She stood alone. Alone and high up on the side of North Mountain, in an Arendelle where great black ships moved on the sea and a long bridge lay like a collar across the fjord and chimneys rose in places they should not... and where no-one knew her, or had cared enough to come.
Had Elsa come up here, year after year, in search of solitude? Had she set her arms around her sister’s ice-cold form and whispered her sorrows into ears that could not hear? Had she knelt and begged Anna to answer, just once, to give her some sign, some hope, some chance to make all right again? Had she known that only her death could set Anna free, and that the long years held them hopelessly apart?
The lost princess, Hans had called her; the girl who had never really lived. Anna’s eyes filled and blurred despite herself. She’d never had anyone. She’d spent her whole life shut away with a handful of aging servants, dreaming of the world beyond the gates while her sister held her at arm’s-length. And when for the first time in forever she’d thought she could have it all — happiness with Hans, real friendship with Elsa, love and laughter and excitement and adventure with all Arendelle opening up before her — it had all been snatched away. Hans had only ever wanted power. Elsa had turned away from her and then struck her with ice, even if she hadn’t meant to. There was no-one and nothing for her down there, only Elsa’s great hulking sons who hadn’t cared enough about some old myth to see if it might possibly be true, or if some lost princess who meant nothing to them might just be alive after all, or if she might need help...
Anna sniffed, hard, found she was still clutching the handkerchief Hans had bestowed on her, and used it with reluctance to mop her nose. But the tears kept coming.
Kristoff — Kristoff would have helped her. But ice-harvesting was a young man’s game. He would be an ancient cottager now, sitting doddering in the corner of his daughter’s or grand-daughter’s cabin with a fire in the stove to warm his bones, and maybe one of Sven’s antlers mounted on the logs of the wall for memory’s sake... and that was if she was lucky. Anna bit her lip. Few men even in the aristocracy lived that long. Chances were, Kristoff was dead and gone. Like everything else.
In front of her Elsa’s ice bridge had once sprung across a great ravine. Now there was nothing but the bare rock, falling away into a dark cleft slippery with summer snow-melt. Anna went closer to look down over the edge, but even through the blur of tears she knew she’d never be able to climb across that way, not even if Kristoff had been there with his rope. Somewhere far below she could hear a trickle of water, and her head swam.
She thought of Kristoff again, and the moment they’d gone over the cliff together. The fall had been over so quickly there had been no time to be afraid, only a long rush of movement in mid-air. And here there was no twenty-foot drift of snow. She leaned out for a better view. It would be so easy...
“Anna, no!” The shout was cracked with age, but it held an edge of habitual command that had her backing away from the edge almost before she’d registered his presence. She glared at Hans, who’d reappeared around the corner, and he returned the glare, looking considerably less dapper and self-possessed than the elderly gentleman who’d been seated calmly on a boulder when she woke. His overcoat was unbuttoned, the clothes beneath were spattered with snow, and he was breathing heavily in his haste, his face suffused as if on the point of apoplexy.
“I thought you’d end up doing something stupid”—his tone was withering—“but not that stupid.”
Anna could feel her own cheeks hot with humiliation. Her knees were shaking now at the knowledge of just how close she’d been. “I don’t see that what I do is any of your business.”
Hans hobbled forward and collapsed onto a convenient rock, a hand pressed to his chest. “Clearly my mistake,” he retorted coldly, “as I was under the impression you were attempting to do away with yourself.”
“Why would you care?” She hadn’t asked him to come rushing back up the mountain. Nobody had asked him to poke his nose into her existence at all. “You got married to someone else, remember? That generally puts an end to an attachment — and so does leaving your bride for dead!”
She hadn’t expected him to pretend he was sorry. She hadn’t expected to get a testy look in response, either.
After a moment he turned aside. “Would you believe me,” he enquired, inspecting his cuffs with undue attention, “if I told you I happen to dislike unnecessary... waste?”
