by Anna Burke
“The hedgewitch says she’s weak.”
“But what about her wolves? Her bear? Even weak, she’s still a match for Avery.”
“He won’t be alone.”
“And neither will she. I have to go.”
“Or stay,” Aspen pleaded. “Stay with us, help us with Father, and when this is over maybe you’ll be free.”
The rose inside me unfurled, spreading its petals wide. I would not be free. I would never be free again if Avery killed her.
“Love is like that. Beautiful, intoxicating even, but sharp as broken glass. You must handle it like you would a rose. Gently, knowing when to prune and when to water, and you must never grasp a cane too tightly, or it will cut you.”
“You don’t understand,” I began, but Aspen cut me off.
“I do understand. This woman killed my husband’s family and stole my sister. She has you under some sort of spell, Rowan, and I will not let you go out there to die.”
“You didn’t exactly seem happy to see me.”
“You don’t know how you looked, standing there in the snow in these furs with that wolf at your side. I thought you were her. I thought that if Avery realized he had been wrong, he would go after her, and I would lose him too.” She stopped, tears welling in her eyes. “I was right.”
“Aspen,” I said, placing my own hand on the swell of her womb. “If you love him. If you love me. If you want this child to have a father, then let me go.”
“He told me to keep you here where you were safe.”
“The Huntress will kill them. What if the witch is wrong? What if he is marching right into a trap? The witch told me the curse, and it isn’t clear what happens to the Huntress once it’s broken. It doesn’t say anything about weakness.” I took hope from my own words. “Even if one of them manages to put a spear in her, which I doubt, the rest will die. Her wolves will tear them to pieces, and her bear will break their bones like twigs. What they don’t eat, the snow will bury, until the only thing left of the Locklands is the baby in your belly, and for all I know she might come for him too.”
Aspen wrapped her arms around her middle. “And she’ll listen to you?”
“She will.”
“But Avery won’t.” Her eyes darkened with resolve. “I’ll come with you.”
“Aspen, you’re pregnant. You can’t be out there, and you don’t know the woods like I do.”
“I won’t slow you down,” said Juniper, speaking up for the first time. “Avery might not listen to me, but Bjorn will.”
“Bjorn?” I asked.
“Her betrothed,” said Aspen, looking thoughtful. “He is close with Avery, but he’s nowhere near as pigheaded.”
I hesitated. Juniper was only fourteen. Too young to be married, and way too young to be climbing these mountains. They had already claimed me and condemned my father. I couldn’t put Juniper at risk.
“Besides,” Juniper said, sounding smug, “you won’t be moving as quickly as you’d like, what with a black eye and bruised ribs. You might need me.”
“You could get hurt, or worse.”
“If Avery dies, Bjorn dies too. I lose either way. Let me help.”
I didn’t have time to argue. Every second that passed brought Avery closer to the Huntress and, for all my words, it was not Avery I was worried about. The Huntress was only one woman, and there was an urgency to the whisper of the thorns that set my teeth on edge.
“We need to leave now.”
“There’s a problem,” said Aspen, biting her lip. “Big Tom’s guarding the door.”
“Who’s Big Tom?”
My sisters gave me a look of disgust so achingly familiar I nearly smiled.
“Did you pay attention to anything in this village?” Aspen asked.
“Or, you know, open your eyes?” Juniper shook her head at me. “Big Tom is the butcher’s son, and he’s about seven feet tall and built like an ox, only he’s not dumb like one.”
“So why didn’t they take him with them?”
“He hurt his leg pretty badly a few weeks ago, but even with a limp he’s still more than a match for the three of us.”
“Juniper, can you get us some food and some warm clothing for yourself?”
“This is my room, so the clothing part is easy. I don’t know about the food.”
“Try. We’ll only get one shot at this. I also need you to find out where they put my bow.”
Juniper nodded.
“Now.”
When the door shut behind her, I turned to Aspen.
