Anna peeked around the door, then pulled back quickly and pressed herself hard up against the wall. She tried to keep her breathing steady. She tried to keep her heart from racing. She attempted to will the blood that was suddenly warming her cheeks back to wherever it had been a few seconds earlier.

None of these endeavors met with any great success.

So finally, before her nerves got the better of her for the umpteenth time that day, she simply bounded around the corner into the stables.

"Oh, Josef!" she exclaimed in would-be surprise. "I didn't realize you were here!"

The newest member of the castle staff looked up at the sound of her voice, then hurriedly rose to his feet in order to grace her with a bow. "Your Highness."

Anna laughed in what she hoped was a charming way. "I hope you aren't going to do that every time you see me. You shouldn't have to stop what you're working on all the time simply on my account. Considering how often I come down here to visit Adelen, you might never get anything done."

"It's only proper, Your Highness," Josef replied.

"And you don't need to call me that either." She smiled and waved her hand airily. "I always feel a little too short to be anybody's Highness."

At these words, her lips traveled a short distance along the path from a smile to a wince. Oh, that was just brilliant. What a perfect way to remind him just how very young she was! Maybe next time, she could just show him her dolls instead.

"Then what should I call you, Ma'am?" he asked.

Her natural instinct was to balk at the stable hand's use of that title too. It made her sound so old! Ah, but in this case, old was a good thing, right? Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. The fact was that there was no way she was ever going to feel comfortable being called, "Ma'am." She kept fighting the urge to look over her shoulder to see if he was perhaps addressing her mother instead.

"You could call me Princess Anna," she offered. "Or just Princess. Or even, you know, Anna. That is my name, after all." And it's what I'd really like to hear you call me, she added silently.

Josef considered these options for a moment, then nodded. "Very well then, Princess Anna. Is there something I can help you with today?"

"No, no," she answered. "Like I said, I just came down to visit Adelen. You know, my horse. He's here. Well, not here, obviously, but there. In his stall. In the stables. Well, of course, in the stables. I mean, that's why we're both here, right? Because, if you want to find a horse, this is the place you would go, wouldn't you? Heh, yeah..."

There was that burning in her cheeks again, right on cue. That might just be a new record for the briefest entry into a conversation before her habitual rambling had managed to thoroughly embarrass her. This was not at all the way she'd imagined this encounter going. Perhaps she should cut her losses early and try again another time. Hopefully after Josef had a chance to forget about her ridiculous babbling. Sometime next year, perhaps.

She had to swallow a sigh before she finished weakly, "Don't mind me. Please, just go back to what you were doing."

She started to take her first step past him and toward Adelen's stall when she finally happened to glance over at the object that he was holding in his hands. Then she stopped and looked again, puzzled.

"Um, what are you doing?"

Josef looked down at the small paint brush he was holding. "This? Oh, well, you see, I got to thinking the other day after I noticed that Trofaste and Tønne looked like they hadn't been ridden in a while. It occurred to me that, if they hadn't seen much use, then what condition might their tack be in?"

He sat back down on the short stool that he had been occupying when she'd entered, then picked up one of several straps of leather that lay upon a clean, dry cloth on the stable floor. He lifted it up to eye level and turned it this way and that, examining it by the light that streamed in through the open door.

"It wasn't as bad as I feared it might be," he went on. "Lennart and the other lads didn't neglect it or anything. They cleaned it all regularly, kept it out of the sun. Still, some of it had dried out a little more than I normally like to see. If it gets too dry, then the leather can start to crack, and that could lead to a dangerous rip while you're riding.

"So I've been taking the time to slowly work some oil into it all. You don't want to do too much, or you'll go to the other extreme and end up making it all limp and useless. Get it right, though, and you can pretty well bring life back to hide that's nearly as tough as jerky."

He dipped the tip of his brush into a small jar of light oil by his feet, then began to apply it to the strap in smooth, even strokes.

