Thorn

by Anna Burke

  “No.”

  “How did they come to be yours?”

  “They are not mine.” She uncorked a flask of water and took a long swig, then passed it to me.

  “Then why do they follow you?”

  “Why do ravens follow wolves?” she asked, pointing up at the clearing sky. The blizzard was fading, and in place of swirling flakes a flock of birds cawed overhead, circling impatiently. “Wolves provide meat. So do I. They follow me because we hunt better together, and because once, a long time ago . . .” she trailed off and I caught sight of the black wolf. He was watching us, head lowered over the carcass, his eyes a burning yellow that saw right through me. She didn’t finish her sentence, and I didn’t press her.

  A drop of blood on her cheek caught my eye. I fought an overwhelming desire to wipe it away as I looked up into her face. The blizzard blew itself out in a last gust, and pale winter sunlight filtered through the pines, lighting up the flakes of snow in her hair. A savage longing cut through me, sharper than the touch of thorns, and I felt the last shreds of doubt vanish beneath the sound of the feeding wolves. I thought of the little cottage at the end of the lane where my father and sisters huddled against the cold, and of the city house, stripped of its furnishings by the banks. I thought, absurdly, of Henrik, rowing us out to my father’s ships to peer up at the decks, the surf breaking against the comforting bulk of their hulls.

  All that was gone now. What was more, it had never been mine in the first place. Not the ship, not the town house, not even the cottage where my mother had been born. All that I had ever owned of value was my body, and even that had not been mine to give, so long as I remained in my father’s world.

  I took a step toward the Huntress, touching the horn at her side with one mittened hand. If she refused me, I would wander off into the snow and lie down in the drifts, empty of purpose, full of broken promise, but free. I had nothing more to lose.

  “Rowan,” she said, her breath frosting as it passed her lips.

  I tugged the mitten off of my hand and raised it to her face, brushing back a lock of hair. It was cold and smooth as it fell against my wrist, and she held very still as my fingers brushed her cheek. A flake of snow melted on her lower lip.

  I kissed her, gently at first, the barest touch of my lips against hers, but when her lips parted under mine a roaring filled my ears, and it was all I could do to stand as the axis of the world shifted beneath me. She tasted like pine and snow and the sweet, sharp bite of winter apples. She moved then, her hands pulling me closer and her lips flushing the cold out from underneath my skin, while the pack fed at our backs and somewhere deep inside me the rose put out more roots, tightening its grip around my heart.

  Three wolves ran in a line along the hills, threading in and out of trees and memory while snow filled their prints and an owl hooted somewhere in the forest, setting out on silent wings.

  Isolde.

  The name followed the wolves, and the Huntress caught it, fluttering against the bars of her fingers like a moth, or some small brown bird. The bird spoke her name with the witch’s voice, and with that voice came fear.

  “For your pride, you may keep your castle and your forests, but only beasts will roam your halls, and all those you love will turn to tooth and claw and cloven hoof, save you. You shall be just as you are, colder than a winter star and just as lovely, and you shall live among them, a huntress, a queen among the bones, until the day comes when you learn what it is like to love helplessly, hopelessly, and truly. Only then will you be free, but freedom will bring you no joy, because the price of freedom will be the loss of one you cannot bear to lose.

  “Until then, I will bind you and yours with ice and thorn, until the years have stripped the memory of warmth from your bones and the only thing that blooms around you is the winter rose. As long as those roses grow wild, you shall reign over winter and all her beasts, but beware: where the winter rose takes root, it grows, and its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear.”

  Rowan.

  She saw the symmetry of the trap, the way it had sunk into her flesh each time she’d touched the girl, how it had closed so slowly she had not felt the steel beneath soft skin.

  She saw a rose on a bloodstained breast and blue eyes wide with an understanding that was blissfully cut short by death.

  Helplessly.

  Hopelessly.

  Truly.

  She was going to lose her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I pulled the red dress from the chest with shaking hands and laid it on the bed, my hair still steaming from the baths.

