Like a stray and homeless dog following a man with food in his hands, in the hope that some crumbs might drop to the ground or the miracle the man might be kind and hand a chunk to him, the small boy trails after the ice-miners. Brave enough to follow them as they make the slow trek up into the cold mountain but not brave enough to walk alongside them, the boy walks in the muddy path gouged by the older men's boots, pushed along by the bravery (or, if you're unkind, ignorance) of those too young to know better, and by a slobbery wet tongue that licks at him when he falters.
"Shhhh," little Kristoff whispers at Sven, as in front of the pair the ice-miners stride up the mountain in what look to the five year-old like ten-league shoes. All around them the mountainside is still, the only things to disturb the sleeping giant the men climbing it; a line of pale lights making the same old jokes and talking about the same old things. When Kristoff is older and braver he'll know that they laugh and joke so loudly to ward off the night, and the animals and old ghost stories that walk it. For now though the adults ahead of him are his idols; what he intends to become when he's a real man, and little Kristoff with only a tiny sled and a pet reindeer to his name needs an idol so very badly.
The men step at the edge of the lake and get on their knees for the prayers to Miner Erhard and Old Olaf, and the man at the end of the line can hear the scuffling and faint childish ooowww as Kristoff does the same. Maybe it's just a little cruel or heartless, but to the majority of the haggard and weary old men – most of whom worry about whether they'll be able to afford the wood to hear their homes in winter, or buy meat and fruit more than once a week – he's a good-luck charm, their own little Askeladden, and in a profession so reliant on good luck they hoard every scrap of it they can find.
The prayers to old saints done, the first man steps one hobnailed boot onto the surface of the lake, and starts the old chant. Saws and pick-axes and forceps glint in the moonlight as the midnight miners start their work.
BORN of cold and WIN-ter air…
"A good night."
"They're all good nights this deep in the season. Wait 'till summer, when the lake's thin enough to put a foot through."
The sleds, piled high with the glittering bricks that will make them enough money to survive the melting summer months, the ice-miners begin the slow trek back down the mountain before the sun can rise for another day and start chipping away at their haul. Huge blocks of ice will sit in basements and cheap ice-houses for weeks or months, packed with straw and sawdust, until the year rolls around again and the merchants, nobles, visiting traders and those willing to pay will want something to cool down. Backbreaking labour and enough risk for a dozen other jobs (merchants, for example never had to worry that picking up one last bun from their cart would send a thousand tons of wood and bread through their fat skulls), but worth good money.
They're practical and hard-headed men, each of which has seen at least one of his friends swallowed by the mountain, so when the first snowflakes of the storm come down gentler than a kiss they don't shrug it off as a little flurry that will pass by in a minute, or bunker down and wait 'till it passes. As one, they tighten the drawstrings around their clothes, pull their hats tighter down over their heads, and turn the pace from a steady walk they could keep up for days into a jog they can do only for minutes. When the north mountain rises and shakes the dust from its coat, it's wise not to be a flea on her back.
To their credit it's also because of those ghosts that haunt their memories that it is only a minute or two before one ice-miner turns to another and asks:
"Where's Kristoff?"
Kristoff loves ice.
Not as a source of income or as a valued profession, but simply for the thing itself. He loves the lakes when the group first reaches them, and he can look out and in child-sized eyes see a perfect still ocean stretched out before him, like a giant untouched jewel dropped into the earth and left to be discovered. He loves the way the stars and moonlight pour into it and bounce around inside and throw it back out in a thousand beams and glows, endlessly reflecting light as the sleds jostle and waver down the mountainside. Kristoff has his own tiny sled now, a tiny little thing made by one of the miners in a fit of drunken sentimentality, and now that Sven is big enough he pulls it behind the other bigger sleds. His own little cubes of ice he drags back down the mountain aren't stored like the others, muddied by straw or dirtied and roughened by sawdust. He keeps them on the ground outside the window of his room, a good-luck charm of his own he can look at any time he wants to look at something beautiful, or to forget.