“No.” Anna’s voice was flat. “So why don’t you tell me exactly what you think you’re up to and what you’re after — Count Kalloukratis?”
Hans sighed.
“As it happens, I came to make you an offer.” He held up a hand to forestall her. “Not that sort of offer... Listen. I told you I had a lot of time to think things over in all those years of imprisonment. To learn what I could from the old priest, and talk the world over together. When he died, I resolved for once and all that if I got free, I’d find some way to make use of my talents. Finding a fortune just made that easier.”
He grinned a little. “It makes most things easier... Well, I’d lost my youth but not my skill at playing a part, and it seemed to me there were plenty of rogues in the world as bad as I was, or worse, and no-one else so well-placed to turn the tables. So I began to meddle discreetly in other people’s business. It’s amazing how many flawless schemes can go awry with a little push behind the scenes from someone as unprincipled as the perpetrator. There was a challenge to it, and a satisfaction I hadn’t expected to find in arranging matters for the minnows to bite back against the pike. And they can be so very grateful.”
Above the neat pointed beard, his smile twisted into ruefulness at his own expense. “There’s a... poignancy, of a sort, in finding oneself the object of entirely unmerited admiration.”
She wanted to believe it was a lie, and found she could not. The whole thing was twisted enough for the Hans she knew — and, though it was hard to admit it, this was not, any more, altogether the Hans she knew. Anna surveyed him. “Are you seriously asking me to believe that you’ve been spending your time as some kind of masked avenger of the innocent?”
“So far as it amuses me, yes.” Hans smoothed his hands down across his waistcoat and rose, a little stiffly. “And the proposition I had in mind was that you should join me.”
She opened her mouth. Shut it again. Caught her breath, and for a moment found she could do nothing but stare.
“Join you — how? As what? Why me? And why on earth would I trust you ever again?”
“That’s simple.” And the smile he gave her this time was the one she remembered from their first evening together, open and dancing with just a hint of shared mischief. “You don’t trust me, of course. It’ll be good practice.”
He came towards her and halted an instant before she would have backed away, planting his stick firmly in the snow and leaning on it with both hands. “Listen. What I need is someone with a face people will trust. A girl. Young and patently honest. Someone with no history and no past that can be traced back. No family ties that can be used against her, and nothing to lose.” A cough shook him, and he paused to recover his breath. “I’m looking for an assistant, Anna. I can’t promise you long”—a brief gesture at his own shrunken limbs—“but while it lasts I can guarantee it will never be dull. You’ll travel in luxury, and move unseen among kings and beggars alike. You’ll never play the same part twice. And you won’t be deceiving anyone who doesn’t richly deserve it.”
“Hold on a minute.” Anna looked at him in disbelief. “Did you come all the way up here with some bizarre notion that you could beg me to leave the only home I’ve ever known, abandon Arendelle and go off around the world with someone I don’t like or trust to places I’ve never even heard of, pretending to be someone I’m not?”
“No, of course not,” Hans snapped. “I came up on the off-chance you might be here, to hold out the golden opportunity to do just that. Now tell me I was wrong.”
Down below her was an Arendelle that might as well have been a foreign country, and a family she had never met in whose eyes she would be little better than a revenant from the grave. All she could see now, as she looked out, was a land of lost chances and memories that hurt. She shook her head.
“You’re right.” It was almost inaudible. “I want to leave.”
Hans said nothing, but when she looked back at him he had held out one hand. After a final instant of hesitation, Anna laid her hand in his.
She didn’t know quite what, in the back of her mind, she’d expected: maybe a vulture’s claw? But his fingers around hers were aged but firm and warm and just like anyone else. She might even forget in time, she thought, that she’d last seen that hand clasped on a sword-hilt, coming down.
“And now that’s settled,” Hans was saying, turning briskly on his heel and tugging her after him, “we need to get moving. I’ve a hundred-ton yacht moored just off the coast to the north of here that will take us straight to Kalloukratis without any awkward encounters with harbour officials or customs men, and once we’re home you can start to get up to scratch with what you’ll need to know about the modern world. Some new clothes and—”
“Home?” Anna had stopped dead, yanking herself free. There was an unpleasant sensation in the pit of her stomach.
