by Anna Burke
Days turned into weeks turned into months.
She had not kept track of time when the witch first brought her world to ruin, and there had been no point afterward. There were no seasons to mark the year, only winter, endless and unchanging and as familiar as loss. Time was inconsequential. She had so much of it.
But years had passed, for all that she did not know how many. The keep provided her with what little she needed, the cellars never quite running dry, the garden never quite giving up, and the scent of baking bread never quite abandoning the ovens. There had been a time when she hated the witch for those small mercies. Each was a reminder that the body she wore was human, and each tied her, albeit loosely, to a life she longed to forget. In time, the hatred too had passed, turning into a bitter gratitude that she tried not to think about, just as she ignored the passing of the years while she herself remained unchanged.
Now, though, the days lined up behind her like a silent army, grim and determined, secure in the knowledge that their numbers gave them the advantage.
Rowan was mortal.
The years would steal her, little by little, and the happiness she’d found would blow like snow away over the mountains. The rose had rooted, and blossomed. So the witch had promised.
These thoughts only came to her in moments like these, when the north wind howled and clawed against the shutters, calling for her and raging when she did not answer. She could not, not with Rowan sleeping in her arms, not with death so close already. She could only wait for the night to pass and dawn to bring Rowan back to her, free of ghosts and curses, the light promising only the sweet, sharp taste of joy.
Chapter Sixteen
A twig snapped somewhere in the frozen forest. I knew the difference now between the crack of frozen sap and the careful tread of game. The wolf crouched beside me. Her ears swiveled, listening to something out of the range of my own hearing, and I watched her watch the woods, relying on her stronger senses.
She no longer bore any resemblance to the scrawny sack of fur and bones I had scooped up off the stable floor. Her shoulders came to my hip, still smaller than her siblings, but larger than any dog I had ever seen. White frosted the black fur around her ruff, and her muzzle was darker than shadow, a sharp contrast to the gleam of teeth beneath.
I checked the string of my bow. We had been tracking a herd of deer for the better part of a day, and the Huntress was somewhere over the next rise with the rest of the pack. I had circled back to startle them into flight, driving them down the slope and into the jaws of the waiting wolves. I stepped carefully, avoiding a deep drift, my muscles hard beneath my furs and my breath coming easily even in the frigid air. I heard only the crunch of snow beneath my boots. I followed the low plume of the wolf’s tail as she trotted through the trees after a scent far too faint for my nose to detect. I knew some of the smells of these woods. There was the sweet musk of deer, and the heavier scent of elk. The raw eye-watering stench of bear, and the harsh odor of wildcat urine. At the edges of these scents hovered the clean, clear smell of snow, and the peculiar difference between snow, running water, and ice.
And roses.
I hesitated, raising my face to the wind. The boundary was close; I had not realized we had come so far, but then again, the boundary did not seem to obey the laws of nature as I understood them.
The wolf’s hackles rose. I breathed the air in through my nose, trying to catch wind of the source of her alarm. The smell of roses was heavier here, and sure enough as we padded over a ridge, I saw the hedge rise into view.
We both froze.
There were no deer, over the ridge, but something moved. It took my eyes a long time to remember the shape. The creature looked so awkward, shuffling through the snow with its mottled pelt and its strange burden. Each step was clearly a labor, and it eyed the hedge with grim determination. Something stirred in the back of my mind, crawling out from the place where I had shoved such things, buried under the weight of snow and fur and the Huntress’s body, burned away by cold and moonlight and the warm red glow of the hearth, and drowned by the sound and fury of the storms that shrieked over the peaks.
The old woman crouched over her pack, unloading it into the shelter of the briars. She was careful, excruciatingly careful, her every move slow and steady as she kept her body clear of thorns.
I crept down the hill, keeping to the shadows of the trees and trusting the snow to hide the sound of my passage. The wolf kept pace. I wondered if she could smell my fear, or if the stench was trapped beneath my furs. This was the first other human being I had seen since I was taken. I tried to remember how long ago that would have been. The effort hurt. I remembered the pup, but not when she had grown. I remembered her first kill: a rabbit, white of fur and dark of eye, but not when she had made it. I remembered the Huntress’s hands, guiding my own along the bowstring, but I did not remember when the bow had become an extension of my arm, or when reaching for an arrow had become easier than reaching for a word. The rose in my bloodstream stirred. I was used to that now too.
I should speak to her.
The thought made me tremble, and I could not stop the shaking. I put my hand on the wolf’s shoulder for support and stepped out from behind a tree.
She saw me. The hedge rose between us, but it was thin here and seemed to part before me the longer I stared at it.
“Lady,” the woman said, sinking to her knees and bowing her head.
I did not know what to say. I stared at her bowed head, wrapped in a thick, woolen scarf, and felt the icy walls I’d built up around my memories of home begin to thaw. Terror gripped my stomach. I needed those walls.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. The words felt thick on my tongue.
The woman looked up. She was older than my father, her skin the brown of ripe acorns and wrinkled from too many years in the sun and cold. “Remembering,” she said. Her eyes were Lockland blue.
