QUICK NOTES

Well, this is it. GLORIA-V-A, here's the fluff!

Since this story is probably going to disappear into the archive, I'd be very grateful for feedback—but I'm sensitive, so please be gentle. I like words. I mean, I really like words. But I worry that I use too many of them sometimes. Unnecessarily.

I'm also overly fond of the sentence fragment. And beginning sentences with conjunctions … See what I did there? The point is that these are intentional errors on my part. The rest? Not so much.

This is the denouement, so I've crammed a lot of information in, here. Not sure it works.

Anyway.

Arendelle and its peeps aren't mine.

Chapter 10

The following afternoon, Kristoff opened his eyes and asked for water. Anna ignored this request and threw her arms around his neck, which proved to be an enormously stupid thing to do. One does not come out of an avalanche unscathed, after all.

The first thing he said was "Where's Sven?" His voice was raw from the cold and hoarse from disuse. Anna assured him that the reindeer was well looked after.

"He misses you," she said, feeling clumsy and sensitive. She busied herself with pouring him a glass of water—room temperature, rather than chilled. She helped him adjust the pillows so that he could rest a little more upright, taking care to avoid jarring his bruised ribs. Then she handed him the glass and perched herself on the edge of the chair, her hands worrying a few stray threads of Gerda's knitting yarn that she'd found on the floor.

He watched her wearily. One of his wrists had been set and bound—a casualty of the slide, she supposed. She wondered how much he knew of the events that followed. Or, she realized with agitation, those that came before.

She could hear birdsong slipping in through the gauzy curtains, along with a slant of warm sunlight and a breath of clean air. Flowers, rather than hoarfrost, lined the windowsill. Somewhere below, Olaf's voice drifted up through his own personal snow cloud. The flurry was Elsa's idea, a way of rescuing him from the returning heat of summer, and he'd been wending his way through the court and the marketplace in a rapture ever since.

Elsa herself was consumed with the prospect of making amends. She'd spent the morning before the people of the city, addressing them in a heartfelt appeal that expressed her desire to elucidate and atone. She demonstrated her powers for them, used her magic to create things of beauty, and then explained how she had learned to control it. She placed herself at the mercy of the city, stating her readiness to abdicate the throne in an act of true penance. This, of course, had thrown Anna into a frenzy of opposition. But the people of Arendelle heard the queen's words and pardoned her, for they were at heart a just and reasonable society, and they loved her. Now she was touring the city with her advisers and with Kai, who she respected and adored, in order to observe any damage caused by the ice and to arrange for its restoration.

Afterwards, when he'd had time to process all that had happened in his absence, Elsa would speak privately with Kristoff. It was he to whom she owed the greatest diligence, for she had wronged him directly in her state of despair that night on the mountain. Anna could tell that he didn't want it, that he could wish nothing more than to return to his life in the mountains with Sven—his quiet, uncomplicated life. But she also knew that he understood her sister, her story, and did not wish for her to suffer on his account. He wanted to put the whole affair behind him, and after all, who in their right mind could blame him?

But this would all become apparent much, much later. At this moment, Anna ducked her head and smeared a few wayward tears across her face with the heel of her hand.

Kristoff looked at her uneasily. "Anna?"

"What?"

"Are you all right?"

She rubbed her nose and produced a moist, sniffling sound. "Of course I'm all right. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well ..." he began, clearly uncomfortable. "It looks like, maybe, you're crying."

"No, I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

"I'm not."

He hesitated, and then said "OK."

Gerda entered the room, then. She gave a shrill cry of joy and clasped her hands to her bosom. This display was followed by an abrupt change in countenance and a businesslike palm to Kristoff's forehead. Anna smirked: he was on her turf, now.

It would become clear, in the next few days, that Kristoff's temperature would always run slightly cold from this point onward—and, in fact, for the rest of his life. This was of course baffling and peculiar, and required something of an adjustment for a man who harvested ice for a living. But in the end, it would prove little more than an annoyance, and Kristoff learned to cope by layering his clothes more thoroughly than he had been in the habit of doing before.

It was something of a shock to Gerda, however, who insisted on calling for the physician and procuring hot liquids at once. She bustled about the room and tidied it up, as she had come to do, and then departed with a troubled frown, leaving Anna fiddling with the yarn in her lap and Kristoff staring at the plaster above him. The princess glanced at him sideways; he appeared to be plotting his escape.

"How do you feel?" she asked.

"Fine," he murmured. "Tired."

She nodded sympathetically, and they fell silent.

"I was worried about you," she said at last. "That's why I might have been crying—only just a little—if you want to know."

His eyes slid down from the ceiling and regarded her with a careful expression.

"Thank you," he said quietly. She waved the sentiment away with a dismissive hand, and then gave a mighty snuffle.

"Oh," she said, her tone both breezy and tearful. "It was nothing."

Kristoff grinned wryly. "Sure, it wasn't."

"I mean," she amended. "Marshmallow did most of the work."

