by Anna Burke
“I’m cold,” I said, hoping she mistook the shaking in my voice for a different kind of need.
“Here.” She lay back down beside me, pulling me against her.
I continued to shake, but this time with the effort of keeping my heart inside my body. She ran her hand down my arm the way I had seen her stroke a wolf, or the bear, and I bit my lip against the longing that followed her touch.
I am sick with cold, I tried to tell myself. I did not come back for this. I came here to escape Avery.
The denial lasted all of another heartbeat as I lay, trembling, seeing stars behind my eyes and hearing the quick draw of my breath as she swept her fingers over the curve of my shoulder and down to my wrist, then up, careless, unaware of the desire spreading from her fingertips like fire.
I wanted to turn, to feel her hands on the tips of my breasts, on my lips, on the smooth skin of my stomach and the hard line of my collarbones, but I didn’t dare with my heart so close to hers and winter still gripping my marrow. I lay there until the last shudder of desire faded, and the world went soft around the edges as warmth, real and lasting, flooded me like wine.
“Tell me about the roses,” I said from the center of this new, warm world.
“You’ve never heard the story of the Winter Rose?”
“No.”
A wolf rose, stretched, then flopped back down on the floor.
“Would you like to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said, remembering with a twinge that was almost bittersweet the contempt I’d felt for Avery’s stories.
“In the mountains, we believe that the Earth was born in Winter. Everything was cold and dark, and the sun only rose for a few hours each day, too weak to manage much else. Winter might have been beautiful then, and she might have been cruel, but there was no one there to see or feel, and so instead she was just lonely. She watched the Sun coming and going and asked him one day why he didn’t stay.
“‘There is nothing for me here,’ he said to her. And so Winter thought long and hard about what she might do to keep him in her skies. First, she made the North Wind. She was a powerful thing, and for a time her company was all that Winter wanted. Eventually, however, she remembered why she had breathed the North Wind into life, and so she sent her daughter on a journey far across the world, to see if there was anything that caught the Sun’s attention. The North Wind was gone a long time, and Winter began to worry until her daughter returned one day just after sunset.
“‘I have watched the sun for a year,’ she said to her mother, ‘and nothing pleases him.’
“This grieved Winter, and Winter’s grief cut the North Wind to the quick, for she loved her mother.
“‘The Sun is warm,’ she said at last, trying to cheer her mother up. ‘And you are cold. Perhaps if you make something warm, the Sun will stay.’
“Winter thought about this, and at last saw the wisdom in her daughter’s words, and so she created the South Wind. The longer the South Wind blew, the longer the Sun stayed in her sky, and Winter rejoiced, for the Sun loved her and she loved him. Together, they made Summer, and life bloomed across the world.
“But as life grew, Winter faded, and at last she realized the terrible truth. The Sun’s love burned too hot, and if she stayed with him, she would die. So, Winter made a pact with the Sun. For the sake of their child, they would part, and Sun would visit Winter for only a short time each year. The children Winter bore in these times were Spring and Fall, and Winter loved them, but she was not happy, for the time passed too quickly and she never saw Summer again.
“The North Wind stayed with her, for she was Winter’s first daughter, and the most loyal, but her mother’s sorrow made her bitter and cruel. One day, tired of grief, she blew into the heart of Summer and plucked a rose from her bosom to bring back to their mother. The rose should have died, but the strength of the North Wind’s conviction froze death, and so it bloomed, spreading across the ice, Winter’s only living memory of her lost child.
“Now, a northern woman who is beautiful and unattainable is called a Winter Rose,” the Huntress finished, “and mothers who have lost children leave carved figurines where the winter roses grow in midwinter, sharing their grief with the season.”
I looked up. Her hair fell around her face, but the firelight shone through, and the shadows it cast were dark and wild.
“Is that why the roses follow you?”
“No,” she said, and the bitter smile that twisted her lips told a story that I was no longer sure I wanted to hear. “You should sleep, Rowan.”
“Wait,” I said, fighting to keep my eyes open. I had decided to stay here, out in the snows, with a woman who I knew so little about, it wouldn’t have filled a half page of one of her books. “Tell me your name.”
I had almost given up on the question by the time she replied.
“Names have power, Rowan. Not power like this,” she touched my bandaged hand, “but still, power. What is your name to you?”
“My name? It’s just a name, I guess. Who I am.”
“Your mother named you Rowan?”
“Yes.”
“And your sisters, Aspen and Juniper. We call those trees the mountain sisters.”
“I know.”
“Your friends in the city by the sea called you Rowan.”
“Yes.”
“All of that is a part of your name.” She paused. “The woman I was, before. I don’t want to remember her. Or the people she lost.”
“And her name would be a memory,” I said.
“Yes.”
I burrowed deeper under the furs, struggling to decide how much to say. “I understand, I think,” I said at last. “There have been plenty of times these past few years where I would have given anything to be someone else. When my mother died, or when we had to flee the city, and especially when I realized that my father planned to wed me to some boorish villager who didn’t know one end of an abacus from another. It’s funny now, that that seems like the worst of it all.”
