#vand

“There, that’s better.” Father said, cautiously dropping to one knee as Taavi glared at him, arms still folded tightly against the heat. “Let me see your gloves?”

Taavi closed his eyes, biting down even harder as he forced the heat back into himself, imagining the cool black silk of his gloves chasing it back like his parents had taught him.

When he felt safe again he swallowed and huffily held his hands out for his father to see.

“Remember Taavi: control, don’t be controlled.” Father said, gingerly touching the silk like he was checking whether a pan was too hot, then tugging the gloves snugly in place. “Enchanted gloves will only do so much for you, you have to be the master of yourself to truly be safe.” Father sighed. “I’m sorry canceling our hunting trip upset you, I know it’s frustrating to be stuck inside by yourself.”

“No you don’t.” Taavi said, looking away. He’d been planning to use the chance outside the castle walls to chase after the singing voice in his mind, to see once and for all if it took him anywhere. “At least you had all your brothers to play with, and Mother had Aunt Elsa. I’m all alone.”

Father laughed wryly, moving to sit against the wall. He patted the ground next to him and Taavi reluctantly sat down next to him, setting his hands palm down against the floor to feel the cool marble through the silk of his gloves.

“Having twelve older brothers is much less fun than it sounds like, I promise.” Father said, ruffling Taavi’s hair, the same dark ginger shade as his own. “And your mother never really knew her sister since she was always ill. You’re lucky to be an only child Taavi, your mother and I didn’t want you to ever feel forgotten, you’re the most important thing in our lives.”

Taavi pulled his knees to his chest. He wished he could disappear, escape from his parent’s constant hovering. But if he ever tried saying things like that Mother got so sad.

Controlling the heat had always been hard, but it had gotten so much harder lately. It felt like fire was constantly crackling under his skin, begging to be released. It seemed like even the smallest things could set Taavi off these days, and it was scary to feel like he wasn’t in control anymore. His own mind was playing tricks on him with the phantom singing too, making him wonder if he really was going insane.

“Do you feel like you’ve cooled off?” Father asked, looking down at him.

“Yes.” Taavi said glumly, resting his chin on his knees.

“Good.” Father said warmly, “Remember-“

“Control, don’t be controlled.” Taavi recited wearily, wiping his nose. “Since we aren’t going hunting can I just be alone tonight please?”

“To do what?” Father asked, looking a little...concerned? ...wary?

To try not to accidentally set fire to the next person who annoyed him and contemplate whether or not he was going insane from the comfort of his bedroom.

“Just, I don’t know, to be alone.” Taavi said quietly. “I just don’t want to be around anyone right now.”

He could see father biting his lip in indecision, but then he smiled, ruffling Taavi’s hair again. “Alright, you can have the evening to yourself. Promise you’ll come get me if you start feeling lonely or too hot again though?”

“I promise.” Taavi said, pushing himself to his feet and tightly folding his arms again out of habit.

“We love you Taavi,” Father said, getting to his feet and pulling him into a hug. “I know things are difficult right now, but your mother and I are doing everything we can to fix this.”

Taavi chewed his lip as he hesitated. Father and Mother were always looking for magic solutions abroad to break his fire curse, they might know why only he heard the singing voice coming to him from the horizon outside his window...

Or it might just be him going crazy, and it would worry his parents enough for them to lock him in his room permanently.

“I will.” Taavi lied, pulling out of the hug. “Can we go hunting tomorrow?”

“I have an export council tomorrow, but I’ll tell my advisors to clear an evening and night for us as soon as they can.” Father said, retying his green silk cravat and tucking it back under the embroidered lapel of his white suit jacket. “We’ll get out into the woods soon, I promise.”

It always took a few minutes for Taavi to walk back to his wing of the palace, but it was easy to see when he was getting close. No valued portraits hung on the walls, no flammable heirlooms or artifacts decorated tables or shelves. The servants had given up replacing wallpaper and wood paneling that had trailing scorch marks in the shape of a child’s hand on it years ago, instead periodically brushing the walls down with something that made them smell bad, but also less likely to burn when Taavi had nightmares that awoke him to flaming bedsheets.

Something that always disturbed others far more than it did him. Mother had told him she’d found him curled up sound asleep in a roaring fireplace for the first time when he was two and it had nearly killed her with fear.

Now when he slept in the fireplace—usually on nights he felt especially lonely or afraid of setting the castle on fire in his sleep—he was careful to make sure his bedroom door was tightly locked first.

Taavi could hear the imaginary singing in his head get louder the moment he closed his bedroom door behind him, calling to him from beyond his tightly locked balcony doors. He ignored it, sitting in front of the crackling fireplace instead and staring into the flames.