"Mm-hmm."

Anna sighed. "Poor thing. I think he's lonely up there."

"You should marry him."

This caught her attention. "Shut up," she retorted. "Seriously, can't you just let it go?"

He waited for a moment.

"No."

Anna was both legitimately annoyed and genuinely pleased by his tendency to provoke her in this way. She was annoyed because it was made abundantly clear, in the end, how right Kristoff had been for mocking her engagement to Hans. But at the same time, she could not quite comprehend the small, stealthy feeling of warmth and happiness that overcame her when he did so. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was finally behaving more like the Kristoff she knew.

A part of her, though, recognized that it was more than that.

Elsa, who had been observing her sister thoughtfully since their reunion, was the first of all people to notice Anna's befuddlement. It came about, in fact, when the two were discussing what to do with Hans.

"Send him back to his brothers," she'd mused that morning over tea. "Let them handle the fool.'

But Anna was less merciful. "He was going to have you executed, Elsa, without even giving you a proper chance to defend yourself." She curled her hand into a fist and brought it down on the table between them as though it could be a substitute for his face. "And he also sort of tried to kill Kristoff."

Elsa shook her head. "I wouldn't have taken it," she remarked.

"What?"

"That chance."

Anna fell silent. Then she sighed. "I guess I didn't know him all that well, after all," she said morosely.

Her sister smiled. "You couldn't know, Anna. It's not like you've had much experience with … people."

They both gazed out over the breakwater. Sails luffed noisily in the distance, and the smell of sea salt was strong in the gathering heat. Aside from a few drifts of rotting snow that lingered in the more shaded parts of the city, all signs of Elsa's terrible ice storm had evaporated. Instead, a light wind carried with it the unusual combination of summer's warmth and winter's purity.

"Maybe I'm just a miserable judge of character."

Elsa shaded her eyes from the sun and peered at her. "I don't think that's true, Anna. Yours is a generous heart, of course, but that doesn't mean you don't recognize genuine friendship when it really matters."

"I don't have any friends."

"What about Kristoff?"

"I hardly know him."

Elsa laughed. "You say that now?" she teased, reminding her sister of the mountain man himself, which she was in no mood to tolerate. "I think you're confused. Tell me this: what's Kristoff's last name?"

Anna crossed her arms and slouched in her chair. "Bjorgman," she said sullenly.

"What's his favorite food?"

"Carrots."

"Best friend's name?"

"Sven."

"Eye color?"

Anna glared.

"I'm just saying," continued Elsa, "that maybe you're not as hopeless as you think you are. Prince Hans has a gift for manipulating others, I'll give him that much. He knew what he was doing, Anna, and you were not the only victim to his charms."

Now it occurred to Anna, as she twisted her lengths of thread, that she would have to confess to her friend that the prince had deceived her … and that she was no longer attached to him in any way.

She studied Kristoff as best she could without actually appearing to do so. His color was better, and he seemed to have recovered some of his prickly humor. But she also had the distinct and inexplicable impression that telling him about the demise of her engagement, right now, would confound him. And because his eyes were tired and because he was beginning to show signs of fatigue, she decided that this could wait.

Instead, she held up the two pieces of yarn for him to see.

"Look!" she said proudly.

In her fingers was a perfect, precisely looped butterfly knot in miniature. The wool was soft and slightly scratchy against her skin, and it had been dyed a sweet, smooth yellow—like the long light of a summer afternoon.

Kristoff, who'd been looking as though he might drift back to sleep, blinked and roused himself. "Hey!" he said brightly. "You did it!"

Anna smiled. "You remember?"

He looked at her strangely. "Sure," he replied, as though this was obvious. She felt her cheeks flush.

"Well," she said, somewhat defensively, "you could have hit your head. Or, I don't know, had it frozen out of you."

"Frozen out of me?"

"Uh-huh."

Kristoff took a deep breath and dropped his head back onto the pillow. "I wouldn't forget you, Anna," he said quietly. "Not ever."

These words were like the warmth she'd felt in her fingertips that night she'd reached for his heart to save him: fierce and radiant and clear. It reminded her of the love she felt for her sister, but it was also different. Newer, less familiar, but no less keen. It was a fledgling sensation, as rough around the edges as Kristoff and as clumsy and inexperienced as Anna herself. She found that she did not want to assail it with her usual enthusiasm, but neither did she want it to go away.

Maybe, just maybe, she could wait and see what happened.

For now, she was content to put her slippered toes up on the edge of the bed and let her friend fall back to sleep. She listened to the fluid sounds of the harbor, the free movement of seawater against the city's embankment, and the voices of its people going about their business. She gazed at the hypnotic migration of dust motes in an errant ray of light, let her skin absorb the pleasant heat of a late summer day. And to pass the time, she abandoned her needlepoint in favor of knotting her thread into shapes of unforeseen elegance, each of them as intricate, as steadfast, and as varied as an icebound snowflake—or as love, itself.

Thank you, thank you for reading!