A few miles away from each other, two women opened books in the same instant.
They had scoured page after page and adopted idea after idea to lead them to this point. They had been searching for so long, it felt, and each of them hoped that this book could be the answer to the questions they asked themselves - that this combination of these words put to text by someone else years and worlds away could somehow be applied to their own lives in a manner that could give them redemption or solace.
Both of them were seeking help in their books.
One of the readers was a queen, and she read in her castle's library. Books with frosty pages lay scattered about the floor below her like cast aside bodies.
She had cleared an entire shelf of books large and small that evening before coming to her current reading material, ripping through each one rapidly, desperately and throwing them to the ground just as quickly when she deemed they were of no use. She scanned the first page and then she flipped it back. Again. Scan, flip. Scan, flip.
The queen knew what she was looking for.
That distinguished her from her fellow reader, an older woman sitting sorrowfully at a chair that she had made for herself when she was far younger. It was too small for her now, but she always sat there anyway. She was only on her first book of the night - really, she had started it the day before and was just continuing - and her eyes scrolled through each page slowly, still hoping that the questions that she was searching for would reveal themselves so that she could then begin work on the answers.
The woman didn't have as many books as the queen in her library, and the ones she did have she had already loved and learned from two or three times over. With each page turn, she sighed, knowing that with it her ideal became less likely.
She knew all of her books and suspected that none of them could help her out of the despair that she had fallen into, but she kept rereading them anyway, hoping that something new would jump out at her, something she had missed before.
The woman had done little but read and hope for almost a month, now.
Where the queen feasted on the captive words of the last few pages, the old woman absorbed. Where the queen's eyes raked through the page, the old woman's paced themselves.
For both of them were seeking help with their books, but they were seeking different kinds of help with different kinds of problems.
Both of the women finished their books just as they were interrupted by knocks.
In the castle, the queen's sister had rapped the wall outside of the library's open door.
"Tonight's not a good night to be staying up late, you know," Anna said playfully. "I never thought that I wouldbe the one saying this, but shouldn't you be in bed?"
"Soon," Elsa said, hurriedly getting up from her seat near the front of the library at the lounge chair that had been her father's. She hurriedly went to work organizing some of the books on the ground, embarrassed by her messiness now that she was in the presence of her sister. "I'll sleep soon," she placed the smaller journal that she had just finished on top of a few others, picked them all up at once, and started towards one of the many towering bookcases lining the walls of the high-ceilinged room.
"Have you read all of these today?"
"I skimmed them all today," Elsa made another trip from the floor to the shelf.
"Quick reader," Anna stepped into the library, bending down to pick up a book which Elsa had thrown down near the door a few hours before. "What do we got here?" she rolled the thing in her hand until she found the title in small letters on the narrow storybook's cover. She giggled when she read it. "The Troll Prince? I remember when Papa read this to me when I was just a kid."
"Me too."
Anna looked up at her sister, who was carrying the last of the books over to their place on the shelf.
"And what's that one you're holding on top there? Is that one of my romance novels?"
Elsa blushed as much as her naturally cool skin would let her. She had finished cleaning up the rest of the books and now appeared beside her sister, snatching the final volume from her and then recompleting the stuffed shelf's contents and thus the library's walls of uninterrupted spines.
"I didn't know you were such a sucker for fairytales and books about love!" Anna teased.
"They're all about love," Elsa brushed off the comment simply. She hooked a freezing arm around her sister's own, gently pulling her along through the door and into the hall. "Come on, you were right, it's late. We should both get some rest for the festival tomorrow."
Not so far away, the other reader had been interrupted by two reluctant, slow fists on the farmhouse's front door.
"I'll get it," Dee said quietly, unsure of whether her son was awake or already pulled into one of the long, fitful sleeps that had started with his illness. The woman put her book down and walked to the door, wondering who it could be. The man from the castle had been the Daleons' only guests in months, and even before then no visitor had ever come to the farmstead at an hour as late as the present.
Hope swelled within the lonely woman. Perhaps it wasn't a guest.
But disappointment was quick to set in once she had opened the door. It was a another guest. Someone else from the castle, she determined, glancing from the man's dark olive suit with the familiar insignia on his chest to the decorated horse that he had hitched to the porch behind him. Dee didn't recognize the plump man.
"Evening, ma'am," he said, looking everywhere but at the woman. His jaw was shaking, but it wasn't cold out. "I'm Isaac, of the Arendelle Royal Guard. Do you mind if I come in?"
"Of course not," Dee said, but she was unable to mask the sadness in her voice. She had thought that just maybe it could have been him. "Are you thirsty? Hungry?"
"I'm fine, ma'am."
"Well, come sit down," the woman invited the guest in, showing him to the most comfortable seat in the house - the couch - and within seconds she was back in her ancient chair. She glanced at the book that she had placed to the ground for a moment, examining the folded poster advertising the Royal Festival that she had put between its pages as a bookmark. "What brings you here tonight?"
Isaac fidgeted ever so slightly, one finger picking at another as his own eyes followed the woman's to the bookmark, delaying the inevitable. He didn't want to say anything, though. He didn't want to come out with it - there was a selfish part of him that wanted her to know before he would have to tell her. He recognized it as selfish and hated it but he couldn't break free of its influence.
"Hm?" Dee mumbled, looking back up at the guardsman.
Isaac still looked at the bookmark, silently praying that she would realize the message that he had been tasked with delivering just by his presence. He didn't want to have to be the one to tell her. He didn't think that he could tell her.
He had just been a part of the search committee that Princess Anna had assigned after the ice master had brought news of the missing farmer the night before.
He had simply gotten the shortest stick after they found the guy.
He wasn't supposed to be there. He didn't want to be there. He couldn't bring himself to speak.
"Isaac, you said?"
Isaac's head flicked up to the call and the two of them finally made eye contact.
Dee understood when she saw the eyes. They were apologetic and sad and angry and embarrassed and so many other things.
He had been hiding them from her.
"No!" her voice was unfamiliar even to herself.
A grunt from the bedroom. "Mama?"
"No, no! Please! No!"