“Are you going to kill Tom?” she asked me.
“No.” I held a hand to my head to try to stop the ache. “Does he trust you, Aspen?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would he come if you called for help?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then do exactly as I tell you. And trust me.”
Aspen’s shriek would have sent me running if I’d heard it, and it worked on Big Tom. The door crashed in with a groan and a spray of splinters, followed by one of the largest men I had seen in my entire life. My hand spasmed on the knife I held to Aspen’s throat, and she gave a very real whimper as it nicked her exposed skin.
“Stop right there, or she dies,” I said in the best snarl I could manage, given that the sight of Big Tom’s thick neck and bulging muscles had turned my legs to water.
“You wouldn’t hurt your sister,” Tom said, taking an impossibly long stride toward us.
I jerked the knife, forcing Aspen’s head back.
“Stop,” Aspen said in a croaking voice. “Please, Tom.”
Tom paused, eyes darting back and forth between us.
“You’re right, Tom,” I said, trying to sound unbalanced. It wasn’t as difficult as it should have been. “I won’t kill her. But I’ll hurt her. Badly. And then I’ll call for my mistress, and whisper your name into the snow.” He blanched. “Unless you let me go.” I watched his face as he processed this, and felt a twinge of empathy. Tom looked like the sort of man who feared very little, thanks to his size, but magic was something else entirely.
“I can’t,” he said, steeling himself. “I can’t let you go.” There was a heaviness to his voice.
“Please, Tom,” said Aspen.
“I can’t let her send a warning.”
“You idiot,” I said, shoving Aspen away from me as roughly as I dared. Tom caught her, and in the moment of space that bought me I reached for him. The vines were ready. Tom screamed as they wrapped around his throat, and I ducked out of the room before anyone else came running.
Juniper waited in the hallway. She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the back of the lodge. “There’s another way out,” she said, ducking through a smaller door that led directly out to the woodshed. “And now we have to run.”
I clenched my jaw against the pain in my body and sprinted over the packed snow and into the trees.
The bear was gone.
Her hand slipped on the axe, and it bounced, nearly clipping her in the face as her body failed to compensate. She had blown her horn, calling the Hounds and the bear for the hunt, and the bear had not come.
Fish swam below.
She watched them, the axe forgotten as the lake ice bit into her knees.
The bear had come to her with the first snows, lumbering out of the drifts like something from another age. She remembered the feel of its fur, thick enough it nearly swallowed her arm to the elbow before she found the slab of muscle underneath.
Where it had come from or who it had been she had never known and never asked, not that the creature would have answered. It hadn’t mattered. Unlike the wolves, the bear did not age and mate and whelp and die. She was like the Huntress— unchanging, elemental.
Gone.
A drop of water fell on the blade of her axe.
She closed her eyes, loosing another tear as the wind blew across the ice, bringing with it the smell of rain.
Chapter Twenty-One
De
scending the mountain had been treacherous. Every exposed slope was an avalanche waiting to happen, and the cold stole in, weakening healthy muscles and promising peace and warmth and death.
Ascending was ten times harder.
Juniper was right about the bruised ribs. Every breath of frigid air hurt, and I had to lean on her from time to time to ease the ache. Soon, though, everything ached. The incline was relentless, and I had not eaten well since I had left the keep. Game was scarce outside the boundary. What little food Juniper had packed might have to last us days, and she had not had time to find my bow.
I missed the wolf. She had not returned, and I felt her absence like another ache. I also missed her jaws. Even a mouse or shrew would have been welcome.
Juniper looked like she felt little better than I did by the end of the first day. I might have been more bruise than muscle, but at least my body was used to navigating deep snow. What I could see of her face beneath her scarf was grim with determination, and she was more than happy to let me build the fire when darkness fell.
“How far?” she asked as I melted a little snow over the fire for us to drink.
