by Anna Burke
Not even Aspen had anything to say to that.
My father had raised his hand to my cheek, a hand that was more calloused now than I remembered it being as a child.
“You are your mother’s daughter,” he said to me, and none of us missed the tears that brightened his brown eyes.
I had regretted my angry thoughts. It was not my father’s fault that she was gone, any more than it was his fault that the autumn before last had boiled the sea into a roiling stew of storms, smashing his ships to jagged timbers and his fortune with it.
We had lost my mother and we had lost our home, but I could bring roses back into our lives, if nothing else.
“Mercy.”
She tilted her head.
The word had meant something once.
Mercy was the swift knife, following the arrow.
Mercy was the rattle in the lungs after a long sickness, the smile that slipped into sleep and faded.
Mercy was death, in the mountains.
This man smelled of wet fur and blood. At least he had not soiled himself, like the other two. Beneath the smell of hides were old odors: salt, wood, spices. Smells that did not come from the mountain.
Her lips slid down over her teeth.
She moved her tongue in her mouth, remembering the feel of words, and raised her spear.
“Please, I have three daughters. They will starve, without me. You must let me go.”
The spear weighed nothing in her hand. Death was as light as air.
“You asked for mercy,” she said. The sounds were wrong, her pronunciation off.
“Yes, please, I will do anything. Anything you ask.”
He did not understand.
Death was wiser.
Three daughters.
Pain stirred.
Once, another man had had a daughter.
Her fist tightened.
Death would have been wiser then, too.
“This is mercy,” she said, and the shaft of the spear thrummed with anticipation.
“Rowan, Aspen, Juniper.”
Again, she paused.
“Trees,” she said. “The mountain sisters.”
“My daughters. Those are their names. Rowan is the oldest. Their mother died, two years ago. If you kill me, they will lose everything.”
His eyes were brown. The other men’s eyes had been blue.
“You should have thought about that before you crossed the boundary and hunted down my Hounds.”
“I— the boundary?”
She smelled fear in his sweat, and confusion. Did he lie? She crouched before him, the spear still steady. He lay on the ground and clutched the wounds the pack had given him.
“You are not a Lockland,” she said.
“No.”
The wolves snarled.
She watched his blood trickle into the snow.
She thought of more words she could say.
“I will not give you mercy,” she said at last.
He closed his eyes, swallowing once.
He did not beg.
She stood.
“Do not come back.”
Her words were stronger now, her voice sure. He opened his eyes when he heard them, and for all that her pronunciation was correct this time, he did not understand.
“You are letting me go?”
She brought the spear to rest against his heart.
“I am letting you go. But do not mistake freedom for mercy.”
The mountain would have its due.
Chapter Two
My father shivered by the fire, his eyes locked in ice while Aspen, Juniper, and I tried to coax warm broth down his throat. My hands shook as I stirred the kettle over the flames. I had been the one to see to his horse while my sisters carried him inside. Beneath the icicles, I had found deep scratches, either from claws or thorns or jagged rock, I could not be certain, but the blood had frozen with the ice, turning the familiar brown gelding into a strange blood bay. It had taken the better part of an hour for me to rub him down, and the harness had creaked like winter trees as I lifted it off his broad back.
“Where are the others?” I asked the horse, running a clean rag over him to dry the sweat that had not yet frozen. The horse leaned against me in response, blowing clouds of steam out of his bleeding nostrils.
The sledge loomed large in the darkness of the barn, death piled high atop its icy runners. I dropped the cloth in the straw. Sprawled above the others, its white fur gleaming even in the dim light, lay the largest wolf I had ever seen. It had not been skinned like the other carcasses, and its frozen, dead eyes watched me.
I stumbled out of the barn in my haste to get away from the monster. I did not want to think about my father facing such a beast, nor did I want to think about the wounds in the horse’s flank, or where Avery’s father and older brother had gone.
Back inside, my father thawed slowly. Juniper sponged the blood from his face and beard while Aspen held his hand. I kept the fire going and the broth hot, dreading the words that would inevitably spill like the broth from his blue lips.
“Rowan,” he said at last, struggling to raise his head. “I have a gift for you.”
My heart pounded in anticipation and in fear. Of all the things I had expected him to say, that was the least likely. He pointed at his coat. In the large front pocket I saw a leather packet. Frost glittered on the hide.
I opened it with my back to my sisters, unwrapping the bloody sinew that he had used to seal it shut. Inside, nestled in a bed of snow, lay a single white rose. The petals felt soft and lush beneath my finger, the delicate leaves a green so dark they looked almost black in the light of the fire. I picked it up. Snow clung to the stem, and as I turned to face my father one of the curving thorns bit into the palm of my hand. I stared at the bead of blood, red against the white.
The rose stirred. I almost dropped it in shock, and another thorn nipped at me, this time piercing my forefinger. At the base of the rose where my father’s knife had severed the flower from the bush, a thin tendril of root crept out, moving like frost across my palm. It was cold against my skin, and I stared, fascinated, as the root tendrils soaked up the blood like it was water, taking root in the wound.