He needed a plan, anything to stop the singing, and as far as he could tell he had depressingly few options. He could tell his parents about the voice in his head and risk being locked up, or he could continue to ignore them and get more and more upset, which he knew would lead to things burning.

...or he could try chasing after the voice like every fiber of his being was telling him to, they sounded so real, but his parents would never allow that. They’d probably just say that-

Taavi blinked, looking up as he realized everything was silent. He turned to look at the closed balcony windows.

No singing. How long had things been quiet before he’d noticed?

Taavi breathed quietly, shoulders unconsciously tensed as he waited for the singing to return. After weeks of hearing it constantly everything felt unexpectedly still and wrong with it gone.

He nearly bit through his lip as a long wailing note broke the silence, the fire beside him jumping as he did. It wasn’t singing this time, but the piercing cry of a violin.

And it didn’t sound far away like the singing. This sound was very close.

A gust of wind shook the balcony doors, rattling at the lock like something invisible was trying to get into his room from the darkness beyond. The violin sound dripped down a scale of notes, fluttering into a tune Taavi didn’t recognize. Something that sounded nothing like the jaunty fiddles he’d heard at parties. It sounded more...longing.

Taavi could feel heat building quickly in his chest and folded his arms tightly against himself as he stood, gripping his arms as he chased it back. The sound was probably just one of the servants playing violin on the grounds, there was no way it could have anything to do with the singing disappearing, could it?

Taavi crept across the room toward the balcony doors, gloved hand hesitating at the lock as he listened to the fluid sound of the violin flowing through the glass. The fleeting thought of going and getting Father crossed his mind, which was ridiculous. He could handle a violin player.

He tripped the lock, opening the door and stepping out onto the balcony. A gust of frigid wind brushed past him, whipping up a dusting of snowflakes before disappearing into the night. Taavi shivered, letting the heat inside him grow enough to chase back the night’s chill, melting his footsteps through the snowdrift on the balcony.

There was a tall ledge of built up snow on the railing, blocking his view. Taavi looked nervously back to the balcony door before tugging off a single black silk glove. He stretched out his fingers, letting heat spill down his arm and toward the snow which instantly melted off the railing.

He smiled a bit at the tiny rush it gave him, he could tell that with a bit more of a push he could actually make flame, not just heat. Something he purposefully hadn’t done in years.

Taavi swallowed instead, hurriedly plunging his hand into a snowdrift instead to cool it off. When it was safe he tugged his glove securely back on and walked up to the railing, looking down.

The grounds outside the palace were dark, things were always dark in the eternal winter of Arendelle, but bright patches of yellow light from the castle windows painted across snow, rocks, and long dead topiary bushes killed by the long winter. Most importantly in this moment however, was the light from his own balcony, which lit a patch of the frozen stream that had always run past his bedroom window.

Or at least it had always been frozen before. Taavi’s eyes widened as he realized the ice had turned to a dark ribbon of moving water that gurgled and twisted across the ground. Even stranger was the tall willowy man sitting on the riverbank with his feet in the water, playing a violin alone in the dark.

Taavi was about to silently retreat to his room when the man looked up at him, song cutting off mid-note as he stood. Taavi jolted, gripping the stone railing as the man’s gaze met his. Even from the railing Taavi could see the man’s eyes were so blue they looked white, nearly as if they were glowing in the dark. A curtain of dark silvery hair fell across his eyes like a horse’s mane.

No, no, no. This was bad. This had to be magic. Taavi had heard too many bedtime stories not to know better.

“You’re Prince Taavi, right?” The man called, catching Taavi off guard with the sound of a distinctly normal and un-magical sounding voice.

“Y-yes?” Taavi called back, folding his arms tightly, still trying to decide whether or not to make a dash for his room. Magic or not he still was a prince, he’d been trained to be dignified in any situation, even ones that were definitely cursed. “What are you doing?”

“Playing violin.” The man said, raising an eyebrow and holding up the instrument as if Taavi hadn’t already seen it. “I know you’ve seen a violin before.”

“I know what a violin is,” Taavi said, “I mean what are you doing here on the palace grounds. At night. Aren’t you freezing?”

The man’s clothes looked thin, and if Taavi wasn’t mistaken he was barefoot in the icy river water.

“As long as the water’s wet it doesn’t much matter to me what the temperature is.” The man said with a shrug, then smiled up at him. “You don’t mind hot or cold much either, do you Taavi?”

Taavi swallowed, taking a step back. Only the servants were supposed to know about his curse.

“Who are you?” Taavi demanded, his nerves getting into his voice, trickling a dangerous heat down his arms that began to heat the stone railing under his hands.

