by Anna Burke
She had thought she would rage against it, when the time came. She had thought she would fight it tooth and nail, snarling with her pack around her, not curled up like this, roses in her back, a wolf in her lap and a stranger’s name on her lips.
Rowan.
She saw the elegance of the witch’s trap. It had been there all along, and she had sprung it with one act of mercy. She should have killed him, she thought for the hundredth time.
But she hadn’t.
“. . . its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear.”
“What will become of you?” she asked the wolf. “What will become of you, when all this comes undone?”
He closed his eyes, his tongue lolling as he panted, and didn’t answer. She let her hand rest above the soft curve of his ear.
There was nothing to rage against.
She remembered the way the girl had felt, sobbing in her arms. She remembered the way she smelled, and the feel of her hair, and the odd tightening she had felt in her own chest as Rowan’s fear and grief spilled down her breast.
She did not know what came next. She had never fully understood the witch’s words, and it was far too late now to ask, but she knew one thing for certain: she could not kill the girl, even if so doing could save her. Even if it meant the end.
“Even if it meant your life?” she asked the wolf. “What would I choose then?”
She didn’t have an answer, only the smell of steel as a long-rusted trap sprang shut.
Chapter Ten
She found me in the library the next day. I was in the middle of a hide-bound journal, half of which had been destroyed by time, water, and something that might have been blood— but the last passage I’d read lingered in my mouth.
At the head of the hunt rode the King’s huntress, a maiden unlike any I had seen in the lowlands. I did not realize, at first, that she was the King’s daughter. The women here are as hard as their men— some harder— and for all that the girl could not have been much older than sixteen, the other hunters deferred to her. She rode as though she had been born on horseback with a hawk on her wrist, and she had the kind of face men broke themselves against. The prince was no exception. I have never seen a man fall so hard or so fast.
The pup pricked her ears toward the door, ceasing her attempts to mangle the carpet long enough to alert me to the Huntress’s arrival. I clutched the book I had been reading to my chest, unsure of what to say to her after all that had passed between us the day before. She walked carefully, and there was an edge to her jaw as she bent to toss the pup a scrap of meat that suggested she, too, was aching from her wounds.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?” I asked, glad of an excuse to break the silence.
“No.”
“But your back . . .” I closed my eyes, wishing I could forget about her wounds and, more importantly, the briars.
“But your hand,” she said, taking the book from me.
I opened my eyes, catching the gentle mockery.
“Look.” She set the book down and began to unbutton her shirt. My mouth went dry, and dread mingled with something else as she slid her shoulder free. I became aware, in a way I had not been the day before, that she had been half-naked the last time I had touched her.
“Give me your hand.”
I held my good hand out to her, and she raised it to the briar that curved over her shoulder.
“Thorn. Leaf. Stem.”
I felt each as she moved my fingers over them, the thorns just scraping my palm, the leaves a soft brush of half-furled green, and the stem smooth where it lay along the red seam of the wound.
“Say it.” She moved my hand in another pass.
“Thorn, leaf, stem,” I said, naming each. I shuddered, and she tightened her grip.
“Say it again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Thorn, leaf, stem. Ice. Snow.” She loosened her grip on my hand, and I let it fall, hesitating just once on the tip of the vine where a miniature rosebud rested like a jewel. “Be afraid of the things you can’t name. The things you can’t see. Like the lynx behind you.”
I jumped, craning my head to see over my shoulder. “Where?”
“On top of the bookshelf.”
I looked up and up and up, the shelves blurring until I saw the wildcat. Its ears twitched in sleep, and one paw hung off the edge, relaxed and almost as large as my fist. When I looked back at the Huntress, I could have sworn I saw her hide a grin.
“The lynx didn’t come out of my hand.”
“Luckily for both of us.” She tried to tug the collar of her shirt back over her shoulder, then cursed in pain as it caught on a thorn and tugged at the wound.
“You deserved that,” I said, feeling a little more like myself.
“Perhaps. Seven hells.” She cursed again as the fabric caught a second time.
“Let me.” I brushed her hand away before she undid whatever it was I had done in the first place and pulled the cloth up and over the thorns. As I straightened the collar of her shirt, the tips of my fingers slid along the smooth skin above her collarbone, and this time the hiss of breath took me by surprise. Her hand shot out, stopping mine, and something that wasn’t pain moved behind her eyes.
“Don’t,” she said. Her voice was lower than I had ever heard it, more growl than speech, and the world narrowed down to a single pair of green eyes.
I felt my breath catch. “I’m sorry,” I said, but my fingers burned where they still touched her skin, and I found myself wondering what I would have thought if my father had betrothed me to this woman instead of Avery Lockland. I had a vivid image of the Huntress lounging inside the Lockland lodge, polishing her hunting horn. It was ludicrous, and yet there were similarities, of a sort, between this woman’s arrogance and Avery’s.
Except her arrogance made my heart beat a little faster, and I would never have willingly stood this close to Avery. I pulled my hand away slowly. She let me go, but I found I could not step away from her.
