Anna felt like a miniature sun had ignited in her chest.
Eventually, they neared the tamed, bountiful farmlands, and Anna, sneaking glances at Elsa, saw that her sister had finally settled into her saddle and was looking around the landscape with curious eyes. She seemed at ease. She seemed relaxed. Maybe it was time for Anna to finally ask her burning question. As they turned left, they passed a beautiful orchard with bright red apples and autumn leaves so orange that the world looked like it had been set aflame. Apples. Perfect.
Anna pointed at them. “Did you know that there’s an apple on the royal flag of Zaria?” she said oh-so-casually. “And that’s because it’s always customary for a guest to present an apple to the host.” A worry pricked Anna’s thoughts. “Your ship does have apples on board, right?”
Elsa shook her head. “Yes, Anna—you’ve made sure of it! If I have any more barrels of gifts you’ve suggested for everyone, my ship will be too heavy to leave the harbor!”
Anna swept her bangs out of her eyes and laughed. “What would you do without me?” She tugged on the reins, gently pulling Havski to a halt. “Elsa, I wanted to ask you something. I was wondering if I could join—” But before she could finish, Havski’s ears flattened as a rustling came from nearby.
A villager burst from the underbrush, panting heavily as she lifted her green skirts high so she could run.
It took Anna a moment to place her—there were so many new villagers in Arendelle these days—but then she recognized SoYun Lim, a girl Anna’s own age who’d recently started to herd cattle on a farm not far from there. Anna had talked to her over the summer, during one of the castle’s hosted bonfire nights, and had asked her about her native country of Chatho. Research, of course, for the grand tour. In fact, SoYun had been the one to help Anna perfect her Chathoanese accent.
But that girl always seemed as calm as a lake on a windless morning, her quiet nature soothing the animals she tended. The girl standing in front of her now was disheveled. Her jet-black braid, which usually hung as straight and tidy as a clothesline, was a series of escaping loops, and she had on two different boots—the left foot was clad in a tall black boot, while the right foot wore a soft brown leather one. But it wasn’t the strange state of her clothes or hair that sent warning bells tolling through Anna. It was the girl’s expression—wide-eyed, as though she’d seen a ghost—and the frantic way in which she flailed her arms to catch their attention.
“Your Majesty!” SoYun bobbed her head toward Elsa in a slight bow. “Thank goodness I caught up with you—something terrible has happened!”
“SOYUN! WHAT’S WRONG?” Anna swung off Havski, landing in a pile of leaves before hurrying toward her.
“It’s my cattle,” SoYun said, looking from Elsa, who was cautiously dismounting from Fjøra, to Anna. “They’re—oh!” SoYun shook her head. “I don’t even know where to begin!” Tears formed in her eyes.
Anna opened her mouth to respond, but stopped herself to give Elsa a chance.
Elsa stepped a little closer. “How about if you take us to your cattle, and you can tell us all about it on the way? Say whatever comes first, and we’ll piece it together, all right?”
SoYun blew her nose, then nodded. “I’m just up that way,” she said, and broke into such a fast walk that it almost could have been a jog. Holding on to the horses’ reins, the sisters followed, trying to catch SoYun’s story as she told it.
“It started a few days ago,” SoYun said, her voice ragged, “when I tried to call the cattle in—you know how it usually works like a charm.”
Anna did. Calling cattle was an old Arendellian custom of singing high notes to summon the animals home. Much practice and control was required in order to do it properly, as it was so much more than a simple call. It was a fairy-like sound. A sound that raised the hair on the back of Anna’s neck and let her know—really, truly, deeply know—for one single instant that any difference between her and the earth and wind and sky was only an illusion. SoYun was now one of the best cattle callers in the village. She never had any trouble. In fact, when the cows wouldn’t come home, people always went to SoYun for help.
“And so, I went out into the fields,” SoYun continued, “and tried to sing them home. But…” Her shoulders slumped. “They never came. Not even when I pulled out my bukkehorn. I went out looking, and when I finally found them…” SoYun’s voice broke off.
“What happened?” Elsa pressed as they cleared a copse of maple trees and entered into a meadow nestled at the foothill of a blue mountain, where Anna could just make out a neat farmhouse among even neater rows of golden fields, and a herd of cattle circled around a large white boulder.
“This is what happened.” SoYun led them forward. As they got closer to the herd, Anna realized the cows weren’t ringing a white boulder after all, but a sleeping bull.
“That’s Hebert,” SoYun said. “The leader of my herd.”
Hebert. The name struck a familiar chord in Anna, and she remembered that a year before, during the harvest festival best-in-show competition, a large energetic bull with that name had won first place. But that bull’s hide had been as black as a raven’s wing, while this one was entirely white.
SoYun took a shuddery breath. “A few days ago, I noticed he had a sprinkle of white hairs, which wasn’t too strange. He’s getting up there in age. But then, the next morning, the white increased pretty dramatically, until he was as you see him now.”
Elsa raised her eyebrows, as if to say, That’s it? Some white hair?
But Anna remembered when a lock of her own hair had turned white as a result of an accidental strike from Elsa’s ice magic when they were children.
SoYun tugged on the end of her long braid and bit her bottom lip. “But I wouldn’t have bothered you just because of that, Your Majesty. There’s…there’s more.”
“Like…?” Anna didn’t take her eyes off the figure of the sleeping bull, his great horns curved up to the sky in twin points.
“He’d been acting funny for a few days, too—at first it seemed like he was scared of something he couldn’t see, like a draug,” SoYun said, referencing a terrifying mythological zombie Anna had heard spoken of around castle bonfires. “And then,” SoYun continued, “he ran around the field until he broke into a panicked sweat, which seemed to turn his fur white. And finally, his pupils grew wide, huge, until his eyes were completely swallowed by inky black.” SoYun made her eyes wide as she looked at them. “And then he started groaning like he was in horrible pain, and fell down, until, at last, he slept.”
Anna exchanged a confused look with Elsa. Anna didn’t usually think of sleep as a bad thing. In fact, the more sleep she got, the better.
Elsa’s eyebrow quirked again. “Slept?” she asked.
“Yes,” SoYun nodded vigorously. “But not a usual sleep. A deep sleep. No matter what we do—yell, shake him, splash water on him—he won’t wake up. It’s been days. Which means he also hasn’t been eating.”
Now that SoYun had mentioned it, Anna could see the bull’s ribs jutting from its sides, the white fur making it far too easy to imagine him as a pile of bones bleached by the sun. Anna wrapped her fingers in Havski’s long silky mane—she didn’t know what she would do if something like that happened to him. At the same time, any thoughts Anna had about a connection between her once-white streak of hair and the blanched bull fell away. After all, when Elsa had turned her hair white, Anna had been in danger of turning to ice, not falling asleep.