Kristoff is lost in his own imagination, thinking he can almost feel the light from the ice behind him bouncing from his little coat, and that's why he doesn't realise what the small snowfall on his head means, and that's why he falls behind the rest of the ice-miners, and that's why he's the only one who sees the girl.
Or more accurately Sven sees it, and raises the alarm.
"What is it buddy?" Kristoff asks as he looks in the direction Sven is honking in. He shivers and clutches his coat around himself and in the way of all small children everywhere, at every point in history, he tries to look out into the darkness and at the same time not look at all, in case he should see something. Even at such a young age though Sven is already throwing off the fears that it might take other, more coddled children years to break free of, and so when he looks, he sees:
It's barely anything, little more than a flask of red and blue. But it's clothing, and people wear clothing, and finally Kristoff's daydreams are thrown out of his little skull and he realises he's alone in the mountain and what started as a light snowfall is quickly turning into something more.
Oh man I'm gonna get in troubllllle. "C'mon Sven!" Kristoff says, and runs after the little wavering scraps of cloth that he thinks are the ice-miners he's meant to be following.
People carry good-luck charms into dangerous places thinking they'll bring them safety. Nobody ever really wonders whether being carried into mortal danger is lucky for the charm or not.
It's ten minutes later and Kristoff is worried now, really worried, like he remembers being back in the Bad Days he tries to keep out of his skull. The snowflakes that turned into a breeze are turning into a real wind now, and somehow the people he's running desperately to catch up with aren't getting any closer. Every time he gets a little bit closer, the figures get a little bit bigger, the storm picks up even more, and he's forced to slow down. Sven's honking is even more insistent and he can see the worry in his pet's eyes, but Kristoff knows that sometimes it's better to be committed to a course than to change half-way through. When you're on a crackling frozen lake with mist all around you and you can't see the shore, it's better to just start walking away from the sound regardless of whether it's taking you farther out, than to keep changing directions in the middle and let the cracks find your feet.
Kristoff is young and stubborn and not a little bone-headed, but he's strong for his age. He keeps walking, dragging his afraid but loyal reindeer alongside behind him. The storm – and it really is a storm now – rages around him, and he's losing sight of the ghosts ahead.
"HEY!" he bellows as loud as he can, waving his arms up and down as if the person ahead of him has eyes in the back of their head. Whoever they are they haven't stopped or turned even once since he found them, just kept walking endlessly. The wind picks up his words effortlessly and throws them away into nothing. Kristoff shivers. The world is white around him, all sense of direction lost except the ghost.
The breath is torn from his body now, every step harder and harder as he unknowingly climbs the mountain he's trying to escape and is now trying to make him into one more feature of its endless hunger. Kristoff trips, and only hands grasping at Sven's fur stop him from falling into the snow, now up to his boots.
"Boy."
He doesn't know what a hallucination is but he knows the voice isn't real. Even though sometimes he likes to move Sven's mouth up and down and pretend his pet/friend is really talking he knows it isn't him either.
"Boy,"
He feels a sharp pain in his side, and that does what a voice can't. That, and the sudden feeling of…warmth?
"Whhhhuuuuh?" is all he can manage as he straightens up and looks around the storm, which seems to be…receding?
"Sire, we cannot leave this child here," the low voice rumbles, and Kristoff looks down instead of around.
"Abbbbluh?" is the best he manages at small rocky beady-eyed figure staring up at him. "Ow!" He hops on one leg when a second troll clips him by the ear and his stubbornness overrides his cold. "Hey!"
"Show a little respect to your elders, young'un," a voice that screams motherly barks.
"Pabbie, we can't delay," a third voice says from much, much further up than the troll did. "Give the boy to the guards, we press on," it continues, and Kristoff cranes his neck upwards to see…
The man sitting on the back of the huge black fjord horse is what the ice-miners would have called nobby, he doesn't doubt for a single second, and so is the woman standing next to him. He's seen them in the town, walking around picking things from the stores, so rich they don't even have to pay right there on the spot (Kristoff had tried buying an apple 'on credit' once and had only avoided a hiding by running faster than the fat merchant he'd suggested it to).
In the storm that's died down to a strong wind though he's never seen nobility who looked as scared as these two do.