“Naturally. Oh, you’ve no need to stare at me like a frightened rabbit; you’ll be in excellent hands with Haydee, I assure you. She’s been growing quite motherly in her old age. She’ll be delighted to take very good care of you.”
Her world was whirling abruptly around her all over again. “Haydee?”
Hans raised an eyebrow. “Your hostess, the lovely Haydee. Not quite so raven-haired as she used to be, I’ll admit, but forever and always”— he swept a bow in reverence to an unseen lady—“my wife.”
“You—” Anna choked, overcome by twin competing desires to hit him and to laugh. “How dared you let me think you were a widower on the make?”
“I never said anything of the sort,” Hans observed, with undeniable — and infuriating — accuracy. The creases of amusement around his eyes were completely impenitent, and this time, she told herself, this time she really would have hit him, if she hadn’t doubted she’d ever be able to get him up on his feet again afterwards.
Instead she found herself picking her way cautiously after the Count across the snowfield, as he led off around the slopes on the far side of the mountain, where he’d apparently left his supplies. It was easier going than the steep rock faces she’d left behind, and the vista unfolding beneath her stretched out over wide fjords and forested slopes in a part of the country she’d never seen before, but she had little enough time to admire the scenery. Hans with his cane was surprisingly nimble on the slope, and it wasn’t long before she was wishing for an ice-axe like the ones in Oaken’s store to use as a stick of her own in places where a third leg would have come in handy. It came as a relief when he paused, breathing heavily, on the brink of a steep gully, ostensibly to admire the view.
“Hans.” The name and its memories still felt wrong in her mouth, but she really couldn’t go on calling him ‘My Lord Count’ forever. “Just how did you manage to get these supplies of yours all the way up here in the first place? And how did you know there was this back route, anyway? I can’t even see the harbour from here.”
“You really want to know?” For the first time that day — for the first time since he’d thrown her aside and shown her the true face of what he was — she couldn’t detect even a hint of mockery when he glanced round at her, and that look in his eyes told her with a lurch that maybe she really didn’t want to know.
But it was too late. He’d taken her arm to guide her a step or two further round the corner, where a cache of crates and canvas had been set up under a rocky overhang. Near it in the snow were a small sledge, its runners half-buried in the crust, a few twigs of brushwood, some coal and... a withered carrot.
“Olaf!” Anna went down on her knees beside the poor scattered remnants, her eyes filling with tears. It was stupid, she knew; if she’d thought about it she’d have assumed the little snowman would have vanished long ago already. But he’d lasted this long, and then melted... along with everything else Elsa’s magic had sustained.
She looked up at Hans, managing a tremulous smile. “So he didn’t die when the magical winter ended — he saw summer after all?”
Hans shrugged. “I wasn’t there, remember? I don’t pretend to know how your sister’s sorcery works. All I know is that he found me somehow and wanted to help. Help you, that is. I didn’t know what to make of it... but the Queen was already dead by that point, and all her old magic was starting to crumble. When we first got this far, you could still see what was left of Elsa’s ice palace up beyond that shoulder.”
He indicated the corner of the mountain they’d just been skirting. “He lasted just long enough to set sight on that, and an hour later there was nothing left of him at all. He knew that if you thawed out then so would he, of course, but he was quite convinced in what passed for his mind that you would come back. That was something worth melting for, he said. Kept babbling about it all the way up; that little creature was the only one in Arendelle, myself included, who was really certain you were still alive up here... and that you’d need help.”
Pulling free the canvas, he had begun to pack everything back on the sledge. Anna caught a final disgruntled mutter, directed downwards, to the effect that some people needed about as much help as a cat in a tree, and found herself nursing a sudden grin. “Did he offer you warm hugs?”
