Forest of Shadows

by Kamilla Benko

  “I know it’s not a game,” Anna retorted.

  “I don’t think you do,” Elsa said, her voice carefully controlled. Anna wanted to shake her perfect sister, to see some sort of crack, to show her that she saw her as an equal. But that tone—that disappointed tone—revealed all too well exactly what Elsa thought of Anna. And then Anna was no longer hurt, no longer numb, no longer frozen. She boiled.

  “I’m not a child,” Anna said. She was grateful that the ice skates’ blades made her taller than she usually was. “Do you think I don’t know?” With each word, her voice got louder and louder until she practically shouted. “Do you think I haven’t been trying?”

  And before she could hear Elsa’s reply, Anna flung herself out onto the ice.

  Digging the blades in deep, she pushed and pushed, going faster and faster. Anna felt too much. She was too much. That was the trouble. She was too distracted. Too carefree. Too ridiculous for anyone—even for her sister—to see how she could be helpful to the kingdom.

  The wind whipped her cloak behind her, but she leaned into it, wanting to feel the fresh iciness against her hot, angry skin. For a moment, she thought she heard Elsa calling out to her, but she didn’t stop. She wanted to skate away from it all. Away from that disappointed note in Elsa’s voice, away from Kristoff’s undeserved gentle kindness, and away from her own messy, tangled emotions.

  Away from her giant, cursed mistake.

  The ice groaned beneath her weight, her blades scratching out a mournful note that Anna couldn’t escape. Faster, faster, faster! If only she could skate as quick as the wind, maybe she’d melt into it and be swept away from all that she’d done.

  And that’s when the ice cracked.

  ONE SECOND, everything was cold and dry.

  The next second, everything was cold and wet.

  The water dragged at Anna like it had fingers.

  She gasped once—a single great breath of air—before it pulled her under.

  The world below the ice was dark and quiet, peaceful even, except for the wild scream that worked through Anna.

  She was cold again! She would freeze again! And if she died…would the wolf win? Anna kicked. She couldn’t let everyone down! But no matter how much she willed her feet to propel her back up to the surface, the heavy blades of her skates dragged her down…

  down…

  down into the dark.

  Or was it up? Sideways? The dark, ice-cold quiet was disorienting, and her thoughts began to slow. And then, a beam of light shot past her as someone chopped through the ice from somewhere above. Anna felt the water underneath her move like a giant horse, a black wave of water that surged beneath her, and she was flying up through the water and toward the surface with all the strength of a geyser. The water didn’t have the temperature of a hot spring, though, but of an icy slush. Elsa. Moments later, after much spluttering and coughing, Anna was in the arms of Kristoff and Elsa.

  “Thank you for saving me,” Anna whispered, shivering.

  But Elsa didn’t acknowledge her words. Instead, her sister said, “Kristoff, you need take her back to Oaken’s.”

  “What?! No,” Anna croaked. “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

  “But Anna,” Elsa said, throwing her hands up in protest, “you almost drowned.”

  “Almost,” Anna protested. “I’ve almost done a lot of things. I have to help with this!”

  Elsa shook her head. “I’m just not sure.”

  “Why are you always trying to push me away?” Anna asked.

  Elsa looked stung. “What? Anna, what are you talking about? When do I push you away?”

  Anna grew quiet. “I’m sorry. I…Please, I need to accompany you.” For a second, Anna thought Elsa would say no, but then something seemed to melt in Elsa.

  She wrapped Anna in a hug. “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to yell—I just…I’m upset, I guess.”

  “I didn’t mean to cast a spell,” Anna said, needing to get the words out now. “I had no way of knowing it would bring my nightmare about the wolf to life.”

  Elsa shook her head. “It just…When did you start having the nightmares?”

  “When I was a little girl, and then, this week the nightmare came back.” Ever since I realized that you were going to leave me behind for the grand tour. But Anna didn’t say that last bit out loud.

  There was the scritch of a match as Kristoff lit a small pile of branches he’d gathered. He gestured the sisters over to the fire.