Anna watched, inexplicably fascinated. Her father had taught her how important it was to clean a horse's saddle and bridle after any significant bit of riding. She'd done so herself many times, since she often didn't have anything else to do after an afternoon's trot around the courtyard. Somehow, though, she'd apparently failed to realize that there was so much more to properly caring for the leathers. Now she wondered how much work the other stable hands had done on her own riding equipment without her ever knowing.

The princess took a few steps closer, then bent down to get a better look at the various pieces laid out on the ground. She had to stare at them for a while, but she slowly began to recognize the patterns in the various lengths of hide and how they just might fit back together.

"So this is a bridle then?" she asked.

"That's right."

"Whose is it?"

"This one is Trofaste's. The bit's a little different than Tønne's." He tilted his head toward the edge of the cloth, where the linked bits of nickel rested apart from the leather straps. "Those two might look like they're both the exact same horse, but they have their own personality quirks the same as anyone. Trofaste prefers a French link mouthpiece. See that extra bean-shaped link in the middle there? Tønne, on the other hand, is fine with a simpler jointed mouthpiece, but responds better with dee-rings instead of the loose ring on this bit here."

"Just how many different kinds of bits are there?"

"Oh, there are maybe half a dozen basic types that are reasonably common. Naturally, though, there's a lot of variety within each of those types too, like the different mouth pieces and rings I was just talking about. When you consider all the possible combinations, there are hundreds and hundreds of different possibilities. The right bit depends upon the horse's temperament, the shape of its mouth, the sort of work its being asked to do. Making the best choice is usually equal parts experience and experiment."

Anna was moderately surprised to find that her jaw wasn't hanging open at this revelation. To be honest, she'd never paid much attention to any other tack besides her own, so she had mostly just assumed that they were all pretty much the same. She had never considered that something as apparently simple as the bit could actually be so complicated.

She stared at Josef with even greater admiration than she'd had for him a few minutes earlier.

"Did you learn all of this during your apprenticeship?"

He shrugged. "Not all of it, no. I pretty much grew up around horses. My uncle likes to joke that I knew how to ride before I could walk, so I almost couldn't help but pick up a lot of things along the way. I did learn a lot more on the job, though. Helping to tend to so many different horses every week, I began to see things that I never would have figured out from just working with our family's lot. All the various breeds and the differences in training and the unexpected problems that cropped up along the way always kept me on my toes."

"You seem to have learned a lot," Anna agreed, "and learned it well! I was amazed watching you with Adelen. It seemed like it all came so naturally to you. I wish I had a talent like that."

The brush paused in its sweeping movements. Josef again lifted the leather into the light, squinting slightly to better appraise his work. Apparently satisfied, he temporarily tucked the handle of the brush between his teeth, carefully stretched the strap out upon the cloth, then picked up another and set to work on it with the same patient persistence as the one before.

"Oh, I'm sure you have many talents of your own, Princess," he finally replied. "I was just fortunate to have found mine at an early age. Not everyone is that lucky. I have a cousin who's a few years older than me, and he well near drives my aunt and uncle crazy with the way he's forever jumping from one new passion to the next."

"I'd love to be able to try new things like that all the time," Anna declared eagerly. "There's so much outside the castle walls that I want to see and do and explore. Maybe then I could find that one special thing that's... Well, I don't know." She shrugged. "That's all my own, I guess. That makes me part of something bigger.

"That doesn't really make sense, does it?" she conceded with a sheepish smile. "I mean, if it really was just mine alone, then it couldn't very well be part of something bigger, could it?"

"Oh, I don't know about that." Josef stopped brushing in the oil for a moment and looked at her thoughtfully. "Seems to me that everything's part of something bigger, no matter how unique it might be. Take these here straps, for instance. You need all of them to make a bridle, but you can't just interchange them. Each one has its own place. Mix them up, and it'll never fit right.

"It's the same with people, I suppose. We're each a part of our families, and those are each a part of the town and of Arendelle. But we all have our roles to play. Even those of us who don't quite know what that might be just yet," he finished with a wink.