“Rowan?” Aspen’s voice broke the spell.
I blinked, and the rose was just a rose, and I was standing in the kitchen of my father’s house with ice melting down my wrist.
“Where did you find this?” I asked him, turning to face the fire.
His face looked haunted.
Aspen held out her hand to take the rose from me, curiosity alight in her eyes. My fingers closed around the stem involuntarily and I stifled a gasp of pain as the thorns bit deeper. I did not look this time to see if my hand was covered in hoarfrost. I could feel it like ice in my veins.
Aspen recoiled from the expression on my face, looking younger than her sixteen years.
“Rowan,” my father said, his eyes fluttering shut. “I am so cold, Rowan.”
“Wrap another blanket around him,” I told my sisters, fear chilling my heart further. I wanted to ask him where he had found this flower, and I wanted to ask him what had happened to Avery’s father and brother and why they had not stopped to skin the white wolf, but his cheeks were flushed with fever.
I put the rose in a vase of water on the kitchen table and helped my sisters carry my father to his bed. Aspen kept sneaking cautious looks at me out of the corner of her large, doe’s eyes, and I wondered what she had seen on my face. Wondered, but did not ask, because the wounds in my palm were strangely chilled and a skin of ice had formed over the water in the vase despite the warmth of the fire.
• • •
I did not tell my sisters about the wolf.
I lay awake long into that night, fearing my dreams, but when they finally came I dreamt of spring. Meltwater ran down the mountains into our valley, washing away memories of winter, blood, and Avery Lockland. I walked through a newly green field and for the first time since my mother
’s death I felt light.
“Rowan.” Juniper shook my shoulder. Her breath steamed in the air. I hovered in the warm green space of the dream for a moment longer.
“Father?” I asked, sitting up in a tangle of sheets as yesterday came back to me.
“Sleeping,” she said in a hushed voice. Her pale face shone in the darkness. “Listen.”
Wind battered the thatch. It rustled through the walls, worrying the chinks between stone and board and prying at the shutters. Behind the wind, carried down from the foothills by the blizzard’s wrath, came the sound of wolves. Juniper’s hand tightened on mine. “There are so many of them,” she said.
“And a door between us.” I squeezed her hand. “We will be safe.” I tucked her back into bed and lit a candle, illuminating the small room where the three of us slept. Juniper’s eyes closed in the comforting promise of the light, and Aspen slept on.
I was wide awake. Doors were made of wood, and wood was not as substantial as people gave it credit for. Wooden ships were supposed to separate people from the water, and look what had happened to my father’s fleet.
I shoved my feet into rabbit-fur slippers and crept into the kitchen. The banked coals glowed, and the sound of the wolves was louder. My rose gleamed on the table, its stem encased in a block of ice. In the darkness, with the wolves at the door, I found it harder to erase the memory of the thorns. I took my father’s sword down from the mantle and sat by the coals with the blade across my knees while my candle cast its feeble glow over the once familiar shadows of the room.
It was not a comfortable position to fall asleep in. I woke with a crick in my neck and soot in my mouth, clutching the sword like a child with a doll. Real sunlight glowed against the curtains, and for a moment I had no idea where I was or what I was doing.
The horse.
I wiped the drool from my chin and my hand came away black with ash from where my cheek had rested. There had been wolves, and that meant that I had to check on the horse, because barn doors were also made of wood.
I hesitated, then decided to keep the sword with me, however foolish it might look to my sisters when they woke. I rebuilt the fire, grabbed the water bucket, and shrugged into my winter clothing.
Several feet of snow fell inward as I opened the door. I swore under my breath and kicked the worst of it back out, then shut the traitorous door behind me and turned to face the yard.
The sun was a pink stain on the horizon, and the edges of the forest were still soft and gray. Everything else was white. The barn was blasted with snow, and the well was a vague lump in the center of the yard. I put one foot in front of the other and forced my way through the drifts to the big barn doors. They were still shut, which seemed promising, and the dread lifted its hold on me until I remembered the dead wolf on the other side. I gripped the cold hilt of the sword, shouldered open the door, and slipped into the musty darkness.
It smelled like hay and living, breathing horse. I scooped some grain into his bucket and broke the ice on the trough, forking some more hay into the rack. Satisfied that all was well, I allowed myself to run past the sledge without looking and escape back into the morning.
A white shape moved against the trees.
The sword hung heavy in my hands, and my mouth dried as the wolf stared back at me. I thought about ducking back into the barn, but if my sisters found me missing they would come looking for me and then this wolf might go after them instead, not that wolves often attacked humans, but— the wolf turned tail and loped away, leaving me alone with my racing thoughts.
I waited for several long minutes before making my way to the well. Scraping the snow off the lid required that I take my attention away from the tree line, which sent the hairs on the back of my neck into a state of intense alarm. I hauled the water up so quickly that half of it spilled, and I had to lower it again, this time taking long, deep breaths to still my shaking hands.
