by Anna Burke
We stayed in the woods after that. It felt safer, and for all that the road was familiar it was also strange to see it cutting through the trees after so many weeks of unbroken forest. The woods were free of people, at least, and the snow lay heavy on the ground. Something about that bothered me, but I couldn’t place it, and I was too hungry to care too much. Game animals made themselves scarce this close to the villages and I was out of food.
We were on the trail of a pheasant when the woods opened before me, catching me off guard. I stopped at the edge of the clearing, my eyes wide as they took in the sweep of yard and the dark wood of the barn. Past the barn, past the well with its mound of snow, stood the cottage. It looked just as it had when I had left it, only without smoke in the chimney. No light escaped through the cracks in the shutters, and nothing stirred in the barn. The wolf sniffed the air once, then trotted over the snow, leaving large canine prints behind her. These too unsettled me, until I realized that I was standing where the wolf had stood the day I looked up from the well and saw the yellow eyes and white fur of Winter’s hounds.
“And now I’m back,” I told the silent clearing. The words felt even hollower than they sounded.
The door opened at my touch. I knew the house was empty, but that did nothing to lessen the sharp ache of disappointment. No cloaks hung from the rack by the door, and no boots slouched against the wall. I ran my hands along the door itself, my fingers finding the places where the door had splintered beneath the bear’s assault. Someone had repaired it, but that someone no longer lived here.
Inside, the house was tidy, unlike the Huntress’s keep, but for all that leaves and bones gathered in the corners of those halls, this house still felt emptier. The kitchen table had a fine layer of dust on it, and the vase where the rose had bloomed in frost was nowhere to be seen. The wolf sniffed at the floor, pausing by the hearth where my father’s chair watched, the battered leather oddly sentient.
I wandered into the bedroom I had shared with my sisters. The pallets had been stripped of sheets, and no clothes remained in the chest. Not even mine. I wondered at this, then decided it didn’t matter. I knew where my family was. Their clothes were no doubt with them.
The rose twisted, and I gasped in pain as a thousand thorns pierced me. It was over by the time I drew my next breath, but I held my hand up to the dim light of dusk, staring at the smooth skin.
She let you go. You knew there would be a price to pay.
I would pay it later. First, I had to find my father.
I walked through the house one more time, running my hands over the familiar surfaces and trying not to feel like I was memorizing every detail. It was the kind of house a person could love, once that person moved past memories of richly decorated town houses, dead mothers, lost friends, and freedom. The walls were sturdy and the roof was sound, and someone had carved roses around the door frame. I paused, running my finger along the trim. I didn’t remember that detail from before, but the work was old and polished with oil from generations of hands. It reminded me of my mother’s garden.
Part of bookkeeping, my father had explained to me as a child, was seeing patterns. It was not enough to add neat columns of figures. A good bookkeeper could see stories in the numbers, just like a poem. A dishonest bookkeeper could tell stories with those numbers, making them lie, but there was an art to that, too. I wondered, my hands tracing a petal, if the answers I had sought about the Huntress had been waiting here the entire time. My mother’s roses had been nothing like the roses that grew around the Huntress’s keep. They were lush and warm and inclined to brown and die in winter, instead of breeding ice, but my mother was an ordinary woman. No magic ran in her veins, and yet . . .
“Why do roses symbolize love?” I had asked my mother one morning as I watched her pruning back the canes. She sat on her heels, pulling off one of the thick leather gloves she wore to protect herself, and showed me a scar.
“Love is beautiful, like the rose,” she said, still staring at her hand. “It blossoms with care, but requires tending. There are many different types of roses, just as there are types of love. Some large, some small, some fragrant, some merely decorative. There are roses that bloom by the sea in poor soil, and those that need rich soils and gentle climates. But the real reason that roses symbolize love is right here.” She had brushed a thorn with her bare finger, letting it dimple her skin.
“Thorns?”
“Indeed. You are too young for romantic love, but think about Aspen.”
“I hate Aspen.” Aspen had, earlier that day, pinched me hard enough to leave a bruise.
“You love your sister; you don’t hate her. But she is hard to love sometimes, isn’t she? Love is like that. Beautiful, intoxicating even, but sharp as broken glass. You must handle it as you would a rose. Gently, knowing when to prune and when to water, and you must never grasp a cane too tightly, or it will cut you.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“Love can be terrible.”
“But you love father. Is he terrible?”
“Your father is a wonderful man, Rowan. But you can love someone wonderful so much it hurts, just like I love you. And you can love someone terrible.” She had pulled me close and kissed the top of my head, and I had lost interest in the subject.
The words came back to me now with a wave of fierce grief. My mother’s garden, the thorn in my palm, the Huntress’s briars, her story about the winter rose— they were all connected somehow, only I wasn’t clever enough to see it.
Cold.
She raised her hand to the falling snow, letting the flakes pile up on her bare skin. It had been years since she had been cold. The sensation startled her, novel in its discomfort, a welcome distraction from the emptiness that filled each waking moment and stalked her dreams.
She had been content here, once.
