Frozen: Conceal, Don't Feel

by Jen Calonita

  Anna’s cheeks were flushed with excitement.

  It was coronation day!

  The bakery was packed. Even though most people she knew wouldn’t travel to Arendelle to see Princess Elsa’s coronation in person, Harmon was still celebrating in its own way. Many people were closing their shops early and planning to rejoice in the streets with shared food, good friends, and dancing. Ma had baked several cakes for the occasion, Goran from the market was bringing a roasted pig and potatoes, and Papa had talked with some men who were bringing their lutes. It was a glorious summer day, and she could feel the charge in the air.

  After three years without a true leader, Arendelle was finally getting its queen.

  Coronation day was all about new beginnings and fresh starts. Anna wished the day when she, too, would get her new beginning could arrive sooner rather than later, but how could she argue with her parents? She was still young. Sort of. And they needed her help. Definitely. Three more years would go by fast…she hoped.

  “Thank you, Anna!” Mrs. Eriksen said as Anna placed several cinnamon buns in a bag for her. “I will see you later at the party.”

  “See you tonight!” Anna said, watching Mrs. Eriksen open the bakery door. When it opened, Anna noticed a young man outside with a reindeer. Their backs were to the door. Kristoff!

  She couldn’t believe he had come. She wiped her hands on her apron and rushed outside, hearing Kristoff’s conversation with Sven in the process.

  “Yes, I’m going to talk to her. Maybe.” Kristoff huffed. “You, Bulda, Grand Pabbie…you act like this is so easy! They may be so-called love experts, but they’ve never left the valley.”

  Sven snorted.

  “Hi,” Anna interrupted, feeling funny. She was suddenly very aware of how she looked, and how he did, too. Kristoff had on a bright blue dress shirt and clean pants. She was wearing a green dress under a flour-and-icing-covered apron. Her braids, which she’d had in for two days, needed refreshing. “Were you looking for me? I mean, not actually looking, but you’re here, so maybe…you’re hungry?”

  He immediately blushed. “What? Yes. I mean, no. I…” He pressed a bunch of carrots into her hands. “I just wanted to give you what I owed you.”

  “Oh.” Anna looked down. “You didn’t have to bring me back—oof!”

  Sven had bumped into Anna, sending her flying into Kristoff’s arms. The two tumbled backward, falling onto several stacks of flour Anna’s parents hadn’t had a chance to bring into the shop yet.

  “This is awkward,” Anna said, struggling to get up. “Not because you’re awkward. Because we’re…I’m…awkward.” She stood up. “You’re gorgeous. Wait, what?”

  She’d never said anything like that before. Did she think Kristoff was gorgeous? She needed to change the subject fast. “So that’s the only reason you came by? To give me carrots?”

  “Oh. Uh…” Kristoff looked like a reindeer caught in carriage lights. “Uh…” Sven kept snorting. “I can’t stay. I have a delivery in Arendelle, so I’m headed down the mountain.”

  “Down the mountain?” Anna cut in. “That’s where I’m going! Well, not today, but in three years. I’m going to open up my own bakery in Arendelle.”

  Kristoff scratched his head. “In three years?”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “My parents want me to run their shop, but I want to leave Harmon someday.” Kristoff just looked at her. “You should understand. You get to see the whole kingdom with your ice business! Your carriage takes you everywhere, while I’m always stuck here.”

  “I wouldn’t call it stuck,” Kristoff muttered. “Seems like a nice place to live. Try begging to sleep in people’s barns all the time when you’re on the road and being raised in a field full of rocks.”

  “What?” Anna thought she must have heard him incorrectly.

  “Nothing.” Kristoff looked away.

  Anna thought again of the life Freya had lost. She didn’t want to waste another moment being in a place she didn’t truly love. “You don’t understand.” She played with one of her braids. Three years feels so far away.

  “Hey.” Kristoff moved closer. “Your hair.”

  “Oh.” She was used to this question. “The white stripe? I was born with it,” she explained. “That’s what my parents were told. They actually adopted me when I was a baby. I dreamt that I was kissed by a troll.”