“What?” She couldn’t see his face; but the way he shot bolt upright — with a hiss of breath and a hand clapped to the small of his back a moment later — was more than enough reward. A giggle escaped her despite everything, and she got a growl in return. “Here — catch.”
Something dark came flying towards her, and Anna got her hands up just in time to field what proved to be a coil of rope. An ice-axe followed, sent skittering across the snow, and a small hamper that Hans hefted with a grunt and Anna, her hands full, didn’t even attempt to retrieve when it fell short between them.
“Food.” He was working to fasten up the remainder of the load, wrestling with half-frozen cordage and recalcitrant straps, and it came out in a series of jerks between gritted teeth. “Open it. If you’re... not hungry... I am.”
She was, she discovered, very hungry indeed. A good deal of the food in the hamper had clearly already been eaten, but fortunately whoever had done the provisioning had packed with a generous hand. Presently the two of them were seated atop the neatly-packed sledge, dining royally — and, in Anna’s case at least, ravenously — on what remained of the lavish refreshments laid in for the expedition.
It was hard to remember that you hated and distrusted someone when you were sitting side by side, sharing a cold venison pasty. Particularly when you came to hand it back and discovered you’d somehow devoured almost all of it. Anna wasn’t sure she’d ever felt so friendly towards Hans as in that moment when he simply regarded her from under one wiry white brow and reached down to pass her another pasty.
She could get to like this version of Hans quite easily, if she wasn’t careful. Not the way she’d liked him the first time round, obviously — that would just be weird — and she wouldn’t be entrusting him with any more kingdoms in a hurry, word of honour or not, but this version was at least honestly dishonest, so to speak. And maybe, after a while, she’d even be able to remember that morning they’d bumped into each other down on the docks without it hurting so much. It was just that she couldn’t help wondering what he was up to.
“Listen, Hans... ooh, wait, is that a jar of pickled damsons?”
Hans sighed, but opened the jar. “You cannot possibly expect me to believe you’re still hungry, not even after sixty years... Well?”
“Well what?” She was trying to extract the fruit without dripping sweet, sticky juice all over everything. There were already purple stains in the snow.
Another sigh as he reached for his cane in order to rise. “Do I take it that ‘Listen, Hans’ was intended as a prelude to something more than ‘please pass the damsons’?”
“Oh yes, well, about that—” She wiped her mouth hastily on the back of her hand and scrambled to her feet in turn. “Don’t get me wrong, but... you’ve gone to a lot of trouble over this. Here we are, halfway up a mountain, when there must be other girls out there who’d be as much use or more in your schemes as I would. So I can’t help asking myself, just what’s in it for you?”
And if he dared to say he’d been feeling some kind of pity for her, then she really was going to push him into a snowdrift.
“Vulgar curiosity.” From his grin, he was clearly not in the least discomfited. “There’s not many girls you can say you’ve shattered a sword on... I knew the stories about you were no myth, you see. I’d witnessed the beginning of the spell in memorable fashion, and I found I had a certain desire, after all, to see how it would end. I wanted to know what would happen. And if it worked out, well — I can always use an assistant who’s ready to scramble up roofs.”
“And out of windows,” Anna added, with a pointed glare, and watched him absorb the implications without a flicker.
“And out of windows. And other crazy places.” It was acknowledgement and invitation in one, and despite herself she felt her heart lift at the promise of adventure.
“I was in jail a long time, Anna. And I believe I told you”—the hesitation this time was almost imperceptible, but his gaze had dropped for an instant—“I don’t care for waste.” The admission was unspoken, but they both heard it.
“Crazy will do. I’ll take crazy,” Anna said quietly, and waited for the murmur to come in response.
“I love crazy.”
It was the closest he would ever come, she thought, to making amends.
“Well, then.” She shook snow briskly from the hem of her cloak, surveying the landscape laid out before her, where cloud-shadows like wind in long grass chased across the flanks of the mountain. “Shall we make a start? Which way is it?”
