An Education

III.

He found the note later that evening.

It had been slipped under his door, likely before he'd gotten back from the ball, and he blinked with surprise as he picked it up and opened it with still-gloved hands.

Quarter past 11 at the edge of the rose garden tomorrow evening.

No surprises.

It had been written in haste, with letters of words overlapping, uneven creases, and a few ink stains blotted on the otherwise clean parchment, but the script itself was the work of a practiced hand.

He supposed she'd had many years to perfect it, being locked away in her room for so long; something like a stab of sympathy struck him at the thought. Perturbed, he pushed away the feeling as he re-read the note a few more times, and then folded the paper back up and stuffed it inside of his jacket.

The document left him with more questions than answers. How had she, for instance, gotten it to him in the first place without being seen? He guessed that she could have had it delivered through a trusted servant of some kind, although the servant would've been seen by another, and the ones in this palace... well, they liked to talk as much as their queen did.

Giving the Snow Queen the benefit of the doubt, he granted that there was some chance, if small, that the letter had made its way to him without drawing too much attention. On the other hand, he wondered how she intended to circumvent her guards and handmaidens in order to meet him the following evening. At least at the ball, they'd had the advantage of getting lost in the crowd; out in the garden, their meeting would be far more conspicuous.

He remembered how she'd managed to so quickly escape her coronation ball fiasco, gliding on ice across the fjord all the way up to the Mountain, and again when she destroyed the prison cell he'd put her in after bringing her back from there. Although in both instances she hadn't exactly gone silently into the night, he didn't put it past the young queen - who seemed in much better control of her powers - to have learned some new tricks since the last time he'd seen her.

Over these concerns, however, another thought loomed large in his mind.

She wants to see me again.

The more arrogant part of him scoffed at the notion - of course she wants to see me again, why wouldn't she? - but the more cautious part, developed in the wake of his imprisonment within the palace, had read her note with a niggling feeling of disbelief.

Can she really be so eager to continue this?

It had taken him aback to find it so soon after their first "lesson" had ended, not to mention how it had already laid out a time and place for the next one. It expressed a keenness to continue which seemed unusual in light of her caustic attitude towards him.

After all, there's never been a "King Hans."

And there never will be.

He frowned at the memory, and then there was also the matter of the odd pause she'd taken in the midst of it, when he'd been listing off the figures in the historical paintings. It bothered him for reasons he couldn't quite place, and he failed in trying to remember which name it had been that set her off.

But why should it have bothered her?

He rummaged through his mental archives for some possible explanation, but the only thing that came to mind was a fleeting recollection of there perhaps being a similar painting in Arendelle's gallery, which he might have seen in passing on Anna's whirlwind tour of the palace during his first night in her kingdom. As to the significance of any of it, however, he had no clue.