Chapter One: Hope and Fear
"Alright, Olaf!" Elsa cried. "Get ready again!"
"Okay!" The snowman grinned broadly, spreading his arms. "Hit me again!"
With alacrity, Elsa aimed her right hand at the ground. Ice burst from her palm and impacted on the ground. Speedily, it spread across the stony surface of the castle courtyard, snaking its way towards Olaf. Almost without thinking, Elsa leaped onto the ice and slid down its length.
"Now grab my leg!" she ordered as she reached its end.
"I would," Olaf replied, "if my middle weren't missing."
Elsa blinked. Panting for breath, she glanced down at Olaf, whose head was resting atop his bottom, and then gazed beyond him, at a large icicle extending upward from the ice. Impaled on its end was Olaf's torso, with his stick-arms jutting out of it, waving frantically.
"Here, let me get that for you," Elsa said. Jumping nimbly from the ice sheet, she walked towards the icicle and pulled the torso from it.
"Oh, would you look at that?" Olaf said, still grinning as he came over to Elsa. "You've impaled me again."
Elsa replaced the snowman's torso. Sighing, she collapsed onto the ground. Olaf reached out a comforting hand. "It's okay," he said. "Maybe you can get it right next time."
Elsa gestured across the courtyard, where a dozen similar ice sheets could be glimpsed. "That's what you said after every one of those."
"I meant it every time."
"I know you did. But I can't wait for every next time. What if it happens again and I'm not fast enough?"
Olaf reached out further, but Elsa brushed his hand aside. She stood up and, with an effort, willed all of the ice sheets to melt. The resulting water began to collect into pools, before seeping down into the cracks between the cobblestones.
"You just need to wait and see," said Olaf. "And hope."
"Hope." Elsa smiled wanly. "That's a word that's been on mind for a long time." And, without pausing to explain herself to the puzzled snowman, she strode away towards the door of the castle's keep.
Elsa didn't quite suffer from cold the way others did, but she still felt the change in the weather that heralded the onset of winter. It was soothing to her now, relaxing, and she looked forward to it every year. Autumns were shorter in Arendelle than in nations further south, the first snow arriving rather sooner than elsewhere. As the nights grew longer, and the icicles did likewise, she was in her element. A creature born of cold, she relished the lowered temperatures. Only one thing could make her feel the cold of a winter's night to chill her marrow.
Fear will be your enemy.
It was almost fourteen years to the day that the tragic accident had occurred. Since then, her life had changed so drastically that even now, just thinking about it was almost overwhelming. She had lost count of the nights she had spent sobbing beside her bed, begging God on both knees to free her from her powers. She had tried to occupy herself with the study of history, of politics, and she had absorbed much in the way of knowledge that she knew a queen ought to have. But even her studies could only ever serve as a temporary distraction. Always, she had to face the reality that she was different, and that she was a danger to those she loved by design. When at last, she had embraced her difference, she had practically done so for its own sake. And even this had failed her; there was no escaping the brutal reality that, without self-control, she really was a danger to others. Her despair had been so great that only a miracle could have pulled her back from the brink.
The miracle had come, and it had come in the form of Anna.
It had stunned her, had overwhelmed her. And in that moment, her thoughts had begun to rearrange themselves and re-form into something more positive. She could exercise self-control. She could master her own powers and use them only for good.
Yet even then, she had been loath to believe it. For the first time in a lifetime of misery, she had tasted the sweetness of hope. And as she had admitted to Anna, it scared her.
"After all these years," she had said to Erich, the Bishop of Arendelle. "After all these years, why do I receive hope only now?"
"Perhaps you were ready only then," Erich had replied. "But who can say? It's beyond my ability to know all that God has planned for you."
"And my powers?" she had answered. "God loves all men, yet he allows me to be born a dangerous perso-"
The bishop had cut her off right there. "Stop right there, your majesty," he had said. "You are only as dangerous as you allow yourself to be, and so are your powers." He had then gestured for Elsa to sit down, which she had done.
"I don't know why you were born with ice powers" he had continued. "But I do know that God allows each of us certain skills. It's up to us to use them either for his glory, or for our own. You can control ice and snow. That is an awesome responsibility. Use your powers for the good of others, and perhaps, through God's providence, you will hear the words 'well done, thou good and faithful servant' at the end of days."
She had taken the bishop's words to heart and had striven to live by them ever since. And she had gained no small measure of control over her powers; she no longer feared them as she once had.
