Dedication

For Tiffany

May you always be a thorn in my side

She smelled it, sharp and bitter on the wind.

The pack smelled it, too.

Blood, and another smell— a smell she had not scented in years, not this far north. She padded through the woods; the pack ranged behind and ahead and to either side, white shapes against the blue-white drifts.

Tracks.

Fresh.

Leather, horse, lynx, wolf, elk, bear, sweat, blood, piss, ale, wool, metal, grain, smoke.

She raised her head, nostrils flared, turning from side to side for any sounds beyond the creaking pines.

There.

Downwind, but it didn’t matter. Not for this game. A faint jingle. A creak that was not bark on bark. A cough that did not belong to cat or elk.

The old hate quickened.

The pack tightened around her.

Red tongues lolled.

Breath steamed.

Winter bared her teeth.

Chapter One

Chapter One

They say the Huntress rides out when the sun is at its farthest and Winter has her jaws buried deep in the heart of the warm, green world. In the mountain valleys, they swear you can hear her hounds on the knife’s edge of the wind, howling down the peaks in a spray of teeth. The Huntress rides behind them mounted on a great white bear with a horn of silver and bone at her lips and a spear cut from the living heart of a mountain pine at her side. No beast can stand before her charge, and every northern child knows that the Huntress stalks the snows, looking for the lost, the unwary, and the bold alike.

So they say, and so the story wanders farther and farther from the truth as the seasons turn, save for the one place time doesn’t touch and cold preserves.

Her keep lies atop the tallest mountain, where the snow never melts and spring cannot bear to shine its yellow light, and the only thing that blooms on those chill stones is the white of the winter rose. They say the veins of that flower run red with heart’s blood, and that to pluck but a single blossom from that mountaintop is to bring the wrath of Winter herself down on you.

I would know, for I have felt the prick of those thorns.

•   •   •

My father came down from the mountain three days after my seventeenth birthday. I remember the smell of snow, and the dark needles of the pines lying stark and cool against the blinding white of the drifts.

His horse was more ice than hair when it stumbled into the clearing where our cottage stood, steam freezing in clouds around its muzzle and icicles clinking as it walked. Frost rimed my father’s beard, and behind him on a vast sledge were stacked the frozen pelts of wolves and elk and mountain lions, a lord’s ransom in winter fur.