by Anna Burke
“But what about us?” Juniper’s lower lip quivered.
“I missed you every day, Juniper, and if I could have gotten a message to you, I would have. None of this is fair. I wish we didn’t have to make these choices, and now . . .” I trailed off, looking up at the broken slope with barely suppressed panic. “Now I’m too late.”
The shadows on the snow lengthened. The sky had gone from cold blue to a colder pink as we fought, and now the wind rose, carrying with it a mournful howl that I almost recognized.
Juniper placed a mittened hand in mine. “We can still make another mile before nightfall,” she said. “Two, maybe, if we’re lucky.”
I nodded and squeezed her fingers, turning away so that she did not see the tears of frustration freezing on my cheeks.
A branch cracked. Both Juniper and I started, and I reached for my bow before I remembered I’d lost it. The shadows beneath the pines were blacker than night. One detached itself from the trees and loped toward us, and my heart nearly leapt from my throat before I recognized the gleam of eye and teeth. The wolf paused a few feet away, eyeing us. I dropped to my knees, begging her to come to me with open hands. Instead, she looked over her shoulder. Another shape emerged from the shadows, and then another.
“Rowan?” Juniper asked in a shaky voice.
“It’s okay,” I told her, counting off the members of the pack. Almost all were here. My heart rose again, this time in hope, and I strained my eyes toward the trees for more signs of movement.
There.
Her white fur caught the light, and the huge white bear lumbered soundlessly into view on giant paws. She was riderless.
“Where is she?” I asked the pack. My voice cracked on the last word. “Where is she?”
The wind picked up, empty and cold and damp. Snow was coming. We were out of time.
“What’s going on, Rowan?”
I didn’t answer. The pack never roamed outside the boundary without the Huntress. I hadn’t thought they could. My skin prickled in fear. “Juniper, you’re not going to like this,” I told her, and then I dragged her with me to the bear.
Her muzzle swung toward me. I had forgotten in the days I had been gone just how much the bear stank. This close, it was nearly overpowering, and I blinked fresh tears from my eyes. The smell would lessen once we were on top. I let the bear sniff me, and then I placed a hand on her shoulder, hoping she would understand. I was too weak to clamber up without help.
The bear knelt.
Juniper whimpered as I heaved myself across the bear’s shoulders, and she went boneless with panic as I hauled her up after me. “Hold on,” I warned, and then the forest slid away as the familiar gait of the animal carried us off into the trees.
Only the alpha female stayed.
The Huntress stroked her fur, resting her cheek against the cold of the stone.
It was raining again, and though the rain froze when it hit the walls of the keep, it was still rain.
A thousand years ago, it seemed, she had raised her face to the first spring rains, listening to the groan of the lake ice breaking up, waiting for the first of the ferns to uncurl near the shadows where the snow still lingered.
Or perhaps she dreamt the rain.
It was strange, this weakness. This cold.
She had never been weak.
She had never had cause to doubt her body, not since she had been a child, struck with fever.
Her hand paused on the wolf’s hip.
Perhaps all this had been a fever dream. The Hunt. The bear. The ice, the snow, and Rowan.
No.
Rowan was real.
She saw her now as she had seen her last, on her knees in the snow, anguish on her face. The Huntress had been able to ease that pain.
“I am a fool,” she whispered to the wolf. “I should have kept her here. I should have told her the price she would pay for her father’s life.”
The smell of roses was suffocating.
“I am so sick of roses,” she said, the effort of speaking almost more than she could stand.
What she would give to see a different flower. What she would give, still, to lay Rowan down in a field of budding clover, with the sun hot and high above them as she lifted Rowan’s shirt and kissed the soft curve of her stomach, the breeze soft and gentle and free of any memory of ice. What she would give for another life.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Night fell. The bear ran, tireless and silent, through the thinly treed upper slopes. Juniper nodded off behind me, her arms wrapped around my waist and her head lolling against my back while I tightened shaking legs around the bear’s withers. My eyes burned with cold and exhaustion, but the bear showed no sign of stopping, and neither did the wolves.
Snow swirled around us. It was thick and heavy, the kind of snow that melts and soaks through clothing before accumulating, and water dripped off the front of my hood before freezing into long, thin icicles that clinked together as we rode on. The bear took us away from the avalanche’s path, down narrow gullies and along high ridges spotted with rock. My eyes adjusted to the starless night slowly, and I saw the world in a haze of black and gray and cold.
Cold. There were not enough words for cold in our language, the Huntress had told me. She had a book in her library that claimed the people of the northern wastes had a hundred words for snow alone, and we had spent an afternoon trying to come up with our own language.
“We need a word for the kind of cold that splits trees in two,” she’d said.
“And the cold that doesn’t feel cold at first, until you’ve been out in it too long and your hands and feet and lips stop working,” I had said, shivering.
She’d kissed me.
“Your lips still seem to be working.”
“Do you even feel the cold?” I’d asked, watching a gust of wind blow snow across her cheek.
“Sometimes.”
Now, as an icy finger snaked inside my hood and down my neck, I realized we’d forgotten one: the kind of cold that slipped inside the heart, one part winter, two parts fear, a cold that froze the blood with creeping terror until even the mountains shrank beneath the weight of the ice inside me. Faster, I urged the bear.