“Remembering what?”
“Many things, child. Many winters.” She gestured to the ground before her, and I looked at what she had brought. Small bundles of sticks, almost doll-like, bound with scraps of cloth or bits of hair, lay in the snow. I recoiled.
“What are they?”
“The memories of others. I bring them here on midwinter.”
“Why?”
“Because that is my job, child. I carry the memories of the dead so that the people in my care may set them aside.”
“You are a hedgewitch.”
“Of course. This boy here,” she said, lifting a small figurine wrapped in a bit of green ribbon, “died of fever a fortnight past. The winter dead belong to the mountain.”
I remembered the story the Huntress had told me about the significance of the winter rose to mothers.
“Why did you call me lady?”
“You belong to the mountain. It pays to be respectful.” She gave me a shrewd look and pulled out another wooden bundle. A strip of yellow silk clothed its chest, and something about the color made my throat go dry.
“Who is that one for?” I asked.
“This is for a man whose body has outlived his soul, his daughters say. He was a merchant once, proud and powerful. Now he sinks deeper and deeper into madness, speaking only of roses. His daughters begged me for help, and I will tell you what I told them. This man will never forgive himself. His heart already belongs to the mountain, and he will die before the spring unless he can find a reason to live.”
“A merchant?” The world went gray, then yellow as the silk.
“Yes. A merchant with three daughters, though only two remain to him. I have brought this here in the hopes that some small mercy might be granted him.”
Father.
“What of his daughters?”
“One is married, the other still too young to wed.”
“Who did she marry then?”
The hedgewitch placed the figure on the snow and gave me a smile with too many teeth. “You know his name, child.” She turned to go.
“Wait,” I screamed after her, but she did not, and her hunched form faded into the forest while the roses whispered and the life I’d chosen shattered like glass.
My father was dying. Madness, the witch had said, but I did not think it was madness. Guilt, perhaps, and grief, one too many losses piled up on his broad shoulders. He had been quietly breaking since my mother’s death, diminishing, fading, desperation turning him into a stranger. Now he feared his eldest daughter dead or worse, and he had given up at last while Aspen married Avery to keep the family fed and Juniper. . .
I had to return.
I had bought myself time, here in the wilds, but I had been a fool to think I could escape forever. My family needed me, and perhaps my presence would give my father the strength he needed to survive the winter.
And if not?
I gazed at the roses, seeing another casket, another time. If I could not save him, then I had to see him. I had to say goodbye. I had to tell him I forgave him, even if he couldn’t forgive himself.
Then I would return to the Huntress.
The wolf turned her head to look me in the eyes, and there was a message there that I could not read and was not sure I wanted to.
Something shifted. The wolves were restless, and there was a strange edge to the air.
Rowan should be back by now.
A strange coppery taste filled her mouth, and she recognized it for what it was: fear. The girl could have met anything in the forest, stumbled upon a bear, or a lynx, or . . . The scent of roses flooded her nostrils, drowning out all else.
No.
The Huntress dropped her spear and ran, racing toward the boundary and the end of everything.
She found Rowan on her knees, staring into the thorns.
“I have to go,” she said, and the Huntress listened to the story that spilled from the girl’s lips, a torrent of words rushing like meltwater.
The Huntress closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her lids, she heard the sound she had been dreading since she followed an old man down the mountain to a tiny cottage on the edge of Locke’s old land. It was barely audible, more of a hush than a noise, a whisper of a whisper, the sound the wind makes before it starts to blow. It was the sound of a single petal falling.
She saw a body on the spring grass, roses red as blood across a broken chest.
“The price of freedom will be the loss of one you cannot bear to lose.”
The pieces fell into place.
“Go,” she told Rowan, gathering the girl into her arms. “Go to your father.”
She could not have designed a better trap if she had been given a century to think on it. If she refused to let Rowan go, the girl would grow to hate her over time, and the ending would be the same. She would lose her, just as surely as she was about to lose her now.
“I will come back,” said Rowan, tears in her eyes. “I will come back to you. I swear it.”
The Huntress kissed her. She tasted like spring and rain and roses, not the cold white roses that surrounded them, but the heady smell of wild roses blooming along hedgerows, heavy with summer, and the ponderous, many-petaled heads of the roses grown in the gardens of the wealthy, overflowing with abundance.
“I will be here,” she said, forcing herself to let Rowan go, forcing herself to smile. She removed the bundle of food she’d packed for the hunt from her belt and pressed it into Rowan’s hands. “This should last you. It is only a three-day journey on foot. Follow the slope of the hills, and bring the wolf. She’ll keep you safe.”
“Thank you,” Rowan said, kissing her one last time.
The Huntress turned away. She couldn’t stop Rowan, but she did not have to see the hope flare to life in the girl’s dark eyes. She did not have to see the reflection of her breaking heart.
A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.
Rowan might return, but the Huntress would be gone, the curse at last unraveled.