“Vand.” said Vand, making a graceful complicated kind of bow Taavi had never seen before. The violin had disappeared from his hands but Taavi hadn’t seen him put it down. “I’d say I’m at your service but, ironically enough, I'm the one that’s in need of your assistance.”

“Your name is ‘water’?” Taavi asked, a creeping suspicion starting to dawn on him as his brain fit several bedtime stories together. “You’re...a nøkk...aren’t you?”

“Ah, smart kid.” Vand said with a smile, taking a few step closer but never stepping out of the river, his feet staying on the surface of the dark rushing water as easily as if it were still solid ice. “Just like your aunt.”

“I don’t have an aunt.” Taavi said, leaning forward over the railing, his head spinning a little at his guess being confirmed.

A nøkk was a powerful water spirit that sometimes appeared in the form of a horse, but the stories said they could look like a man with a violin if they wanted. But why would a nøkk come to him?

“Don’t tell me your parents haven’t told you about Elsa?” Vand said, a dark look crossing his face, “They can’t have hushed up everything about her.”

“She died before I was born, she was so sickly she hardly ever even left her room.” Taavi said, his interest now thoroughly peaked.

Hearing anything about Aunt Elsa was such a rare occurrence in the palace. Taavi had only ever been able to find a single portrait of her, hidden away in an attic he’d discovered when he’d gone exploring. It was a painting of her and Mother when they had both been little children, back before Mother had gotten the white streak in her hair “from her nerves”, as the servants always said. Elsa had looked so kind and happy. Even Mother had looked happy back then.

“Sickly?” Vand said with a humorless bark of laughter. “Your aunt is stronger than all the humans of this entire kingdom put together.”

Taavi did not miss Vand’s use of present tense.

“You say that like she’s still alive.” Taavi said urgently, not noticing that nearly all the snow on the balcony around him had melted by now, the snowmelt pouring over the edges of the balcony. “Do you know her? Do you know what happened to her? Why no one ever talks about her?”

Because aside from the painting of Aunt Elsa and Mother hidden in the attic Taavi had also found an old chest that had belonged to Aunt Elsa. An entire trunk filled with neatly folded pairs of blue gloves. Just like the black ones he always wore.

He’d rushed to ask his parents about them, but by the time he’d succeeded in dragging them back across the castle to the attic the trunk had vanished. Taavi had not missed the way the servants avoided looking him in the eye as his parents made unconvincing excuses as to why he seemed to have either imagined or lost an entire trunk of silk gloves.

“Good questions,” Vand said, rubbing the back of his neck. “And I can answer them, but only if you come with me.”

“Come with you? Where?” Taavi asked, pulling back from the railing a bit as his sense of caution returned to him.

Stories about nøkk were never very consistent as to whether they were friendly, or if they would drown you the moment you got within arm’s reach. With the stream currently mysteriously unfrozen and distinctly drown-in-able this did not seem like a good time to try his luck without anything else to go on.

“You have been hearing the singing, haven’t you?” Vand said, looking north and then back up at Taavi. “I’m here to take you to it. You haven’t come.”

An unexpected lump appeared in Taavi’s throat, “I haven’t been imagining it?” he asked, his voice cracking just a little, “It’s real? I’m not going crazy?”

“Not by a long shot.” Vand said soberly. “And we need to leave now. You have magic for a reason and you need to start using it.”

“You know why I’m cursed?” Taavi asked, eyes wide.

“I do know, but I don’t know here.” Vand said, pushing his hair back with a sigh. “I know everything that’s ever happened in the world, water has memory. But I have to find the right water to remember it.”

“So you only remember what’s happened in a certain place?” Taavi asked, confused.

“I know you nearly drowned in this stream when you were three,” Vand said, gesturing down to the water he stood on. “It was during a summer that was just warm enough to thaw it for a week, which is why you have a fear of drowning.”

Vand’s voice sounded oddly detached and his gaze seemed fixed in the middle distance, as if he were reading a book in his mind.

“And I know your mother once sat on this riverbank while braiding flowers into a crown when she was a child. And I know four hundred years ago this stream was a river and your ancestor dropped his ring into it while they were beginning to build this castle. And I know hundreds of thousands of years ago this wasn’t a stream at all, but an ocean.”

Vand blinked, looking back at Taavi with a smile, the normal warmth coming back into his voice. “But I'll forget those specific things once I leave here and go to different water that has different memories. I know why you have magic, and I know what it is you have to do with it, and I know what happened to your aunt. But you have to come with me to where I can show you, and to do that you’re going to have to use your magic.