  “When did you first have the nightmare?” Elsa prodded as they huddled close to the flames. Steam rose from Anna’s clothes as they slowly dried.

  Anna thought back. “I think it was the night you…you know.” She touched the spot in her hair where the white streak had once been, recalling once more when Elsa had accidentally struck her there with magic as a young girl. “I can’t believe you’ve never had bad dreams.”

  Elsa shrugged. “The last time I had a bad dream, I must have been eight years old. I woke up and my entire room had turned into a winter landscape.” She shook her head. “I felt so bad! Everything got wet and they had to bring in new furniture and carpets for me.”

  “And you never had the nightmare again?”

  “No.” Elsa leaned her head back and looked up. “Father taught me a bunch of tricks to try to control my emotions, my magic. I remember he came into my room once with a mug of hot chocolate—”

  “He used to do that for me, too!” Anna said.

  Elsa smiled, and Anna smiled back, enjoying the surprise bridge that linked them.

  “And Mother joined him and told me to imagine bunching up all the nightmares and throwing them out the window,” Elsa said. “I used to think that when I balled them up, I would throw them and pretend to feed them to the constellations in the sky.”

  “I used to do that, too!” Anna said, feeling closer to her sister than ever. “I’d pretend to give them to Frigg the Fisherman so he could fish for them. But the trick didn’t stop me from having nightmares.”

  Elsa shrugged. “Mother’s trick worked for me. I haven’t had a nightmare since.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” Kristoff said, “but speaking of stars…it’s getting late.”

  The sisters smiled, and Anna felt a little bit better, if not completely. Her clothes were still damp, but no longer dripping.

  After putting out the fire, Kristoff stepped back on the ice, and Anna followed after him. But the bright hope that had been so certain before now seemed to have been left behind in the maple leaf pile at the riverbank.

  Soon enough, the sun began to set, casting long shadows on the ice as they continued to skate up the rest of the Roaring River. Anna couldn’t help thinking that their shadows looked like drowning figures trapped beneath the ice.

  They were quiet as they skated. Anna didn’t want to accidentally step on the tenuous peace between her and Elsa, while Kristoff seemed to be lost again in his own worries. Kristoff’s birth parents had died long ago, and for the early part of his life, Sven had been his only family—until they’d both been adopted by the mountain trolls. The farther they glided away from Sven, the quieter Kristoff became, until, at last, it became unbearable for Anna. She needed a distraction—for all of them.

  “Kristoff, have you ever met the Huldrefólk?” she asked, blurting out the first thing she could think of. “Did they ever visit the trolls?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I know of,” he said. “The trolls like to hide, but the Huldrefólk—well, they really like to hide, right? I don’t think anyone’s ever seen one.”

  “They’re known for finding lost things, too,” Elsa said, slowing down so the other two could catch up with her. No one in Arendelle, or probably in the whole world, for that matter, was as comfortable on the ice as Elsa. While Elsa always moved with grace, when she skated, she was more than grace. She became someone with wind in her veins and wings on her feet. “It’s said that Aren of Arendelle once went to visit them.”

&
nbsp; “But his adventures led him to many make-believe creatures,” Anna said as his tales gradually came back to her. “Like mermaids and dragons.”

  “Right,” Elsa said with a nod. “So maybe the Huldrefólk are like dragons and don’t exist at all. Maybe Aren never even existed.”

  Kristoff made a face. “So why do you two know so much about this guy if he may or may not have existed? He’s just a legend, right? A myth?”

  “Possibly. It’s said he did a lot of great things for the land,” Anna said. “He carved Arenfjord himself, you know. Or so the old myths go.”

  Kristoff snorted. “Yeah, right. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “You’ve never heard the story?” Anna asked in surprise. “I thought everyone knew it.”

  Kristoff jabbed a thumb at his chest. “Raised by trolls, remember? Some of us didn’t have fancy lessons growing up.” There was something strange lurking in his voice, as though Anna had hit a nerve. It must have had to do with his worry for Sven. She turned to Elsa and asked, “You know the saga verbatim, right?”