The wolf did not return. I cast anxious glances back over my shoulder as I struggled to balance sword and bucket while also navigating thigh-deep drifts. It was in one such backward glance that I saw them. A few yards from the door, perfect and clear in the lightening yard, was a set of prints that did not belong to a wolf. I set the bucket down and edged closer.
The print was larger than my hand, larger than three of my hands, with long, dark gouges in the snow from impossibly long claws. I stared at the bear prints and felt my heart freeze over. No door could have withstood an assault from paws that size. Not the door to our house, not the door to the barn, and not even the door to the city gates that had closed shut behind me, forever altering the course of my life.
The tracks circled the yard, obscured here and there by a drift before retreating back into the forest. “Father,” I whispered into the cold, clear air. “What have you brought with you?”
• • •
My father slept most of the day, his skin hot to the touch and his eyes fevered. When we removed his clothes, we discovered three long gashes on his thigh that glared angrily out of his puckered flesh.
I didn’t mention the bear prints to my sisters, and I didn’t dare draw comparisons between the wounds on his leg and the claws in the snow. The wolf had been alarming enough. Instead, I ground herbs into a poultice and prepared more broth, taking a mental inventory of our larder and cursing the forebearer who had built the house out of sight of the village. I was not walking down that wooded lane.
The wolves returned that night. I lay awake long after my sisters’ ragged breathing subsided into the calm, measured breaths of sleep, listening to the mournful howls and the sound of my father coughing.
Tomorrow I would have to go in search of the village herbalist, and someone had to find Avery to discover whether his father and brother had returned by a different route. I had contrived to keep my sisters in the house for today, which was easy enough, given my father’s health and the bitter cold that had descended, and I had taken a broom to the prints near the door as if erasing them would erase their maker.
Tomorrow, the frozen bubble that had enveloped our house would burst, thrusting us back into the world.
Frost spread outward from the vase on the table, and the rose opened a new bud, the faintest pink visible in its veins. I gave it a wide berth. I was beginning to think there was something very wrong with that rose.
I must have drifted into sleep sometime after midnight, because the night was old when the scratching started. It roused me from a dream of warm rain and melting snow, a horrible, wrenching sound of shrieking wood and deep animal breathing.
Something was clawing at the door.
I sat bolt upright and met two more pairs of terrified eyes.
“What the hell is that?” asked Aspen.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t know, not really. A bear scratching at the door was just as likely as a bull moose, or a madman, or a dragon. Well, maybe not a dragon. These things didn’t happen, not in town, and not even in quiet upland villages.
“What do we do?” asked Juniper.
“Stay here,” I told them, slipping my feet once again into the soft down of my slippers and padding into the kitchen to take the sword down from the mantel. Out here, I could hear the snuffling of some wintry creature working its nose along the cracks of the door. I ran back into our bedroom with the sword held tightly in both hands and bolted the door, then shoved the dresser we shared in front of it.
“What about father?”
“He will be fine, and he would want us to protect ourselves,” I said, ashamed of my fear. I should have led us all to his room and barred that door. I should not have given in to the suspicion that the bear was after him, a dark, cold, slimy thought that was not quite as brave as the blade I laid again across my knees, preparing for another vigil.
I could not prevent my sisters from peering out the door the next morning. We stood, three dark heads against the white of the fresh snow, staring at the long, pale gouges something had scratched into the
red wood of our front door. Something, and not someone. No tool could make those marks, and no man had left those tracks.
In the smallest of blessings, my father’s fever broke that morning, sparing us the need to go for the herbalist. We moved him back to the kitchen onto a pallet by the fire, and Juniper sang to him while I cooked and Aspen stoked the flames. Every now and then I would go to the door, expecting to see pale golden eyes watching me from the forest. All I saw was the occasional flash of wings as the birds searched for food amid the drifts.
Mercy.
She remembered so many things now.
To spare a life was to ensure suffering.
Death was surer.
He would learn that.
She knelt by his tracks, resting her hand against the deep print of his boots.
Mercy.
He should never have touched the roses.
She stared at the briars. His tracks led past them, winding down the mountain to the soft green lands beyond, death somewhere on his person.
One step, and she was past the thorns.
Two steps, and she was free, free for as long as the rose stayed in his hands.
Thief.
She growled deep in her throat.
She should have killed him. Instead, she would show him the meaning of loss, as it had been shown to her.
Her howl swept down the mountain like the fall of a knife, sowing fear in its wake.
As he had taken, so would she.
As she had lost, so would he.
A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.
Chapter Three
He called us to him as the daylight waned.
“My daughters,” he said, his voice a low rasp. “I was afraid I would never see you again.”
We waited for more.
“I am so very, very sorry for all of the trouble I have brought on you.”
Aspen assured him that he had brought no trouble at all. Juniper stroked his hand. I met his eyes. There was terror in their depths, and a regret that surpassed the loss of friends and business.
