Thorn

by Anna Burke

  “Let her go,” she said. “She is a wolf, not a dog, and she needs to be with her own kind.”

  I wanted to protest. I felt naked without the wolf, but the pack stayed behind. Apparently, wherever we were going did not offer them enough of an incentive to join us. The wind pressed my cloak against me, pushing me after her toward the shore of the lake. There was no sign of the bear, for which I was grateful––not that I would have necessarily seen it against the white of the snow. The wind picked up past the shelter of the walls. It tossed the Huntress’s hair around her face, snarling and gnashing as it tore through my furs. I shoved my hands deeper into my clothes and looked up at the walls. Clouds gathered over the lake as the wind shifted the snow in dunes and drifts. I shivered, and broke into a run to keep up with her.

  “Here,” the Huntress said when we reached the middle. The surface of the lake felt different under my feet, and the wind grew even stronger. “Here” was nothing, only windswept ice, and a cold so numbing my lips might as well have belonged to a stranger.

  I gazed again at the mountains and the peaks above us, and as I watched a beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and fell on the keep’s tallest turret. It stained the granite red, a pale hue that tricked the eye with a parody of warmth, breathtaking against the grays and blacks and whites of winter and so untouchable I could have sobbed had the tears not threatened to freeze to my cheeks. I tried to picture what the keep had looked like when banners flew from the turrets and laughter filled the halls and the stables smelled of hay and horse while the torches spilled light out into the winter night. There was beauty there, beyond the ache of solitude. Beside me, the Huntress fell to one knee.

  I suppose it is that beautiful, I thought, before I realized she was scraping the snow away from the ice beneath our feet. I thought of the stitches straining against her skin, and a sharp pain of longing shot through me, followed by fear. I remembered the dark green of the vine against her torn flesh, and the sharp pull of the rose in my palm.

  “Look.”

  I knelt beside her and tugged the furs more tightly around my shoulders with my good hand. She scraped the last of the snow free from the ice, and there beneath the surface swam a shoal of fish. For a moment I was back on the wharf, rough wood against the thin cloth of my summer dress, watching the few fish who dared brave the busy waters of the harbor while Sara, or sometimes my father, spoke to the men and women on the ships.

  There was something different about these fish. I leaned closer, then gasped. They did not move. They were frozen, round eyes fixed on some distant hope, their scales glittering in the high, clear light of the winter sun.

  “Look beneath them.”

  Sure enough, past the frozen school, partially obscured by the blue-black depths, swam a second shoal. These circled lazily, dark bodies heavy with cold. I looked up to find her watching me. Eyes shouldn’t be that green, I thought, momentarily arrested. There was a question there, written somewhere between the bottomless black of iris and curl of eyelash. I opened my mouth to speak, and the wind snatched away both the words and the thoughts that formed them. Kneeling, she looked much younger, more like a girl and less like Winter herself. Kneeling, she was harder to hate, and I watched, transfixed, as a flake of snow melted on her cheek. Was I imagining the sudden flush beneath her skin, or was that just another trick of the light?

  “Are they alive?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  I tore my eyes away from her and stared back at the fish. They didn’t blink. Then again, I was not sure if fish blinked at all. Their gills remained as stationary as the rest of them while my breath plumed in the air. I wondered how long they had been frozen there, and how long it would take them to thaw.

  How long will it take me to thaw?

  “Yes,” I said, and my heart broke at the shred of hope I saw in her face. This was what came out of a lifetime of frost. Fish, caught at the surface when it froze. Perhaps they had slowed, unaware of the grip of ice until it was too late, blood giving up ground vessel by vessel until scales flowed over solid ice instead of flesh, or perhaps it had been instant. Here, at the center of the lake, with the castle a red gleam behind her, I understood.

  The Huntress had not brought me here to show me fish. I was looking at her heart.

