Chapter Text
"What have we here, then?"
Anna thought the answer to that was pretty obvious. It was a little boy with hair the color of new hay and a face spattered with grime. He made no sound, didn't even look up at her father's question.
"What's your name, laddie?" Da asked patiently, but still no reply came.
The woman standing behind him cleared her throat. "We don't know if it's his hearin' or--"
A burly man nearby clapped hard, and the little boy jumped. Anna did, too, but hopefully nobody noticed.
"Thank you, Thomas," her father said drily. "Not that, then. Is it his tongue?"
"We heard him mutterin' in his sleep when we found him by the shore. Not any language I've ever heard."
"No one else with him?"
"Not a soul. Just...wreckage."
Da nodded. "I'll not leave a child to suffer in my lands long as there's life and breath in me. Can you care for him if I were to send you gold enough for his keeping?"
"Aye, my lord, gladly."
"He's yours, then," he proclaimed. "Give him a good supper and a wash and bring him back to see if he'll get on with the other children."
Anna desperately wanted to follow along with the boy and the woman, wanted to know more about this accidental changeling, but there were more men and women waiting yet for an audience with her father, and he'd asked her and her sister both to stand and watch how the business of clan governance was handled. It was horrendously boring, but her sister and mother both had been acting like perfect ladies all the while, and she was doing her utmost to match them. It wasn’t easy, though, not when her stockings itched worse than grass did when she snuck out and rolled in it instead of going to lessons.
Two dreadful hours later she was free and burst out of the great hall and into the yard, nearly bowling over the little boy from that morning. "What are you doing just standing in the middle of the way like that?" she demanded hotly, but he gave no response, not even a shake of the head, and she paused and looked him over, taking the measure of him. "Can you really not talk, then?"
He only looked at her with those sad, dark eyes. She frowned. "Well? Do you understand me, boy?"
If it were her alone in a new place with no mam, she realized suddenly, she'd not want to talk much either. And if it were very new--
"I'm sorry," she said, "shouldn't have talked so hard to you. I suppose you'd understand I was being cross with you even if you don't know the words."
His brow furrowed, as if he really were trying to understand, and an idea came to her. "Wait," she instructed, leaping to her feet and holding a hand towards him, palm up.
He nodded; that at least was universal. She ran off, and a few moments later she was back, clutching a bit of charcoal and a scrap of parchment. The boy watched, head tilted in curiosity, as she scratched out the four letters of her name.
She looked up, ready to explain, but before she even opened her mouth he smiled and pointed at her. "Anna," he said, rounding the first A in a way she'd never heard before.
"Aye, that's me. Anna."
The boy smiled and laid a hand over his heart. "Kristoff."
The sun was warm on her cheeks as she flopped ungracefully onto her back in the middle of a patch of heather. It was the first true day of spring, and the mists had at last retreated back up the sweeping slopes of the hills to reveal the new life that had been waiting to emerge from beneath the crusts of snows the whole winter long. The air itself was still crisp and cool, but neither of them cared, not when there were blankets to wrap over their shoulders and good company to be had.
“Sorry I’m late meeting you out here,” Anna said, not bothering to look at him.
“It’s alright. I don’t mind,” Kristoff replied, settling his arms behind his head as he laid back to gaze up at the trails the clouds were stretching across the watery blue sky.
He’d improved in great leaps and bounds over the last year and a half, and she tried not to pride herself too much on that fact or else it’d be a sin and the elders would have her head, which was even scarier than the wrath of God himself. But it was hard not to, not when he could read and write now nearly as well as she could, though he still rarely spoke aloud to anyone except for her. She tried not to feel too proud of that, either.
“It’s just there was a whole ceremony for my sister and some boy from France so they could get betrothed. He’s already going on seventeen, can you believe it? Don’t know why he’d come all this way for my sister. She doesn’t even smile half the time, not even at me.”
“Betrothed?” Kristoff asked, his brows pinching together. “I don’t know that word.”
How strange it was she had forgotten to teach it to him when it was the most important word in her world these days. “I wish I didn’t,” she muttered, rolling onto her stomach so she could look at him. “It means you’ll marry them. Like you’re promised to them.”
“Oh. I understand promises.”
That he did; she’d made him swear about a million of them already, promises to meet her somewhere or not share her secrets or do a favor for her. And he kept every last one of them. “Yeah. So you promise when you’re grown up that you’ll get married.”
“How can you promise to love someone if you don’t know them?”
She sighed. “It’s not like that. Love doesn’t matter when it’s for the good of the clan.”
“Are you betrothed to someone?”
Anna laughed. “Me? No, no one’s interested in scrawny little girls with too many freckles. I can’t even curtsy right.”
“I’ll be betrothed to you, then.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”
“Well, when we’re grown up, if we’re still friends, I promise to marry you.”