A glance back at him, and her jaw dropped. “Oh no. You don’t seriously... I am not going to harness myself to your sledge. What do you take me for — a reindeer, or something?”
“An assistant,” Hans snapped, still holding out the hauling-straps rigged at the front of the sledge. “It’s not all glamour and disguises, you know. Do you imagine I’m going to haul loads if I don’t have to, at my time of life?”
And she had to admit there was some reason in what he said.
Just pretend he’s a poor old woodcutter, she told herself, settling the ropes resentfully about her shoulders and leaning forward to test the strain. Poor old grandpa needs my help...
It wasn’t too bad, actually. In fact — when the downward route turned out to include the steep gully they’d passed previously — it was more a question of picking their way gingerly down while holding the sledge back at every step as it tried to get away from her. Hans had his ice-axe out and a rope belayed around his waist, she noticed, but there was no way she was going to trust their joint safety to a man of over eighty.
“This is ridiculous.” It wasn’t as if they’d even got very far. If she looked back the right way, she was almost certain she could still glimpse purple splashes on the side of the snowdrift above. “I’ve got a better idea.”
Below her the gully swept on downwards, a white untouched path between rough ribs of rock that petered out at last on the lower slopes, where bare scree took over. Anna jammed a stone under the front runner and paused to rest aching shoulders. Conscience — she had taken on a certain responsibility, after all — drove a quick check to make sure Hans hadn’t actually fixed his rope onto the sledge. Then she shrugged free of the shoulder-loops, gripping one firmly in either hand, and seated herself squarely on the front of the load. Without letting herself think, she leaned forward, tweaked out the stone she’d wedged in position, and kicked off. “See you at the bottom!”
The sledge shot forward, gathering speed. It was steeper than she’d thought. Faster than she’d thought. The gully walls loomed abruptly and she leaned into a frantic swerve. Again, in a long swooping curve that carved a shower of ice-crystals from the crust. Rocks flashed past as she fought to steer a straight course. The thrumming of the iron runners ran through her in a long thrill that was half terror and half sheer exhilaration.
In the next instant the sledge hit a bump, tilted wildly, and came back down with a bone-rattling crash. Already the scree below was rushing up towards her at breakneck speed. Stop — somehow she had to stop.
There was a soft drift ahead at the mouth of a side-gully. Anna bit her lip and flung her weight across desperately, struggling to steer. For a second or two she could see herself shooting past, faster and faster, all the way down and out over the lip of the gully. Then her frantic attempts bore fruit. The sledge veered right, dug its nose into loose snow, and sent her flying head-first into the drift.
Arms flailing, she surfaced, dizzy with breathless laughter. “Oof. That was... quite something.”
She’d made it about halfway down the steep descent. Down below, patches of rock and thin turf had begun to spread and join with the coming of summer, until at the edge of the snowline only a few shaded hollows still showed white. Above her she could see Hans, leaning on the handle of his axe and waiting with an air of infinite patience. He gave no indication whatsoever of being about to attempt a solitary arduous clamber in her wake.
Surely he didn’t expect—
Anna folded her arms and watched him in her turn, waiting to see who would be the first to crack. She had the sledge and the supplies, after all. There was nothing preventing her from going off on her own and just leaving him up there. She could try to find the trolls. Maybe Kristoff had left troll grandchildren. The thought brought a giggle, but stranger things had happened.
She certainly wasn’t going to go back up there to assist a stubborn old man who’d climbed a mountain with Olaf’s help for her benefit. Of course not... With a sigh, she began groping around for the ice-axe he’d provided her, finding it roped neatly on again behind the stores.
He’d told her not to trust him, or anyone else. He’d walked out on her the moment it suited him, and maybe that was sixty years in his past, but to her it was only yesterday. She couldn’t think of anyone more deserving of a dose of his own medicine. But she was going back for him anyway, because she was better than he was... and besides, she wanted to have another go at that run down the gully.
There was room for two on the sledge.
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