  Kristoff’s eyes widened. “Did you say ‘troll’?” He hurried after her to hear more.

  “Anna is…dead?” Olaf repeated as if he didn’t understand the words coming out of his mouth.

  Elsa saw his heartbroken face and heard a sob escape her lips before she even realized it was happening. “I think I killed her.”

  A blue glow appeared above her fingers, ice escaping and climbing up the walls and covering the floor. The world waited outside her door, pounding harder to get in. The ice couldn’t have come at a worse time, but Elsa was too consumed with grief to care who saw it now.

  Anna was dead. That was why her parents had hidden her sister’s existence from her. No wonder Mama had always looked so forlorn. Elsa had changed the footprint of their family forever. How could her parents forgive her for what she had done? How could the kingdom?

  Wait.

  Elsa stopped crying and thought of the fountain in the courtyard and their family portrait in the hallway. Both showed a family of three. Wouldn’t her parents and Mr. Ludenburg want to keep Anna’s memory alive by including her in such works of art? Wouldn’t people talk about the lost princess? Why would her parents have hidden a painting of their original family in Elsa’s lockbox? Yet no one had ever uttered a word about Anna before. In fact, Mama had always told people who asked that she couldn’t have any other children after Elsa.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Elsa said, her questions coming faster. She felt her heart quicken and heard a whooshing in her ears. She was missing something, but what? “I know people have always tried to protect me, but how could Mama and Papa make the whole kingdom forget I had a sister?”

  “I don’t know,” Olaf said, toddling over. “Maybe this letter will explain it. When you dropped the painting, this was underneath it.”

  Elsa looked up in surprise. “Letter?”

  Olaf held a piece of parchment in his twig hand. Elsa recognized the handwriting immediately.

  It was Mama’s.

  “Elsa!” Lord Peterssen and Hans were both calling to her now, pounding on the door again. “Elsa, are you all right? Answer us!”

  Elsa didn’t answer. Fingers trembling, she reached for the letter in Olaf’s outstretched hand just as she heard a key jingling in her door. Her heart pounding, she skimmed the letter quickly. There was no time to read it carefully. Instead, she searched for the answer she most needed to find. Her eyes passed over words and phrases like trolls, the Valley of the Living Rock, and a secret we’ve hidden for years, and she kept searching till she found what she was looking for.

  We love you and your sister very much, but circumstance forced us to keep you apart.

  Keep us apart? Did that mean Anna was alive?

  Elsa started to laugh and cry at the same time.

  She was not alone. She had a sister!

  “Olaf! She’s alive! Anna’s alive!” Elsa said as the commotion outside her door increased.

  Olaf’s face broke into a toothy grin. “Where is she? We have to find her!”

  “I know! I know!” Elsa looked down at the letter again, prepared to actually read it this time and learn how this was possible. Our darling Elsa, if you’re reading this, we’re gone. Otherwise—

  Her bedroom door flew open.

  The letter slipped from Elsa’s hands as Olaf dove for the dressing area. Hans rushed into the room.

  “Elsa!” he said, his face filled with fear. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine!” Elsa insisted, pushing Hans out the door as he, Lord Peterssen, Gerda, and the Duke attempted to enter. She moved into the hallway, shut t
he door behind her, and realized Kai and Olina were also there. Elsa wondered: were they in on the secret, too? Did they know about Anna and where she was? She had so many new questions that needed answers.

  Lord Peterssen clutched his chest. “We thought you were hurt.”

  “No,” Elsa said, laughing despite herself. “I’m fine. I’m better than fine. Truly.”

  “Why wouldn’t you answer us?” Hans pleaded. “We thought…”

  The Duke looked sharply at Elsa over his spectacles. “We thought you were running away from Prince Hans’s proposal.”

  “Proposal?” Elsa repeated, and then she remembered all at once what they had been discussing before she heard Olaf’s crash and hurried back inside her room. “I…”

  She needed to read that letter. What circumstances forced her parents to separate their daughters? Why didn’t she learn about her powers until her parents’ death? Why didn’t the rest of the kingdom talk about Anna? If her sister was alive, where was she? Had Elsa frightened her away with her magic?

