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He has not slept. The wolves have moved ever closer to the city, threatening to sneak into the towns, to hide in the alleys, to make a noise sharp and terrifying by his head. He is terrified of wolves. In the Southern Isles, they hunted the last of them to nonexistence years ago. They do not fear the elements in the Southern Isles. There are four seasons and no wolves, no restless spirits.
Hans, sleep deprived and rattled, meets his wife in the hallway. They see each other perhaps once a day. She regards him passively. Elsa's expression is not cold. That would be too obvious. Everything is cold. It's just the first adjective that comes to mind. No. Elsa is staring at him with something that looks more like death. And he has seen enough death in Arendelle to know.
"You look lovely this morning," he says. Though whenever he tries to speak to her, his lower jaw goes stiff with pain, a shooting chill up into his temple. When he married her, forced a ring onto her fingers, his own had blistered with the chill. They sleep in separate wings. The cold may not bother her, but he is still made of flesh and blood.
"I'm aware," she says, and does not hold her dead eye-contact with him as she passes him in the hallway into what used to be Anna's room, what was supposed to now be a nursery. As if. What was supposed to be the place they sent their staff to tend for the future of the country. As if.
She will not take breakfast with him, and he doesn't even bother to ask anymore. One year into winter and there is hardly breakfast anyway. Though, Hans has to admit, the tenacity of the Arendelle populous as a whole is remarkable. There are ways for people to survive in an eternal winter. A foot-servant once remarked that the food no longer rots. Hans had countered that neither do the corpses, and the pointed look that the servant had returned was enough of a response.
The gates are not open. The gates are never open. This is the historical precedent and Arendelle is a country rich in tradition. If His Majesty wants to speak to the citizens, to hear their grievances (and of course he does. He is so kind. He tried so hard. He has given up so much. He is looking so thin and pale these days. He is trying so hard, giving out blankets, offering what he can. What little, little, little he can) he must leave the confines and comforts of the castle.
Every time he passes under the stones, his long blue coat with the collar up to his neck pulled close around him, he thinks of Elsa. "I hope they tear you limb from limb," she had said, her face unmoved. She was statuesque in her beauty, chiseled out by mountain flint. She was standing at the window, her nails dug into her palms. She didn't bleed. He has never seen her bleed. It is possible she doesn't have the means to do so.
This morning, under the cool clear blue of the summer-winter sky, on a horse, he heads North towards the mountains. The complaints of sorcery, of the trolls, has increased steadily in the last year. It is time to put an end to this, if possible. Probably not possible. Hans does not think of this. Hans does not see impossibilities, only opportunities. He lives by the motto of the closed door and the open window, the understanding that there is always a way out. He once argued with a brother about this. “But if the door closes, Hans,” the older boy had said, so smug, “Then you can’t get out. What good does a window do you? How do you know it’s not too small to get out of? Or that you’re not at the top of a thousand foot building?”
“Well, then,” Hans had replied, young and defensive and annoyed at having holes poked into his optimism, “I’ll break my shoulders and jump.”
“You’ll fall,” the brother had snorted, and returned to his studies.
“Yeah,” Hans had snarled, and thought about throwing the inkwell as he left, “But I’ll get out of the stupid locked room, you idiot.”
Now he is riding towards the West Slope, the trees scraping at the sky with desperate, frostbitten fingers, blistering and bleeding ice. Now he is pulling himself slowly out of the saddle, his thighs aching with the cold, every muscle in his body trying to contract as tightly as possible. The rock garden is practically sizzling with magic. It hums with the same kind of high, hollow noise that the books in Elsa’s library do. There is a house on the far edge. A cabin, a stable, a butchery. As Hans approaches the shelter, intending to stable his horse, he is greeted by an imposing and frost-tipped figure; a boy with broad shoulders and a solid jaw, a boy suited to this kind of misery in his existence. The prototypical Arendelle commoner.
“What are you doing here?” the boy snarls, his knuckles raw red, his hands stained a coppery brown, a hatchet in his hands.
“That’s now how you speak to me,” Hans reminds him, dismounting and closing the stable gate, securing the horse in what limited warmth there is.
“Get out of here.”
“Kristoff, we need to have a conversation.”
“Don’t you talk to me. Get your horse out of me. Get out of here.” The boy is livid, red in the face from more than the chill, grasping the hatchet so tightly that Hans would be worried if he wasn’t royalty. Nothing hurts royalty. Nothing and nobody.
“Listen to me,” Hans says, placing his hand on Kristoff’s, willfully ignorant of the way the boy shudders under his touch. “I’m going to give you an opportunity.”
“Yeah? I’m going to give you a black eye if you don’t leave soon.”
“Don’t be hostile,” Hans says, looking at Kristoff’s hands. “I’m not hostile. We don’t have to make this situation hostile. Unless you want to explain to the villagers what’s happening to their families.”
“They know,” Kristoff says, “You have to give them some credit.” He lowers his hatchet, scratches at his arm. The browning blood-stains trace from his wrist to his elbow.
Hans considers this, the colors. Kristoff is otherwise shades of grey and black, dusted in the white that surrounds everything around them. Hans can remember the colors when he arrived a year or so ago. He can remember summer. He wonders if Kristoff can or not. “Do you want to know a story I heard?” Hans asks, wrapping his arms around himself against the low, constant wind. “Why don’t you let me into your house? Or your store?”
“Why don’t you turn around and go back to your palace?”
“I need to tell you this story,” Hans replies, unblinking.
Kristoff takes a step forward, lowers himself to Hans’ eye level. “Is it the story about how you murdered Anna?”