I slept somehow as night stretched into morning. The lumbering stride never faltered beneath me, and the bear shifted her weight to catch me each time I threatened to slide off. Juniper cried with exhaustion and fear. Her sobs matched the rhythm of the bear’s stride, then subsided, and we ate the sausage and bread we’d been saving for the journey home. We both seemed to know that no matter what we found at the end of our ride, a few bits of blood sausage and brown bread would not make one bit of difference.
“Rowan.”
I closed my eyes and listened to the Huntress’s voice rise out of my memory, more real than the daylight around me.
“You look like your wolf,” she’d told me the morning after we’d lain together for the first time.
I had stared up at her, my limbs still tangled in hers and my body heavy with sleep, awed into silence by the magnitude of the change that had grown within me at her touch. Even the weak winter sunlight felt different. Brighter somehow, and yet less solid.
“You belong here. You’re wild, in your own way.”
I had thought of my city, with its comfortingly familiar maze of streets, and the sharp stench of sewage and spices and overripe bodies pressed close against the sea. That was where I had thought I belonged, but cold stripped away illusion. Sinew and bone and fire were all that mattered, and there was comfort there in the space between life and frozen death. Comfort, and purpose, and a freedom as fierce as winter’s fury.
“Rowan.”
The voice was wrong. I jolted awake as Juniper shook my shoulder, and the world slid back into focus. Before us stretched the lake. The bear paused on the shore, breathing out huge clouds of steam. Her muscles trembled beneath us, and I wondered what the journey had cost her.
Home, rustled the rose.
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sp; “Let’s go,” I said to the bear, but she remained poised on the edge, weaving her snout back and forth. One of the wolves trotted out over the ice, and then he too paused, sniffing the frozen surface. He returned to the pack with an odd, careful gait, and then Juniper’s gasp brought my attention to the line of figures struggling across farther down the shore.
“There’s still time,” she said.
“Go,” I told the bear, digging my heels into her ribs. She roared in response, rising on her haunches, and Juniper and I tumbled off into the snow. When I pushed myself to my feet, my legs weak and aching from the endless ride, the bear had loped off around the edge of the lake, avoiding the ice entirely.
“No,” I shouted after her. “Come back.”
“Look.” Juniper knelt at the edge, clearing the snow away from the surface. I crouched beside her, and my heart stopped with fear. Hairline fractures crisscrossed the surface, white against the thick black ice.
“That’s impossible,” I said, looking around me at the snow and the high cold sky. The lake never thawed.
“Do you think we’re light enough to make it across?” Juniper asked.
I glanced at the wolves. They had not followed the bear, and were watching me expectantly. Some of them weighed as much as I did, but they had four paws to distribute their weight, where we had only two feet. Going around would be safer, but it would add miles to our journey, and Avery was already a quarter of the way across.
“Follow me, but stay at least three meters behind,” I said, putting one foot on the ice. It held. My pup trotted out ahead of me with her nose to the ground, following a trail of her own. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and followed.
Each step brought us closer to the castle on the far shore, and each step took us farther away from safety. I knew nothing about ice. No thaw had come to this mountain in living memory from what I could tell, and the Huntress had not spoken of the time before. The snow on the lake made it nearly impossible to judge the appearance of the surface. Even so, I could tell the difference underneath my feet. Some places were as hard and impenetrable as I remembered. Others had a soft, yielding quality that turned my stomach. In a few places, water filled my footsteps, and I prayed to whatever gods were listening that the ice would hold.
We heard the screams when we were halfway across, and heard the unmistakable crack of breaking ice. I dropped to my knees, thinking to spread my weight, but Juniper started to run toward the Locklands.
“No,” I shouted after her, and then I was running, scrambling to grab her as her foot sank through a rotten patch and she teetered, arms flailing, standing at the edge of the river of meltwater that snaked its way across the lake and separated us from the Locklands.
“I’ve got you,” I told her, hauling her back onto safer ground. She kept screaming, and I followed her line of sight, horror welling in my throat.
Several of the villagers were in the water. I could see the small dark shapes of their heads, and heard the shouts of the rest of them as ropes were thrown and lines formed to pull the freezing men and women from the black water of the lake.
I closed my eyes. Even if they got them out of the water, they were dead if they didn’t get warm. I forced Juniper into a sitting position and pulled her boot off her foot. She was lucky. The water had not soaked through, and the boot was already freezing over. I helped her get it back on, and she looked up at me with dull eyes.
“What if that was Bjorn?”
“It wasn’t,” I told her, willing myself not to let my voice shake. I hoped, for Juniper’s sake, that it hadn’t been her boy, but it had been someone. “We have to go. Be even more careful. If you feel the ice start to break, go back, not forward, and if we get separated follow our trail back to shore. Don’t think about Bjorn,” I added as her eyes strayed back towards the villagers. “We need to focus.”