Suddenly, Anna felt distinctly self-conscious. Her plan when she had first headed down to the stables today had been to just engage Josef in a bit of amiable conversation. She'd simply wanted to impress him with her witty banter – which, granted, just went to show how little she'd actually thought through this supposed plan of hers.

Still, she had never intended to start confiding her hopes and dreams to him. They'd barely met, after all. She was nobody to him, besides the Princess of Arendelle and the daughter of his newest employers. So how was it that she had somehow ended up talking to him about such personal matters? Maybe she was just desperate for anybody new who might take the time to listen to her... and who wasn't made of oils on canvas.

"You know," Anna said in a bid to change the subject, "you couldn't have picked a better time to join the staff. Midsummer's Eve is coming up soon, and we always have a big banquet for all the staff and their families. Then afterward, there's a bonfire down by the water's edge. There'll be music and dancing, and everyone always has such a great time. I hope you'll be able to come."

An eager grin split the young man's face then, and with it came a childlike excitement that suddenly made the difference in their ages seem almost as small as Anna imagined it to be. "Oh, I will. I've been wanting to see one myself for five years now. I missed the one Midsummer's Eve celebration that was held during my time here as a stable boy. I don't even remember now why I couldn't make it back then, but I do remember the rest of the hands going on and on about it the following day. I was so jealous, and so disappointed that I'd missed it.

"Even now, people in the town talk about it every year, you know. It's just about the only time that anybody who doesn't work in the castle gets to see inside it these days. When there was no celebration the year after they closed the gates, everybody thought that would just be the end of it. You wouldn't believe the excitement the next year when it was announced that it was happening again."

Anna returned his smile with one of her own. "Oh, I think I might. It's one of the highlights of my year too, and one of the few times I get to visit outside the castle. Every year when it comes around, I thank my sister for convincing Mother and Father to start celebrating it again. And every year, I find myself wishing that things could be that way all the time."

She was surprised and rather disappointed to see Josef's smile fade, to be replaced by an awkward and somewhat uncomfortable expression. He lowered his eyes for a moment, only to realize that he was still holding the brush and a piece of bridle. Both had been forgotten during these last few minutes while they had been talking

Looking rather surprised to find both of these items in his hands, he nevertheless bent down, dipped the bristles into the jar of oil again, and set back to work on the dry leather. Unsure what had caused him to suddenly cut off their conversation, Anna sat and watched him quietly, trying to figure out what she might have said or, even better, what she ought to say next.

She didn't have too very long to ponder those questions, however. Without taking his eyes from his work, Josef spoke again.

"Begging your pardon, Ma'am – I mean, Princess – but I would like to ask you a question. You must forgive me if it seems a little out of line for one of my station. It's just that... Well, it's something that I've been wanting to know for a while now. No one else seems to have the answer, and I don't think I could bring myself to ask it of the King or Queen. So I mean no disrespect, and if it makes you uncomfortable, then you certainly don't owe me a reply. I only..."

He trailed off. Anna peered at him closely, wanting to understand what it could be that was making him so uncomfortable. She was a little startled when she realized that there was now a hint of color rising up into his cheeks, though she could not begin to guess if it was just another symptom of his original discomfort or if it might possibly be caused by her sudden keen attention.

"What's your question?" she asked softly. "I'll try to answer it if I can."

His eyes darted to hers ever so briefly before they resumed following his own careful brush strokes. A few more seconds passed before he finally gave voice to his query.

"Why did they close the castle gates?" Before she could answer, another rapid string of words tumbled out of his mouth. "I know it's not exactly any of my business. Only, I loved working here back in the day. As a boy, to be helping to tend to the horses that belonged to the King and Queen was an unbelievable thrill. And I got to see so many amazing people come passing through the courtyard. Then one day, I was suddenly told, 'We're afraid your services will no longer be required,' and that was that.

"I've just wondered ever since... you know... what happened?"

