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The first time she saw the marks on Kristoff's chest, it was in a brilliant wash of sunlight, the angular symbols dark against pale skin. Anna, dashing into the stables, skidded to a halt and stared while Kristoff hastily turned away, cheeks red. His name had been on her lips as an exuberant shout, but it faded into a silent exhalation. The hot summer sun was pouring into through the open doors, the dust motes from the hay sparkling so that the air was full of a golden haze, and Anna was staring at Kristoff's bare back, his shoulders, the sweat-sheen on the nape of his neck, glimpsing his chest as he twisted to stretch out one long, muscular arm to the limp blue drape of his shirt, the fine-woven fabric that usually covered—The rake he'd been using clattered to the floor, and the noise jolted Anna out of her stupor.
"Wait! Don't—What's that?"
Kristoff froze, shirt dangling from his hand. "What?"
"On your chest—" Anna ducked around to his front, and when he awkwardly raised a shielding arm she pushed it back down. Burning curiosity had completely overwhelmed the nagging awareness that this was technically indecent, and definitely improper, although her fingers stopped short of touching his chest, hovering above the inked lines. "Is this a tattoo? You really have a tattoo?"
He shrugged, shifting as if he was going to rub the back of his head but then freezing again, arms stiff at his sides. "Ah—yes?"
"I didn't know," she said. "I mean, of course I didn't know, why would I know? Of course I didn't know, I just didn't think about—I mean, I've never seen one before, I didn't know anyone in Arendelle had one, I guess I knew sailors got them but I always thought they were something people only got far away, and I never imagined—" Anna bit down hard on her lip to stop her tongue from gabbling out more words.
"They aren't uncommon, in the mountains," Kristoff said. "I would I have told you if—if I'd realized you would want to know."
Of course she wanted to know—she wanted to know everything about him, but it would never have occurred to her to picture this tracing of black over the left side of his chest. Despite adventures and kisses and more than a month of living under the same roof, Anna felt as if she was seeing him for the first time.
"How long have you had it?"
He shrugged again. "A few years. It's one of the first things I spent money on, when I had any."
"Did it hurt?"
"A bit." He grinned faintly when she gave him a dubious look. "A lot."
Her touch ghosted across his skin, then when he didn't pull back she rested her fingertip against him, shaping the lines with her hand as she tried to shape the sounds with her mouth. But he'd only given her a few brief lessons in his way of writing, after she'd looked at his ledger one day and been bewildered.
"What does it say?"
"Jaská."
There was a catch in his voice as he said the word, a hesitancy, and Anna bit her lip. "What does that mean?"
Kristoff paused. Anna looked up at his face, and his eyes were so shadowed and distant, something like pain tightening his mouth, that she opened her mouth to take back the question, started to pull her hand back, ready to apologize for being brash, inquisitive, intrusive Anna—but his hand came up to cover her finger lightly, his own fingertips brushing the tattoo.
"It means 'quiet', but—it's also my mother's name."
"Your mother?"
He nodded. "My first mother. My human mother. She—I was really young, when she died. We lived in the mountains, in a small village, but it was my father's people, not hers. And one day he didn't come back from a harvest…I'm not sure what happened, I wasn't old enough to understand. But when the sickness came…" Kristoff stopped, swallowing hard. Anna pressed her palm flat over his chest, feeling the rhythm of his heart beneath the tattoo. "A lot of people died. It spread so quickly, and no one knew how to treat it, and then someone said that it was her fault. That she was cursed, that she was bad luck, that she was somehow responsible for my father being gone, and that she'd brought the sickness. By then not many people were left, but they drove us out. And it was just the two of us. And then—" He glanced up, over Anna's head, but his hand tightened over hers. "Then she got sick. And it was just me. And—well, you know."
"Kristoff," Anna whispered. Her eyes were stinging with tears.
"Sometimes I have trouble remembering her. I was so young, when—and the trolls helped, when I was with them, but when I left the valley sometimes I would realize I couldn't picture her face. So I got this." He let go of her hand and tapped the tattoo. "So that I'll always remember her. And you know—since I got it, sometimes I have dreams. I see her, and I always recognize her. So I guess it worked."
Anna blinked, and a tear spilled over. Kristoff's calloused thumb caught the drop, wiping it away gently. "Don't, Anna, it's all right. I was lucky. I found Sven, and I realized I could work, and the ice harvesters didn't drive me off—some of them even shared their food with me sometimes, let me share their fires. And I found the trolls, and they became my family, and—" A smile quirked one corner of his mouth as he looked down at her. "I met you. I was lucky."
She smiled back at him, biting her lip against the tremble of more tears, and looked at the runes on his chest again. Her thumb rubbed across the name, just as his had over her cheek. Jaská. Quiet. Kristoff's mother. It was so much more than just an exciting, exotic secret—it was his past, his history, and he'd shared it with her. Impulsively, Anna leaned forward to kiss the inked lines lightly. Kristoff stiffened and she pulled back.
"Anna," he whispered.
Suddenly all of Anna's senses seemed to wake up at once—she'd been so absorbed in Kristoff's story that she'd almost forgotten he was bare-chested, even though she still had her hand pressed to his skin, even though she'd just touched that skin with her lips. But now she was abruptly aware of the heat of him, warmth radiating from his body. She could taste salt on her lips from the sheen of sweat on his chest, could feel the tensing of muscle under her fingers. There was something shy and vulnerable still in his expression and in the fairness of his untanned skin, but Anna also saw a spark deep in the golden brown of his eyes, saw the masculine roughness of his jaw, and the contrast made her stomach swoop like a new butterfly. Intimacy wrapped them in a cocoon that seemed to muffle every sound from the courtyard, leaving the sun-drenched stables as hushed as a church. She was so aware of him that her body was tingling with it, her heart fluttering out of rhythm even as she felt the steady thump under her palm skip a beat.
"Anna," Kristoff said again, voice rough.
"Anna! Princess Anna! Are you in—oh!"
The quiet intimacy shattered, and suddenly Anna's cheeks were flaming, her hands clenched in her skirts, and Kristoff was belatedly scrambling into his forgotten shirt, turning his back. Johanna had turned her back too, although she'd turned slowly and she was definitely peaking over her shoulder. "Sorry!" she said cheerfully. "Didn't mean to interrupt, I was supposed to tell the princess that she has letters just arrived with that new ship, and there's parcels from Paris that the queen is eager to open, but I could pretend I didn't find—"
"No, no, I'm coming!" Anna could barely glance at Kristoff, although when she did she saw that his ears were as red as her face felt. But as he bent to pick up his rake he smiled at her, and she felt as if the sunlight was glowing in her very blood. She smiled back and then hurried away, before she could give in to her impulse to fling her arms around him in front of her lady-in-waiting.
Johanna had to trot to keep up as Anna rushed across the courtyard.
"Nothing happened," Anna told her.
"Of course not," Jo said. "Sorry. Next time I won't look so hard."
"Jo!"