Chapter Seventeen
Snow fell. I welcomed it, because snow dimmed the light of the world and muffled the sharp edges, sounds fading, even the feel of the earth lost beneath countless feet of snow. The wolf led; I followed. That first night, heat from the fire melted the snow on the overhanging branches of a nearby pine, and then it froze again, dangling from the boughs in long teeth of ice. They brushed against me every time I stood to fetch more wood.
Winter still has her teeth.
The fire did not warm me. I stared into it instead and remembered.
My mother died one morning in early autumn when the leaves in her garden had just begun to turn and the rosehips were still firm and tart and not yet ripe for picking. The wasting illness had stripped her bare, until the woman in the bed was nothing more than a whiff of perfume, a memory of passage, the essence of a life distilled into paper-thin skin and too-large eyes. The only thing the sickness left her was her voice.
“Take care of them, Rowan. You must be strong, and you must believe that I am with you always. There will be days where you will want nothing more than to run from the weight of your strength, but you must learn to bear it because that is what it means to grow up. I had hoped to spare you that a little longer.”
She had squeezed my hand, and the fierceness of her grip surprised me.
“Mothers are not supposed to have favorites, but you will always be my firstborn daughter, and there was a time when I loved you more than anything else in the world. You must love your sisters now for me and forgive your father, for he is a good man, but he does not have your strength.”
I had tried. I had given them all I could, but I had run from it in the end, just like my mother had warned me I would.
A stick fell, sparking, and I shielded my eyes against the light.
She would have understood, I thought. She too had fled from a life she hadn’t wanted. She had left the village of her birth to live in a city by the sea, carrying only the cutting of the mountain rose she’d planted in a stranger’s garden. That she had come to love that stranger did not make her choice any easier, or the risk any less great.
Now my father was dying, and the only thing that would save him from himself was my forgiveness.
The wind roared through the trees. I listened for the howl of wolves, but only the branches of the pines replied. I bit down hard on my cheek and on my disappointment. For all the pain it would have caused me, I had not wanted the Huntress to let me go.
It did not get easier. The second day brought more snow, and the wind pushed against me, roaring up the mountain towards the keep and threatening to take me with it. The wolf’s ears lay flat against her skull, her eyes yellow slits between her lids. Each step cost me something, but by the end of the day neither the Huntress nor what awaited me in the village was at the forefront of my mind.
It was cold. There was no way I could light a fire in a storm like this, and so I burrowed under the sheltering branches of a pine, scooping out a hollow for me and the wolf. I forced myself to crawl back out once more, knife in hand, to cut pine boughs to lay upon the snow. They would at least prevent the ground from leaching the heat out of my body.
The smell of the needles sent a stab of longing through me as I lay with the wolf pressed against my back.
The storm continued into the third day, and again we stumbled down the mountain, the words of the Huntress echoing in my head. My three-day journey was nowhere near its conclusion. I could not see where I was going, and so I trusted to the wolf, hoping she had the sense to avoid triggering an avalanche or walking us off a cliff.
We found game by accident. I stepped on the rabbit, and its back broke beneath my boot. It must have been scurrying along some hidden tunnel, thinking itself safe beneath the snow, just like I had been before the old woman found me. I finished the job, then fed it to the wolf. I would have to make do with the dried meat in my pack, since there was no guarantee tonight would yield a fire on which to cook the rabbit and I was not hungry enough to eat raw meat quite yet.
I reg
retted the decision a few hours later. The snow slowed enough for a small blaze, and by dawn the sky had cleared and I roasted a few vegetables in the coals, softening a strip of dried meat in my mouth while I waited. I tried not to think about the meal I would have eaten back at the keep. In the howling darkness, free from the spell of the Huntress’s presence, I wondered if the food there was enchanted like the stories old women told about the forest fae who tempted lost children with feasts that lasted a thousand years and made the children forget where they had come from while their mothers wept over empty cribs. It was always the mothers who suffered most in those stories. The children seemed happy enough.
If only I had stayed away from the boundary, I thought, the dull ache in my chest spreading. If only I had stayed asleep.
On the fourth day, I came across the road. Ruts from logging teams turned my ankles beneath the snow, but I welcomed the pain. Where there were roads, there were people.
The clank of trace chains warned me of their presence long before they saw me. A woodsman and a young boy whom I took to be his son walked behind an old dray horse hitched to a log. The horse caught the wolf’s scent and shifted nervously, tossing its head. The wolf, for her part, took on a stalking stiff-legged curiosity that should have served as a warning to me, but did not.
“Which way is Three Elms?” I asked, stepping out from the trees with my hand on the wolf’s hackles.
The man shoved the boy behind him, fumbling for the crossbow dangling from the harness hames.
“Wait!” I put myself between him and the wolf, cursing my own stupidity. “I’m lost. I mean you no harm. Three Elms?”
He pointed down the road, his hands still gripping the weapon, and as I nodded my thanks I saw him make the sign against the evil eye. My shoulder blades prickled for a long time, waiting for his bolt to land. “I should not have brought you,” I told the wolf.