  The wind picked up again, bringing with it the sounds of pines so much like surf. A beam of sunlight caught the scales of one of the fish, painting it red and blue and green before it vanished, and the brilliance of her world became too much. I couldn’t breathe. There were truths here that hurt to look at even out of the corner of my eye, and the agony of a life spent in this place, with its beauty and its emptiness, cut me deeper than thorn or blade.

  It was no wonder her heart had frozen.

  The sun faded. Clouds wiped the red from the walls of the keep, painting it safely gray again. The wind shrieked a little louder and blew a little colder, and the howl in the back of my throat turned into a cry as the illusion of warmth bled to death on frozen pinnacles of snow. I turned and ran from her, away over the ice toward the distant forest, and the wind lifted my arms like wings. She did not stop me, and I did not look back to see what I had left behind or how much she might have seen in my face.

  I was gasping for air by the time the trees began to cast their shadows at my feet, and the tears froze and cracked on my cheeks. I did not know who I wept for: the fish, the Huntress, or myself.

  “Why?” I screamed. The sound reverberated around the bowl of the lake, and somewhere a wolf raised his head to howl. Another voice joined it, and another, until every hair on my body had raised in recognition and alarm, but the Huntress did not reply.

  I wrapped my furs around me, breathing in the steam from my breath to thaw my face. I was cold. Dangerously cold, with the sweat from my flight drying on my body. I looked up at the sky, still light against the dark of the pines. A snowflake landed on my lashes.

  More flakes fell, whirling through the pines and dancing in gusts across the lake. From this distance, the keep looked like something out of a tapestry, woven by a hand whose only experience of cold was what could be glimpsed beyond the warmth of the hearth.

  I did not remember sitting, but the snow mounted on my knees, a dim pressure that reminded me of the wolf pup. For a moment, through the fast fall of night, I thought I saw the front door of our little house in the village. It had looked so bleak in the early spring when we first arrived. Our town house had been brightly painted, and the garden full of my mother’s roses. This cottage was all hewn timber and thatch. Dead stalks had poked out of a large rectangle in the yard, hinting at the remains of a kitchen garden, and the barn was full of old manure. It was the kind of place a peasant girl might dream of, and my heart ached for a moment as I remembered Sara’s parting words.

  “What am I supposed to do without you?” I had asked her.

  “This would have happened either way,” she said. “Do you really think the Duke, or whoever your father decides to marry you off to, would have let his wife run wild with a girl from the stables?”

  “Do you think I would have given him a choice?”

  Sara had put both hands on my shoulders and looked me in the face. “I forget, sometimes, that knowing how to read and write doesn’t make you smart. There are a thousand ways he could have prevented you, many of them legal, some of them not, but no one would have dared question him. At least this way you can still write me letters.”

  If I could send a letter now, what would I say to her? That I needed her to raise an army to come rescue me? Or would I tell her the truth, the truth that burned colder than the cloud-covered stars, which was that the only thing worse than my captivity was what awaited me on my return?

  I thought of my sisters and my father and the little house, a warm light set deep in the mouth of a trap I would spring no matter where I stepped. I belonged to Avery now, and if not Avery, some other man. I looked down at my body, hidden beneath my furs, and hated it. My body was th
e real prison, something to be bartered or sold or carried away on the back of a great white bear. This was the truth that Sara had tried to tell me, the truth I had not wanted to see, the truth that now was as clear to me as the biting cold.

  You could stay here, whispered the part of me that I had never quite been able to silence. You could stay here with the Huntress and her wolves, and make something new.

  My family already thought me dead, or at least lost forever. They would never need to know that I had chosen this life. I would fade in their memories as my mother had, until the pain of loss became bearable and I passed into mountain myth, the girl who was carried away into the winter night by the Huntress on her great white bear, and in time they would remember how to laugh, as would I. The snow fell harder, and I thought I saw the faces of my sisters rise up out of the white.

  “I’ll miss you,” I told them, my chest constricting at the thought of never seeing them again. They would be happy, though, in the village. Aspen would marry, and Juniper was young enough to find a place for herself, with or without a man.

