Chapter 7: To the Trolls
Kristoff hardly registered the blue blur race past him out the door before a chilled wind slammed it shut. He tried the door, only to find ice jamming the lock. Ever since he first laid eyes on Elsa's imposing fortress of isolation on the North Mountain, he knew she was the sort of person who preferred to work alone. But now Anna was in trouble, and he wouldn't sit idly by.
"Hey Sven, give me a hand."
Sven walked up to the door, pawed at it a couple times with his front legs to gauge its strength, then turned about and gave it a fierce two-legged back kick. Splinters flew around the frozen bolt as the rest of the mass of the door slammed open. Krsitoff gave Kai a brief bow, saying "Sorry about breaking your castle," before dashing down the hall after Elsa, Sven following at his heels.
The man and his reindeer caught up with the Queen as she was dashing out of the courtyard, turning in the direction of the river. "Where do you think you're going?" Kristoff asked.
Elsa was clearly out of breath just from the run out of the castle, and had slowed down to a walk before answering. "I'm going to find my sister. You heard Gerda. The Bandits learned magic, so I'm going to find this sorceress."
"You think Anna is with the sorceress just because the Bandits know how to make fireballs?"
Elsa's only reply was with a cold glare, which grew frost on the tips of Kristoff's exposed blond hair.
Kristoff wiped the icicles off before went on, "All we know about the sorceress is that she taught Gerda to talk to flowers. That doesn't sound much like fire magic to me."
Elsa shot him another cold glare before breaking into a run again. "I see. And you are some sort magic expert?"
Despite the tension of the moment Kristoff wanted to chuckle. He had nearly this exact conversation with Anna the first day they met. "Not me, but I've got friends that are. And they don't live that way." He though back to the first time he met his family, remembering the trail of ice that led him to the Valley of Living Rock. "In fact, you've met them before."
Elsa's eyes were still tight in a glare, but when she saw Kristoff, her eyes widened with realization. "The trolls…"
"I think Grand Pabbie may have some insight. Why don't you hop on Sven. It'll be faster."
"You take Sven," Elsa answered. "I've got a better idea."
She brought her hands together into a ball of air that glowed blue, then threw it toward the ground. The glowing ball flattened outward and twisted on the soil, like a puddle freshly spilt onto the floor. Raising her arms up, the glowing ice took shape—legs stepping out of the puddle, a long cervine torso topped with an elongated head and snout. From above the ears, a pair of icicles grew and branched outward. Finally, the glow on the ground evaporated, and a reindeer of ice and snow stared back at Kristoff.
Both Kristoff and Sven's mouths dropped.
Elsa smiled at this, then climbed on her mount. "I take it you like her? I suppose we'll have to come up with a name for her eventually." The queen and her snowdeer dashed up the road pointing east of the North Mountain, but after a few yards, turned and came back. "I think you had better lead the way, Mr. Bjorgman. I've only been to the Valley once, a long while ago."
Kristoff was slowly regaining control of his jaw, but had enough to say, "Sure. Follow me." He climbed onto Sven, and with a "Hya!" headed off at a gallop northward toward the Valley of Living Rock.
The Bandit Queen sat with her eyes closed, holding on to the last fragments of her latest vision. So, the queen of Arendelle had found out about Anna, and now had summoned a snowdeer to take her northward? With her eyes still closed, the Bandit Queen thought about the icy mount—it was a thing of beauty, with the setting sun dancing off frosted fur and the forest refracting through its antlers. But as she opened her eyes, she remembered that the animal was the product of a devious magic that could freeze a person's heart.
It wouldn't matter if Elsa was after Kjerstin's and Anna. Arendelle's queen would never find them up here.
The Bandit Queen looked down the glacial valley—snow-covered and lit only by the Northern Lights. The sun was just setting in Arendelle, but up here it had set hours earlier. Soon this valley would be engulfed in the polar night. Would the fortress be ready by then? She turned to look at the rising towers of rock and snow. To her they still looked like the derelict skeleton of something that once was grand, left decaying by two decades of disuse. With work it could be beautiful, but all she could see now was an ugly scar on the frozen valley.
The men would simply have to work harder. And she knew how to persuade them. She stood and turned to the camp, and as she walked, the whites of her eyes crystallized outward into blue sapphires.
Within an hour, the four had reached the Valley of Living Rock. Sven was panting heavily from the run, but the snowdeer simply stood.
Kristoff and Elsa walked into the middle of the boulder field. "So, I know you've met them before," Kristoff began. "But, uh, I should probably warn you that the rock trolls tend to…"
He was interrupted by a deep rumbling noise as a dozen boulders unwound themselves into trolls, staring intently at the two humans. Then one finally shouted. "Kristoff's back!"
A second troll added, "And he's brought another girl!"
A third troll, with white flowers growing from her mossy hair and a dozen red crystals around her neck, rolled up. "Hey, what happened to that girl with the red hair with white stripes? I liked her."
"Hi Bulda," Kristoff answered. "That was Anna. She's in trouble. This is her sister Elsa. We have to save her, but we need Grand Pabbie's help."
A murmur went through the valley, as even more rocks unrolled themselves and started whispering, "Elsa?" "The Queen?" "The snow queen is here?" The whispers only ended when a larger, older-looking boulder rolled slowly through the crowd.