  You will not run from me, I thought, stroking the dark wool. You will not run.

  But she had.

  We had ridden back to the keep, and I had laughed in her arms as she pointed out the smaller details of her forests: prints there, a tuft of hair here, water flowing deep beneath the drifts.

  I lost her when we passed beneath the shadow of the roses. I felt her stiffen, and I knew before I turned to look that she wore her other face: cold, implacable, inhuman. She helped me off the bear with hands of stone, and I walked away from her, the thrill of the hunt fading into sore muscles while she checked over the wolves for injuries. I fled to a place where she would not hear my heart breaking.

  “She kissed me,” I told the dress. She kissed me, and she felt the world tilt, too.

  I stared into the brass mirror I’d found in one of the empty rooms. My eyes were no longer bloodshot, and my hair, clean and combed to the best of my ability, curled in the heat from my fire. I remembered something my sister had said in the months before I left.

  “Wear the red dress, Rowan.”

  I had let her lace it up, hating the game, but there was nothing playful in her face when I’d turned to grumble at her. “What?”

  “Trust me on this, Row. If you ever decide you do want Avery, or any other man for that matter, wear red. It’s . . . it’s your color.”

  “Aspen,” I said to the empty room, “you’ll laugh, but I need you now.”

  I slid into the dress. The wool was so finely woven it felt more like linen, and I laced it up as best I could with trembling fingers. The bodice was lower than anything I’d ever worn, though still modest by city standards, showing only the barest hint of cleavage, and it fitted my hips as if it had been made for me. I opened my palm and watched the rose petals ripple in some unseen breeze, wondering if by some fae trick it had been made for me, just as my room was always clean and there was always wood stacked against the hearth.

  Beneath the dress I had found a pair of simple shoes, and these too fit, the leather supple and soft. I had nothing to put on my face, and I had lost all my hairpins, so I did what I could with a few braids and twists, my fingers remembering skills I’d thought they’d forgotten. When I was finished, I looked into the mirror.

  The bodice of the dress was embroidered with roses, the thread only a few shades darker than the cloth so that I almost didn’t notice them at first. The skirt was elegant and loose, not full like some of the styles I’d seen, and it did not drag on the floor. It was a dress made for a woman who did not need clothing to emphasize her beauty, and I realized with a jolt who this dress had been made for, who the clothes in the chest belonged to, whose room I had been sleeping in all of these months.

  The ghost of the woman the Huntress had been stared at me out of the mirror, then faded, leaving only my own dazed expression. I sat on the bed with my earlier confidence shaken.

  How would I feel if the Huntress showed up to dinner wearing my clothes?

  There is a reason this dress feels unworn, I thought, stroking the skirt. And there is a reason she brought me to this room, just as there is a reason the chest has contained almost everything I’ve needed so far. The rose in my palm bloomed a darker shade of red, and I pressed it to my exposed chest, resting the rose over my heart. And Aspen is right, I thought, not bothering to glance back at the mirror. Red is my color.

&nbs
p; I wrapped my wolf-skin cloak around my shoulders to keep off the chill and descended the steps down to the keep proper where I would find the Huntress, even if it meant looking beneath every drift in her forest. I would find her, and then . . . I did not know what I would do then.

  Do you think she is the sort of woman to be overcome by tricks of light and cloth?

  I was almost to the kitchen stairs when the wolf pup appeared, her jaws open in a wolfish laugh. She trotted off in the opposite direction toward the part of the keep that held the locked tower room. I followed, the rose in my hand pulsing with the strange magic of the place.

