by Anna Burke
“They knew the price.”
“The price for what?” My voice rose. I tried not to think about the white wolf on the sledge and the resemblance it bore to her other wolves.
“Drink,” the Huntress ordered.
I obeyed, but the wine did not drown my questions.
“The price for what?” I asked again.
She gave me a swift, piercing look. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“You’re the Huntress,” I said, taking another sip. “But I don’t understand what that has to do with a price. Or murder.”
“If you knew who I was, you would not be asking me that question.”
I felt my fear ebb, pushed aside by a growing wave of irritation.
“Fine. Are you going to tell me?”
She swirled the horn of wine, glancing up at me once through the tendril of steam rising from it.
“I haven’t decided.”
Before I could release my cry of outrage, she stood, beckoning me to follow her. “Come, merchant’s daughter. I have a place for questions.”
She led me up a different staircase. I thought it might lead to the central tower, but I was not sure. I had been allowed so little access to the keep that the layout remained hazy.
“I assume you can read?” she asked, coming to a halt beside a large door framed by lintels carved in the shape of massive bears.
I nodded, and then she opened the door.
My father had kept a small library in our town house. Three shelves: one for the histories, one for his records, and one that contained everything from epics to old sea charts.
This room was different.
Shelves lined every wall, and in the center stood a round hearth with a copper chimney. The grate around the fire was carved with more hunting scenes, but it was what the light of the fire revealed that held my gaze.
Books. More books than I could count, and scrolls and maps and even a table with a life-size model of the mountains. I stepped toward it, trailing my hand along the sharp peaks as my eyes devoured the room. I forgot about my father, and the Locklands, and the story behind the Huntress’s name.
I had seen one other library like this, and that had only been a glimpse, on the solitary occasion my father had brought me with him to court. Books were expensive, and their contents hoarded. The wealth of knowledge in this room was staggering, and unlike the library at court this one did not have guards standing at attention to make sure the books remained untouched.
Well, unless I counted the wolves.
“There . . .” I trailed off and tried again. “There are so many of them.”
“The winters are long here.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her run a hand through her hair. It hung loosely around her shoulders, absorbing the torchlight, and it framed lips twisted in a smile that slashed her face in a cruel stroke.
I approached a shelf, my hand stretched out in preparation to touch the hide-bound spines. Some had titles marked in gold leaf; others were blank, their contents concealed by their bindings.
So many words.
A hunger that had lain dormant since we left the city woke. I chose a book at random, pulling it off the shelf and cradling it between my hands.
I’d taught myself to read. Sitting on my father’s knee, watching him pore over lists and missives, I’d given him the surprise of his life when I corrected him. “Sheep, papa, not ship,” I’d said, or so he told the story.
Not that it had done me much good. Women in the mountain villages did not need to read, and few enough men bothered with the skill.
But a library this size . . . Only royalty could command such a collection. Royalty, or a sorcerer.
I turned back to the Huntress, the book unopened.
“Who are you, really?” I asked. “You said this was a room for questions.”
“I didn’t say it was a room for answers.” She crossed the space between us and pulled another book off the shelf, her fingers skimming the spines familiarly until they found the one they sought.
“Brother Bartleby. He was well traveled for a monk.” She handed the book to me, then gestured around the room. “Help yourself to anything you want to read.”
I tucked the book under my arm without looking at it, my body prickling with unease. I was not going to be distracted by Brother Bartleby.
I tried another tactic.
“So, what am I doing here?” She was still close enough that I could smell the melted snow on her hair.
“The same thing I am doing here,” she said.
“And what is that?”
“I’m not a philosopher.” Her voice had the high clarity of running water, but I heard the growl beneath the music. “Neither is Bartleby. That’s why I like him.”
She turned, her eyes on the door, and I grabbed her sleeve. She froze, looking as shocked as I felt at the boldness of my actions.
“Tell me why you have brought me here.” My voice didn’t shake, and her arm was warm and human beneath my hand, but there was nothing human about her eyes.
“A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.”
Cats had eyes that color. Green, hypnotic, predatory. My body tensed for flight.
“I am not a rose,” I said.
She tilted her head. “Then perhaps you are a thorn.”
My hand pulsed in a memory of pain, and I heard a distant rustle of leaves as my breath caught. I pulled my hand back, clenching my fingers tight against my palm as I tried to steady myself, but my heart beat too rapidly and the pain in my palm was sharper than the prick of the rose had ever been.
Something is wrong.
The books spun, then steadied, and I flinched as the hot wine sloshed over my shaking wrist.
“Drink,” she advised.
I did, and the wine drove back the leaves from the corners of my vision but not from my mind. “I think I need some fresh air,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, and so I stepped past her, keeping my steps to a walk until I was through the doors. Only when I was sure she was out of sight did I break into a run, flying down the stairs and through the dark corridors until I was back in the kitchen, then the empty hall, and finally the stable. The open doors at the end framed the fading light, and I stumbled to a halt in the drifts, gasping down lungfuls of cold air.
A thorn for a thorn.