The far shore was a just few yards away when the wolf yipped out her warning, leaping sideways as a great chunk of ice tilted up under my weight, nearly dislodging her and sending me plunging into the lake. Cold exploded against my lungs. It knocked the breath from my body and sent stars shooting across my vision. Juniper’s screams echoed strangely, and then my breath returned, blocking out all other sound in great, shuddering gasps that failed to mobilize my limbs. The ice shelf floated a few inches from my face, and from here I could see the striations and bubbles within the candled ice. This wasn’t something that had happened overnight. This was a thaw that had been a long time in coming, and in that cold, dark, space of water, I finally understood.
The cold.
The roses.
The horse in the meadow and the briars and the thorns that still pierced my heart. They were a language, just like my mother had told me so many years ago in the warmth of her summer garden. Juniper screamed my name again, but the sound was far away. I saw, through the rotten ice, a hundred years of cold. I saw a young woman astride a snow white mare, cantering through a forest green with the first leaves of spring and white with the last rime of frost, a pack of leggy wolfhounds at her heels, and I saw an old woman walking to meet her, snow filling up her footsteps. She turned to look at me through the ice. Wrinkles grazed her lips and folded her eyes, tiny lines that spread like the cracks in the ice, but the eyes beneath them were familiar.
Rowan, said the witch, and water rushed into my mouth as I tried to answer.
“Rowan. Rowan!” A hand seized my hood, pulling me back towards the surface. Juniper lay flat on her belly, arms outstretched, while my wolf stood beside her with anxious eyes.
There’s still time, said the old voice, still strong, a memory trapped in ice like the Huntress’s fish, swimming free into the clear, cold spring at last. I reached for Juniper and the rose unfurled, leaves and vines and thorns lashing themselves onto the porous surface of the lake and pulling me in with Juniper’s help until we were panting and shivering on the shore.
The black gates rose before us. I traced the iron roses with my eyes, my body collapsing into paroxysms of cold.
“Come on,” said Juniper.
I let her pull me to my feet, one arm around her shoulder, the other trembling along the wolf’s back.
“T-t-t-this w-w-w-way.” I stuttered the words between chattering teeth. The shadow of the stable fell over us, and I stumbled over bones and dried leaves on numb feet. Two more wolves detached themselves from the empty stalls. Juniper didn’t whimper, and I didn’t have the strength or coordination to reassure her, anyway. The stable opened into the abandoned hall. In the delirium of hypothermia, I thought I saw banners flapping from the rafters and smelled the rich aromas of roasting boar and frothing ale. Faces passed before me, people I had never met, ghosts, maybe, but real and warm and laughing. A few raised their mugs towards me, ale and mead and wine sloshing down the sides to pool on the floor where eager dogs snarled. I tried to smile back with frozen cheeks.
Ghosts followed us into the kitchen. A large woman stepped out of our way, bearing a tray of sweet breads, and a child tried to pluck one while her attention was elsewhere. A lithe woman with hair so blonde it was nearly white slapped the child’s hand, then snatched a roll for herself with a wink at the cook. Fresh herbs and apples polished until they hurt the eye rested on platters. My mouth watered, and the heat from the many hearths burned against my face. Juniper sat me down before one, her face pinched with fear.
“It’s okay,” I tried to tell her, but no words came out.
Rowan.
The people in the kitchen paused, as if they, too, heard the woman’s voice, and I watched in dismay as they faded away, leaving behind empty tables and dark hearths. Beside me, Juniper struggled to light the fire. I tried to help, but all I could do was shiver.
“There,” she said, catching a spark at last.
“Clothes,” I managed to mumble. I had to get out of my wet clothes. Juniper nodded, and I noticed with detached clarity, as my sister peeled layer after layer of icy furs from my body until I was naked before the bla
ze, that a layer of dust had settled over the room.
I soaked up the warmth with my knees pulled up to my chest, staring into the fire as the delirium passed. The villagers who had shared my fate would not be so lucky. I could only hope that they had had the sense to light a fire when they got to the far shore. When the worst of the shivering retreated back into my marrow, I stood. My bare feet felt like ice against the flagstones.
“Go,” I told Juniper. “Find Avery. Find Bjorn. Tell them there is fire and shelter here, if they leave their weapons behind. Tell them that if they do not, they will find only death.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“Then stay here, by the fire, and warm yourself. There is food, somewhere. Rest. But I have to do the rest of this alone.”
“Rowan—”
“Trust me.”
“Take my cloak, at least,” she said, unfastening it from her shoulders.
Juniper’s hair was tangled and matted, as I was sure mine was too, and she looked less real than the ghosts I still could half see out of the corner of my eye. I did not wait to discover what Juniper decided. Time was running out. I could almost hear the sand running through the hourglass, only instead of sand, I heard the soft flutter of falling petals.
Her breath slowed.
Thought was no longer reliable.
Words, faces, half-formed memories of a world that once had been. They floated around her, and once she thought she stood on top of the mountain, stars surrounding her, close enough to touch in the soft darkness of the sky.
I was Winter once, she thought in a rare moment of clarity.
She did not know what she was now.
Sometimes, when the wolf turned to nose her gently, she thought she heard the howls of the rest of the pack, but not often.
How long have I been cold? she wondered. How many lifetimes have I spent frozen while the rest of the world turned?