QUICK NOTES:

So. Yeah. I post, and then I revise. That seems to be the way of things, lately. Please consider returning later to catch up on the improvements. And on that note, I have made significant changes to some of the chapters leading up to this one. Don't know if these changes enhance the story or befuddle it. That's for you to decide.

Please be kind. I'm sensitive.

Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 19

She kicked him when she came around, right in that tender place below the ribs. It was simply a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of course, and her sister hadn't been prepared for such a violent response to the magic. She'd expected Anna to go still, like Kristoff had. Instead, the princess came to with a cry of shock and indignation, her listless body snapping to attention and walloping Kristoff in the gut.

"Anna!" cried the queen, reaching for her sister's flailing arms. "Anna, stop!"

At this, the princess did go still. It took a moment for her head to clear, and in that time the only coherent sound was that of her own breathing. She blinked up at Elsa, bewildered and gasping for air as though she'd been starved of it all this time. Then she leaned forward and heaved unproductively over the edge of the sofa.

Elsa's cool hands found her, then, and smoothed the hair from her brow. She whispered soft, formless syllables against the crown of her head. And in an instant, Anna was transported by a memory so profound and so unexpected that it took her breath away all over again: her mother doing just the same, comforting a very little princess in the face of her sister's rejection.

Now as she had then, Anna let her body go slack. The difference, of course, was that her mother was gone. Even after all these years, the pain of remembering was acute. Had she forgotten everything in her time on the mountain, surrounded by the ghostly whispers of those she'd loved? Every stroke of Elsa's hands and every gentle benediction in Elsa's voice reminded her of the lost queen Idun.

Yet here was the very sister who had shut her out so cruelly, whose rejection had sent her, weeping as a child, to the waiting arms and consoling words of her mother. Elsa, who had once been every bit as lost to Anna as the late queen, was restored to her in the last two years. And while the one could not replace the other, Anna had recovered something that she'd dearly missed in them both: a family.

Anna tightened her arms around her sister now. The cold—exquisite, agonizing, miraculous—continued to surge through her body and then slowly, slowly began to subside.

"It's OK," muttered Elsa. "You're OK, now. You're all right."

Anna nodded against her shoulder, and for a time they were silent. When she felt that she could breathe properly, at last, she lifted her head and peered up at Elsa.

"Thank you," she said, her voice barely audible.

Elsa sat back on her heels and beamed in reply. The expression—so rare, once upon a time—radiated with infinite, unmitigated happiness. She was beatific in this moment. Radiant. Reconciled.

At peace.

Elsa had saved her. She'd used her own two hands to banish the fever and bring Anna back from her own, strange version of the mountain that loomed over Arrendelle. It had been a terrible place—a private limbo that felt both threatening and indifferent in its changelessness. Anna shivered at the memory. It had only been a dream, of course. Even now, it was fading as thoroughly as the fever itself. By the time Anna was whole again, nothing would remain but a vague, untethered sense of dread. It would not be a frequent thing, and it would only ever hover on the periphery of her awareness, when it occurred at all—but it was a feeling that she would never quite be able to shake entirely.

Her thoughts drifted to Kristoff. Is that how he'd felt, after all this time? Bedeviled by his own ordeal on that peak so many months ago? And yet, still, he was drawn to the mountain each spring as surely as the migrating osprey are drawn to their northern haunts …

Gradually, Anna became aware of her surroundings. The sofa, the blankets. The fire on the hearth, blithely going about its business. And Kristoff—speak of the devil and he shall appear—sitting mere inches away from her.

He was doubled over for some inexplicable reason.

"Kristoff?" she breathed, hardly able to accept that he was real. It had been months since she'd last seen him, aside from that strange hallucinatory encounter on the mountain—and even then, he'd been a ghost, some sort of delusion. A dream within a dream. Now he was sitting at her feet, sound as the earth beneath its blanket of snow.

He didn't quite respond, however. Instead, he lifted a hand and offered up a small wave of greeting.

Anna frowned.

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," he croaked.

"You kicked him," supplied the queen.

"What?"

"He's just winded."

"I'm fine."

"I kicked you?"

"You didn't mean it."

They went back and forth like this for a bit until—in no time at all, really—Kristoff was speaking with ease again. Still, it took considerably longer to persuade Anna to stop apologizing, and by then Elsa felt compelled to leave them. Assured, at last, that her sister was safe, she could tend to Kai and the rest of the citizenry.

"I love you," she said now, with unexpected vehemence. She brought her bare hand to Anna's cheek and held it there, unchecked in her movements and apparently unconcerned by the touch of her exposed fingers to Anna's skin. The princess gazed up at her, taken aback, and was surprised to see a sheen of tears in her sister's eyes.

Elsa smiled through them.

Somewhere outside, lying as though discarded amongst the paving stones, were a couple of spindly twigs and a scattering of uniformly-sized pieces of augite. The latter appeared to have been polished by the elements, and they glistened wetly as the freezing rain turned to coagulating flakes of snow. Two round stones, larger than the others, seemed to gaze up at the sky even as they were blanketed under the silence of a winter storm. The city, too, began to disappear under a shroud of white—all remaining signs of life erased in a matter of seconds.

It was deceptively peaceful, for things were roiling inside the castle. Elsa sprinted madly through the halls, calling aloud to her staff and rallying a small troupe of physicians behind her. She could feel the magic burning along the tips of her fingers again, and this time she welcomed it. This time, she would hide behind neither the walls of her fortress nor the warmth of its princess. The magic had worked, and this time—this time—the Snow Queen would be the one to save her city, as a sovereign should.

Reaching her room, Elsa spared a moment to peer down into the courtyard from one of its beveled windows. The snow was banking quickly. At once, she pulled on her heaviest pair of boots and considered only for a moment the two slender gloves that lay on the ottoman beside her. Then, turning swiftly, she left the palace without them.

They were no longer necessary.