  I found the Huntress in a large room that might have been a ballroom or an audience chamber or both. Part of the stone roof had fallen through, leaving a pile of moonlit rubble, and past the rubble, through a sparse fall of snow, was a throne. I froze when I saw her sprawled across it. She looked too natural there. It was like discovering that a dependable plow horse knew how to piaffe, except that the Huntress was as far from a plow horse as any living thing could be. She was royalty, or whatever the mountain equivalent of royalty might be. I had known that, in a way, for all that she had never told me who she’d been. She could read, and hunt, and she radiated power in a way I’d only seen in those born to it. Those traits led to only a few possible conclusions. Seeing her here, though, enthroned, was different. I knew the Huntress.

  I did not know this woman.

  I backed away, my soft shoes soundless on the floor, ashamed suddenly of my conviction. As a rich merchant’s daughter, I had been good enough for a minor noble down on his luck or an-other wealthy merchant, but never someone like the woman wearing the Huntress’s face. The shame that had followed me ever since we’d fled the city washed over me in a hot, prickling wave.

  “Rowan.”

  I kept walking.

  “Rowan, wait.”

  Running footsteps echoed in the room, and it occurred to me through my desolate haze that this was the first time I had ever heard the Huntress’s steps make a sound. I turned in surprise, and then she was close enough for me to see her eyes. They were rimmed with red and wild, and two high dots of color stained her cheekbones. I reached for her, unthinking.

  “You,” she said, as if she had only just realized who I was. “Rowan.” Her eyes dropped to the dress, then back to my face. “Rowan,” she said again, like it was the only word she knew.

  “What is this room?” I asked her, still aware of the looming presence of the throne behind her. It seemed impossible that I had not discovered this place before, and at the thought the rose in my hand burned.

  “My mother’s throne room.”

  “Your mother.”

  “Yes. My mother. It doesn’t matter now, though.”

  “Doesn’t it?” I asked, my chin rising in defiance.

  Her hair looked tangled, as if she had sat for hours with it balled up in her fists. “Why should it matter?”

  “Because,” I said, wishing I had never laid eyes on this dress, or this room, or the woman in front of me. “Because I keep thinking I know you, and then you go and do something like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like remind me that you’re something I can never have, no matter how much I want it, no matter how hard I try to tell myself I shouldn’t even want it in the first place.”

  She looked at me like I’d driven a spear through her lungs. “Rowan.”

  “I should hate you, but I don’t. I don’t hate you, and I don’t hate this place, and I want—”

  The Huntress touched my face, and then her lips were on mine and my words fell to earth like spring snow, silent and inconsequential, as she kissed me. I wrapped my arms around her neck and pulled her closer. The throne faded, along with the rubble and the roses and my fears.

  I opened my eyes when I felt light hit them. We stood beneath the crack in the ceiling, and above us, framed by scudding clouds, rose the moon.

  “Wait.” I pushed the Huntress away from me with every ounce of willpower I possessed.

  She paused, her hand cupping the back of my neck, her face half lit by moonlight. “My name is Isolde,” she said, answering the question I had not yet asked.

  “Isolde.” I tasted it and discarded it in the same instant. “You are not Isolde.”

  “No,” she said. “Do you believe me now?”

  “Yes.” I moved to kiss her again, but she pulled away, a half-smile on the lips I wanted on my own.

  “Dance with me.”

  “What?” I asked, tugging at the collar of her shirt.

  “Dance with me. Now. Here.” She stroked the embroidery along the sleeve of my dress.

  “I was never a very good dancer,” I said, remembering the parties I had gone to in the city, dancing with too many men with too many hands while my eyes followed the women around us.

  “It doesn’t matter.” She moved, her step as light and careful as it was in the woods, dancing with death with a spear in her hand. I moved with her, one hand on her shoulder, one hand on her waist. Had I been in the city, I would have placed my hands differently, but when I tried to adjust she shook her head.

  “Just like this.” Her position mirrored mine, and I followed her steps while the wind whistled over the crack in the roof, making its own music. “You surprised me,” she said. “For a moment, I did not recognize you.”

  “I should not have worn the dress.”

  She pulled me to her with a complicated series of steps that caught me off guard. I felt her heart beating against mine as she spoke.