Now she saw Rowan each time she closed her eyes. At night she lay beside her ghost, and the ache inside her grew until she gave up on sleep and watched the clouds chase the moon.
The cold crept in further.
Death was mercy in the mountains, and cold the gentlest way to die. Was this what the witch had meant by freedom? She would die here, alone at the top of the world, and the curse would end with her life.
All this, for nothing.
No.
Not nothing.
The Huntress closed her fist around the snow, remembering a laugh, a touch, the taste of happiness. Not even a lifetime would have been enough.
The snow melted, running down her wrist, and with it immortality.
Chapter Eighteen
The setting sun cast my shadow before me as I followed the dirt track into the village and up to the Locklands’ door. I heard the whispers following me, and the sound of shutters and doors opening as I put one foot in front of the other, meeting my shadow with every step. The wolf stayed close. I had wanted to lock her in the cottage, but my hand had hesitated on the latch and she had bolted out, baring her teeth.
Let them see, I decided. I was thankful for that decision, now that the entire village had turned out to stare. If I had felt out of place here before the Huntress had taken me, it was nothing to how I felt today.
The Lockland lodge was a huge, sprawling house that had been added on to over the years as the family grew. At one point, I guessed, there had been real wealth here, but that day was long gone. What was left was carefully maintained, but rough, just like the rest of the village. I raised the stag’s head knocker on the broad doors and let it fall, once, twice, three times. The sound echoed in the stillness of twilight.
A young woman opened it a few heartbeats later, her cheeks flushed and her lips still wearing a lingering laugh that died when she saw the wolf. The smells of sweat and ale washed over me, and I felt my own hackles rise in response.
“I need to talk to Aspen,” I said, not bothering with courtesies.
The girl’s face paled, and she glanced over her shoulder.
“Who is it?” A
male voice asked. The woman wet her lips, fear radiating from her pores, and didn’t answer.
“Aspen,” I said to her again, keeping my voice low. “Now.”
I had not thought about the consequences of my return. My father was dying; that was enough to compel me, but the fear in her face awoke an answering fear in my own heart. I had been gone for months. Long enough for spring to come and go and winter to come again. Long enough for Aspen to marry, and long enough for my family to mourn me as dead. Long enough for suspicion to take root where joy might once have bloomed.
“Just someone here to see Aspen.” She took a step away from me, her eyes glued to the wolf.
“It’s colder than the Huntress’s tits out there, girl. Shut the goddamn door.” Heavy footsteps approached, and then I was looking up into the blue eyes and bushy beard of one of Avery’s cousins. His glare turned to terror as the wolf growled, and I worried for a moment that he might piss himself. “Avery,” he called over his shoulder. “Someone get Avery.”
The girl slipped away, and I willed her to find my sister before this man thought to put a crossbow bolt through my heart. Behind me I could hear the gathering crowd.
“Rowan!”
I turned, my heart catching in my throat. A girl stood no more than ten feet away from me with her arms full of groceries. She was even taller than I remembered, and she wore her dark hair pulled over one shoulder in a long braid threaded through with ribbons. I took a half step toward her, then another, unsure. “Juniper?”
“It is you.”
My youngest sister looked at me out of a face that had lost the fat of childhood. Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she was in the process of putting down her basket when another familiar voice poured cold dread down my spine.
“Rowan.”
I turned to face my former fiancé, words dying in my throat. He, too, was taller than I remembered, and he had grown a black beard like his cousin’s. It suited him.
“Avery,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. As always, the dread I felt before seeing him had me trembling with doubt at the sight of his face. Beauty was so deceptive. He smiled his easy smile, looking every inch the headman’s son.
“We thought you were dead. Or ran off to your city. Some of us thought you’d run off to your city and died. But,” he said, looking me up and down, “here you are. Alive.”
“Where is my sister?”
“My wife is inside.”
“And my father?”
“I’m afraid your father is not well.”
“Bring me to them.” I dug my hands into the wolf’s fur as Avery’s eyes flashed at my presumption.
“Where have you been, Rowan?” he asked.
“I want to see my father.” I was all too aware of the rising murmur of the watching crowd.
“We thought you were dead,” he said again. There was an odd emotion there. Anger, maybe, or regret.
“I’m not.”
“Tell me where you have been then, and I will let you see your father.”
“Don’t you know?” I asked, looking from him to Juniper. “Didn’t my father tell you?”
The emotions wrestling on his face coalesced into something more familiar: disbelief. “The Huntress is a fairy tale.”
I had nothing to say to this. It had never occurred to me, not once in the time since I had been taken, that the villagers might not believe the story told by my family. “Your father came down from the mountain sick with madness. It happens.”
“Your father crossed the boundary, Avery,” I said, speaking the first words that came into my head. The crowd gave a collective hiss.
“No.” Avery’s face darkened. “My father respected the old ways.”
“Who do you think the boundary protects?” I nearly shouted. “Why do you think there is a boundary at all, or old ways, if not for the Huntress?”
“Say you’re right then,” he said, his voice tight. “Say the Huntress killed my father and my brother, as your father claims. Why did she release you?”
