by Anna Burke
She could feel the burden of all those years now, pulling her down into the stone. All that kept her alive was the magic that still lingered in the roses, and that too was dying.
Rowan, she tried to say, but her lips refused to move, and the wolf whined deep in her throat.
You are free now, she thought, looking into those golden eyes. Free to be what you have always been.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The halls were empty. My wolf paced beside me, sniffing at the cobwebbed corners, and I broke into as much of a run as my aching joints could manage.
“Where is she?” I asked the wolf as I tried to think. My mind was still fogged with cold and sluggish, but the answer rose out of that blank wasteland unbidden: the room at the top of the tower. The room that had remained locked throughout my entire stay, no matter how many times I asked the Huntress what was behind its door.
I ran.
The stairs went on and on and on. I crawled toward the end, my nails digging into the stone while the last of the dying briars whispered around me. Too late, they said, petals of ice melting on the steps as I came at last to the locked door. I pounded on it, the jolt sending spikes of pain up my arm and into my shoulder. There was no answer from the other side, but I could smell the cloying scent of decaying flowers.
The rose.
I pressed my palm against the iron, and the sound of the lock tumbling into place as a tendril of vines tripped it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
No carpet graced the floor of the room beyond the door, and no tapestries adorned the walls. Instead, the entire room was hung with vines, and the floor was thick with drying petals. In the center, curled around each other like a pair of nesting birds, lay the Huntress and the alpha female of the pack. The wolf raised her head when I entered.
“No.” I fell to my knees beside the Huntress and placed a hand on her shoulder. It was cold to the touch through the wool of her shirt, as was her cheek, and her chest rose and fell with the barest hint of life. “No,” I said again, louder this time, and the sound went on and on, pouring out of the open window and over the lake where Avery and his armed mob waited to kill the woman who lay, nearly dead already, in a flood of roses. She did not move. I lifted her shoulders into my lap, cradling her head in my arms, and stroked her thick dark hair. “No. You can’t leave me.”
Her lips were pale and cold. I kissed them anyway, willing life back into her body. Nothing happened.
Shouts echoed from somewhere within the castle, and I heard the heart-stopping roar of the bear. Avery had arrived. I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was that the Huntress was dying.
“Rowan?” Her eyelids fluttered open, the green of her irises like a slice of spring.
“I’m here,” I said, my voice breaking.
She raised a hand to touch my face.
“You came back.” Her voice was clear, like running water, but faint.
“Of course. Did you doubt it?”
Her smile broke my heart all over again.
“I was always cursed to lose you.”
“She believes she understands the curse, but she only sees what she fears,” the witch had said.
“You’re wrong,” I told the Huntress. “Can’t you see that? I’m here. I’m right here, Isolde.”
“Are you?” Her eyes searched my face. “I’ve seen too many ghosts since you left.”
“Tell me what to do. Tell me how to save you.”
“Hunt. Remember me when the first green comes. Watch the first spring fawns. Listen to the birds.” She turned her head to the window. “Smell the damp soil on the breeze and walk through fens still cool with snow. Feel the sun warm the rocks in the high passes, where the mountain lions den and the eagles nest. Look down on the valleys and you’ll understand. We were the eagles. We were the lions. We fell on them because they were below us, so far down they didn’t even look real. She was right perhaps to curse me for that, but you should have seen us, Rowan. We were wild. We were . . .” She shuddered again, and I held her closer. “We were wrong. All flesh, all blood, all teeth and bone and grace.”
“It’s in the past now,” I said.
“The past is everything.”
“I’m here. Don’t you see? That means you didn’t lose me. That means there is still a future, and nothing in the curse said you have to die for your sins!”
“Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t.” The tears came faster now. “Just tell me how to save you.”
“You already did.” Her breath caught, and I held mine until she breathed again. “I love you. I loved you from the moment I saw you, even though I knew it meant this. You’re worth a thousand springs.”
“You can’t die,” I commanded her.
“I am the winter rose,” she said. “And the roses are dying.” Her face tightened with pain, and she turned her head away from me. Another shudder shook her, and this one lasted longer than the others. The room spun as I remembered the feel of thorns spreading in my veins.
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. You can’t leave me. I came back.”
Footsteps pounded on the stairs and the white wolf rose, hackles up. I ignored her. It didn’t matter. The Huntress’s heart stuttered underneath my hand, flickering, fading, gone.
Snarls echoed against the stone, followed by screams.
“Stand aside,” said Avery Lockland.
I looked up from her body through eyes blurred with tears. Avery stood in the doorway with blood seeping through his clothes and briar scratches on his face, a bloody hatchet in each hand. I did not see my wolf.
“Move, Rowan.”
I shook my head. I was waiting for the reassuring thud of a heart against ribs, and it wasn’t coming. Avery took another step, his eyes flicking around the rose-strewn room. Then he saw the woman in my arms, and he froze.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said.
“She’s dead?” Disappointment twisted his face. “She can’t be dead. She was mine to kill.”