I would have preferred to be locked in a cell, I decided, staring at the roses rioting over the stone walls. I would have preferred to sleep on filthy straw and endure depravity after depravity, rather than this false freedom. I would rather have suffered at the hands of a brute, because that was knowable, predictable, and a simpler kind of fear. I would have preferred anything to the terror building slowly within me, along with gods knew what else. I pressed my bare hand into the snow, willing the cold to freeze away the throbbing pain.
I had imagined the rose moving in my hand. Hadn’t I?
I had imagined the ice covering the kitchen table.
I had imagined all of this, and soon I would wake up, damp and weak from fever, because this was the stuff of madness and fever dreams.
My tears froze on my face, and my hand began to itch and burn with cold. I tucked it under my chin, wary about bringing it too close to my heart. I did not want anything else taking root.
The shadows cast by the walls climbed the keep as the sun set. I shivered. This was a cold I had never endured. It stopped my breath and burned in my lungs, and when I tried to stand at last my legs were heavy with it.
Dread rushed back into the space the cold had vacated. There was hot stew waiting, and wine and a library and a warm bed— all the things another me would have cried out with joy to receive only a few days ago. I looked back over my shoulder at the snow, now turning blue with evenfall.
They said it was the gentlest of deaths. You felt warm at the end, and sleepy. It would not take long. I took a step back toward the drifts, and then a growl broke into my thoughts. I jumped, my heart forcing bloo
d back into my extremities. There was nothing gentle about being devoured. I tried to determine where the growl had come from, but all I could see was the settling dusk, and that the stable stood between me and safety. I hurried toward it. My eyes could barely make out the stone arches that demarcated the stalls, and I fumbled in my pocket for the flint I’d taken from the mantelpiece in my room as I felt along the wall for a torch, letting out a prayer of thanks when my hands found one.
It took several attempts for my frozen fingers to get a spark, and another several attempts before the torch lit. The light cast more shadows than it illuminated. When I was halfway to the door, I heard a yip coming from the next stall. I edged forward, holding my breath until I could peer around the edge of the stone. A pair of eyes caught the torchlight, and I made out the dark shape of the she-wolf hunched against the far wall and the handful of smaller shapes milling around it, mewling. Beneath the glowing eyes of their mother, I spotted glistening, bared teeth.
“Go no closer,” said a voice at my shoulder.
I almost dropped the torch.
The Huntress raised her arm, placing it gently but firmly between me and the wolf.
The pups mewled louder at the Huntress’s voice, a few bold ones attempting to cross the sea of straw and old bones between us.
“This way.” She stepped back, waiting for me to follow, but the light of my torch had just fallen on another mewling shape. This one was only a few feet from my boots, lying prone on the exposed stone floor. Its little chest rose and fell so slowly I was not sure it breathed at all.
“What,” I said, struggling to find my voice. “What about that one?”
The Huntress’s eyes, like the she-wolf’s, burned gold in the light of the torch.
“It is weak.”
“Is it going to die?”
She knelt beside it, pressing a finger to its muzzle. It barely stirred.
“Yes,” she said.
“And you’re just going to leave it?”
“The mother did.”
“But—” The pup tried to raise its head, belatedly recognizing the departed warmth for what it was.
“Life is cruel, and winter is crueler. The other pups will be stronger without it.”
It let out a high, thin sound.
I recognized that sound. It was the whimper that had been building in the back of my throat for a week now, full of desperation and bewilderment.
“No.”
I thrust the torch in front of me, moving before she could stop me, and scooped the pup up from the flagstones. The she-wolf let out a growl that threatened to rip muscle from bone, and I scrambled backward into the Huntress with the pup pressed against my breast.
The wolf held her ground.
I clutched the pup tighter to me as my heart knocked against the pup’s fragile rib cage, momentarily grateful for the strength of the Huntress’s body behind me, until I realized that she could feel the quickness of my pulse and the terror radiating from my pores. Animal instinct jerked me away, and I looked up into her face. She did not say anything, but her eyes wavered between green and gold.
The pup stirred enough to nuzzle my neck, and a grim certainty settled over me as its blunt muzzle searched along my jaw, the way it had in the weeks following my mother’s death when I’d woken from grief to find my younger sisters’ eyes glued to me from within their round faces, waiting for someone to tell them what to do now that the world had stopped ending and the sun was shining and the roses in my mother’s garden were again in bloom.
A pup might die somewhere, someday, but not this pup.
The Huntress watched me. Torchlight cast the queer shadows on her face I was slowly growing accustomed to, and I tried to block out the sound of rustling leaves. At last she nodded, turning on a silent heel and leading the way back to the kitchen.
She remained silent throughout most of the meal. I ate quickly, the pup curled up in my lap. Her fur, for the pup was female, was dark and dull, and her bones felt fragile as eggshells. My conviction flagged, and the strange rustling at the edge of hearing threatened to drive me mad. She was not as small as I had first believed, but still small enough that I suspected milk was the best choice.
I had no milk.
I eyed the soft chunks of meat floating in the stew and tore a small strip off to feed to the pup.