The man looks down from the old troll (and Kristoff is getting warm enough that a Real Live Troll is fast becoming A Thing) to him. "Boy, have you seen anyone on this mountain tonight?"
Kristoff knows he should take his hat off and show respect but, well, he's cold. "Only one sir, headed…" he turns and points, and realises he's pointing up the mountain. All this time he's been walking back the way he came, towards the summit, not down to the house he shares with the other ice-miners and their warm little fire and fresh carrots.
You'd have followed that ghost up and to your death all alone, a little voice in his head tells him, and then all at once the bravery leaves what is, in the end, still a small child, and Kristoff starts crying.
"There there," the old mother-troll says, and Kristoff and Sven are enveloped together in a big warm mossy hug. "You're both alright now."
The king and the troll he called 'Pabbie' are exchanging words now. Something about in time and magic storm, but Kristoff can't hear and doesn't care because it's the first hug he's shared with another person since…since ever.
Tears dried out now and a huge blanket that feels like it's made out of a hundred pounds off moss wrapped around his shoulders, Kristoff rides behind one of the guards on the huge horse. He's stayed quiet now, ever since he realised who it is he's been riding with.
The king and queen!
All the royalty Kristoff knows are from the old miner's stories, books being not really the kind of thing ice-miners bought for their barracks. Generally they were minor characters, generally there as bit-parts that commanded the brave knight to go off and slay the ice-trolls threatening the kingdom, or petty tyrants for Akeladd to run rings around while he stole a magic cup or dagger. He knew in a general sense that Arendelle was ruled by a king and queen but that knowledge had as much to do with his day-to-day life as the silk shirts some of the miners bought in summer; pretty to look at and nice to feel maybe, but not useful for real work.
So he's surprised when it's the king and queen, not the guards, who break trail as they climb the increasingly rocky mountainside. A small hand points and Kristoff follows it to spot the small path sandwiched between two huge boulders, carving a path away from the big snowbanks they're walking up. For a second he can see something green there.
"That's our home."
"Isn't it cold up here?" he asks the old mother-troll, who hasn't really left their side since they were found.
"Oh my no laddy," she almost sings back, reminding Kristoff of…something. "With all the steam and the hot rocks in there it's just as warm and toasty as your own mother's house is!"
"I don't have a mother," Kristoff replies without thinking, and that's the end of that conversation as the troll woman looks down at him with pity and horror. He clutches the huge mossy blanket closer to him.
"The wind's picking up," the king says.
"We are almost upon them your majesty," Pabby replies. "We must hurry."
They pull to a stop in the middle of a raging storm. Without asking Kristoff jumps down from the saddle and lifts the huge mossy blanket up to let Sven snuggle under it. Kristoff can't remember when he got Sven, or even if he was given Sven at all. The small reindeer could have just followed him home one day for all he remembers. Sven is his best friend in the world though and he'll gladly go a little cold to make sure Sven isn't shivering.
"Stay here Kristoff," the troll he's learned is called Bulda whispers. "While we and his majesty deal with this."
Sven gives a mournful honk as she moves up away from them and is almost instantly swallowed by the white wall that swirls around them. "What do you think buddy?" Kristoff asks.
Honk, is what is actually said, but what Kristoff hears is I wanna know!
"Me too." Kristoff spares a glance around him at the king's escort. Like the ice-miners; hard-bitten men chosen for the strength of their arms and iron in their hearts, and maybe not for the quickness of their minds. "Let's go!"
"HEY!"
But Kristoff is too quick, and the guards that have to scramble down from their huge horses are all wearing riding gear instead of something actually appropriate for the mountain, and they haven't spent all the time that Kristoff has walking through snow. Compared to them the small boy practically skips through the heavy blizzard, and he's out of their sight in seconds, hidden behind…
"Child what did I tell you?" Bulda cracks at him. But the child in question isn't listening, because he's looking past the bulk of the trolls and up towards the king and queen, and…
The stones rise behind them, four fingers of granite and a thumb that thrust into the air, and on the snow-covered 'palm' he sees her.
The ghost.