“Do you miss the ocean?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to say to that, and so I said nothing, looking up into her eyes while something that might have been distant surf or my heartbeat thundered in my chest. I nodded, mute.
“Good.”
• • •
At the far end of the library, tucked in an alcove I had overlooked before, was a small table. The Huntress piled several scrolls on top of it, and I tore my eyes away from the muscles in her arms as she spread the first across the table.
I leaned in, transfixed. The map was beautifully drawn in colored inks that rippled over water and shore, and my eyes devoured the unfamiliar coastlines. Not even my father had owned a map like this. “It’s beautiful,” I said, running a hand along borders the artist had rendered in elegant loops and twists that brought to mind currents and waves.
“Is that what it looks like?”
“What, the ocean?” I began to laugh, and then I saw her face. She was serious. “In a way, I guess. It’s blue. But . . .” I trailed off, picturing the sea’s many faces. “It’s blue like snow is white, or winter is cold. Blue is just a word. It doesn’t do it justice. And it’s not always blue. Sometimes it’s gray, or even black, and when the sun hits the water it turns gold and the froth on top of the waves is as white as cream. And it sounds like wind in the pines. I used to wake up when I heard the pines in the village, thinking I was back home.” I broke off.
“They say there are monsters in the waves,” she said, pointing to a beast with too many fins, drawn in exquisite detail.
“There are monsters everywhere.” I met her eyes. “But there are wolves in the water. Sailors have seen them.”
“Wolves?” She rolled up the map, arching an eyebrow in disbelief, and opened another scroll. This one contained a drawing of a ship.
“That’s a pirate ship,” I said, pointing at the narrow hull. “You can tell by how it’s built. They’re fast. They have to be.”
“My father lost his cargo to pirates once.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t sea wolves?”
I glared at her. “If it had been sea wolves, they would have taken the men, not the gold.”
She leaned against the table, watching me. I felt a flush creep up my neck under the scrutiny. “I wanted to see the ocean once,” she said.
I tried to picture her standing on a wharf or striding across the deck of a ship, the wind snatching at her hair. I couldn’t. She was ice and snow and mountains. “Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“A hundred reasons, and then it didn’t matter.” She touched the parchment.
“Who were you, before you were the Huntress?”
She looked up, and I saw another woman in her face, a flicker of longing and loss. “Someone else.”
“I think I would have liked to meet that person,” I said, surprising myself.
A shadow fell across her eyes. “I am glad you didn’t.”
“Why? How could you be—” I cut myself off before I finished the sentence, but she heard the words I hadn’t said. I could tell by the icy calm that descended once again over her features.
“How could I be any worse than this?”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, wondering at the truth in my words.
“You haven’t met many monsters, have you?” she asked.
I thought about the bankers in the city, with their cold calculations and unflinching exactness as they stripped everything of worth from my family. “I’ve met a few,” I said.
“And your betrothed? Is he a monster?”
I felt her words like a slap. “Avery?” I asked, my world tilting. I had not told her about Avery. By not speaking his name out loud, I had kept these worlds separate, safe, protecting myself from acknowledging the things I did not grieve and, worse, the shimmer of relief I had found at the bottom of my despair. She reached into the slim pouch she wore at her belt and pulled out the carved wolf.
“Avery,” she said, turning the carving over in her hands. “Is that his name?”
“How did you know I was betrothed?”
“This is a traditional betrothal gift, Rowan. Although he carved it with more skill than power, unfortunately for you. You’re having quite the wolf winter.”
I forced myself to breathe. It didn’t matter in the end if she knew about Avery. “He’s not a monster.” I owed him that, at least.
“Do you love him?”
I laughed. The sound seemed to startle her, and her pupils contracted.
“No.” I bit off the words. “No, I don’t love him.” I will never love him. I am not capable of loving him, I thought. Not like I loved Sara. Not like I could love someone like you, if you weren’t the Huntress. If you weren’t made of ice.
Leaves rustled a warning.
She looked up. Her eyes filled half the room, and there was a wildness to the high planes of her cheekbones that set the hairs on my arms on edge. “A wolf pup is not a dog, for all their similarities,” she had told me when she had caught me trying to train the pup to sit for a scrap of meat. “She will always be her own master. Never forget that. She may sit for you now because she feels like it and because it pleases you, but never forget what she is. She is wild; you will never know her heart, and she will never come to heel.”
What about you? I wondered. Are you a woman, or are you too like your wolves?
“Here,” she said, handing back the wooden wolf. “I should not have taken this from you.”
I accepted the carving. It felt oddly heavy in my hands.
“Avery Lockland,” I said, stroking the little wolf’s blunt snout. “You killed his father and brother, you know.”
An unfamiliar expression flitted across her face. “I killed poachers. I did not ask them their names.”
“Avery is the head of his clan now.” I tucked the wolf into a pocket, half-wishing she had kept it. I did not want to think about Avery. I did not want to think about what he might do, as chieftain, to avenge the loss of father, brother, and bride.