That did not mean that she had no cause for worry at all, however. Her trip to Weselton, not five months before, had left her with as many fears as it had resolved. It was true that she now had a quasi-understanding of sorts with the duke; if they were far from friends, they at least were no longer actively at loggerheads. And with trade re-established between the duchy and Arendelle on Elsa's own terms, she could rest assured that Rudolph had no further cause for complaint that didn't involve an inability to cheat Arendelle's merchants.
But fresh fears had risen from the ashes of the old. The first of these was the potential political consequences of the reestablishment of trade with Weselton. For all that the terms had proven very favorable to Arendelle and had required steep concessions from the duke, it remained a possibility that other rulers might see her recanting as a sign that she, Queen Elsa, could be bullied and prodded into changing her mind. As yet, there had been no sign of danger on such a front, but she knew she had to remain alert to the possibility.
The second fear was more immediate, and it concerned a previously unknown bodily condition she had. When she had exposed the scheme of Rudolph's eldest daughter to murder him, the resulting conflict has shown that not only was she hypersensitive to pain, but injuries dulled the speed and precision of her ice formation. It was a crippling weakness, one that had made her realize just how blessed she had been not to have suffered any such injuries before- not least during her fight with the duke's bodyguards the previous year. She knew now that she hated physical pain. And she knew, too, that when combined with emotional pain, it could make her lose her cool in combat.
Again and again, she had practiced with Olaf, repeating the maneuver that had almost caused her to lose her fight with Kirstine. And again and again, she had come no nearer to being confident that she could be in the same situation again, and succeed.
"It's an obsession, your majesty," Kai had told her. "You need to stop it. If the time comes, you can decide what to do then."
She knew he was right, but she couldn't help herself. Always, the same fear gnawed at her mind:
What if Anna's life depends on my fighting skills, and I fail again?
And lastly, there had been the duke's revelation to her: that his wife had bartered with a powerful being she would not name for the power of fire. She had failed to master it and had killed herself by accident.
As Elsa reached the door of the keep, the duke's words returned to her:
"I fear there is someone out there who peddles magic powers on a whim, not caring for the safety of others."
She had poured over every book of beasts, every scrap of information on magic she could find, and she had turned up nothing. She could not share her fear; she had sworn not to reveal what the duke had told her. But the knowledge that such a being roamed the earth was worrying in itself. She had no idea if it was benevolent or not; Rudolph was a man prone to imagining the worst, and had automatically concluded that he, she, or it -which, he couldn't say- was evil. But if it was-
No. Elsa grasped the handle of the door and gave it a push. Don't think of it.
Entering the keep, she shut the door behind her, and then hurried down the richly carpeted hallway to her left. Up the stairs she went, allowing her hand to trace across the polished, ivory-gilt banister. Through another hallway strewn with maroon rugs she passed, until she reached the door at the end of the hall. She passed through it, into her study, and closed it after her entrance.
The room was as it always was- her desk on the left side of the room, a window against the rear wall. The volumes remained on the bookshelves, the scrolls on her desk. And on the wall opposite the window, there hung the portrait of her father in full regalia.
Slowly, she strode over to the portrait. It hung in shadow, unlit by the candles that illuminated the rest of the room. Yet it remained visible, staring down at her with its stern, but not uncaring, glance. The contrast was almost a metaphor for her mixed feelings about the man who had inadvertently caused her so much suffering, but who had done so out of a genuine sense of love.
Yes, it had been genuine. She had tried to imagine otherwise, but she could not bring herself to forget the look of very real pain that had filled King Adgar's features when she had refused to so much as touch him.
"I didn't want to hurt you," she said, voicing her thoughts aloud. "Even now, I don't want to. But there are still times when I think I hate you. And at the same time…I want to embrace you. But I can't- you're a corpse in the grave, with a soul awaiting God's judgment. I can't yell at a decomposed body, and I can't embrace it either."
Elsa began to turn, and then stopped. She glanced quickly at the face in the painting. It remained as it always had been- a blend of intensity and warmth. She reached out and felt the portrait's dry surface.
Shaking her head, Elsa turned away and strode towards a chair by the window. She collapsed into it, her weariness after her exertions finally overcoming her. She eyed the portrait once again. It was still the same.
Yet, try as she might, she could not shake the feeling that, out of the corner of her eye, she had seen tears rolling down the dead king's face.