by Anna Burke
What stories, I wondered, did they tell about the Huntress?
“Feel the arrow here, and here, and here.” She touched my hand, my shoulder, and my stomach, encircling my waist with her arm. “Breathe,” she said, and I did, feeling the pressure of her hand.
“Draw.”
I pulled back the arrow, and she guided my wrist with her other hand, her arm resting against mine.
“Aim.”
Her hair brushed against my cheek as she sighted with me down the shaft. I narrowed my eyes, focusing until the target filled my vision and my heartbeat matched that of the Huntress.
“Now.”
I released. The arrow took the target in the left-hand corner, and pride overrode desire as I turned to her for approval, not bothering to hide the smile on my face. She squeezed my waist, pulling me to her with some of the same fierce joy I’d seen in her face earlier.
“Well done, Rowan,” she said into my ear, and I decided this must be how eagles felt, soaring over the peaks, higher than any other living thing on earth.
I hit the target what felt like a hundred more times that morning before she took the bow out of my hand.
“How do you feel?”
I swore there was a glint of sadism in her eyes. “Like my arms are made of dough,” I said, letting the arms in question hang limply at my sides. The only benefit of my shaking muscles was that there was no room left for other earthly wants.
“You’ll be wishing they felt like dough tomorrow. Come, some wine will help.”
I walked beside her on the way back to the kitchen, carrying my bow and spear. There was something unsettlingly right about walking into her hall armed to the teeth, even if I didn’t have a clue what to do with one of the weapons in my hands, and was too weak from learning how to use the other to so much as pluck the string.
This was how I used to feel reading epic poems about long-dead warriors, or listening to Henric tell stories about his people’s warrior gods and goddesses. Limitless. I widened my stride, letting a little more of the yoke of the past few years slide off me.
Beside me, the Huntress smiled.
“You were wasted on your village boy,” she said, and I felt the weight of the arm she did not place around my shoulder like a ghostly caress.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling my chin tilt a little higher and not caring that I might look ridiculous, strutting into the warmth of the kitchen.
“Put up your bow and heat us some wine. I have something else for you,” she said, and this time I did feel the slight pressure of her hand on my back.
The pup tried to wrest the spear from me when I leaned it against the wall. “Stop that,” I scolded her, smiling despite myself. The smile stayed on my lips as I heated the wine, and it was still there when the Huntress returned. She paused in the doorway, her eyes widening a little as they met mine, and then I saw the object in her hands.
It was fur, but not just any fur.
“You’ll need this in the snow,” she said, settling the wolfskin cloak around my shoulders. I stroked the white ruff, feeling the power of the departed animal rippling through the flawlessly tanned hide like a subvocal growl.
“Was this . . . was this one of yours?” I asked her in a hushed voice. She smoothed the cloak, pulling it more securely around me, and I saw the answer in her face. “But you said they were your family.”
“They are.”
I had nothing to say to that. The blood rose to my face, and I stood there with her hands on my shoulders and the wolf’s pelt soft beneath my hands, unable to breathe at the magnitude of what had been left unsaid.
“I . . .” I managed at last, stumbling over my words. “No one has ever given me anything like this. Ever.”
“I thought you were a wealthy merchant’s daughter.”
I touched her hand, and what she saw in my face made her turn away from me, reaching for the wine. “Thank you,” I added, somewhat lamely. She placed a horn of wine in my hand, then reached behind me and lifted the hood over my head.
“There.”
I reached up and felt the ridge of snout and curve of ears. The heaviness in the air between us lessened, and I tilted my head as I had seen her wolves do. She surprised me with a laugh, and then she did wrap her arm around my shoulders, pulling me close enough to whisper. I heard her words, muffled though they were by the hood.
“It suits you too well, Rowan.”
Rowan’s smile split the gray morning.