“Far.” I didn’t have the energy to say more. We stared into the flames, too exhausted to sleep, and let feeling creep back into our fingers and toes.
“Why?” Juniper said just as I was nodding off.
“Why what?”
“Why did you wait so long to come home?”
“I was a prisoner, remember?”
“Aspen said you told father you belonged there.”
I watched the fire, trying not to relive the memory of the Huntress turning away from me, the sweep of her shoulders hunched and broken. “You should sleep, Juniper.”
She curled up against me, and I waited for her shivers to subside before I let myself drift off, checking and double-checking that the fire stayed lit.
I dreamed of a high mountain meadow, where a cool, earthy breeze swept up from the lowlands and meltwater trickled down from the peaks. In the center of the meadow stood a white horse. There was something vaguely familiar about it, and as I stared, dazzled by the sunlight, I saw the body at its hooves. I knew, with the certainty of dreams, that I had to get to that body, but my feet were tangled in a snarl of thorns, and they bit deeper with each step I took, ensnaring me further in the briars.
I woke in a cold sweat to add more branches to the fire. The wind had picked up in the night, and the flames guttered low even in the sheltered bowl I had scooped out for us from the drifts. Above, the stars burned with the peculiar brightness of early morning. I thought of how much brighter they would be from the top of the mountain, with the sweep of the lake beneath me and no fire to dim them, and bit back a sob.
The second day was harder than the first. The slopes were steeper here and the snow higher. Last night’s wind had swept the drifts back into the trail broken by the Locklands, and we had to force our way through with none of the comparative ease of the day before. Each excruciatingly slow step heightened the growing sense of panic that had haunted me since last night’s dream. We were not gaining on the Locklands. If anything, we were falling behind, and the roses straggling through the snow had a wilted, damaged look to them that suited my mood. I formed ice balls in half-frozen hands to throw at adventurous squirrels but missed each and every shot I took. Juniper’s harsh, rasping breath pressed too loudly on my ears.
“Breathe through your nose,” I told her, straining to hear anything beyond the sound.
“I can’t. It’s clogged.”
I tried to bury my irritation and missed another shot at a squirrel. I did, however, find his cache of acorns, which looked like the worst of the tannins had been leeched out of them. Roasted nuts would give us strength.
“What are we going to do when we get there?”
I looked up from the meager meal I’d laid out to thaw before the fire. Juniper’s eyes watched me expectantly, wide and dark and young.
“Try and talk Avery out of it,” I said, looking away.
In truth, I had no idea what we were going to do if we caught up with Avery. I didn’t think he would listen to me, and I didn’t think Juniper’s Bjorn would make much of a difference, either. The Huntress had laid most of Avery’s family in the ground. I didn’t see much hope for a peaceful resolution.
“You know that isn’t going to work,” Juniper said, calling my bluff.
“We have to try.” I gave the fire an overly vicious stab.
“Do you have to save her?” She spoke in barely a whisper, but the accusation was loud and clear. An ugly silence descended. “Why?” She asked, finally. “Is it the magic?”
“No.” An owl hooted in the distance. The sound emphasized the gulf between me and my sister, and I felt the miles of wilderness stretching out around us to either side.
“I don’t understand. She kidnapped you. She killed people, Rowan.”
“I know.”
“Then why?” she asked again, her face incredulous.
A gust of wind tossed the pine boughs over our camp and dislodged a fine mist of snow. I raised my face to it, letting the cold burn against my cheeks and listening for the distant cry of wolves. The wind carried only its own howl, however, and did not blow away Juniper’s words.
“I love her,” I said, the sound of rustling rose leaves rising to a cacophony. “I love her, and I left her, and now everything is falling apart.”
• • •
There was something wrong with the roses. I grew more certain of this with each passing day. My feet crunched on fallen petals, frozen into perfect, translucent shapes that bloomed the palest of pinks against the snow. Had they ever dropped their petals before? I could not remember. We should have neared the boundary by now, but all I saw were the roses that had followed me down.