He said it so sincerely, his eyes so big and solemn she couldn’t help but smile. “Alright, then. I promise, too.”
"Why, you've gone and grown half a mile and left me behind!" she cried, settling her hands on her hips.
He laughed, and that was different, too, no longer the giggle of a boy but the deep, rumbling chuckle of a man. “You’ve changed, too. Even more freckles.”
His face reddened when his voice cracked on the last word, but she only grinned; there he was, then, still the boy she’d always known, even if now she had to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes. “I go away for a whole year and come back to mockery?”
“Feistypants.”
“Brute.”
“Wee little thing.”
“Wild big thing!”
They were both nearly doubled over with laughter. “I missed you, though,” Anna managed to gasp out. “The letters weren’t the same.”
He grew quieter then. “I missed you, too.”
“I won’t have to go away again, though, now that they’ve finished me into a proper lady. Until I’m married, at least.”
His eyes met hers, dark and searching, and she felt a sudden thrumming in her heart, like the wings of a hummingbird barely beginning to take flight. “Are you betrothed to someone else now, then?”
She shook her head, unable to do anything more when he was looking at her like that. Someone else. She had expected him to forget almost immediately; she should have known better. Kristoff didn’t forget things he said in sincerity, which in his case was everything.
He nodded, looking almost relieved. “Good. We’re almost grown up now, aren’t we? I’m sixteen next month.”
“Aye, and I turned thirteen the last one.”
“And we’re still friends, aren’t we?”
“Well, I’d certainly hope so.”
“Then it’s still settled. Between us, I mean.”
Anna smiled and set a hand on his arm, and he blushed again. So did she; that had changed, too. She squeezed and felt him flex beneath her touch, all newly-won hard muscle thanks to the apprenticeship he’d taken with the blacksmith in her absence. “I suppose it is.”
“I suppose we’re both orphans now,” she said softly, and he reached over to set his hand atop hers where it rested on the hard oak of the pew. “How have you managed it all this time, all this—this feeling so alone?”
“You’re not alone, Anna,” he whispered back as the minister made his way to the front. “You’ve got your uncle still, and your sister, and—and you’ve got me.”
Her eyes were damp when she met his gaze, but there was still a spark in their blue depths, the one that always seemed to ignite something in him, too. “Is that one of your promises again?”
“Aye, it is. You’ll always have me.”
She looked like she wanted to say more, but then the minister cleared his throat and the service began. Instead she flipped her hand beneath his, slipping her little white fingers between his rough, work-hardened ones, and held on tight.
“Feels like you haven’t asked me to meet you out here for half an age,” Kristoff said, already sprawling out with ease, all long, solid limbs and teasing brown eyes. “Thought maybe you were starting to forget me.”
Anna didn’t laugh. Instead she sat down and tucked her knees up to her chest, her long skirts coming up just enough to reveal a slice of skin above her boots. How does she have freckles even there? he found himself wondering, unable to tear his gaze away though the tips of his ears were burning.
“I’m eighteen next week,” she said with a frown. “And my uncle’s got it in his head that I’m halfway to being an old maid already.”
“What does that make me, then? A walking corpse?” he asked, trying to tease, but she didn’t rise to the bait.
“He says with my sister being a widow and shutting herself in these past years, and him only having sons, I’m the last hope if we’re to survive what’s coming next. Said we needed allies, and I said ‘what for’, and all he did was shake his head and try to be mysterious. It’s positively ridiculous, such a self-important man getting to lead us all just because he’s got a cock swinging beneath his skirts and I’ve only got—”
“Anna!” he cried, horrified. “Where’d you learn such language?”
Secretly, though, he was amused, and she knew it, too, finally giving him that familiar sunny smile.
“Never you mind about that. The point is he’s going on about me getting married off to some son of a MacDonald or a Campbell if they’ll have me, and I told him—I told him…”
She trailed off, looking away from him again. His heart started to pound, like it had when he had stood with her at the edge of the cliffs that overlooked the seas and she’d whispered, “Doesn’t it make you want to jump? Just to see how it feels?”
“I’m not as good as you,” she said softly, “at keeping promises. But I do try, Kristoff, I do. And I’d like to keep this one if you’ll have me.”
“Which one?” he asked, his voice ragged as he leaned towards her. They hadn’t spoken of it in years, but he’d always wondered, always hoped—
“Well, what I just said,” she said, looking up at him again with a touch of impatience. “That we’re grown now, so you’ll have me, and I’ll have you, and—”
He’d been waiting long enough. He leaned forward then and kissed her, gently at first and then harder when she kissed him back, tangling her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. It felt like a promise all over again, the way her lips pressed against his, like a seal that would keep them bound together for the rest of their days.
When at last they pulled away, her cheeks were rosy, and she was breathing hard, and both of them were grinning like the reckless fools they were. “Aye, Anna,” he said, and her smile grew improbably wider. “I’ll have you.”