“No,” the Huntress said, green eyes lidded as she studied me with that quiet, unreadable look that I had seen so often in the eyes of her wolves over the past week.
“Then what should I do?”
“Give it here.”
She held out her hands and I passed the bundle of fur to her after only a few moments of hesitation. Its wormy little tail wagged as it recognized her scent, and I inched to the edge of my seat, ready to snatch it back at the first hint of violence.
Instead, she nestled it in the crook of one arm, took a bite of stew meat, and began to chew methodically, her eyes never leaving mine.
“I don’t—” I began, but then she put her mouth to the pup’s, and I fell silent. The tail wagged some more, and the blunt muzzle lifted. I watched with my stomach turning as the Huntress let out a fine dribble of chewed meat. The pup lapped at it, first tentatively, then vigorously, and the Huntress spat the rest of the meat into her hand.
Revulsion warred with hope.
“You are lucky,” she said, letting the pup nose through the brown slop. “It knows what solid food is.”
I refrained from pointing out that chewed meat was hardly solid.
“So it will live?” I asked. My hands twitched, ready to take back the pup.
“It might. It is still young for weaning, and it may never be as strong as its siblings. You will need to feed it every few hours, and chew the meat. The mother throws it up,” she added, perhaps sensing my distaste. She passed the pup back.
I stroked its skull, noting the round curve of the ears. “You will live.”
• • •
“Rub its belly,” the Huntress told me on the second day when she came across me trying to feed the pup more crudely chewed meat.
“Why?” I said, exhausted from a night of little sleep.
She knelt beside me, massaging the pup’s taut abdomen with smooth, downward strokes of her thumb. “Because it can’t eat if it hasn’t shat.”
Her head was bent towards the wolf, and I noticed the intricate knot that bound her hair at the nape of her neck. She smelled today of pine, not snow, and beneath the pine lingered a remnant of roses. My breath caught, and the world spun, then steadied, light frozen as it played over the smooth skin of her cheek.
“Here.” She took my hand, mimicking the slow stroke. The pup squirmed, flailing paws that seemed larger today than they had been yesterday, and tried to mouth my fingers with the beginnings of needle-sharp teeth. I let her guide me, and I thought inexplicably of Sara.
“Like this,” I had said, adjusting Sara’s position on the quill as she struggled to form letters on the scrap of parchment I had smuggled out of my father’s study.
“I feel like I’m going to break the damn thing,” she’d said, staring at the quill in her calloused fingers.
I felt that way now, touching the pup’s delicate skin, my eyes glancing off the Huntress’s lips. Nothing natural is that perfect, I told myself.
At the nape of the Huntress’s neck, tangled in that dark knot, I saw a flash of red. I reached for it, pulling my hand out of hers without thinking, and plucked the rowan berry from her hair.
She flinched at my touch, then stilled, her body taut, her breath silent. The berry rolled to the center of my palm and settled over the scar-that-wasn’t-a-scar.
“There was something in your hair,” I said in a voice so soft I barely heard it myself. She raised her eyes to look at my hand. It was the only part of her that moved.
The pup rolled over and began worrying the leg of my pants, but the Huntress remained kneeling, her eyes raised to mine, every muscle in her body tensed. I closed my hand slowly
around the berry, my own breathing so shallow it barely brushed my lips.
One moment she was beside me, and the next the air was cold and empty and she was gone, her long stride taking her out of the kitchen and into the keep. I rose, hoping the pup did not choose that moment to defecate, and scrambled for the stairs. She moved with a speed that was impossible to follow at a walk, and so I ran, my footsteps ringing against the stone until the sound forced me to slow. The last I saw of her was a flash of bright silver as she mounted another flight of stairs. I stopped at the bottom, panting. This was the other tower, the one with the candle that burned against all logic, and the stairs climbed up into darkness. I sat at the foot, the pup mewling from the unexpected abuse, and did not follow.
Her skin burned where the girl’s fingers had touched her.
Burned, and the cold did little to ease the pain of it.
The door was locked behind her, and the window was open, the ghost lamp burning near the sill. The roses bloomed around it in a white lake, save for the rose that ran through her veins, red as the blood of the wolves she could not save, redder than the blood of the men who’d died to avenge them.
How many years had it been since someone had touched her like that, thoughtlessly, without fear? How many winters had passed outside of this one while she paced the snows? How many springs?
The girl’s face floated before her.
She had a half-tamed, feral look to her. It was hard to picture her in a city somewhere, her hair brushed smooth and her eyes calm. The girl had too much of the mountain in her to thrive anywhere else, and yet . . .
The Huntress recognized that look. She had seen it in her own eyes, the last time she had looked in a mirror, however many lost springs ago that had been. Reckless, hungry, wild. A wolf in a cage.
She knew a thing or two about cages.
Freedom will bring you no joy, because the price of freedom will be the loss of one you cannot bear to lose.
“No more,” she said. A breath of wind rustled the rose vines, and she thought she heard the witch’s laughter. “No more memories. No more words.”
A rose for a rose, whispered the vines.