“Perhaps he’ll learn from their mistakes.”
“I doubt it.” Ask me more about the sea, I thought. Anything that isn’t Avery.
“Do you think he will come looking for you?”
“No.” I squared my shoulders. “I think he will be happy to be rid of me.”
“And yet you would return to him.”
“I would return to my family. If that means I have to marry Avery . . .” I trailed off, unwilling to finish the sentence.
“We do terrible things for the people we love.” Her words reached in and shaped my panic.
“And we do terrible things to the people we love,” I finished for her, thinking of my father. “Were you ever betrothed?”
“No.”
It was a stupid question. She was the Huntress. She probably would have devoured the heart of the first man foolish enough to beg her favor. I remembered the woman in Avery’s story, then dismissed the thought.
“I had my first suitor when I was thirteen. They were relentless.” She touched her shoulder, grimacing. “First my mother said no, and then my father, and by the time it was up to me I’d learned the only answer I was willing to give.”
“Where are they now? Your parents?”
“Somewhere in the snow.” Something in her tone told me that was the only answer I was ever going to get. “I’ll let you get back to your reading,” she said, leaving me with my head full of ships and wolves and men I wanted to forget.
“Lockland,” the girl had said. The word echoed in the empty hallway, and there was a bitter taste in her mouth. Irony perhaps. Or hate. She’d tasted too much of both to remain discerning. Hot, bitter copper. The blood of winter.
How many years had it been, she wondered, since she had tasted anything else?
How many years had it been since there had been anything else to taste?
The sky flashed through an arrow slit— blue, as blue as the eyes of the boy she’d killed. Things had been simpler when all she had wanted had been sharp teeth and soft flesh. Before the voice in her head had started speaking again, taking control of her tongue and twisting it into words she’d long forgotten.
Words. Words were the currency of memory, and yet even without them she had never really escaped those eyes.
“I have paid,” she told the witch. “I have paid for his life ten times over.”
“Then let it end.” She heard the witch’s words like a whisper of ice.
“How can I let it end, when the price of freedom is more loss? You’ve taken everything already.”
The hallway didn’t answer.
“I will not give you my Hounds.”
The wolf at her side looked up, unused to hearing her speak aloud.
“You lost them once, and it didn’t break you,” said the silent castle.
The Huntress bared her teeth.
“I don’t have time for riddles.” She continued pacing, chafing at the pain in her back and the nagging feeling that, after all these years, she was no closer to understanding the curse than she had been when it was cast.
How could she end something she did not understand? How could she know what she couldn’t bear to lose, until she lost it?
It was all madness, like all magic, obeying rules that warped beneath the practitioner’s hand, binding itself to the fabric of the world until there was no way to remove it from the weave.
“Tell me this, at least. What does Rowan have to do with this?”
Wind gusted down the hallway, and she could have sworn she heard a hint of laughter in its high, mad sigh.
Chapter Eleven
“Come with me,” the Huntress said, standing in the doorway of the library.
I looked up from the book open across my knees. She wore the clothes I had come to associate with her absences: leather hunting breeches; tall, fur-lined boots; leather jerkin; thick wool tunic; and the heavy bearskin cloak
. Her hair hung heavy over one shoulder, loosely confined to a dark braid, and her eyes . . . I looked away.
I should never have spoken to her about Avery. Something had changed. Now, when she looked at me, she saw me, and I had the feeling what she saw no longer looked like the shaking, ragged creature she’d dragged in from the cold. Or rather, dragged into the cold.
“Come with you where?”
“I want to show you something.”
I frowned at her. Her eyes flicked up to my furrowed brow, and the corners of her mouth twitched up in something that might have been a smile.
“You have been in this library for days. Even your wolf pup is bored, and I am tired of resting. Come outside.”
I glanced at the shuttered window. Light spilled from the edges of the shutter, falling across the golden eyes of the pup. When had her eyes turned gold? I wondered. She whined softly and left off worrying the frayed edge of the carpet. Besides, it wasn’t as if I had found anything in my research. I set the book aside and stood.
The Huntress turned with her usual grace and set off down the stairs. I followed, grabbing my cloak off the back of the chair. The clothes I wore inside and the clothes I wore outside were much the same, since I rarely ventured further than the courtyard, and besides most of them came from the chest at the foot of the bed, which seemed to contain only winter things. Even the red dress was cut from winter-weight wool. I pushed all thoughts of the dress out of my mind. Something about it unsettled me.
It was late afternoon, and the slanting light of the sun cast the mountain in a sheet of gold. The snow sparkled like gleaming steel, and everything had a sharpness to it, clarity like the edge of a knife framing even the shadows. The iron gate had wrought itself anew, the black stark against the white of the snow and the white of the roses, and I slipped past, careful not to let so much as a rusting flake touch my sleeve. Not that the gate showed any sign of rust. Like the rest of the castle, it defied the touch of age.
The pup peeled away from my side, scenting her brothers and sisters, and the Huntress placed a light finger on my shoulder, halting the command in my throat.