“Oh,” said Crier, glancing down at herself. “Yes. I forgot.”

“Makes one of us,” said Ayla. Crier stared at her. “Come on, talk to me as you dress. It’ll keep you awake. It’s what my brother always made me do when I had nightmares and was afraid to sleep.”

Ayla began to help her dress, eyes averted, and for a moment, Crier was brought back to the days—less than a month ago—when Ayla had been her handmaiden. Had laced her into fine dresses, poured scented oils in her bathwater, braided her hair.

“What would you like me to talk about?” Crier asked, shaky.

“Tell me one of your stories,” Ayla said. “Tell me one that ends right.”

“What does it mean? To end right?”

“I don’t know. Just—happy. Or something close.”

Crier made a soft, considering noise. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Once, a very long time ago, when the mountains had just begun to sprout from the earth and the whole world was white with newborn snow, there was a girl called Hana who lived in a little wooden cottage with her mama and papa. Hana was a good and clever girl. She helped her mama chop wood for the hearth fire and sow the fields with barley, and her papa make bread and sweet jam. But the nearest village sat beyond a snow-choked mountain pass, and so Hana did not have any friends to play with. She was very lonely. She tried to play with Mama and Papa, but they were grown-ups and thus did not remember how.

One day, after Hana finished her morning work, she was overcome with a rush of such loneliness that it felt like an ice-prick in her heart. She sat below a white birch and let her tears fall to the snow, and quietly she sang:

“Sister Winter, Sister Winter,

Will you let me sing for you?

Will you join me with your reed pipes?

Can we play like children do?”

Hana didn’t know it, but Winter was watching from nearby. She could hear the soft little pulse at Hana’s throat, taste the salt of Hana’s tears. Winter was not softhearted, but something about the girl’s song burrowed its way inside her snowbank chest and stayed there. Winter closed her eyes and made the Northern Wind sing alongside Hana. A cold, howling duet.

Hana laughed. The Northern Wind laughed with her.

And Winter, who could take any form, turned herself into a little girl, and she crept out of the woods and sat with Hana under the white birch, and that was that.

Years passed.

Winter was a monstrous friend.

Oh, sometimes she was good. Sometimes she was a girl who played and laughed and would dance all night to amuse Hana and Mama and Papa. Sometimes she kept their fields unfrozen, their garden green till solstice. But sometimes Winter stumbled through the doorway, clutching a ragged cloak in both hands, shaking fresh snow all over the floor. Sometimes she stretched gracelessly before the hearth fire, bony limbs akimbo, and sneered at the fire, and the yawning hearth, and the snow-damp firewood heaped in a corner. The chimney, cobbled together from bricks of black mud. The ax. Sometimes Winter made herself at home and stayed for months. Those were bad times for Hana’s family. Winter never let the snow melt, not even in summer. There was so much ice caked onto the ground, so much permafrost, no lukewarm summer could touch it. For months, the sun was nothing but light: pale, watery light, refracted by the frost-bowed trees, flung in strange patterns, scattered glass-like across the snow. Winter was beautiful and terrible, always both at once.