This time, Anna did not even attempt to hide her sigh. "Well, I suppose that's something that you and I have in common then," she admitted. "Mother and Father have never really explained it to me either. Believe me, I've asked. Apparently, there are some things that even princesses don't get to know. So I'm sorry, but that's one question I'm afraid I can't answer for you either."

Certainly, it seemed obvious enough to Anna that, whatever the reason might be, it was in some way tied to Elsa's seclusion within her room. She still didn't understand how, though. And even if she had, she didn't think that was the sort of thing she'd be willing to share with someone who was still mostly a stranger to her – even if he was a very friendly and handsome stranger.

Josef nodded his acceptance of her answer. "Fair enough," he said. "My thanks to you anyway."

Once again, he paused in his task to scrutinize the results. With a quiet grunt of satisfaction, he gently placed the strap back down upon the cloth at his feet. He stood and stretched, then bent down to pick up the jar of oil. Fastening its lid back on tightly, he carried it over to the corner and set it upon a high shelf. Then he swished the brush around in a bucket of cleaning water, flicked most of the moisture off onto the floor, and finally dried the rest with another bit of rag he pulled out of his pocket. Then he returned and began to transfer the pieces of leather to a safe location on another shelf, where the oils could be allowed to soak in for a while before the bridle was at last ready to be reassembled

Anna watched all of this distractedly and without comment. Thoughts of Elsa and the many secrets kept hidden within her family had effectively placed a damper upon her usual talkative tendencies. She didn't even realize how quiet the stables had become until she suddenly jumped at the next noise.

"Weren't you here to see a horse?"

She looked up to see Josef standing in front of her, wiping off his hands on that same well-used piece of rag. His smile was back again, and there was a merry twinkle in his eye.

"What? Oh, right! Yes, Adelen. You know, perhaps a short little ride around the courtyard would do us both some good."

"Can't argue with that logic," he replied. "Why don't you go open the stall, and I'll just grab your saddle and bridle."

And so, a few minutes later, Anna was trotting her horse across the flagstones while Josef leaned against one of the columns and watched with an expert's eye. As she swung past him on her circuit, he called out little bits of advice. Mostly, he pointed out small changes she could make that would get the same results with less wasted effort on her part, and less discomfort for her mount.

Minor though the adjustments were, Anna found herself having to struggle against several years of habit in order to actually make them properly. Whenever she did manage them, though, she could immediately feel the differences that they made, slight though they might be. It felt like Adelen responded more easily and with less resistance.

It looked like she had some new things she could still learn after all.

• • •

Elsa peered out of her window at the scene below. Her sketchbook rested in her lap and she held a pencil loosely between her fingers, but she was not drawing. Instead, she just leaned her shoulder against the glass and watched as her sister bent down in her saddle to talk to the new stable hand who had so caught her fancy just a few days earlier.

She still remembered the last time she had seen Anna making a new friend from this very vantage point years ago. Back then, the sight of her sister apparently moving on with her life had made Elsa feel more alone than ever, and the result had been an uncontrolled burst of jagged ice all along the window sill. Later that same day, when her father had seen the aftermath of her emotions, he had presented her with her first pair of gloves. Along with that gift had come the repetition of what had soon become her own personal mantra: Conceal it, don't feel it. Don't let it show.

So much had changed since then, and so little. She did not feel the same pangs of jealousy this time as she watched Anna talking to... What was his name? Oh yes, Josef. She was truly glad that her little sister had found another someone with whom she could talk. For a while, Elsa had thought she might at least be able to be that much for her sister. Now she realized that simply was not meant to be. She was back to merely being an observer in Anna's life – a listener, perhaps, but never a speaker.

She also found that this arrangement no longer hurt her as much as it once had. Maybe that was part of growing up. Then again, it might only be because she was too emotionally drained to respond to it quite so deeply anymore. When that sort of pain is with you day in and day out for so long, there comes a time when your mind simply cannot help but to stop feeling it.