The Huntress crouched, readying herself for another lunge as the girl adjusted her grip on the spear. The Huntress had wrapped the spearhead at Rowan’s insistence, for all that the girl had yet to land a blow, but her last thrust had been close.
I’ve missed this.
She’d had too many thoughts like that, of late. The space between her worlds was shrinking, and Rowan stood at the center of that divide, her dark curls blowing in the snow.
“Strike. Pretend I am a bear.”
Rowan struck, and the Huntress stopped the point with her hand, letting it rest against her ribs.
“Well struck.”
Rowan pulled away, feinted, and struck again, and this time the Huntress was glad she’d wrapped the spear because it caught her underneath her left breast with a sharpness that took her breath away.
“Are you hurt?”
Rowan was at her side in an instant, and any resemblance between this moment and a moment from her past life vanished. None of her Hounds would have fallen to their knees in the snow beside her during a sparring match.
She stood up, brushing snow off the knee that had borne the brunt of her misstep, and raised the girl up with her.
“I am not hurt, because I am not a bear,” she said, touching a gloved hand to the girl’s cheek. “But if I were a bear I might be dead.”
The girl’s cheek flushed where her glove touched her, and something in the Huntress stirred. She could feel the girl’s pulse as her glove trailed down her throat, racing, insistent, and the part of the Huntress that had not remembered it was human wanted nothing more than to push Rowan down into the snow and nip at her throat, tangling that dark hair in her hands.
The part of her that was human wanted that, too.
The pressure of the spear brought her back, her own ragged breathing driving the point in closer, and her heartbeat thundered down the shaft and deep into the mountain, echoing down the slopes in warning and in need. She pulled away.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow what?” Rowan called after her, and she heard the frustration in the girl’s voice.
“We hunt.”
Chapter Fourteen
The day of my first hunt dawned with a howl. The shutters on my window clattered, straining at the hinges, and I pulled the thick curtains more tightly over them to stop the draft. Even the fire in my little hearth sputtered, the draw from the blizzard outside sending a shower of sparks upward.
Disappointment came in with the cold. There was no way the Huntress would go out in this, and I did not bother hiding my unhappiness.
“Damn it,” I swore, kicking the chest at the foot of the bed and earning myself a sore toe. I could not spend another day in the yard shooting arrows or dancing around the Huntress with a spear. I had calluses on my hands now from weeks of practice, and an ache that followed me around wherever I went, sharpening into a need so deep it felt like pain whenever my eyes fell on the Huntress. The only thing worse than being near her was being away from her. I paced the library or, worse, I tried to read, and my eyes glossed over the words and gleaned no meaning from the letters. A hunt was exactly what I needed. Time spent outside these walls, without the whispering presence of the roses, would clear the air.
None of that seemed likely now. I dressed in my hunting clothes anyway and descended the stairs in search of breakfast, if not for myself, then for the pup, who bumped me playfully with her shoulder.
“When did you get so big?” I asked her, momentarily distracted by the revelation tha
t my runty wolf now reached my hip.
She chose not to answer, and instead chased the drifts that blew in through the arrow slits in the outer hallways, darting from one pile of snow to the next with an enthusiasm I did not share. I followed her, nudging her out of my way now and then when she showed signs of wanting to bite at my boots.
The Huntress was not in the kitchen, but I found my spear propped against the table. Behind it lay a slice of thick brown bread and cheese. I shoved it into my mouth and chewed as quickly as I could, my heart pounding. My heart pounded more often than not these days, and I closed my eyes against the sound before it drove me mad. I tried to concentrate on eating, then gave up, wrapped the rest of the bread in a bit of cloth, shoved it into a pocket, grabbed the spear, and sprinted for the stables.
She was waiting, framed against the blowing snow and wrapped in the huge white bearskin that she’d worn when I first met her. The wolf pack ranged around her, tussling over bits of bone and growling in high spirits. I stood mutely before her and pointed at the snow.
“It’s hunting weather,” she said, giving me a grin that set off my reckless heart again.
