Mother would have known. Anna hadn’t just lost her mother when the ship sank beneath the Southern Sea’s waves. The world had lost Queen Iduna’s stories and lullabies, and there was no way to recover them. Or was there? Anna kept turning the pages. There were too many emotions at war within her to settle on any one page, on any one definition. Faster and faster she flipped through the book until fragile pages slipped out and flitted to the floor.
Anna froze. As carefully as she could, she picked up the papers to realize with relief that they weren’t pages from Secrets of the Magic Makers at all, but scraps of research that had not yet been bound in. One page displayed some familiar-looking blueprints: it was Arendelle Castle. Anna squinted at the page. She, like Gerda, already knew all the secret passages and places that were marked, except for one that drew her attention now and the one she was currently in.
Below the castle, something called the Earth Giant’s Passage seemed to run from somewhere beneath the ice room next to the kitchen and then turn south, under the waters of Arenfjord, to…to somewhere. Anna couldn’t tell. The black ink ran off the page, unfinished. But instructions had been printed in the margins. Three flagstones in, two across.
“Fascinating,” Anna whispered and set aside the blueprints. As soon as she found something to help the animals, she would definitely be taking a trip to the ice room. She shuffled to the next piece of paper. It was a map of Arendelle and the land that surrounded it. Markings circled a black sandy beach and a place called the Dark Sea, and scrawled across it in that same clean flourish that distinguished her mother’s handwriting was one of her father’s many sayings.
The past has a way of returning.
It was underlined twice, as if it meant something important. Anna squinted at the words, trying to make sense of them. But she was confused. The past was the past, so how could it ever come back? And why would her mother have written it on a map…a map that was stored in this particular book in this secret room? Was it supposed to mean something?
Anna yawned. Maybe the words didn’t mean anything special at all. Most likely, she was only looking for meaning because she so badly wanted meaning to exist. And because she dearly missed her mother and, for a moment, had felt close to her again as she read her book. Or maybe it was because she was tired. So very, very tired.
Anna had no idea how much time had passed since she and Olaf had entered the secret room, and with no window, it was impossible to tell. Tucking the map back inside the tome, she looked up to find Olaf balancing on a dusty wooden chair as he pulled a snow globe from a shelf.
“Hey, look what I found!” Olaf called. “Snow that can exist in summer—just like me!” He plopped a kiss on the globe. “Hello, little pocket flurry.” Giving it a shake, he sent the glittering snow swirling around a miniature of Arendelle Castle carved from a seashell. It was pretty, and Anna had definitely seen that snow globe before: not the actual snow globe, but a sketch of it in her father’s sketchbook she still kept in a place of honor on her dressing table.
“I think my father also knew about this secret room,” Anna said, “which means that there’s only one family member who might not know about it yet.” She snapped Secrets of the Magic Makers shut. “We have to go tell Elsa!”
“Tell me what?”
ELSA HAD RETURNED.
And though Anna knew her sister had been up since way before her, had held a meeting for the villagers, visited a farm, scoured the library, then visited another farm, she was still crisp and clean, her blond braid a streak of sunshine against the burgundy of their mother’s cozy scarf, which was now wrapped around her shoulders. Elsa stood still, her mouth open, staring in what could only be called astonishment at Anna and Olaf inside the secret room.
“H-how? I mean, did you…” Elsa sputtered. “What is this place?”
Happiness and relief washed over Anna. From the expression on Elsa’s face and the way her voice shook, Anna knew—the same way she knew that ice was cold and fire was hot—that Elsa had not known about this particular secret. For once, Anna had not been the last to know.
“We found a clandestine room,” Olaf said. “Clandestine means secret. But I guess now it’s not so clandestine. Unless you can keep a…what’s the noun form of clandestine? Keep a clandestiny?” He still held the snow globe in his hands. “Do you mind if I show this to Sven?” And before the sisters could reply, he skipped out of the room.
“I don’t know, exactly,” Anna said in reply to Elsa’s question. “But isn’t it wonderful?” She gestured to the secret room’s shelves and fought the urge to giggle as Elsa took a few steps into the room and looked around, her eyes wide, taking in the dried herbs, the gleaming copper spyglass, and the creamy swirl of what appeared to be a narwhal tusk. Elsa moved closer to the shelves.
“How did you find this place?” Elsa asked.
“Olaf,” Anna said. She filled Elsa in on the items, the map, the notes, and the book she felt could hold the answers to their problems. At the mention of their parents having been in this room, Elsa gasped.
“And so,” Anna concluded, “I bet we can find something in here about the Blight.”
“I don’t know about that,” Elsa said. “But whatever is affecting SoYun’s cows is also affecting the Westens’ goats. I couldn’t wake them up. I tried everything.”
“I mean, look at this title!” Anna plucked the Alchemist’s Almanac from the shelf and turned back to Elsa, but Elsa’s attention seemed to have snagged elsewhere, onto an old golden frame that had been carefully leaning against a wall. The painting inside of it was muddied by grime, but Anna thought she could just make out a pair of eyes and a strong jaw: a portrait.
Picking it up, Elsa blew, and a puff of dust ballooned into the air, settling on Anna’s face. Anna sneezed while Elsa held out the painting at arm’s length and squinted. “I think this is supposed to be Aren of Arendelle. The painting is so dirty, though, it’s hard to tell.”
Anna placed the almanac back on the shelf and peered over Elsa’s shoulder. “What makes you think it’s Aren?”
Aren was a legendary leader from times of old—the very, very old, before the last ice age, even. So old, in fact, that it was most likely the famous warrior had never even existed.
“See that?” Elsa pointed at a dark smudge. “I think that’s supposed to be Revolute, his sword with a ‘yellow diamond, bright as an eye.’”
Anna stared at her sister. “Are you…quoting something?”
“Yeah,” Elsa admitted. “That’s a line from the Saga of Aren, written by an unknown poet whom some claimed was actually Aren’s true love.”
It sounded kind of familiar to Anna. While she knew everything that there was to know about Arendelle, there were still some things, like these fine details, that she knew she’d once known but had forgotten. The things that she’d forgotten were usually stories her parents had shared. Embarrassment crept through her. She hated when she forgot things!
She tried to remember everything she could about Aren. There were endless stories and epic poems about his brave deeds—from helping the Huldrefólk hide their tails to journeying under the sea to sing with mermaids or questing to mountaintops to meet the sun. According to that particular story, Anna recalled, the sun had been so impressed with Aren that she’d given him a sword called the Revolute Blade. With the sun’s sword in his hand, Aren had carved the fjord between the mountains. And not just any fjord, but this fjord: Arenfjord, the backbone of the kingdom of Arendelle.