The Northern Wind told Winter what he’d seen out on the tundra.

He braced himself for her howling, earth-splitting rage.

But Winter was already gone. She could cross entire ice fields in the span of a breath, and she was leagues away.

She found Hana’s body easily. The girl was dead, but a tiny spark had survived in the core of her, the last pinprick of heat in a cold hearth. You did not burn so bright for so long without such a spark. Winter didn’t know much about humans—the soft golden years she’d spent with Hana were only brief moments compared to all the millennia that had come before—but she knew that. She had seen that spark once or twice before in the kindest, warmest souls.

Winter, of the snowbank breast and icy dark heart, whose touch made green things wither with frost, knelt down beside Hana in the snow. She cupped Hana’s face in her hands and pressed her frozen mouth to Hana’s forehead. She let her breath fan out across Hana’s body.

In the purple dusk, between the snow and the rising moon, the spark in Hana’s heart flickered and flared.

Without opening her eyes, Hana sang:

“Dearest Winter, sweetest Winter,

I hear you knocking at my door.

I hear you whispering my name.

I hear your footsteps cross my floor.”

Winter took her hand.

Together they crossed the tundra to the Steorran Sea and fetched the medicine that would save Mama’s life. Together they crossed all the way back. Together they helped Mama drink the medicine, and they helped Papa when he broke his shinbone, and they helped sow the fields and tend the garden and reap the summer harvest for years to come. Winter still brought snow down to blanket the mountains, and she still brushed the barley and cabbages and all the wildflowers with her killing touch, but her heart had shifted. There was a darkness in death, but Winter knew from Hana that it wasn’t emptiness or shadows or the absolute black between the stars. Death was dark soil. Death was a soft and ancient womb.

After a great many years together, it was finally time for Hana to die. She was ready for it. She lay in her bed and waited. Her starlit heart burned steady.

Winter held her as she died.

Winter carried Hana’s body out of their house, past the garden and the barley fields. Past the river that had long since carried Mama’s and Papa’s ashes. Past the foothills and up into the mountains. She laid Hana down in a cradle of stone.

The mountains wrapped their arms around Hana.

They were one.

That persistent spark, all that was left of Hana, sank deep into the stone. It was not her, but it was the old ache of her. The bright of her. The spirit of her, which would glow until even the mountains died.

And Winter sang:

“Dark-heart lover, death-part lover,

Lay you with me in the snow.