In a blue dress that barely looks thick enough to protect her from a stiff breeze, let alone the arctic storm raging around her, the girl stands feet apart planted firmly in the snow. In front of and facing away from him the king is gesturing (pleading? A king? Impossible) with his hands up, palms forward like he's trying to placate her. Kristoff feels a gust of wind even stronger than before slap him, and when he recovers and looks back up he imagines for a second the girl is looking straight down at him, and he can see the most incredible blue eyes he's ever seen in his life. But the moment passes and he realises the girl isn't even aware of him, she's shouting at the king and trying to…she's trying to protect something? There's a rough bundle of red and green by one of the 'fingers' and the blue-eyed ghost is switching between holding it and talking with the ever-closer king.
"Come away child!"
A warm and rough hand grabs him, and he and Sven are hoisted away.
"That meeting isn't for the likes of us."
He steals a quick glance backwards at the confrontation taking place, and now the ghost is holding up another girl as the king rushes at them, and the expression on the first girl;s face isn't pain or fear anymore; its happiness in the midst of the blizzard. The last thing Kristoff sees before the storm (and is it his tiny imagination or is the storm just a little weaker than it was before) covers them from view is two glowing jewels staring down the mountain, chunks of beautiful, perfect ice locked into the face of someone barely older than he is.
Kristoff loves ice.
"Who were they?"
"Boy weren't you paying attention? That was the king and queen! Their majesties!"
"I mean…ummm..."
"Oooooh boy you're still too young for those kind of thoughts!"
Kristoff blushes scarlet as he's led down the valley and tries to bury his head in the mossy blanket he's wearing, which is difficult because every time he does so Sven keeps nuzzling up against him.
He had watched from behind Bulda, half blind from the snowstorm, as people-shaped shadows moved like a puppet-show on the great stone hand, and then several things had happened at all once: The king had turned back to the group of soldiers and gave some sign Kristoff couldn't see, and the tension had leaked out of the entire lot of them like a deflated water-skin. By some miracle the storm had started to dissipate, changing from a howling gale to a strong wind, and once again Kristoff could see through the distance to catch a glimpse of the ghost he had spent the night chasing, now with her arms wrapped around the smaller red-haired girl he spotted when the storm was at its peak. He hadn't had have a moment to spare to look at her though, because they had been locked onto the first girl whose eyes had looked like sapphire chunks in the rising sun's light. Finally, he had watched as words were exchanged between the king and the troll-leader, and the result of that was obvious even to him.
"Pabby?" Bulda had asked as the weary old stone walked back towards them. Behind him the king and the others had mounted their horses to leave.
"It was no use, he was…insistent."
"You foolish old troll, letting them leave just like that!"
"He is the king, my dear, and some bonds are too strong for a 'foolish old troll' to simply walk and stand between."
"Pabby you know we can't just leave it at-"
Bulda's eyes widened like dinner plates as Pabby waved a hand at her, then he had looked down at Kristoff. "And who is this little one, brave enough to climb the mountain on a winter's night?"
"'M Kristoff," he managed to stutter. Something warm and fuzzy and smelly pushed itself out from under the moss blanket. "And this is my best friend Sven!"
Pabby and Bulda exchanged a look, this time one he can't decipher. Then the old troll turned without a word and walked back towards the guards, all ready to leave. Kristoff looked at all of them and finally spotted them; two smaller shapes, bundled up against the winter cold, huddled up on the saddle of the guard-captain. He couldn't see them clearly under the twists of fabric but it looked like they were holding hands.
"Kristoff my boy."
He was jerked out of his focus as Pabby talks. "Whut?"
"How would you like to visit the home of the trolls?"
And what young boy, raised on the myths and legends of a bunch of superstitious old ice-miners, would have been able to say no to that offer?
Which was how he found himself walking through the strangest forest-cum-valley-cum hot spring he had ever seen, covered in a thick blanket made out of the same moss, led by real trolls.
"Wow…" He puts his hand over a plume of steam rising from the ground and only keeps it there for a second before it becomes hot enough to scald.
"Mind now boy. The earth here keeps us nice and cosy but mind you don't test her patience," Pabby says, but not in the way one of the miners would chastise and slap him for playing around with one of their tools. More in the way that he's really worried he might get hurt. It's a nice kind of warning.