“A marriage is a lifetime.”
“My father was going to trade me. I was the price of our new life, of his stupid furs, of the house that I found at the bottom of my mother’s inheritance, and it didn’t matter what I wanted. I told Aspen and Juniper that it would be okay there. I promised them we would be happy, and then we got there and they fit in, and it was only I who hated everyone. I tried. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. It all seems so stupid now.”
Something warm and furry clambered over the furs and pounced on my face. A hot, wet tongue bathed my eyelids, and I struggled to free my ear from needle-sharp teeth as the pup whined her enthusiasm for my return.
“I let a boy die once before I became the Huntress, simply because he irritated me. Everything is relative.”
I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at the Huntress. The pup licked my nose with an impossibly long tongue, then flopped down on my chest to chew a spot on her leg, apparently content once more with her world.
“How did he die?”
“I took him on a hunt. He was green, and the hounds found a bear.”
I flinched at the thought of the wounds on her back. I did not want to talk about death. “How are you healing?”
She sat, turning so that I could see her shoulder. Her skin had knitted over the gashes, and beneath the translucent flesh the rose still grew, green and black and white, like some sort of queer tattoo. I raised a hand to touch it, but the pup pounced at the movement, wrestling my wrist back down to my chest and growling fiercely.
“Let’s take a look at that hand before she chews it off.” The Huntress peeled off the bandage, and I looked away, not wanting to see the damage or what lay beneath the cuts. “There are advantages to magic, if you can learn to live with it,” she said.
I looked.
A rose bloomed at the center of my palm, but unlike the roses on the walls, this one was blood red, and the skin around it was almost totally healed. I touched it tentatively. S
kin, not petals, met my fingertips, but I heard the rustle of leaves.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, because it was, no matter what else it meant, no matter what else it would bring with it. I held it up to the light, transfixed. When the pup lunged again, I batted her away without pain.
“Your pup is growing,” said the Huntress.
“Yes.”
“She’ll be ready for her first hunt soon.”
I looked from the red rose to the gold of the pup’s eyes in her black face, and wondered at the strangeness of it all. “You said she should have died.”
“She would have, without you.”
“You said she would only breed more suffering.”
“She might. Or she might not.”
I smoothed the fur on the pup’s face, thinking of bears and elk and all the dangers of the wild that she would face as she grew. I would be helpless to save her, then. “I am not a green boy,” I said, an idea forming in my mind. “Take me with you, next time you hunt.”
She placed a hand on my cheek, turning my face toward her, and searched my eyes for a long time. I did not know what she saw, or what, indeed, she was looking for, but when she let me go she nodded.
Outside, a wolf lifted its muzzle to howl.
She lay with the girl in her arms long into the cold, dark blue of the night. Past the roof, if she closed her eyes, she could see the stars: the Hunter with his bow striding across the heavens, the Great Bear foraging along the crest of the mountain, and the Wolf prowling the horizon. They looked down at her out of glittering eyes.
She knew what they saw.
In the violet sprawl of the heavens, she felt the earth shift beneath her, the ice thinning, a hint of thaw breaking free from the snow to blow over the lake, redolent with long-dead leaves and moss.
She wanted to run.
She wanted to stay.
She wanted to hold this girl like this forever, winter stretching into eternity in a long breath of frost while Rowan’s dark hair brushed the Huntress’s cheek.
“Freedom will bring you no joy,” the witch had said.
She did not want freedom.
This was enough, this small moment, this brief promise of respite from an ache she had not thought to name till now.
I will teach you to hunt, she told Rowan in the quiet of her mind. I will show you the beauty of my wilds, the glory of the heights, and then you will not leave me.
Chapter Thirteen
The Huntress led me down a spiral staircase near the stables, holding a torch.
“Are you taking me to your dungeon?” I asked, only half joking. I hadn’t explored this part of the keep for a reason, I didn’t want to encounter anything large and hairy that might dwell here.
“Not quite. In here.” She opened an iron-bound door into a room that smelled of steel and leather. My jaw dropped when she held the torch aloft. The room was ringed with rack after rack of weapons: swords, shields, bows, arrows, spears, axes, knives, and other things I didn’t have a name for.
“You could raze a village with this,” I said in a hushed voice.
“We did.”
She walked to the far side of the room and ran her hand across a row of spears, selecting a tall, narrow-shafted length of bright-tipped ash and tossing it to me. I caught it. The wood felt strange beneath my fingers, more like metal or bone than branch.
“You need a spear for larger game. An arrow will only irritate a bear or boar unless you get it in the eye, and you can defend yourself against almost anything you’ll find out there with the shaft. Come here.”
I obeyed, stopping before the wall of bows. The Huntress selected a few, measuring them against my height with a critical eye before selecting a smaller bow made of some sort of dark polished wood.
“You don’t need a longbow, and it would take months, maybe years, of work before you could draw it. This is a hunter’s bow. It will bring down a deer or a rabbit easily enough, and it won’t take up as much room when you’re not using it.”
