Hans.
Hans stood in place, looking up at the thing behind her with his mouth agape. Elsa stood up as she turned around and saw…
...a monster made of packed snow and clear ice. Spines of ice jutted out from its hunched back. Its eyes were hollows; its fangs were icicles. It had enormous hands, disproportionately large hands, deadly hands that ended in pointed, crystalline claws. Eyes glowing with a fey light, it raised its arms and roared.
The castle guard - with astonishingly bad timing - entered the stable grounds at just that moment. Elsa turned half-away from the ice creature she had manifested at the clattering of armor. The even cadence of hoofbeats broke into disorder as the horses and their mounted guards saw the ice monster. To their credit, the men drew their swords and the startled horses held their ground.
The ice monster stepped over Elsa. He stepped out in front of her, confronting the guard, and roared again. Maximus, the bravest of horses, leaped forward. His rider swung his sword at the monster looming over them. Elsa screamed, but it came out as an airy, almost voiceless cry.
The monster bounded past the attacking guard. It hurtled past all of the guard with the force of a gale wind. It ran, scattering the cavalry out of its path, knocking riders off their mounts. The guard captain was one of the riders thrown to the ground. The monster ran off. Some of the guard raced after him on horseback, while others dismounted and saw to their injured brethren.
Elsa dashed through the chaos to hop up to Maximus's back. "Princess!" his rider called after her, "Princess Elsa, wait!" Desperate to catch her escaped magic, she ignored him and urged Maximus into pursuit. He sprung into a gallop without hesitation.
She gave no more thought to Prince Hans. She did not see the his shock double when the guard had called her by title.
Maximus had a gallop like the boom of thunder. He closed the ground to the ice monster at speed. Elsa kept her body forward, low and against his neck. She was crying, icy tears sliding off her cheeks in the wind. The monster had run down from the castle and into to town. Destruction and human injury lay in its wake.
In the path of the monster, ornamental trees bore shattered trunks, carts were broken, and market stands were overturned. Townspeople huddled in fear in doorways. Maximus dashed through the obstacle course. Their passage added to the frey already caused by the guards chasing the monster, some of whom had been unmounted or otherwise thwarted in that pursuit.
Elsa passed guards nursing gashes, bruises, and sprains. She rode on, horrified that it was her errant magic that had hurt people she considered friends. She had to be the one to catch the magic. What could anyone else do? She didn't even know what she, herself, would do when she caught up to it.
They left the center of town. The open terrain of the shoreline gave her a clear view of the remaining guards that chased and of the monster. It was running toward the woods, slowed down by its need to wreck things along the harbor boardwalk. It picked up a huge coil of tarred rope and heaved it back at the guards.
Maximus veered off the boardwalk and detoured through an alley behind the fish stands and taverns. He shot out at the edge of the woods just as the ice monster bashed through the boundary of trees. The guard were far behind. Elsa could see them caught up in a pile of detritus.
The monster avoided the road and charged through the trees and forest undergrowth. The changed terrain slowed him down, but it slowed Maximus down, too. The monster's skin was crusty. It crackled with hard, glossy scales from a cycle of melting and re-freezing. Elsa reached for the monster with her magic when they closed in on it. She tried to dismiss the monster as she would do with Olaf when she wanted him to go.
Instead of making the monster dissipate, reaching out with her magic made a tether between them. She was almost unseated from Maximus as he ran, and he whinnied when he felt her being pulled off. The connection became a channel that pulled more from her and gave it to the monster. It grew larger as its ice renewed.
Elsa panicked. She signaled Maximus to run, but Maximus refused. Instead, he confronted the monster with short, aggressive charges that confused it. It howled and slashed at the tree canopy, but it would not attack Maximus. Its increased size left it few avenues to run. It lumbered toward a break in the dense tree cover.
Maximus continued herding the monster toward the open space. It was not a glade or meadow; it was a bare strip at the edge of a ravine. The monster may have heard the yells and calls of the guard, who were now catching up to Elsa, because it turned around. With a sharp drop behind it and the guard riding up behind Elsa and Maximus, the ice monster had nowhere to retreat.
The monster looked at Elsa. Its hollow eyes met hers.
A terrible, cold emptiness fell over Elsa with the creature's shadow. In that moment, she understood that the creature was not something she could will away. She slid out of the saddle, to Maximus's consternation, and pushed past the horse. Her slow steps toward the ice monster were not from caution. She could hardly move.
This was the real Elsa, she told herself, the wrongness that everyone would see if they knew her true self. She would never be free of it, and it would only get stronger and larger. She couldn't control it, because it was bigger than her. It would consume her, and she would be helpless against it.
It would destroy everything.
Time had only made it stronger.
She would never be able to return home. Leaving Arendelle was never temporary. Anna was happy and safe, as long as Elsa was far away from her. Anna was safe. Anna was happy… as long as… Elsa… accepted exile.
She was never going back.
The guards rode up just as the monster turned and stepped off the cliff's edge. Elsa, nearly at the edge herself, saw it break into chunks as its body crashed and tumbled. It hit the bottom of the ravine and exploded in a cloud of snow that slowly drifted upward and evaporated.
Maximus grabbed the back of her dress with his teeth and pulled her away from the sheer edge. Then the guard were all around her. They were cheering. Maximus nudged her away from the danger of the ravine. She was boosted back up into the saddle. Still, the guards shouted praises and cheers.
She was in a daze all through the procession back through the town, which became a spontaneous parade. Maximus marched at the front of the parade, yet it took Elsa time to realize that they were celebrating her. The townsfolk began raining brightly colored paper and flower petals from upper story windows. Children ran alongside the procession, whooping and shouting. The citizens of Corona shouted out her name, "Elsa! Princess Elsa!"
"Princess Elsa, our Elsa!" the crowd cheered.
"Our hero!"
"The hero who saved Corona!"
"All hail Princess Elsa, defender of Corona!"
The praise and shouts went on and on, a wild and happy noise. The crowd lauded her. The people of Corona raved.
All Elsa could see was the destruction that she had inflicted on the town. The procession rode through wreck and ruin. The shouting voices blended and overlapped.
"...Elsa!"
"...of Corona…"
What was the difference, she wondered, between the sound of a cheering crowd and the sound of an angry mob?
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