  I would have left them anyway, I realized, tasting the truth of it in the snow. I might have lasted a year, wed to Avery, and then I would have packed a bag in the night and made my way back to the city, or killed him, or fallen in love with the wrong woodcutter’s daughter. I never had a future there that didn’t end in grief. Here, at least, the ending was uncertain.

  I stood. My legs were numb and moved so slowly they might as well have been unresponsive. My arms were a little better, as I had kept them tucked beneath the furs around my chest, and I beat at my legs in a vain attempt to bring back feeling. When that failed, I crawled toward the shore of the lake, hauling my body through the drifts in slow, painful jerks as my knees remembered their duty.

  Past the shelter of the pines, the wind stole whatever warmth I had left, howling with the force and fury of a blizzard, and I realized I had no idea in which direction the castle lay.

  No no no no no, my mind chittered. Not now. I could not freeze to death, now that I had decided to stay. I flung my arm over my face to shield my eyes from the worst of the storm. I had two choices. I could try my luck crossing the lake in a whiteout, or I could hug the shore, which would eventually bring me to the keep. Assuming, of course, eventually occurred before I froze to death. I tried to visualize the bowl of the crater. The lake had to be at least a mile from shore to shore, but it was longer than it was wide. To go around could take hours, and it was nearly full dark.

  I did not have hours, and I would not survive out here at night.

  I had to get home.

  At the thought, the rose stirred in my blood, nodding like a blossom toward the sun.

  There.

  In a way, it was a blessing that my legs refused to hold my weight for long. The wind was weaker this close to the ice, and would have knocked me over if I had dared to stand. I moved one limb at a time. Beneath me swam the Huntress’s fish, trapped in a murky twilight, fins churning slowly through the black.

  The strength of the rose’s pull faded as the cold bit deeper and deeper. Strange shapes formed in the gusts, and ice gathered on my lashes, fragmenting my vision. Once, I thought I saw the Huntress astride a white horse, her head thrown back in laughter, a hawk on her wrist. Then the wall of white changed, and she was only snow.

  I crawled on.

  The snow parted again, and I saw my mother. The memory was piercingly real. She had my thick, wild black hair, and Aspen’s lips. I reached for her, but she looked past me, through me, and then she too was gone.

  Even the wolves were made of snow. They circled me, howling, only to vanish when I turned my head. I stopped looking and kept my eyelids closed but for a sliver, to protect them from the cold. The howling grew louder and more insistent. “I’m here,” I tried to shout, but the words were ripped from my mouth by the wind.

  The first time I fell flat on my chest, I struggled back up, my muscles as unpredictable as water. The second time I fell, I managed to roll over and haul myself on my elbows. The third time, I stayed down, and the cruelty of my body’s betrayal, now that I had chosen life, bit deeper than the cold.

  Where was the Huntress? Where were her hounds, or her roses, or any of the other beasts that roamed her halls?

  More faces came and went, fading in and out of the wind. Somewhere my pup was hungry. Somewhere my sisters huddled before a fire, mourning me for dead and clinging to secret hopes. This was the price I would pay for betraying them.

  The howl ripped out of my throat with all the anguish of their imagined cries. It was a sound unlike anything I had ever made before, and it ripped my soul loose from its foundation. It went on for a long time, longer than I had breath, and then a hot tongue licked my frozen face, and I realized that the howl was no longer my own but the cry of the she-wolf, her teats heavy, her muzzle lifted to the storm. The rest of the pack materialized out of the snow, even the black wolf little more than a white shadow.

  “Rowan.”

  The roughness of her voice and the feeling of weightlessness as she lifted me in her arms registered on the same level as the swirling snow, and felt only slightly more real. I felt the harsh fur of the bear against my face and lips, and then we were flying, the bear’s strides parting the blizzard until the iron gates loomed ahead, and then the smell of roses overwhelmed me.

  She had let the girl go.