The real danger, at least in Elsa's mind, was if you let yourself stop feeling anything else either along the way. Sometimes it had seemed like the easiest way to follow her father's advice, to shut out the fear and the sadness, was just to shut down all her feelings entirely. But then, she had experienced a few times when exactly that had happened through no conscious decision on her part. Nothing had seemed to matter and nothing had held any interest for her. Such days often came on suddenly, without warning or reason, and left her with so little motivation that she couldn't even begin to think about finding a way out of her despondency.

Fortunately, things weren't that bad today. She really did feel happy for Anna. It was a quiet, subdued sort of happiness, but it was there nevertheless.

Elsa turned away from the window to look back at her pad of paper. Her emotions might still be with her, but something else was missing instead. The top sheet was completely blank. She felt the urge to draw, but not the inspiration.

She had come to sit by the window in hopes that she might see something to change that. And though the sight of her sister had buoyed her spirits, she had already filled many a page with images of Anna and Adelen. She felt the need to do something different today. On its own, however, different was not something that was terribly easy to capture on paper. She had lost track of exactly how long she'd been gazing out at the courtyard, but so far, nothing she'd seen had captured her fancy.

Still at a loss, she now found her pencil beginning to wander across the blank page in aimless doodles. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, she could find shapes within such scribbles that would spark her imagination. So she just let the lines drift as they would. And yet, no matter how hard she looked, all she could see was a mess of random squiggles.

She finally gave up when she was suddenly attacked by a mighty yawn, with a second following closely behind. It wasn't fair the way they ganged up on her like that, but she knew when she was outnumbered. Setting paper and pencil down on the floor beneath the window, she stretched out upon the padded bench and allowed the warm sun of the spring afternoon to pleasantly bathe her face and body. It wasn't long before her eyes grew heavy and her thoughts sluggish. In no time at all, consciousness slipped away and sleep crept in to take its place.

Elsa found herself standing... Well, she wasn't sure where she was, exactly. All she knew for certain was that there was blackness above her and whiteness below. The terrain wasn't flat and it wasn't featureless, but it seemed to rise and fall in strange formations that she couldn't quite understand. She turned on the spot, taking in this unusual landscape and trying to make sense of what she was seeing. No matter the angle, however, something about it continued to elude her.

A frigid wind blasted down upon her out of nowhere, sending her braid whipping out behind her as she held up her hands to ward the arctic air from her face. Normally, Elsa didn't mind the cold, but something about this gale bit into her and chilled her to the bone. Even after it subsided, she was still left shivering uncontrollably.

She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing her hands up and down her sleeves to try to encourage circulation. The frigid sensation continued to lay claim to her limbs, however. It was so bad in her legs, they were prickling all over. It was as though they had fallen asleep, only several times more painful. Trying to restore normal blood flow, she lifted one leg up, then stomped the foot down hard onto the ground.

Her arms flew away from her torso and began pinwheeling madly as the world reeled beneath her. She felt as if the ground was rising, rising, lifting her straight up into the air. She looked down to see that a sheet of iridescent crystal had taken shape beneath her feet. Even as she watched, intricate patterns spread outward from where her foot had landed.

Suddenly, the horizon disappeared around her as walls shot into the sky, growing until they towered far above her head. As she craned her neck upwards, the six vertical surfaces converged to a single sharp peak. Looking up at the vertiginous height made her head swim and she fell over backwards, landing heavily on her rump.

Architectural embellishments continued to take shape around her. Pillars reached upward to support the distant roof. Stairs sprouted from the floor and climbed higher and higher until they disappeared beyond a distant second floor that had somehow managed to grow straight out of the walls. Everywhere she looked, the structure was shifting, changing, expanding, as if it were a thing alive.

Then she caught sight of the most welcome feature yet: a door that appeared to lead to the outside. Scrambling to her feet, which wanted to slip on the glassy surface, she hurried to the opening... and found herself tumbling head over heels down a steep incline. Only when she finally reached the bottom, somehow none the worse for her precipitous exit, did she turn and look back at what she had just left behind.