"Whose patience?"
"The mountain of course!" Bulda says. She hasn't let either of them out of her sight since they had left the company of the king. "All over the place she's one frosty mother, but here where we live she got breath hot enough to make a dragon shudder."
"What's a dragon?"
Bulda pauses for a second open-mouthed, then grabs the two of them into another bear-hug. "Ooooh you're so cute! Now we're definitely keeping you!"
For Kristoff the next few hours pass in a blur. The narrow passage ends and changes into a flat plain of warm rock and moss, and Kristoff gapes as he watches the aurora dance in the sky above them, as bright and colourful as any he's ever seen in his short life. He wonders if it's because the king visited the mountain, but that train of thought is de-railed immediately as suddenly he's pelted with small rocks and pebbles that turn into a herd of trolls, adults and children and elders, all of those want to talk to the human stranger and his warm slobbery pet. For Kristoff the next few hours are the happiest of his life.
"Oh my dear, I fear we have all made a terrible mistake."
"Quit your whining Pabby, it isn't like you. No sense in complaining about the past, better we look to fixin' the future." Secretly though she's worried. Pabby is old, old, even for a troll, and now he looks every second of that age.
"The future is what I am afraid of now, my dear, and all the more because I cannot imagine why I should be. Those two young princesses…."
"Those two girls! Why Pabby maybe you really are getting' too old if you were afraid of them. Why, looking at that pair I've never seen a family so close."
"And that love is what I am afraid of. In all the world there's no greater force than love. Those with love beating in their breast can do incredible things. Slay dragons with nothing more than a simple blade, wake the dead with a kiss and conquer armies without a single soldier that will follow them. Love can make someone jump into hell without a moment's thought, or thaw a heat that's never known peace."
"Then I see no reason for you to worry your craggy head about them, if'n they have such a force on their side," Bulda says, but she looks at the old troll leader, as close a friend as she's ever had, and can see he isn't convinced. Or isn't thinking in that direction at all.
And Pabby isn't. He's lived on the mountain for generations, and troll memory goes deeper, goes into the very rocks itself. He remembers the stories his father told him, and his father before him. All of them were clever wrappings meant to reveal a moral or warning at the end, and one of them is pushing itself up through the ground now and jumping up and down for attention. One about a boy and girl and a queen and a mirror of ice. He saw the look in the eyes of the crown princess when even the thought of taking her sister away had been mentioned to her, and he remembers the ice he felt around Anna's little heart. He hopes that nothing is wrong, that everything will be fine. He hopes that the fierce love he could see between the two sisters would keep them safe from the mistake he feared he'd seen tonight.
He hopes that when he passes on his children won't have a new story, about a pair of princesses and a hand of stone, and a heart of ice.
"Kristoff!"
The boy turns away from his game with the other troll children and skips (skips!) towards Pabby and Bulda. "Yes!"
Pabby and Bulda share a glance, having already shared what she knows about the boy before they arrived. "How do you like it here my boy?" Pabby asks gently. About this however, he won't have to worry.
The boy beams. "I love it!"
"How would you like to come up and visit any time you want?"
He doesn't even have to finish the sentence.
"Why Pabby that's a rotten thing you're thinking, you old fossil."
Pabby doesn't really bother to argue, because she's right. He can wrap it up in nice disguises, talk about how much good they can do for an orphan boy, but good doesn't erase bad. Like a rock hidden inside a thrown snowball, it looks pretty flying through the air but it will draw blood when it hits. "I know my dear, I know. I have good intentions."
Bulda crosses her arms and sighs. When she speaks it's in the gravelly voice of a woman who absolutely means what she says. "Don't you just use that boy and throw him away Pabby, I'm warning you."
"I promise." Give more than you take, help more than you hurt has been the motto he's tried to live all his life, ever since his ancestors came out of the ever-hotter and less…accommodating...south, to beg the old king for a place to live. Old King Olaf had given them one, in exchange for promises of fealty.