Grand Pabbie unrolled from his rock, and looked up to Elsa, before quickly bowing. "My Queen…" he began.
Elsa felt a torrent of emotion. This rock was the reason she had spent her adolescence in isolation. His words, just a warning of the danger of her powers, led her to be separated from her sister all those years. He had told her to learn to control her powers, but not how to. He warned her of fear, but didn't realize that the separation would make her fear her powers. Elsa wanted to hate him, for hiding the truth, for letting herself and her Papa believe that locking the girls away was the right course, for …
But she looked at the old troll and only saw a great sadness in his eyes. She let him continue.
"My queen. We trolls don't hear much of the world at large anymore, confined as we are to this valley. But it filled me with great sadness when Kristoff told us that the castle gates had been closed all those years ago. I knew it was the wrong course, but there was nothing I could … I sorry. So very sorry." He looked down again.
Elsa tried to smile, but it faltered. "I … I want to be mad at you for your part in all that, and maybe I will eventually. But right now there is something more important. Anna has been kidnapped."
Kristoff leaned in and added, "By bandits."
"With magic," Elsa continued.
"Fire magic," Kristoff finished. "We were hoping you knew something about that."
"Fire magic?" Pabbie asked, then turned and looked at the ground before anyone could answer. "So the Boreal Bandits learned how to use our crystals."
"You know about the Boreal Bandits?" Kristoff asked.
"They raided this valley twice. The first time five years ago, they were in such a state of disarray, we managed to fend them off. But they escaped with one of Pebble's blue crystals."
A small troll girl rolled up, showing off her necklace, which sure enough had a blue crystal torn from it.
"We saw them again two years ago. The second time, they had a new leader, their Bandit Queen. And she had a power…. It was a strange magic. She could see … could see what we were doing when she shouldn't have. She could see through our eyes whenever we used our magic. I have seen that power only once." He paused and looked up at the sky. It was a dark blue with a few stars starting to appear, a cloudless autumn evening.
Kristoff nodded, encouraging the old Troll to continue his story.
"Do you know, Elsa, how your powers of ice and snow came to this world?"
Elsa frowned and shook her head, not sure what this had to do with the Bandit Queen.
"It was a drop of the moon, fallen down from the sky." Pabbie swayed his hands into the air, and smoke flew upward. As it settled, it formed the scene of a troll on the pinnacle of a large mountain, as if talking with the sky.
"Long, long ago when the world was much younger, the sky was closer to the ground. Back then, drops of the sun and moon used to drip down on the earth. On nights when the Northern Lights glowed, we trolls could climb the highest mountain and touch the lights. Eventually we learned to bottle the light in these crystals. That was the source of our magic." The image changed to the troll scooping yellow light into a crystal, then stringing it around its neck.
"This was a much younger age, and some of us trolls were not the … best … characters. We fashioned a mirror out of a perfectly smooth pond that had been frozen by a moondrop." The image showed a handful of trolls slowly excavating ice from a pond. "We wanted to use it to see as the sky saw—see through the eyes of the sun and moon. But we trolls were never meant to create magic, merely to bottle it, merely to use it. We tried as best we could, but the magic in the mirror was corrupted. We had made it so that whenever we looked through the ice, we would only see the ugly side of anything that was reflected."
Elsa tightened her eyes, trying to guess where the story would go. Growing up, she had heard the fairytale of the Troll's Mirror before, although it was always wrapped in a silly morality tale tried to use to blackmail her and her sister into using good manners at dinnertime.
Pabbie continued, "Then, one among us though he should consult the sky, see if the heavens could cure our mirror. He took it to the top of the tallest mountain on a dark, moonless night and showed the stars their corrupted reflection." Pabbie's illuminated images changed to reflect the story. "But the sky was appalled by what it saw. Immediately the moon rose, and showered a torrent of moondrops. They broke the mirror into a million shards, some no bigger than a grain of sand. So offended were the heavens, that they moved far, far above the earth—never to share their magic again."
"The moondrops carried … ice powers?" Elsa asked.
"Indeed. In that torrent, one of the first Kings of Arendelle was struck in heart with a moondrop. That is how ice magic first came to your line, Elsa—from the moondrops that had already fallen. And they are not the only magic that remains from that storm. I fear that this Bandit Queen has found one of the shards of the mirror. That is how she could see through magic eyes."
Kristoff frowned. His family never told him they had been raided by bandits in the past—twice! And although story time with Grand Pabbie had been one of his favorite things growing up, he wasn't sure how this story helped them find Anna.
"Grand Pabbie," Elsa began. "Gerda told us about a sorceress who lives at the headwaters of the river. Could she be the one with the mirror's shard?"
"This I know not," the troll answered. "What I do know is there are not many in these lands who know magic. If this woman is a sorceress and found a shard of the mirror, then there is a good chance she is the one who led the raid on us two years ago."
The Bandit Queen was interrupted by another vision, this one of images in smoke, and a view from two feet off the ground of Elsa and the ice man. So, they had gone to the trolls.
A/N: Lady reindeer totally have antlers-I read it on Wikipedia so you know it's legit. Also, what should we name Elsa's snowdeer? 'Cause I've got plans for that character... such plans.