  She needed to read the letter immediately.

  “Yes, Prince Hans is waiting for an answer,” said the Duke, motioning to a confused Hans.

  “I think this conversation should wait till after the coronation,” Hans said.

  “Yes, we need to go to the chapel,” Lord Peterssen reminded the Duke.

  Gerda placed a hand on Elsa’s arm. “Princess, you look flushed.”

  “Hans, I…” Elsa looked from the prince to the others. All she could think about was Mama’s letter. “I need another moment.” She reached for the door handle. The Duke held the door closed.

  “I think you’ve spent enough time shutting people out,” he said firmly. “Don’t you?”

  Elsa felt a flash of anger at the Duke’s words.

  “You can’t talk to the princess like that,” Hans said. The two started arguing.

  Elsa looked desperately back at her door. A letter with keys to her past was on one side, while Hans and the Duke were trying to decide her future on the other. Her fingertips started to tingle, and this time she couldn’t hold her emotions back. She needed to get to that letter.

  “I’m not doing this right now,” Elsa said shakily, and the Duke tried to interrupt her again. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

  The Duke touched her arm. “Princess, if I may—”

  The tremors going through her body came in waves. Her high collar was beginning to itch terribly, and her emotions were too strong to control. “No, you may not,” Elsa snapped. “I need to go back to my room. You should leave.”

  “Leave?” The Duke looked outraged. “Before the coronation?”

  “Princess, there is no time to go back to your room again,” Lord Peterssen pleaded.

  “The priest is waiting,” Kai added.

  “Princess?” Gerda said, sounding unsure. “Are you all right?”

  No, she wasn’t all right. She needed to read that letter. Circumstance forced us to keep you apart. She needed to find Anna. They’d been separated for far too long. Elsa looked from the crowd in front of her to her door again. If they wouldn’t let her enter, she’d find another way back inside. The castle had many secret passages. She’d go around. Elsa tried pushing her way through the crowd in desperation. Her sleeves felt so tight; she could barely move her arms.

  “Elsa, wait.” Hans reached for her, accidentally pulling off one of her gloves.

  “Give me my glove!” Elsa panicked.

  Hans held it out of reach. “Something is troubling you. Please just talk to me,” he said. “Let me help you.”

  “Princess! The priest is waiting,” Lord Peterssen said.

  “Weselton is a close trade partner and I should be at the coronation…” the Duke was muttering.

  Gerda tried to intervene. “The princess is upset.”

  Elsa closed her eyes. “Enough,” she whispered.

  The Duke kept talking. “I was trying to help you present yourself in the best possible light after closing yourself away and…”

  Elsa needed him to stop talking. All she could hear inside her head was Mama’s words.

  We love you and your sister very much.

  Sister.

  Sister.

  She had a sister!

  Nothing else mattered. She pushed past them and ran down the hall. The voices followed.

  “Princess, wait!” Kai cried.

  Elsa was done waiting. She needed to read that letter. Sister. Sister. Her breathing became ragged and her fingers tingled so badly they burned.

  “Princess Elsa!” Hans called.

  “I said, enough!”

  Ice flew away from her hands with such force it shot across the floor, spiking into jagged, twisted icicles that formed an immediate barrier between her and the others. Hans jumped out of the way of a spike that threatened to hit him in the chest. The Duke was knocked off his feet. Frozen crystals of ice floated through the air and silently fell to the floor.

  Elsa gasped in horror.

  Her secret was a secret no more.

  “Sorcery,” she heard the Duke whisper. His face pulsed with anger as he struggled to stand up. “So that’s why. I knew something dubious was going on here!”

  Elsa grasped her own hand in shock. She locked eyes with Hans and saw his confusion.

  “Elsa?” he whispered.

  She did the only thing she still could do: run.

  Down the hall she raced, bursting through the closest set of doors she could find.

  “There she is!” someone cried.