The current king is no Olaf, all beady-eyed and afraid as he teetered between holding up the old ways of his fathers and the support and stability that the worship of the new Christ-God brought. Agdar is a kind-hearted man who tries his best for his subjects, sometimes possibly a little too willing to strike a bad deal to keep the peace. The king also owes him a favour, from the last time a bad deal went a little too sour, and Pabby now intends to collect on it. The boy is clearly a natural with animals, the king's stables always need clearing out, and since time began young girls have always loved horses…
"Kristoff is a good lad," Bulda says, looking at her clan leader with perhaps a sharper eye than she normally would. "He just needs a little guidance in his life, not those horrible old ice-stabbers he's been dragged around by."
He nods, but his mind is elsewhere. In the story of his father and his grandfather, the boy had been the cursed one, rescued from the clutches of the snow queen by the love and pure heart of his children sweetheart.
Pabby watches as the young boy and his reindeer play with the other trolls, and in the boy's content and innocent smile sees a store of hope, to be nurtured and kept against a cold day that – to his own ancestors and the human God he hoped would never come – that it might be needed.
END OF CHAPTER
Four down.
A big thanks to people still reading, and all the new followers. A great thing about FFnet is that even if you don't leave a review I can still see how many people are reading along by traffic stats, and by the ones for this one I can see that's a whole bunch of people and I really appreciate that. A big thanks to those who've already followed and reviewed because I'm not gonna lie I still get a kick out of hearing real feedback and see those fav/follow numbers go up. Generally you can expect an update once a week, plus or minus a few days as real life interferes with me or I get into a good groove (so don't fear HawtDamm the show will go on). I'll post updates around 7-9 GMT.
Still looking for that proof-reader too. Basically someone who's willing to check me for spelling and grammer and who I can bounce the plot off and is willing to say 'no Cobray that's fuckin' dumb' in exchange for, essentially, early access.
Alright enough talking about me, chapter notes:
Oh Kristoff, you really do just blunder into things don't you? The movie said nothing about how the hell a young boy ended up following a group of ice miners so neither will I, except that it was obviously tragic. I'm perfectly willing to believe that superstitious old workmen would take a young star-struck boy to a frozen mountain for luck because hey this is the beginning of the industrial revolution and what are child rights? I'm not entirely heartless though, Kristoff has some good days and bad days ahead of him
Speaking of whom the ice-miners really lost out in the saints department. Hell even tin miners got their own specific patron but do dudes who go out onto middle of frozen rivers over freezing water? Nooooooo. I figured Saint Erhard was as close as we were going to get, even if France isn't exactly near Norway.
Old Olaf is of course Saint Olaf; King Olaf II. Like a lot of kings back then he barely qualified as a Christian (what with all the wars and the murder) but made a big show of it to placate the peasantry, and was canonised pretty much the second he died as a political move to create a national unifying figure. Like Kristoff the history of the trolls is pretty much a blank page, and I like the idea of the trolls fleeing from an increasingly Christianised and anti-pagan Europe to try and make a home in a place still filled with the old religions and stories.
Frozen Heart would probably not be used as an actual work song. It's too complex for one, and the tempo changes too much and becomes too fast for another, you don't want a fast tempo for something as dangerous as any kind of mining. It's probably too dirge-like for the other place they'd sing it too; pubs after work to get drunk and forget about the work they just did. It's a fantastic song though and of course the most symbolic and foreboding on the entire Frozen soundtrack, so the hell with it.
Askeladde/Askeladd/Askeladden is a recurring figure in Norway mythology and children's stories, the middles ages' own little Dennis the Menace who went after his enemies with wits rather than fists. A more human and less antagonistic Loki. Both sisters have aspects of his personality and skills, and this definitely isn't the last time we'll be seeing the name.
This is probably the last time there'll be an author's note as big as this one. Tumblr has to be useful for something and I'm not gonna lie I'd like to try and use it to get the fic spread a little further afield, so I'll probably put them there instead to give you a reason to visit, follow and reblog it. So if you enjoy a chapter and want to see a little of the background thinking and notes that go into the story and my writing process shimmy on over to cobraygordon dot tumblr dot com.
Peace out.
Cobray