“You’re going out in this? You can’t see or hear anything,” I said, pushing aside the desire to pound my hands against the walls. “Can they even catch a scent in that?” The memory of the storm that had nearly killed me shivered through me. Beyond the stable door the blizzard raged, blowing heavy drifts down the stone aisle. The Huntress paused and tilted her head like a wild thing, as if whatever she had heard had answered her unspoken question.
“Are you not coming then?” she asked.
I pulled my hood up over my head and made to stride past her out of the stable. A huge white shape eclipsed the dim light, lumbering in with an overpowering odor of bear. I took a quick step backward, still not quite used to how easily the large animal moved, and the Huntress caught me around the waist. It was so easy to lean into her. It would be so easy to tilt my face to hers or turn in her arms, the memory of her body in the firelight glowing white-hot.
“Easy,” she said, giving me a quick squeeze before she leapt astride the bear, spear in hand.
I stared up at them, awed anew despite myself by the sight of the massive muzzle weaving slowly back and forth, and by the tumble of dark hair pouring from beneath the hood of her cloak. The wolves lifted their heads to howl. The sound echoed in the stable, and I found myself clutching at the pup’s fur.
“Rowan,” the Huntress said, holding out her hand.
I let her haul me up before her. The motion brought a flash of memory, taking me back to that first ride, and I shoved aside thoughts of my family. She raised her silver hunting horn to her lips and blew, the bugle joining the howls of the wolves, and the pack surged forward, lean, loping shapes vanishing into the teeth of the blizzard, my pup lost somewhere in their midst. Their howls vanished in the greater howl of the storm, and I was grateful for the fur-lined hood of my cloak. A long strand of her hair tangled with my own, blown forward with the shrieking wind. I watched them dance for a moment, black and brown, and then the castle walls loomed out of the white and the dark green of the rose vines sliced through the snow-blasted stone.
Past the gate, whirlwinds of snow tore across the lake, and I leaned back and turned my head against the Huntress’s shoulder as one ripped into us. She wrapped her free arm around me and urged the bear into a faster gait while I gave up trying to ignore the feel of her hips and let the cold wind cool my face.
The wolves led us down the slopes to the tree line, where bearded pines and twisted firs clawed for purchase, their boughs too laden with snow for even the blizzard to stir. One of the wolves snapped at a passing hare but he did not give chase, and we rode like we were a part of the storm. The cold did not touch me this time as it had before. I tightened my grip on the Huntress’s arm, and if she noticed, she said nothing, just as she never spoke when she caught me watching her from across a room or brushed me aside when I stood too close.
The high, sparse slopes bled into rugged forest, thick with evergreens and a bumper crop of boulders half buried in snow save for where the wind had sheared the drifts, exposing frozen lichen and black rock. I tried to picture my father here, following the Lockland clan deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountains. I could not reconcile the man I knew with this untamed place, so far away from the sea. I thought of the ships in his office, encased in glass bottles, each a model of one of his vessels. He had smashed them, one by one, when they sank. I remembered coming across the splintered wood, lost in the shards of broken bottles, the glass as green as the sea and just as cruel. The trees here were tall enough for masts, if any man dared fell them so far from the coast. The Huntress shifted behind me, and I found I did not want to think of my father.
We rode for hours, or maybe it was only minutes. It could have been a year, for all I knew, tree after tree whipping past us through the storm. Somewhere out there was the boundary. I could feel it past the curtains of snow, an invisible pressure against my temples, different from the pressure building within me.
It was as if my very thought had conjured them. The hedge rose before us in a frozen tangle, taller than a man, taller even than the Huntress atop the bear. Snow piled up on the vines, but the thorns broke free, long, vicious things that put the bloom my father had brought me to shame. Against the thorns, the roses looked fragile, almost delicate, their petals somehow whiter than the snow, or perhaps the palest shade of pink. I tore my eyes away, sure I could hear them whispering.
