Hello my dear readers. Thanks so much for your reviews!
I don't own Frozen. No matter how hard I try.
The villagers advanced on Gerda. She stumbled back, recognising that there was no way a 60-year-old woman was going to make it past 300 civilians, armed or not. She didn't think they would hurt her, but she didn't like her situation.
"Okay," she swallowed. "I'll take you someplace the Queen might have gone."
"Might?" hissed one of the angry villagers near the front of the assemblage. "The Queen's a murderer! She should be hung."
Gerda winced, both at the idea of the Queen's execution and the man's bad grammar. Hanged, she told him in her mind. "I'll thank you to know that the death of the Princess was as pure an accident as knocking the milk over!" Gerda told him coldly, trying to stay calm. "I'll take you to speak to the Queen, if she's gone where I think she has, but if you're going to try anything violent, I think you should know that Queen Elsa has every right to defend herself against such attacks using whatever means necessary."
Muttering arose amongst the people. Gerda frowned. Had she said the wrong thing?
"You mean she'll kill us, just like her sister!" Called a young woman from the middle of the swarm of angry villagers. It was just like a scene from a novel Gerda's mother had liked to read when Gerda was little, the angry mob of villagers. However they were in a luxury palace, not outside some creaky old barn somewhere, and as far as Gerda could tell, only one or two civilians sported pitchforks.
"No," Gerda corrected, "I mean if the Queen requires self-defence involving the use of her powers, she has every right to do so."
"Take us there then," demanded the same young woman. Gerda peered at her. She was very young, around the age of Princess Anna. Still a teenager then. Her black hair was pulled into a bun at the back of her head, with tendrils hanging around her face as though they were trying to escape. She had dark, heavily lidded eyes and a slightly upturned chin.
"Very well," Gerda told them reluctantly. "I'll take you to Queen Elsa's ice palace. But I can't take three hundred or more people tramping through the woods, so it'll just have to be a smaller group. I'll only take five and we will bring Kai with us. We'll take the carriage."
The sleigh ride was awkward, and the atmosphere was so tense Elsa felt like she could reach out and touch it. The only words spoken were when Kristoff began to move slightly off course, or when the path they should take changed direction. Kristoff steered tersely, while Elsa redrew the map as best as she could remember it, knowing that she would forget if she left it too long.
Midday came and went, and both Kristoff and Elsa were too stubborn to break the silence and suggest stopping for lunch. Maybe it was better that way, Kristoff reflected. He was a lot more accustomed to missing meals than the prestigious Queen Elsa was, and besides, they needed to ration.
Elsa sorely missed her lunch, but she wasn't going to complain. They would have to eat dinner, though. She wondered how long their supplies could last, and where they could get more food once they began running low. She used the end of the pencil to erase a line marking one edge of Arendelle and began to redraw it correctly. She hadn't known much about the geography of neighbouring countries, but Arendelle's coastline and border had been drilled into her from a tender age. Carefully she labelled the West Coast and drew a few waves near the line that marked the edge of the land, just to make it more easily distinguishable. She had no colours, but shapes were easily determined.
As the afternoon passed, clouds drifted over their heads, providing some welcome shade. Kristoff drove in silence, pondering Anna's condition and his recent argument with Elsa, while she perfected her map. Elsa tapped her pencil against one of the blank spots on her map, struggling to remember. Forest? No, she didn't think so... maybe a mountain range? There was something there, but she couldn't remember what it was, and she remained hesitant of asking his help.
It occurred to Elsa once or twice that it was petty to give one another the silent treatment after a fight - after all, what's done was done, and there was no way either of them were going to turn back now and search for the missing map - but whenever she was going to break the silence, she couldn't bring herself to. She'd always thought of Kristoff as a strong person. Sure, he wasn't invincible, but he was pretty close to it, in Elsa's eyes. Somehow she didn't want to look soft before him, by bowing to the pressure of their argument. True, it might be stupid, but Elsa bit her lip and ignored it. She'd spent too long perfecting the perfect girl mask, there was no way a simple argument would make her look weak.
Especially not in front of someone so important to her family as Kristoff.
Gerda and Kai climbed into the carriage. The castle's finest four horses were already hitched to the front of the carriage - the Queen and the Princess' horses, Phantom and Satin, lead the equine quartet while two jet black guard horses whose names Gerda didn't know stood closest to the carriage.
A uniformed guard sat already in the drivers seat, and Kai seated himself next to him. That left Gerda to sit in the back of the carriage. The five citizens who were accompanying them (Gerda suspected they'd nominated themselves) took their places. The young woman who had called out sat primly next to Gerda, crossing one leg over the other and adjusting her worn skirts. The man who'd called for the Queen's death was also with them, along with three others. They settled themselves on the padded seats and with a flick of the reins, the driver set them off towards the castle gates.