Hans has stopped defending himself. Kristoff does not care about the details, about the facts, about things he saw with his own damn eyes. Instead, Hans says, “No, it’s a story about wolves.”
“You are a wolf,” Kristoff snarls, and shoves past Hans, “Leave.”
Hans watches him for a moment; watches the blood-stained, lumbering form shuffling off towards a single bright light in the small cabin. The sound of the magic from the rock circle is nearly overpowering, but a long low whine is starting in the caves above them, in the ice of the mountains, a whine that is becoming a howl. “Kristoff, please,” Hans says, “You have to stop.”
Kristoff turns, holds himself slightly taller as he says, “You know what I used to do?”
“Sell ice, yes,” Hans snaps, “I am more than familiar with your economic woes. You and the entire union of your people. I’ve told you, there are some things I can’t do, like control the weather.”
“Well,” Kristoff laughs bitterly, “You are married to someone who can.”
“You know she can’t,” Hans says. Defending Elsa is task suited more to Sisyphus than a young king, but it comes as second nature. Hans has defended Elsa to his father, to the dignitaries of foreign nations, to her own people. When you’re married to a woman, Hans figures, even a woman who has single-handedly created a famine in her nation that has, in a sense, driven all domestic animals from the capital and put all the elderly and weak to rest, you still have to defend her. That is love. Or a close approximation. An approximation that appears authentic. “Kristoff, listen to me.”
“Shut up.”
“Please,” Hans says. Shouts. Please. “Listen to me. You need to stop. You’re…”
“I’m what?” Kristoff has turned around, is looking intently at his king, waiting for the man to break. Kristoff has known summer boys before. The boys who had somewhere warm to wait when the seasons were real, when winter was six months and not twelve. The boys who were rosy-cheeked and fat-fingered. The boys who showed up first to buy the meat when Kristoff first started selling. He wasn’t surprised or disappointed. He didn’t have the energy for that. He doesn’t have the energy for a summer king, either.
Hans speaks quietly, “You’re making wolves.”
“I’m making a living.”
“No, Kristoff,” Hans insists, stepping closer, extending his gloved hand in a helpless motion. “You don’t understand. I read the books. Elsa’s family has books of magic and lore and I read them and I-”
Kristoff is laughing and it sounds broken and ugly, like the crunch of a shoe on hardened snow. “You?” he finally says, “You dabbled in sorcery? After your wife…”
“I had to know,” Hans insists, “And I know. You’re making wolves. When you… do what you’re doing with the bodies… Their spirits can’t rest. They have to seek out-”
“I know.”
Hans is stunned into a dumb silence. The mountain towers over them and the sun is sinking in shame, the magic of the rock circle hums unbroken. Somewhere in the looming shadow the howling is increasing. Hans can picture the wolves making their way down the mountains, padding gently in an enormous, fanged wave. “Kristoff, do you understand what you’re doing?”
“I was raised by trolls,” Kristoff replies, unblinking, unsmiling. “You think I didn’t know that by chopping those people up I was damning them? They’re going to come back for you. I’m making sure of that.”
It’s not my fault lingers in Han’s lips, but doesn’t escape. Instead, he forces a smile and says calmly, “The consumption of human flesh is a capital crime, Kristoff. I expect you to shut down your little business by the end of the week or find yourself on the other side of the butcher’s table, as it were.”
“Have you ever seen a wolf up close?” Kristoff asks, a genuine smile on his lips as the shadow eclipses the valley. But Hans isn’t listening. He is sliding back onto the saddle and steering the gelding out of the stable, away from the rock circle, as quickly as the horse can go back into the town, back through the treacherously icy streets overlooking the fjord, back through the enormous gates.
The castle is made of solid stone, dug from quarries hundreds of years ago. At least two feet thick. He measured, once, when he first heard the wolves. There is no way that they could break though. He’s sure. He’s measured. There are gates and solid oak doors and two feet of stone and a hell of a lot of ice that would trip the bastards up and there is… there is Elsa. Standing at the top of the stairs in her dress the color of her eyes. “Hello, dear,” she says, and she stresses “dear” so much that it may break her teeth to say it. “Where were you?”
“Dealing with a law-breaker,” Hans says, smiling. “How are you?” He is climbing the stairs to meet her and she is turning away, walking ahead of him. He won’t dare to get too close. Mistakes of that kind have already been made, and he was never a child who had to put his hand in the fire twice, so to speak.
“Fine, waiting for you to leave.”
“This is as much my kingdom as yours now,” he says, no malice in his voice.
“When you leave, so can I, so can the people,” she says, speaking as though her voice were removed from her body. “When you leave, and I leave, there is no more kingdom.”
Hans doesn’t point out that there is actually a complicated line of minor royals in place across the country to prevent the total collapse of Arendelle entirely. “I’m not leaving,” he says.
“Yes you are,” Elsa replies, sounding more confident than he has ever heard her be before. “You’re going to leave when they come for you.”
“What are you talking about?”
Elsa turns, waits for Hans to catch up to her, and touches his face. He can feel the cold sink into his bones, feel his skin start to blister at her touch. “Hans,” she says, unblinking, unsmiling, so dead behind her eyes, “I hope they tear you apart.”
He pulls away from her and flees to his bed, wraps himself under his covers. But he cannot sleep. There is the sound of screaming on the wind. A single, long, painful shriek. A young girl with pretty green eyes. The sound of a thousand wolves approaching, a wave of fangs, an army of unfeeling semi-sentience. The winter is eternal, and it knows that Hans is not.