“Because—” I broke off, mind racing. Because she loves me, but that was not something I could say to the man who I was once to wed.
“How do I know you’re who you say you are, and not some trick?”
“Trick? Avery.” His name burst from my lips, and he flinched as if I’d struck him. “You can’t explain me away, Avery.”
The sounds of the crowd faded, and for a moment it was just the two of us. I remembered, with a twinge of regret, the small things Avery had done for me over the months I had known him. The carved wolf, the walks around the village where his pride in his home had soured to bitterness each time I looked down on what I saw with scorn.
“I’ve never been able to explain you,” he said, but I did not have time for what might have been.
“Rowan?” Aspen appeared at Avery’s elbow, her dark eyes wide. He placed a protective arm around her shoulders, and I couldn’t help staring at the swell of her stomach. Aspen. Pregnant. It didn’t seem possible, and I reeled as I understood what my mind had tried to tell me. I really had been gone a year, from one midwinter to another.
“You’re alive,” she said. Then she saw the wolf. Something flashed across her face too quickly for me to read, but I saw her place a hand on Avery’s arm with a deliberation that held meaning, even if I could not tell what that meaning was.
“How is father?” I asked her.
The expression that I could not read flashed again, and she frowned. “Dying. You’re too late, Rowan.”
The chill in her voice forced me back a step, and the wolf looked up at me with questioning eyes. “I—”
“You should go back to wherever you came from,” Aspen said. “There is no place for you here.”
“Aspen—”
“Go, Rowan. Juniper, get inside before that creature rips out your throat.”
Juniper obeyed, looking just as confused as I felt. Even Avery seemed taken aback, but he allowed his wife to pull him back into the warmth of the lodge. Aspen shut the door on me herself, and I heard the thud of a bar falling across it. I stared at the dark wood, stunned and aching and more tired than I’d ever felt in my life.
The crowd parted before me, and I did not dare to meet their eyes. They were not throwing stones yet, but I did not trust these people. The wolf pointed her nose toward the forest, and I hesitated, the temptation to vanish into the trees strong. I watched her lope into the woods, the wind rippling the fur along her back, while I followed the road back to the cottage.
I collapsed in front of the cold hearth. My eyes saw nothing and I heard only the rustle of thorn against thorn until a soft knock on the door roused me from a lapse in consciousness that bore little resemblance to sleep. I held my breath, listening, and then Juniper’s voice called my name.
“Can I come in?” Juniper’s lower lip quivered with suppressed emotion when I opened the door.
I stepped back, afraid to speak, afraid to break the spell of her presence.
“It’s freezing in here,” Juniper said. “Let me light the fire.” She checked that all the shutters were tightly latched, then laid a small fire in the hearth with shaking hands. “I brought you some bread and cheese and sausage.”
“Aspen,” I began, but Juniper cut me off.
“Ignore her. She didn’t mean it. Not really. I think she was trying to protect you.”
“Protect me? By telling me to leave?”
“You don’t know what it’s been like since you left.”
The accusation hurt.
“Since I left? Do you think I wanted to leave?”
“No! Of course not. Rowan, eat something, please. You look half starved. I brought something for your . . . your friend, too.” She pulled out another bundle, and I smelled the clean, coppery scent of blood as she unwrapped a meaty bone.
“Juniper.” I wanted to hug her, but something held me back. It was too strange, being back in this house without Aspen or my father. “What happened?”
> “After . . . after you left, Father went mad. That’s why no one believes him. He wouldn’t stop talking about roses and bears and a woman with a bone-white spear. Aspen tried to tell Avery the truth, but he didn’t want to listen. Aspen says he’s afraid of the truth. It was . . . it was easier after a while to forget what we saw and just go along with him.”
“What does he believe then?”
“He believes his father and brother were killed in an avalanche, and that Father was hit in the head. He believes you ran away to the city afterward because without Father nobody could force you to marry him.”
I might have done, I thought. “They crossed the boundary and killed the Huntress’s Hounds.”
Juniper looked at me like I, too, was crazy. “I don’t know what the Hounds are,” she said, her eyes beseeching me, “but Avery says that no one here would ever cross the boundary, which is why it could not have been the Huntress.”
“He called her a fairy tale. How can he not believe in her but believe in the boundary?”
Juniper took a deep breath. “Because if his father crossed the boundary, then that means it was his father’s fault he and Avery’s brother died, and his fault that you were taken, and Avery can’t accept that.”
“But you remember,” I said, reaching for her hand. “You remember the truth.”
“Of course I do.” She trembled. “I will remember it as long as I live. How did you get away?”
“She let me go.”
“Why?”
“I met an old woman in the woods. A hedgewitch, I think. She told me father was sick, and so the Huntress let me come back.”
Juniper gave me a wary look.
“She just let you go?”
“She’s not a monster, Juniper.”
“She killed people and stole you away from us because father picked a flower.”
“She—” How could I explain what the Huntress was, or why she had done what she had done, to someone who did not know her?