  It had seemed harmless enough to show her the lake’s secrets. She had not expected to find pain out there on the ice, and then the storm had risen to meet night and not even the wolves could track Rowan’s scent.

  Her grip tightened on the still body in her arms. The storms had never hidden something from her before, but this storm had been different. It had fought her, wrestling against the power left to her by the witch, twisting and snarling whenever she tried to grasp it.

  “Come back to me,” she said into the stiff, frozen hide of Rowan’s hood. “Come back to me.”

  She had seen her future as the winds swept away all evidence that a girl named Rowan had ever lived. Empty hallways, abandoned rooms, roses creeping across the unmarked graves of everyone she had ever cared for, or could have cared for, leaving her alone with her wolves for all eternity.

  That might have been enough, once.

  “Not yet,” she pleaded with gods she’d never believed in. “Please, not yet.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Warmth.

  The thought drifted through the dream of spring, echoed in the rush of meltwater. I soaked up the feeling. It had been a while since I’d been warm, because . . . my mind hesitated, as skittish as a wild animal.

  Snow. Wolves. The Huntress.

  I tried to move. Something heavy lay across my chest. I opened my eyes to a dark room, lit only by the light of the roaring fire. Furs covered all I could see of my body. I was lying on my side, and the weight on my ribs was comforting rather than claustrophobic, as was the smooth, soft warmth behind me. I leaned back into it, my body craving the heat, my mind still drowsy from cold and fatigue.

  The warmth moved, too.

  Awareness poured into me, mercilessly informing me that my toes and fingers still ached with frostbite, and also that I was very, very naked. The body beside me, that wondrous source of warmth, was also naked, and there was only one person on this mountain to whom that body could belong.

  “Skin to skin. It is the only way to save someone as cold as you are.”

  I froze as her words drifted across my ear. Something moved at my feet, and I saw the tip of a white ear. The wolves were here, too. My pack. Leaves rustled just outside the edge of hearing, and I tried to sit up, but her arm weighed a thousand pounds and my muscles refused to obey me. There was a strange clacking sound, like old bones knocking together, and as she pulled me closer, I realized the sound was my teeth chattering.

  “You are safe. I promise.”

  Her body was as soft and hard as she was. I could feel the muscles of her stomach move as she spoke
, and the curve of her breasts pressed against my back. She was wrong. I was not safe. In fact, I had never been more in danger. I remembered the decision I had come to in the snow. My heart beat faster, stuttering in my chest.

  “Breathe slowly,” she said. “Cold can weaken the heart.”

  I closed my eyes against the bitter irony of her words. My heart stuttered again, then resumed its beat, and I took a deep breath of warm air. The breath brought me closer to her, and the torpor that clung to my limbs prevented me from rolling away from the heat of her skin and the cool, piney scent of her hair. I shuddered as she held me while the nearness of my death passed over me like a winged shadow, and the feel of her arm around me was all that kept the ice at bay.

  “It will pass.”

  “The storm came out of nowhere,” I said, grateful that she could not see my face.

  “Rowan.” She pulled away from me, leaving me once again out in the snow, and I shivered uncontrollably as she propped herself up on one elbow to look into my eyes. I saw the accusation there.

  “I didn’t,” I said, my body shaking uncontrollably. “I didn’t want to die.”

  “You didn’t?”

  I wanted to touch her then, but all I could do was lie there while the last of the cold left me in great, shuddering tremors.

  “No.”

  “Then why did you run?”

  Hold me, my mind screamed. “It’s all I know how to do,” said my mouth.

  “You should not have stopped running.”

  I closed my eyes against her words, hurt seeping in around the cold.

  “If you had kept running, you would not have frozen.”

  “If I had kept running, you would not have found me.”

  “Open your eyes, Rowan.”

  I refused. If I opened my eyes, I would see her skin, glowing rose-gold in the firelight as light spilled over her shoulders and breasts and the little pool of shadow between her collarbones, and she would see everything.