“Go,” I told him. “Go back to your village before you kill any more of your neighbors. Go back to my sister and your child. Treat them well, Avery Lockland, or I will rip your throat out with my teeth.”
Avery laughed. There was blood in his beard.
“You? You can’t hurt me if she’s dead. Step aside, Rowan. I’m going to bring her head back and mount it on my wall, right next to her wolves and that thrice damned beast of a bear.” He raised an axe as he spoke, his eyes narrowing, and struck me across the face with the butt. I flew backward, skidding through the roses, until I lay with my face on the cool ground. The room tilted, then righted. Avery raised his axe again. He did not see the white she-wolf behind him, but I did, and I cried out as his downward swing missed the Huntress and took the wolf in the side, but not before her jaws closed on his arm. The crack of breaking bone split my ears, and Avery screamed.
The wolf growled, once, but then her jaw slackened, and she slid to the ground with his axe buried deep in her rib cage. Her eyes found mine. I held them, gold and black, huge as harvest moons, until they glazed over with death and the sound of Avery’s ragged breathing filled the air. I pushed myself up to stand unsteadily on legs that desperately wanted to fold beneath me.
Avery let his broken right arm fall and raised his left. The blade glinted in the light from the window, arcing high above his head.
“No.” The voice was mine, exploding from my chest, but the words were not. “You will not strike that blow, Avery Lockland.”
Avery froze. I would have frozen, too, except my lips kept moving.
“It is done. The price has been paid. Your debt is settled. Go back to your greening hills and leave this place.”
“I will leave. With her head.”
“You will leave, and if you are lucky, you will get to take your own head with you.”
“Who are you to threaten me, girl?”
I walked towards him, each step shaking but certain. “I am Wint
er, boy, and I will slaughter you like a spring lamb.” A gust of wind rushed through the window, stirring up small whirlwinds of rose petals. They settled on the Huntress’s body like a shroud. With the wind came a smell that made my chest ache anew. Rain. A clap of thunder shook the tower, but within me ice hardened, the power that had sustained the Huntress through her endless winter flooding into me.
“Rowan?” His arm shook with the effort of holding the axe and beads of sweat dripped down his face.
“Walk away, Avery Lockland.”
He brought the axe down. Time slowed, frost blooming over my skin while rain began to fall outside the window. The Huntress lay between us, her face turned toward the rain and her dark hair spilling over the roses like black blood. Around her the briars stirred. Thorns rustled against each other as the vines shot across the floor, climbing up Avery Lockland’s legs and sinking into his flesh. The axe fell from his hands and bounced harmlessly off the flagstones as blood streamed from a hundred punctures. When the thorns reached his throat and face, he screamed. I left him there. He would live, which was more than I could say for the wolf at his feet, but I did not believe in vengeance anymore. Nothing undid death.
I crawled to the Huntress, collapsing beside her. “You said you put a curse on her to save her,” I said to the witch, wherever she was. “How is this salvation?”
“Poor child.” The witch’s voice rumbled with the strength of mountains. I did not look up. I heard her stoop to place a hand on Avery, and his ragged breathing calmed beneath her touch. “I had to know if she could ever love, and the surest way to measure love is loss.”
“No,” I said, resting my head against the Huntress’s cool cheek. “There are other ways. You could have just asked me.”
“She was willing to give up everything for you.” The witch’s words fell on my ears like a whisper of frost.
“And now you’ve taken everything from me.”
“Have I?” She knelt on the Huntress’s other side and placed a gnarled hand on her breast. “This is not death, child. She is merely feeling her mortality. She may yet die, though, without your help.”
“I’ll do anything.”
“Would you give up your own life?”
I looked up into her eyes, and what I saw there was colder than the water of the lake. “Yes.”
The witch considered this. “You would not be the first to die for her,” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“She would never forgive you for making such a choice.”
“I don’t care,” I said, the words turning into a shout.
“But I do not want your life, child.” The witch smiled to herself as if this should have been obvious. “A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn. Haven’t you been paying attention?”
Understanding blossomed before me.
I placed my hand on the Huntress’s chest as I had done to my father, only this time I did not send out vines. The Huntress’s back arched as the thorn pierced her heart, and I felt the whisper of the leaves rise into a storm that broke over me in a torrent of white-hot pain as the rose left me to take root in the Huntress’s breast. I collapsed beside her, my hand sliding onto the hard ground, empty, with not so much as a scar to mark where the magic had been.
“Where the winter rose takes root, it grows, and its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear,” the witch said, patting the Huntress on the shoulder. “That is what I told her, but people never pay attention to semantics. What she held dear then was power and her own arrogance, things she could not hold onto and still love you.” She rose, her joints creaking. “It gets tiring, always being right, in the end. But you see? I gave her the means to save herself, and perhaps her kingdom, if she still wants it.”
“She might have learned that on her own.”
“She might have, at great, great cost to others.”
“What about her Hounds?” I asked, my eyes straying to the dead wolf. “You punished them for her crimes.”