  Without realizing it, Elsa had exited the castle. She was standing in the courtyard in front of the statue of her and her parents, where hundreds of people were waiting. When they saw her, the people began to clap and cheer. Elsa started to back up, then heard voices. Hans, Kai, the Duke, and Lord Peterssen were coming. With no choice, she ran down the steps, holding up her coronation gown as she darted into the crowd.

  “It is her!” someone shouted.

  “Princess Elsa!” People bowed to her.

  Elsa spun around, looking for a path out of the crowd.

  A man blocked her. “Our future queen!”

  Elsa’s heart was pounding. She tried to go another way.

  A woman holding a baby stepped forward. “Your Royal Highness,” she said kindly.

  Elsa immediately thought of her mother and Anna.

  “Are you all right?” the woman asked.

  “No,” Elsa whispered, her eyes darting left and right as she backed up again. She bumped into the fountain with the family statue behind her and put out her hands to stop herself. Instantly, the water in the fountain froze. The geyser that was shooting high into the sky crystalized in midair, as if it were reaching out to grab her.

  The villagers shrieked.

  “There she is!” she heard the Duke shout from the castle steps. “Stop her!”

  Elsa saw Hans and Lord Peterssen and hesitated. Hans was her safety net, but she couldn’t risk hurting him. She couldn’t risk hurting anyone. She thought about which way to run, but people were on all sides of her. Didn’t they realize? She couldn’t control what she was doing. She needed to be alone.

  “Please, just stay away from me. Stay away!”

  More snow shot straight from her hands and hit the castle steps, exploding with such force it froze them. The motion knocked the Duke off his feet again, sending his glasses flying. Elsa was breathing hard in shock.

  The Duke sat up, reaching for his glasses. “Monster. Monster!” he shouted.

  She wasn’t. She didn’t want to hurt a soul. She looked around for someone who understood her, but there was no one. Her people looked terrified. Even the kind woman now seemed to be shielding her baby from Elsa.

  Sister.

  Anna had once known that Elsa had the ability to do magic. Surely, Anna would be able to understand her again. Elsa had to find her at all costs.

  Elsa started to run again and didn’t stop till she cleared the castle courtyar
d and reached the village.

  “Elsa!” she heard Hans calling. “Elsa!”

  But she kept running. She spotted the steps leading down to the water and descended them, running until there was nothing but water in front of her. There was nowhere left to go. She stepped back as she saw Hans approaching, and her foot landed in the water. Instantly, the water froze beneath her shoe. She looked down in wonder as tiny crystals of ice spread. The wind started to whip up and snow began to fall as she took another step. The ice spread again, forming a pathway for her escape. She took it.

  “Wait, please!” Hans begged, running after her with Lord Peterssen on his trail. The snow was falling harder. “Elsa, stop!”

  Elsa wouldn’t stop now. Finding her sister was more important than anything in the world. All thoughts of her coronation slipped away. Elsa took a deep breath and continued onto the ice, praying it wouldn’t crack beneath her feet. The ice held firm, spreading as she ran across it. Her cape billowing around her, Elsa felt resolve coursing through her veins as she took off across the fjord into the gathering darkness.

  Suddenly, there was a rumbling beneath Kristoff and Anna’s feet. A flock of birds shot by overhead. Sven started snorting and shuffling as a family of squirrels scurried past them across the street. Anna heard someone shriek and saw an elk run past. Sven tore off.

  “Sven!” Kristoff shouted.

  Anna and Kristoff chased Sven into the village square. People had started coming out of their homes and shops to see what was going on. Birds and animals began streaming out of the woods in every direction.

  “What’s happening?” Anna asked as the rumbling grew louder.

  The sun vanished behind the clouds, and a cold wind whipped through the trees, causing them to sway.

  “Look!” someone shouted, pointing down the mountain.

  It was one of the finest summer days Anna could remember, but the fjord somehow appeared to be freezing over. A blue glow hovered above the water as it froze, knocking the boats in the harbor sideways. Suddenly, the freeze began to trickle up the mountainside, heading right toward them.

  “Ice,” Kristoff whispered.