Juniper trailed behind me, speaking only when necessary and watching me out of eyes that seemed to take up half her face. She was hungry and angry, and I held the blame for both. The bitter taste of resin and bark filled my mouth. Bitter, but better than nothing, and I knew we had to save the last of the bread and sausage in her bag for the return.
“You should go back,” I told her again, pausing to let us catch our breath. “You have enough food to get you home if you follow the hedge, and it will be easier going downhill.”
She shook her head.
“Please, Juniper. You’ll be safer there.”
“You were screaming in your sleep last night,” she said, surprising me.
The dreams of spring came every night now, and every night I failed to reach the body in the meadow.
“I’m sorry for waking you.”
Juniper shrugged, then pushed past me.
“Catch your breath,” I warned her. “You’ll need it.”
Ahead of us rose a forbidding stretch of white wasteland that I remembered from my descent. Far up it, clinging to the white like little black ants, struggled a line of tiny figures. I knew from my time with the Huntress that distances in the mountains were deceiving. Avery and the rest of the villagers could be a day ahead of us or more. They had the luxury of taking turns breaking trail, and more food besides. I squinted. They were moving carefully, and with good reason. It was no coincidence that I remembered that stretch.
“Look.” I pointed, and Juniper followed the line of my hand in time to see a wall of white break away from the cliff, sending up a cloud of snow and setting off a rumble that we could hear from here. The figures were far enough away to escape unharmed, but an avalanche was a bad sign. If one part of the slope was unsteady, the rest could be, too, and half a mountain of snow had just filled the small valley between us and the trail. Juniper took a step toward me, forgetting her anger in fear.
“Are we safe here?” she asked. Plumes of snow were still rising into the sky.
“We’re not safe anywhere out here. That’s why you should go home. I shouldn’t have let you come.”
“You don’t get to let me do anything.”
“We�
��re never going to catch up with them in time. Go back and tell Aspen we failed.”
“No.”
“You know what we’ll find if we’re too late, don’t you?” I asked her. “Death. You don’t know what she’s capable of. What her beasts are capable of.”
“Or maybe we’ll find her body, and the bodies of her beasts. You don’t know what the Locklands are capable of, either.”
I flinched at the cold fury in her voice, and at the images her words conjured.
“Or we’ll be lost out here and die of cold and hunger,” I said. “We’ll have to go miles out of our way now, and we could lose their trail entirely. Nobody will find our bodies, I promise you that, except the crows and foxes.”
“You should never have come home.” Her words echoed Aspen’s.
“You’re right. It was so stupid of me to want to save my father. I’m a terrible, terrible person for daring to think that I could bring one bit of good into this goddamned awful world.”
“Go on. Feel sorry for yourself. I tried that for a while too after you were taken prisoner.” Juniper crossed her arms over her chest, sneering the last word.
“I was a prisoner.”
“Were you? Then why are you running back to your jailer?”
“Because life isn’t simple, Juniper. Shouldn’t you have figured that out by now? Marriage isn’t simple. Love isn’t simple, no matter what Bjorn may have told you.”
“You don’t get to talk about Bjorn. You want them all dead.”
“I don’t want anybody dead. That’s the point. I don’t want Avery to kill the Huntress, and I don’t want the Huntress to kill Avery. I don’t belong in that village, Juniper, but that doesn’t mean I hate them.”
“You never even tried to belong.”
“I was the price father was willing to pay for your belonging. We’re merchant’s daughters. That means we’re goods, whether we want to be or not. Look at me, Juniper. I never wanted to marry Avery. You know that. He knew that. But Aspen loves him. Who knows? She might find happiness once this is all over, which is something I could never have done with Avery. I didn’t mean to fall in love with the Huntress. I didn’t mean to be happy. I didn’t want to wake up one day and realize that the only time in my life I have ever really felt free was when I was trapped in an enchanted castle.”