Elsa gasped.

Impossibly delicate spires adorned the pinnacles of a breathtakingly beautiful palace. It seemed to glow, capturing and turning every slim ray of light that chanced to fall upon it. Some places reflected the gleam back like a mirror while others bent and broke it like a prism. Everything was sharp edges and hard lines, with hardly a curve to be seen. And yet, the overall effect wasn't harsh at all. It was triumphant, magnificent, a celebration of infinitely intricate geometries somehow made manifest.

She rose to her feet once again, still unsteady even on this far more stable surface, and gaped in unabashed wonder. What was this place? What was it made of? And how had it come to be here, where there had been nothing at all mere moments ago?

Her eyes traced every facet, drank in every detail. It was unlike anything she had ever seen or even imagined before. She didn't know how she could possibly find the words to describe it to anyone else, which was a shame. Since she didn't know where she was, how could she ever bring anybody here to show them its glorious splendor? At the same time, how could she keep this to herself, never able to share it with anyone else?

Then she realized with alarm that the castle was slowly beginning to recede from her, or perhaps she was pulling away from it. Only now she wanted to hold on. She tried to draw herself back closer again, sorry that she had rashly escaped it in such a terrified hurry. There was nothing which she could grasp, however, that would arrest her slow and inexorable retreat. So instead, she tried all the harder to fix the image in her mind – to capture every little nuance, shape, and shadow in the hopes that she might visit this place again someday, even if only in memories...

• • •

Elsa awoke with a startled exclamation and a vivid image still painted on the canvas of her mind. Determined not to lose it, she did not even bother trying to reach down to grab her pad and pencil. Instead, she simply rolled off the bench onto the floor where she scooped up both items and began to draw feverishly, like one possessed.

There were so many fine lines to lay down that she feared they would all merge together into a single muddled mess. Still, she dared not let such concerns slow her hand. She was terrified that the image might slip away before she captured it fully, and such a loss would be unbearable. So she continued to plunge ever deeper into the complex web of details that she knew must somehow resolve themselves into an amazingly elegant whole.

In the end, only one detail of any importance was omitted from the image that she managed to capture. It was one that she herself had not even noticed, as fascinated as she had been by the beauty of the radiant structure itself. In truth, it was only a small thing, though it might have tainted her appreciation of everything else had it registered upon her senses.

But so it was that she failed to include the small figure of a black haired girl with an eerily familiar face, who had been standing upon the balcony of that splendid palace. This girl had spent the entire time studying Elsa with the very same intensity that the princess had directed toward all the graceful turrets and spires.

Elsa had unknowingly chosen a much more accurate name for her dream-bound doppelganger than she had even realized at the time. Danger can be exceptionally subtle, and is often difficult to even notice until the time is much too late. It can lie in wait for an eternity, until some hapless fool unknowingly stumbles into its arms.

And Fare, like her namesake, was nothing if not patient.

A/N: I think I may need to take a break from "Falling Snow" for a while.

Please understand, I don't intend to abandon this story. I have poured far too much of myself into it already to want to leave it unfinished. After all, I've worked on it continuously for nearly six months now, averaging a little under ten thousand words a week. It's just that, unlike Pabbie, I appear to have misplaced the fun somewhere along the way.

I suspect there are many reasons for this, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with the writing itself. Regardless, I just feel like I need some time to recharge my batteries so that I can come at it again fresh and from a better place.

I'm not sure what form this break will take or how long it will last. It may be that I continue to update, only at a greatly reduced frequency. It may be that I keep writing but refrain from posting for a while, in order to build up a comfortable backlog so that I don't feel so much pressure to crank out something new each and every week. It may be that I need to set the writing aside completely for a time until I can get back into a better head space.

No matter what, I want to thank all of my readers once again for your amazing support and encouragement. I'm terribly sorry to leave you in the lurch like this, and I can only hope that most of you will still be here whenever I manage to make it back. My deepest gratitude and love to you all.