"I’ve been sent to protect you, come with me and we can fix everything, but if you stay here things will only get worse. You know I’m telling the truth, you can feel it can’t you?”

Taavi could indeed feel it. It was like a string running through his chest was pulling him northward, demanding he go with Vand. In that moment he couldn’t even imagine going back into his room, trying to lock out the singing again now that he knew what it meant. Or rather, now that he knew there really was a way to find out what it meant. Nothing else felt like it mattered if it meant he could solve this.

“I-I don’t know how to use my magic. I don’t know how to control it.” Taavi said, arms folded tighter than ever. He felt like he was one step away from leaping over the edge of a cliff he would never be able to climb back up, and he desperately wanted to jump.

“Well lucky for you I know exactly who we can visit to help you, and it happens to be our first stop anyway,” Vand said.

“The first stop being?” Taavi asked, already itching to leave despite his best efforts to seem reserved.

“Your aunt of course,” Vand said casually, but Taavi could see the gleam in his pale eyes.

“So she is alive?” Taavi asked breathlessly, one leg already over the balcony as he started to climb down the thick dead ivy that covered the castle’s stone wall. The ice and snow crusted there melting away to provide him easy hand and footholds as he scrambled down.

As far as he could tell he really had no choice but to go with Vand, and he had to do it now before he changed his mind or Father came looking for him.

“Not exactly.” Vand said, his face becoming serious again as Taavi joined him on the ground, walking right up to the edge of the stream.

Up close Vand seemed even more subtly otherworldly, his pale skin almost translucent looking, as if there were a glow emanating from inside him.

“Elsa is trapped in between places.” Vand said, “But for me to remember more I have to take you to where she was killed.”

“O-okay.” Taavi said, only choking a little on the word.

A cold gust of wind swept past them, kicking up an eddy of snowflakes and dead leaves that whisked around Taavi and Vand, pushing them toward the north. Vand looked intently the way the wind had come, as if listening to it.

“Gaurds are coming.” Vand said quietly. “We need to leave now.”

Taavi’s heart was racing, heat rising in him and sending the snow around him melting down in a ring to the dead grass beneath. This was it, he was leaving, finally escaping, he was finally finally going to get answers about everything.

“Are we going to run?” Taavi asked in a hushed voice.

“How are you at horseback riding?” Vand asked, cracking his knuckles with a smile.

“I’m pretty good at it. Do you have a- ohhh.” Taavi trailed off at the sound of a splash, mouth open as he stared at the huge shimmering horse now standing in the stream beside him, far bigger than any of the beige ponies with the black and white manes they had in the royal stables. Its watery body was completely translucent, its eyes glowed a spectral white, and it shook its watery mane like it was silently laughing at his surprise.

Knowing Vand was a nøkk was one thing, seeing him like this was another entirely. Taavi was suddenly acutely aware that if he chose to climb up onto Vand’s back the water spirit could easily kill him any moment he wanted to. And by drowning no less.

“You’ll stay in shallow water?” Taavi asked weakly, his throat suddenly feeling very dry. “Please? I can’t swim.”

A stiff breeze pushed against his back and Vand looked up, pricking his ears and pawing impatiently at the stream with one watery hoof. Hurry.

Taavi could hear voices coming now, the gaurds would be here any second.

He glanced up at his bedroom balcony one last time and then stepped into the stream. Vand knelt one of his front legs to let Taavi get a grip on his watery mane--which felt cold and smoother than silk, but deceptively solid--and then stood as Taavi swung up onto his back. Taavi settled himself exactly like the royal horse master had taught him to the few times they’d practiced riding bareback. Being able to look down and see his feet on the other side of the horse however was a deeply unsettling experience that Taavi quickly decided not to repeat if he could help it.

“Let’s go.” Taavi whispered, crouching low to the water horses’ back. Definitely because it was good riding technique and not because every bit of this absolutely terrified him.

Vand shook his head with an unearthly whinny and lunged forward, hooves skipping across the surface of the water as he dashed up the stream and away from the palace grounds far faster than any horse should have been able to gallop, forcing Taavi to truly pay attention to his posture and wind both his hands tighter into the watery mane just to stay on.

Once they finally hit a rhythm and Taavi was able to do more than numbly scramble to hold on he looked up, squinting as the freezing wind whipped past them. He caught the sight of them racing through the canal that ran through town, and then just as quickly they were riding into the darkness of the snowy forest, the river water rushing loud and cold beneath them with only the moon overhead to light their way.

But even with his eyes tearing up from the frigid wind and only the night sky to see by, Taavi could still tell where they were headed.

Straight up the forbidden mountain. A place even he knew was filled with the darkest of magics.

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