  Elsa nodded. “It helped pass the time when I was growing up.” She paused a moment, seeming to collect herself, and then spoke the familiar lines that signified the beginning of a story: “‘A long time ago, in the time before time, a great darkness swept over the land…’”

  Anna held her breath as Elsa recited the ancient tale and described how an everlasting night had set over the mountains, and how humankind had fled to their boats for safety. Humans then lived on the waters for hundreds of years, until the day a strange sickness smote them. Scared, the people had asked the most ancient of water spirits for help, and the Water Spirit had told them that they were withering away without a place to plant their roots—they needed to return home. But all were too scared, except for a young boy.

  “‘Young as the morning, as fierce as a twig, Aren stepped out onto the land…’” Elsa recited.

  They skated in rhythm to Elsa’s voice, a stroke of one leg, then the other, a beat that flowed through Anna, and calmed her. Impossible things had happened in the past. So why couldn’t they happen in the future?

  She took heart as Elsa described how Aren had climbed up the highest mountain to bargain with night and bring back the sun, and how when he’d finally freed the sun, the sun had gifted him the Revolute Blade and told him how to bring his people home: by carving a new path for them, right between the protective mountains.

  Elsa’s voice picked up speed as she reached the crescendo of Aren’s very first quest, and Anna couldn’t help mouthing along with the words as she suddenly remembered.

  “‘Revolving moon and spinning sun, forged a crescent blade. From light and dark within the heart, the burnished sword was made. The curving arc of Revolute shimmered in his hand. He raised it high above his head, and smote the edge of land.’”

  Without missing a beat, Elsa reached out a hand for Anna, gesturing for her to join her on the final stanza of Aren’s first adventure, which Anna found herself happily able to recall. Together, the sisters finished telling the tale: “‘The sea rushed in as hidden power flowed from the gleaming sword, and shaped the rock and forest crown of the first majestic fjord!’”

  Their voices rang out as one, the words triumphantly echoing across the ice.

  “Not too shabby,” Kristoff said. “It kind of reminds me of the troll ballad about Dagfinn the Dusty, a troll who was allergic to mountains and would accidentally cause avalanches wherever he went by sneezing boulders out of his nose.”

  “Wait, what?” Anna giggled. “That’s what trolls say boulders are? Troll boogers?”

  Kristoff shrugged. “Well, yeah. I can sing it for you, if you’d like.”

  “Maybe later,” Elsa cut in, stopping with a spray of ice. “We’re here.” She pointed up at a sign:

  MINER’S MOUNTAIN

  WARNING: KEEP OUT

  NO TRESPASSERS OR GOATS

  HULDREFÓLK ARE WATCHING!

  Anna looked up at the sparkling summit of Miner’s Mountain. If she squinted her eyes just so, she thought she could make out the mystic’s tower. But it was so high up and so far away that from where she stood it looked more like a chimney that had been stuck on top of a roof rather than a tower on a mountain. It would take days to climb all that distance.

  For people who didn’t have a magical sister, that is.

  Elsa waited for Kristoff and Anna to step off the frozen river before she did so herself. As soon as Elsa was on the bank, the ice cracked, and blue water began to flow once more. With a twirl of Elsa’s hand, Anna’s ice skates melted away to reveal her boots beneath, but Anna hardly realized it because of the great whirlwind that kicked up around her, snow climbing into the air higher and higher, until solidifying into a grand icy staircase.

  Elsa had done it again. While the staircase of ice was long and ever so high, with nothing but a curving, slender handrail, it would be much easier to navigate than a treacherous and tedious rocky trail. There must have been at least a thousand steps in the ice staircase—Anna couldn’t be bothered to count. Either way, they were going to climb it, because, at the very top, answers were waiting for them.

  “Classic,” Kristoff said to Elsa.

  “Thanks,” she replied.

  One step, then another, they ascended.