The bow’s grip felt strangely comforting in my hand. The only weapon I had ever handled was my father’s sword, and never with his permission. My father drew the line at arming his daughters, and my mother hadn’t lived long enough to argue the matter. She would have known how to shoot, I realized, tracing the leather of the grip with my thumb. Any mountain girl knew how to kill and skin a rabbit. That was considered a useful skill, unlike reading, as Avery had been quick to point out. I tightened my hold.
The Huntress found me a quiver, bowstring, archer’s glove and guard, and a whetstone before leading me back to the surface. I tried not to trip over the spear on the steps, but the butt clanged a few times, emphasizing just how much more quietly the Huntress moved than I did. I watched her boots in the spaces between clangs.
Something was different.
No.
Everything was different.
I had awakened to find her gone, with only the wolf pup keeping me company. Her chambers were larger than mine, but not as large as some of the abandoned rooms of state I’d wandered through on the days I’d spent alone here. She made her bed in a sea of furs, and the usual hunting tapestries hung on the walls, but the room still had the feel of a servant’s quarters despite its size. It was only as I was leaving, dressed in the clean, dry clothes she’d laid beside the bed for me that I realized where I was. This was the room above the stables, where the master of horse might have lived, or the mistress of the hunt. It provided easy access to the stalls below and overlooked the courtyard, giving the occupant a full view of the castle’s comings and goings, but it was not the sort of room a chieftain’s daughter might have lived in. The more I thought I learned about the Huntress, the less I knew.
She had not spoken of my brush with death again. I’d wandered down to the kitchen, my heart lodged too fully in my throat to eat, only to find her waiting in her hunting leathers. Neither of us acknowledged the tenderness she’d shown me the night before.
“Put these on,” she told me now in the courtyard, handing me the gloves and guard. “We’ll start with the bow.”
I tugged the arm guard on over my wool shirt and fumbled with the glove. It was in need of oiling, but fit relatively well once I got it on. I watched the Huntress out of the corner of my eye as she hauled an old target made of sacking and aged straw out of the bowels of the stable, trying not to remember the feel of her skin against mine.
“Any idea how to string a bow?” she asked me when she returned.
“You put the loop over the end.”
“Try it.”
I secured the string to the nock on the lower limb of the bow and tried to bend it.
“Stop.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Brace the bow against your boot, or it will slip.”
I tried again. It was hard to concentrate with her standing so close to me, but I managed to bend the bow enough to slip the bowstring into place.
“Good. Here.”
I took the arrow she offered and nocked it, preparing to draw.
“There are two ways to shoot a bow,” she said, moving her hand down my arm to adjust my grip. “The proper way, and the necessary way. We’ll start with the proper way.”
She raised my elbow as she spoke, then turned my body perpendicular to the target.
“Widen your stance,” she said, and there was no way to convince myself I was not acutely aware of how little space separated her lips from my ear. I moved my foot back, which brought me up against her body.
“What’s the necessary way?” I asked, to keep myself from thinking.
“The way you’ll shoot in the woods. Pull back with your first two fingers and sight down the shaft toward the target. When you’re ready, release.”
She stepped away from me, and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. The target seemed very far away from the tip of the arrow and my arm shook with the effort of the draw.
I missed.
“Now watch me.” The Huntress plucked th
e bow from my hand. She nocked and released before I could blink, the arrow hitting the target with a thunk. Then she shot again, and again, standing, kneeling, and once, lying in the snow. Each time, the arrow found its mark, and when she turned to me at last I recognized the gleam in her eye for what it was: joy.
“Now, watch as I do it the proper way.” This time, she stood as I had, with her feet squared beneath her shoulders. She released three arrows in quick succession, then slowed for my benefit. “Do you see?”
“I think so.”
“You learn how to walk before you run, but you won’t always have time in the woods to perfect your stance. Or the space.” She handed the bow back to me.
“How long did it take you to shoot like that?”
“I learned to ride a horse before I could walk, and my mother gave me the hilt of her dagger to teethe on. I was born to the hunt, Rowan. Do not compare yourself to me. Try again. This time, breathe through it, and find the target with your eye as well as the arrow. Your body knows what to do.”
I am not sure I trust my body, I thought as she adjusted my stance again, the length of her leg touching mine. What would she think if she could see my thoughts?
I bit my lip and released. This arrow was closer than the first, and I tried to concentrate on that instead of the dull ache of anxiety that had taken root in my bones. What I felt for the Huntress seemed natural enough to me, but this was not the city, where women could live together without judgement unless, of course, they were the daughters of wealthy merchants with dowries the size of ships. I was also mortal. Whatever the Huntress was, however human she had felt beside me, there was something in her that was too wild to be mere flesh and blood and bone.
I had heard the stories told by sailors about women possessed of unearthly beauty who sang to passing ships from rocky shoals, luring captains to their deaths, and mermaids who seduced men before they drowned them. Henrik had even told us stories about women farther north who wore the skins of seals. If a man stole their skin while they were bathing, he said, the women would be trapped on land forever. Every seafaring culture had stories about dangerously beautiful women, and in each the lesson was clear: beauty killed you.
