Frozen 3

Chapter 22

Yelena

I woke up with a start, suddenly sitting up in bed. I was panting, struggling to catch my breath and my wits. For the past few weeks, I had been waking up more and more often in the middle of the night, unable to get back to normal sleep. But this time it was different. It wasn't just another bad dream or the beginning of another sleepless night. No, it was something else, an intuition, a bad feeling pulling me out of my only moment of peace and quiet of the last twenty-four hours.

I looked around me. I had just had time to put my tent back in place despite the storm before going to bed, exhausted. A few things I hadn't had the courage to pick up were still on the ground. I usually hated to have my things scattered around, but something else disturbed me. My eyes went to the entrance of my tent, which was slightly ajar. The moon's rays were shining through the small slit they had left, giving me a clear view of my surroundings. Still sitting on my bed, legs stretched out and hands firmly clutching the thin straw-stuffed mattress, I tried to figure out what had caused me to wake up. I didn't notice anything unusual. I closed my eyes, concentrating only on the silence of the night. The silence! That was it. The loud whistling of the wind that had lulled me to sleep was gone.

I stood up hurriedly and almost tripped over one of the knickknacks on the floor. I cursed but didn't take the time to lean on my stick that I had left at the back of the tent. I opened the doorway abruptly. Night had set in, and I had left a still rosy sky when I went to bed. But that wasn't the only thing that had changed. The violent gusts of wind that had shaken the Northuldra camp so much had completely disappeared, leaving behind only the trace of their passage with many uprooted trees. I came out of my tent wearing only a light linen tunic tightened at the waist by a thin leather belt. I wasn't used to showing my face like this. I didn't like feeling unkempt, as I loved perfection in everything I did. Yet, I felt that this time there was something much more disturbing to worry about.

I walked silently through the snow to the center of the small village. The bad weather of the previous days was now only materialized by tiny flakes slowly falling from the clouds covering the black sky above my head. The Northuldra seemed to be all asleep.

No light came from the tents and huts around me. I was alone. Alone to understand what was happening. There was not the slightest breeze, the landscape around me seemed frozen. The branches of the trees, which usually swayed to the rhythm of the shocks inflicted by the wind, were perfectly still. The snow was falling in vertical lines, not affected by any gust of wind.

I heard footsteps behind me. I immediately recognized this slow, heavy step that was approaching.

"What are you doing out at this hour? You're going to freeze to death!" Silja asked me as she finally came up to my side.

"The same as you, I suppose," I replied, keeping my eyes fixed on the sky.

The old woman came and sat on a rock not far from me. She stuck her cane in front of her in the snow and rested both hands on it. I gave her a quick glance of curiosity. She was facing me, looking doubtful.

"This is the first time in weeks that I've noticed that you care about anything other than that girl," she said.

"So what? You should be happy about it!"

"I'm not happy about it because I never said I was sad about the previous situation. You were always blinded by details and never noticed what was really important."

My eyes dropped back to her. I sighed. She always had a way of remaining unruffled, of never showing the slightest emotion on her face under any circumstances. In all the time I'd known her, I'd never been able to read her mind, and I knew I never would. She was the only person who gave me so much trouble, I who had always been used to read any person only by the expression of his eyes. It was the reflection of the soul. You could learn everything about someone just by looking into their eyes. But with Silja this was impossible. Her eyes reflected only a whitish glow, completely empty and impervious.

The silence of the night was getting heavier and heavier. We looked at each other without a word. I knew she was waiting for a reaction from me, something, anything. But nothing came. I opened my mouth several times but no sound came out. I had nothing to say to her. She was right, that's all.

"What will you do when she wants to go back to her sister?"

"What do you mean?"

"Will you let her go?"

"Why do you ask that? I can't keep her here at all costs, so of course..."

"Because that would be one less spirit to protect us," she interrupted.

I was silent for a moment. The old woman got up and took a few steps to go back to where she came from. Before she got too far away, I said to her:

"Since the birth of the Northuldra people, we have lived without Elsa. We were simply surrounded by the spirits of earth, fire, wind and water, and we were perfectly content with that. She came much later. We've obviously managed without her so far. She's not essential to our survival or protection, that's obvious. So yes, I would let her go back if she wanted to return to Arendelle for a while."

Silja stopped and said to me without turning around:

"You are making a mistake, Yelena, if you do not consider her essential to our survival. This young woman is far more important than you seem to think. We just haven't discovered the role she will play with us yet. You underestimate her too much."

"All right, then tell me what she can do that the other spirits can't," I challenged her.

The old woman stiffened. She turned her face in my direction and sighed.

"I don't know. She's nothing like the spirits we know. She's completely different," she said.

"What do you mean you don't know? I thought you always knew everything before anyone else!"

"Not this time Yéléna! She is completely unknown to me in spite of all that I could observe of her. This young woman is neither like us nor like the other spirits. I can't find out anything specific about her and that worries me as much as it worries you. But the difference between the two of us, my dear Yelena, is that I do not allow myself to judge her only on her origins. It's not what her parents did that concerns me - assuming they did anything - but what she will do and what influence she will have on all of us. You seem so intent on believing that she must have evil intentions because she is from the same family as Runeard that you don't even consider her as someone who could possibly be of service to us as other spirits have done long before her."

I didn't know what else to say and stood there with my fists clenched. Silja's face was closed, betraying anger. It was rare that she was so expressive that I finally understood what she was feeling. But she didn't give me a chance to watch her any more and walked away for good, slowly moving through the snow. I sat down on the rock where she had been just a few minutes earlier and thoughtfully observed her footprints. The silence had settled around me again, reminding me that I was alone, as I often was. But this time the surrounding calm did not soothe me as it should have. On the contrary, it worried me. Not hearing the wind whistling against the walls of the huts and tents, not feeling the fresh air tickling my skin, not seeing the clouds moving slowly in the sky... All this frightened me. I didn't know what was going on. For the first time in sixty-four years, I was witnessing an event without really understanding its causes and consequences. I was no longer in control, as I used to like to have all the cards in my hand to act as I wanted, without ever being disturbed by an unexpected element. But what I had feared was happening without me knowing why. Like the giants of the earth, the spirit of the wind had also disappeared.