A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.
It seemed a lifetime ago that those words had grieved me.
The wolves slowed, picking up a scent, and veered away from the lingering presence of the briars and back toward the mountains. I strained my half-closed eyes and muffled ears for sight or sound of what we chased, but all was lost in white.
When the Huntress’s breath caught in her throat, mine followed. There, behind a veil of snow, stood a massive bull elk. His back was to a fall of rock, and lichen hung from his massive antlers like tattered velvet. Frost blended with the white hair beneath his chin, and when he snorted a warning at the boldest of the wolves, his breath steamed in the air.
The only elk I had seen this close had been dead, and I was not prepared for its beauty. He was full of life, eyes luminous and muscles hard as he faced the death written in the golden eyes of the wolves.
“Look closely,” she whispered into the fur of my hood as she leveled the tip of her spear to point.
The animal’s front right leg hung limply, the foreleg swollen and red with frozen blood. He could barely put any weight on it at all, I saw, even when he had to steady himself as a wolf darted in to nip at his heels. I understood, all at once, the brutal compassion in the wolves’ hunger, and the mercy in the Huntress’s spear.
She slid down from the bear’s back without a word, her heavy bearskin cloak nearly vanishing against the snow. Her spear rose taller than she stood. I stared at the tip, stilled by the realization that I was alone on top of the bear. The animal shifted, and once the first bite of fear lost its sting, I let myself feel, for a moment, the power of its muscles ripple through me. This is how the gods must feel, I thought, the snowbound forest far below me. I was convinced that, if I wanted to, I could reach out and peel back the white of the sky to reveal the moon. A gust of wind blew the thought away, bringing cold back with it, and I missed the heat of her body.
She circled with the wolves, patient and deadly with her long spear and loose hair. The wind tugged at it with an almost passionate intensity as though nothing pleased it more than running through the tangled locks. I stifled a pang of jealousy. When she struck, a part of me struck with her, staring up into the lowered horns as her spear took the elk in the chest. He sank to his knees, bellowing, and a wolf leapt for his throat. I saw black fur arrested in motion, and hot blood spurting out to continue the arc of his leap, only to end in a red mist across the snow. It was not my pup. Not yet, bu
t I sensed her on the outskirts of the hunt, watching.
The Huntress retrieved the spear when the beast lay still, wiping his heart’s blood on the thick fur of his hide. It left a red stain against the brown. She met my eyes as she straightened, a flash of forest green that brought the rest of the woods into sharper clarity before she pulled out a long knife and began sawing off a haunch.
I had seen things killed before. A horse once that had broken its leg in the street, and more chickens than I could count. This was different. Those animals had not fought. They had trusted until their last breath, and sometimes chickens farther down the line had pecked at the blood and feathers of the fallen, oblivious to the fact that they too would soon share that fate. The elk had fought as if he planned on living, even though his death warrant had been signed the moment the wolves scented him. It was a curious thought. Had the Locklands known they were going to die when they saw the Huntress emerge out of the snow? Had that knowledge changed anything?
“You’ll want to get down,” she said.
I slid off, and she caught me, minimizing the impact of my frozen feet on the ground. I would have objected to her help had the bear been a horse and the Huntress been anyone else, but pride seemed silly somehow out here in the cold. The bear roared the moment I slid free, scattering the wolves, and I flinched as she tore into the carcass, shaking it as if it weighed no more than a kitten.
“It will be easier to let them feed here than to haul it all the way back to the keep,” the Huntress said, wrapping the haunch she’d cut free in a length of oilcloth. “And when they are done, the ravens and the foxes will feed, and I will have fewer bones to trip over in the stable.”
I listened, unable to wrench my eyes away from the visceral ripping and tearing before us. A few of the braver wolves darted in to snap up the scraps.
“They are not dogs,” I said at last, repeating back to her something she had said to me about the pup.