“That was part of the price she paid for power. They do not seem to have minded too much, however.”
My wolf limped into the room as she finished speaking and lay down against my back to lick her wounds. “Who are you?” I asked, at last, feeling the Huntress’s chest rising and falling slowly beside me.
“I am just an old, old woman.” The witch picked up one of the faded petals and held it between two fingers. “But perhaps now I will become something else.”
The petal fell, and I blinked. Where the witch had stood, I saw a young woman, with hair as fine and black as silk.
My jaw fell open.
“There is a king on the other side of these mountains in need of a lesson,” she said, and I heard the memory of a cackle in her lilting voice.
Then she was gone.
“Rowan?” The Huntress stirred. She looked just as she had before, only less bright somehow and more real. Her eyes remained the same piercing green, but they were human— human and alive and full of wonder. I burst into tears, unable to speak.
“I don’t understand.” She held her hands up to the gray light. A bolt of lightning flickered outside.
I stopped trying to speak and flung myself on top of her, letting her arms wrap around me while I tangled my hands in her hair and pressed my lips to her cheek, then her neck, her collarbone, and the spot between her breasts where a single red rosebud lay, already fading. The sound of her beating heart filled my ears, and she tilted my face up to hers and kissed me hard. The world faded to a small round room at the top of a tower, where spring had come at last.
Epilogue
They say the winter rose still blooms, up there on the highest slopes, where the winter storms scour ice and snow into the shapes of beasts and the tops of the mountains scrape the stars. Some say the Huntress died that day. Others say that she lives on, stalking the snows as she always has, looking for the lost, the unwary, and the bold alike, and that the stories that came down from the mountains that spring were what they’ve always been: stories.
This is what I say. I say the Huntress still rides out, but her horn no longer calls ice down from the cold high places, and the briars that surround her keep no longer bloom in the snow. I say that her halls are no longer dark and empty, but filled with life and laughter, and that the only magic that still lingers is so old we’ve forgotten that it is magic at all.
I would know.
Avery had a change of heart once he woke from whatever spell the witch had placed on him. Perhaps he understood, at last, that we were not responsible for the choices of our fathers, or, more likely, he never quite forgot how near he came to death at my hands at the top of that tower. He returned to Aspen, and their child was born that spring, a blue-eyed, red-faced, squalling baby boy.
My father shed years like old rags when Aspen laid his grandson in his arms. This turned out to be both blessing and curse, for as soon as he recovered his strength and wits he approached me with a plan. Surely the Huntress, now that she was freed from the clutches of a curse, would be interested in opening a line of trade. The furs she could bring from the upper slopes would fetch a fortune in the city, and now that she was mortal, she would need an income. Perhaps a marriage, too, could be arranged, both for myself and for the Huntress. My father knew many wealthy men.
She did not kill him, and neither did I, but he did not suggest marriage or furs again.
A few of the wolves stayed past the breaking of her power. The bear did not, and the Huntress watched her leave with a faraway look that I tried not to take personally, just as I learned to respect her occasional silences, and to expect that some mornings I would wake alone to find her gone, sometimes for a few hours, other times for a few days, and once or twice in the coldest months for weeks on end. There are different kinds of freedom. Each has its price.
The seasons passed. My pup grew gray hairs. The Huntress complained, every so often, of mortal maladies, her voice laden with indignation, and one summer I awoke in
the middle of the night to a harvest moon so large it threatened to break open upon the peaks like a giant egg.
I slipped out of the keep and down to the shores of the lake to watch the moonlight spill out over the water. Footsteps, light and sure, followed me some time later, and neither the Huntress nor I spoke as she sat on the rocky shore beside me. I leaned my head against her shoulder and felt the certainty of happiness like a mortal wound. It was almost too much to bear, and yet we sat there, silent, two wild things caught in a moment of stillness that stretched out over the water like a held breath.
I say this, too.
Winter misses her. There is an agony to the way the winds howl around the keep in the darkness of the year. I think sometimes of the story of the winter rose, and I can almost believe it to be true. As for the Huntress, for all her longing for spring, for all that she loves me and I love her, there is an emptiness that will never leave her, a loss that runs as deep as the roots of these mountains. Sometimes I feel it too. Sometimes I think that there is a part of me that will always be frozen, a shard of ice lodged in my heart where a thorn used to be that a thousand, thousand summers will not melt.
A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.
Acknowledgments
This is a fairy tale. Specifically, it is a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and a great many talented writers have been here before me. I read as many retellings as I could under the guise of research for this book, and what I found gave me hope. In almost all of these retellings, it was not beauty that defined Beauty, but bravery. So here’s to strong heroines, the writers who write them, and bravery in all its forms.
Much deserved thanks go out to the crew at Bywater Books for bringing Thorn together, and to Ann McMan, mentor and graphic designer extraordinaire. I am also lucky to have three phenomenal readers who are also exceptionally talented individuals in their own rights. Alessandra Amin, Stefani Deoul, and Karelia Stetz-Waters, as usual you rock.