  At first, Anna didn’t bother holding on to the fragile railing, but about two-thirds of the way to the top, she looked down and gripped it tight. The staircase was clear as glass, and Anna—though brave—wasn’t entirely comfortable with the sight of her feet seemingly dangling above thin air. From this height, the pines seemed to shrink, smaller and smaller and smaller. As they moved up, the sun moved down.

  At long last, in the blazing sunset, they reached the top. From there, the tower was much taller than Anna had realized—and much more jumbled. The rocks that made up the tower seemed to be haphazardly arranged, and certain stones seemed to be on the verge of slipping out of place. In fact, the tower did not look unlike the staggered piles of books Anna had left in the library. Elsa reached the door to the tower first, and paused. Her hand remained still, raised out in front of her, as if she couldn’t decide whether she should knock.

  Anna pulled her cloak to her chest as the wind sang around them. “What’s wrong?”

  “What do I say?” Elsa asked.

  “You knock and say hi, and we’ll go from there,” Kristoff called. “Hurry.”

  “What Kristoff said,” Anna said, watching the sun sink over the horizon.

  Elsa threw back her shoulders and knocked.

  Then the three of them stared at the door and waited, but nothing happened. Was no one home? The thought filled Anna with a heavy dread. They had come all this way, and Sorenson was not there.

  Elsa knocked again. Nothing.

  “Stand back,” Kristoff said. He moved in front of Elsa and put his shoulder to the door. But it was sturdier than it looked. He lifted his pickax high.

  “Why don’t you try the handle?” Elsa asked.

  Kristoff raised an eyebrow and did just that. The door swung easily open.

  “Huh,” he said as he put his pickax away. Without saying another word, he went inside.

  Anna exchanged an amused glance with her sister, and they followed him through the doorway and into the tower. From the outside, the tower had looked about to topple, but the inside seemed solid enough, made up of rock and wood and books.

  Anna had always imagined a mystic to be exacting, the kind of person who might label the spices in their kitchen cabinet, but everything seemed to be randomly placed. Plants sprawled on top of books, and books on top of statues. On the far side of the circular room was a spiral staircase. There was practically everything under the sun in the tower room.

  Except for a mystic.

  KRISTOFF GROANED, letting his traveler’s pack thump to the floor. “He’s not here. Now what?”

  “I’m sure he’ll come back,” Anna said, unclasping her clo
ak. The tower felt especially stuffy after being in the wind all day long. “In the meantime, we wait.”

  Arooooooooooooooo!

  A long, low howl wrapped around the tower, carving a pit in Anna’s stomach—was it the wolf? Had it escaped Elsa’s ice dome?

  Kristoff, however, remained calm. “It’s just the wind. Trust me.” He picked up a small guitar that leaned next to a potted plant. “Growing up with trolls, you know what’s the wind, and what’s a wolf.” He strummed the guitar. The tinkling sound filtered through the air, pretty, if a bit off-key.

  Anna’s fear receded a little, and she hoped he was right. “I’d rather the wolf be stalking us here and leaving the villagers alone,” she admitted.

  “Very noble of you,” Elsa said. “We’ll stay, but just until we figure out a plan in case Sorenson doesn’t come back soon.”

  “Maybe there’s a book or something here that can undo the curse,” Anna said. “One that’s already been translated.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Kristoff said. “I’ll take the upstairs. You two search down here.” And with a nod at the girls, he lit his lantern and disappeared into the swirl of dark steps above them. Anna thought she knew why he wanted to search a floor by himself. When Anna was upset, she always sought company, but when Kristoff was upset, he liked to be by himself or with Sven. And with Sven in trouble, she knew Kristoff was having a hard time, too.

  Elsa sighed. “Ugh. I knew coming here was a bad idea.”

  Anna felt herself bristle like the gray barn cat, but she didn’t want to fight, not again, not so soon. They had come a long way, and they had more of a way to go. So she kept her voice light. “We don’t know that yet. Let’s just give this room a chance. Please?”