  “I would know you in anything, Rowan. And I am very glad you wore it.” She grinned at me, and my heart skipped a beat as the woman I knew returned. “It was a trick of the moonlight and old ghosts. This side of the keep is full of them.”

  I let her spin me away and bring me back, my feet finding the steps while the room blurred around me, the Huntress the only fixed point.

  “Then why do you come here?” I asked, breathless.

  “To remind myself.”

  “But you’re not Isolde anymore.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, wrapping her arms around me slowly, her steps sure and easy as she lifted me into the air. Snow brushed my throat, and I tasted moonlight like pale wine. “But I’m here because of her, and so are you.”

  She lowered me, and I clung to her neck, still drunk. “Why did you run from me?” I said, my lips brushing her skin with each word.

  She ran her hands down my side, and I moved against her, desire rising to meet her touch. “Run?”

  “You changed earlier. And you’ve run from me before.”

  “So have you,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. I can’t run from you now.”

  “And why is that?” I struggled to focus on her words instead of her hands.

  “Do you really have to ask?”

  “It’s the dress, isn’t it,” I said, only half-teasing. There was power at work here. I could feel it in the beat of my heart, blood rushing through veins ringed with briars, and in the walls of this room with its tattered tapestries and old banners. The Huntress kissed me, and the wind picked up, whipping snow down through the moonlight.

  “It’s not the dress.” She laced her fingers through mine and led me into another dance.

  I was out of breath and flushed by the time our steps led us to the door.

  “Wine?” she asked.

  I didn’t want wine. I wanted the lips that had formed the word, but I nodded.

  She did not offer me her arm, as Avery or one of my father’s acquaintances might have. I was glad of it. Instead, she took my hand with the same grace she did everything, making it look as natural as breathing. Maybe it was. I tightened my fingers around hers and did not look back.

  “Wait here,” she said outside the kitchen door. “I’ll get the wine.”

  But where will we drink it? I wondered as I waited in the dark of the hallway, thinking of the room above the stable and a bed piled high with furs.

 
The library, as it turned out.

  The Huntress lit the fire in the grate, then laid a fur before it. I shivered. “Sit,” she said, as the silver and black hairs of the pelt rippled in the flames. She shrugged out of her leathers, leaving only the fine wool of her shirt between me and her skin as she settled onto the floor. I watched the cloth rise and fall with her breathing, the firelight warm on the exposed skin of my chest.

  “Are you human?” I asked her.

  “Would it matter?”

  I met her eyes, and this time I didn’t see forests. I just saw her. “No,” I said, my voice rough. I didn’t care what she was or who she had been; I just wanted her.

  She leaned back to look at me, and I did not blush under her gaze as it traveled down my throat.

  “I don’t want you to leave,” she said, and I felt the swell of mountains in her voice. “I want you to stay here with me.”

  I slid the sleeve of my dress over one shoulder, my heart racing as I spoke. “Always.”

  She closed her eyes, her lips parted over words she did not say aloud, and suddenly I did not want her tenderness or the gentle heat of the flames. I wanted the Huntress, and the Huntress was ice and snow and shattered light. I pulled her to me, startling her eyes open, and kissed her hard as the weight of her body settled over me.

  She answered, her lips moving down my neck to my shoulder, then farther down, and I wrapped my legs around her as she tugged the gown lower. The wool was sturdy and did not tear, and she let out a growl of frustration that sounded so much like a wolf I would have laughed if it had not unleashed a new wave of desire. She raised me up, her fingers as deft on the laces as they were on a bowstring, and I let her lift the dress over my head before lying back on the softness of the furs to let her look at me. I could feel her eyes, and at last I felt her hands, gentle again as she ran them down my sides and over the arch of ribs and hips until I ached for her to touch me with each shuddering breath.

  “Please,” I said, and I remembered, as she slid inside me, that please was one of the first words I’d ever said to her, and then the world opened around me as she moved with my body and I remembered nothing else for a long, long while.