His arm curls around my waist, his hand settling at the small of my back as he tugs me closer to him. He’s so warm. How is it possible that he’s still so warm? “I think I can manage that,” he says with a small smile. “But you must start. It all began with you, after all.”
“All right,” I say, resting my head on his chest, his steady heartbeat against my ear. I close my eyes, trying to decide where to begin. So much has happened over the years. But there is that one day. One fateful day that changed the course of both our lives forever.
I open my eyes. “It all starts with the wind,” I say. “My dear friend Gale.”
As I speak, the words begin to course through me like the forbidding waters roiling outside. And like the waters, I will finally make myself heard.
Agnarr will listen.
He’s always been the storyteller in our family. But not this time. Now it’s my turn to tell the tale.
“STOP IT! YOU’RE TICKLING ME!”
I squealed in protest as the wind swirled around me, twirling me off my feet.
Gale, the Wind Spirit, seemed particularly, well, spirited this morning, tossing me playfully toward the sky, then catching me in a soft cushion of air as I fell back to the earth. My stomach dipped and rolled with each up and down motion as I tried to wrestle my way back to the ground. But I didn’t put up too much of a fight. After all, this was the closest I, a human girl, could come to flying.
And who didn’t want to fly?
“Where have you gone to, Iduna?” Yelana’s voice cut through the forest. “Come back here and finish your knitting!”
Uh-oh. Gale dropped me unceremoniously onto my butt, swirling away quickly to hide behind a nearby oak. The Wind Spirit knew better than to mess with Yelana when she came calling. I groaned and rolled my eyes as I scrambled to my feet.
“Coward,” I scolded.
Gale swept up a small pile of leaves, creating an overly exaggerated Yelana-shaped leaf monster, complete with scolding finger. I couldn’t help a small laugh. “Yes, yes, I know. She can be scary. But still! You’re the Wind Spirit!”
I turned my gaze toward the direction of our camp, where Yelana was probably sitting near the fire with the rest of the women. Knitting. Who could sit around and knit on a day like that? The sky was awake! Brilliant sunlight streamed through the canopy of trees above. It was the perfect backdrop for the day’s impending celebration: the completion of the pact between us, the Northuldra, and the Arendellians, who lived in a stone city on the banks of the fjord.
They’d come to us years ago with an offer of peace and goodwill, promising to build a mighty dam to help us water our reindeer and keep our land fertile and fresh. I didn’t really understand the whole thing, and I wasn’t sure our elders were completely sold on the idea at first. But in the end, they came to an agreement and the dam was built. That day we would feast together to mark this new alliance between our people and theirs.
It was a day to dance and sing and celebrate the beauty of the forest.
Not sit around and knit.
Besides, I was only twelve years old. Which meant I literally had ages to learn boring grown-up things like knitting. Not to mention I already had a perfectly good knitted shawl to keep me warm. I hugged it to my chest, running my fingertips along the intricate patterns depicting the four spirits. My mother had made it for me when I was a baby, and I’d worn it ever since. I remembered her now, cuddling my five-year-old self close as I breathed in her warm, earthy scent. Listening to her sing sweet songs about a river of memories.
Memories were all I had left of my mother now. My father, too.
I shook the memories away, turning back to Gale, who was busy stirring up a pile of brown leaves into a small whirlwind. I bowed playfully to the spirit as I moved farther away from Yelana and her call to return to knitting.
“May I have this dance, fine sir?”
“But of course, my fair lady!” I replied in my best approximation of a wind spirit’s voice. Gale couldn’t talk like normal people could. But sometimes I swore I could hear the spirit sing. Sweet, high notes so heartbreakingly beautiful I felt as if I could get lost in them.
Gale picked me up again, with more force this time, twirling me back into the air. This time I didn’t bother to fight it. “Higher!” I begged instead. “Higher than the treetops! I want to see the entire world!”
“Anything you wish, Princess!” I made the wind respond as it pulled me higher and higher until we rose above the trees and into open blue sky.
I wasn’t really a princess, of course. We didn’t even have royalty here in the forest. Instead, we had a council of elders, which was basically a bunch of wise old people who liked to sit around and give advice. Other voices should be invited to the conversation, even if they didn’t always agree with each other. For one person to rule over all, the elders would say, wasn’t good.
But in the books the Arendellians brought to our villages as gifts while building the dam, there were often princesses. And princes and kings and queens, too, who were breathtakingly beautiful and wore fine clothes and jewels and lived in mighty castles like the one down on the fjord. Some were good and helped their people prosper while keeping the peace. Others were evil and did not appreciate all that was given to them. They would scorch the earth for their own selfish gain, not caring who got hurt in the process.
If I ever became a princess, I’d be one of the good ones for sure.
“Whoa! Who’s that? Hey, come here, little fellow.”
I almost fell out of the wind’s embrace as I whirled around, my eyes locking on a strange boy far below me, trudging down the reindeer path. He didn’t look much older than me, with thick blond hair and a strange fitted green jacket and a shirt as red as the autumn leaves underneath his feet. As I watched from above, he knelt to the ground, reaching out to try to pet a small rabbit that was sniffing the grass nearby. The rabbit, of course, was having none of this and quickly hopped away. The boy got to his feet just in time to find himself inches away from the daily reindeer parade to the watering hole, and, with a startled look, he leapt backward. I rolled my eyes. Hadn’t he ever seen reindeer before?
One of the baby reindeer lagged behind the rest, going up to him and sniffing him curiously. The boy’s face brightened and he dropped to his knees, pulling the creature into his arms and cuddling it as if it were the most precious treasure in the world. It made me smile.
I was about to tell Gale to set me down so I could introduce myself when I heard an angry voice cut through the trees.
“Agnarr! Where are you?”
The baby reindeer froze. It squirmed out of the boy’s—Agnarr’s—arms and raced in the direction of the herd. Agnarr watched it go, a sad expression taking over his face. The voice came again. Louder this time. More impatient. His shoulders slumped and he ran toward it, disappearing from view.
It was then that it all started to come together. He must be one of the Arendellians!
“Come on, Gale! Let’s follow him!” I cried, any thought of adhering to Yelana’s impatient call forgotten. “I want to see their camp!”
Gale obliged, whisking me in the direction Agnarr had gone, opposite the path of the reindeer herd. A few moments later, a small camp came into view. There were tents set up around a central firepit, though they were much different from the huts we used, which consisted of a tripod of poles covered by flat wooden slats. These tents were more like little houses made of brightly colored fabrics and topped with tiny flags fluttering gaily in the breeze. In the center, plopped down on the firepit, was a huge black cauldron, bubbling over with a delicious-smelling stew.