Snow fell. I welcomed it, because snow dimmed the light of the world and muffled the sharp edges, sounds fading, even the feel of the earth lost beneath countless feet of snow. The wolf led; I followed. That first night, heat from the fire melted the snow on the overhanging branches of a nearby pine, and then it froze again, dangling from the boughs in long teeth of ice. They brushed against me every time I stood to fetch more wood.

Winter still has her teeth.

The fire did not warm me. I stared into it instead and remembered.

My mother died one morning in early autumn when the leaves in her garden had just begun to turn and the rosehips were still firm and tart and not yet ripe for picking. The wasting illness had stripped her bare, until the woman in the bed was nothing more than a whiff of perfume, a memory of passage, the essence of a life distilled into paper-thin skin and too-large eyes. The only thing the sickness left her was her voice.

“Take care of them, Rowan. You must be strong, and you must believe that I am with you always. There will be days where you will want nothing more than to run from the weight of your strength, but you must learn to bear it because that is what it means to grow up. I had hoped to spare you that a little longer.”

She had squeezed my hand, and the fierceness of her grip surprised me.

“Mothers are not supposed to have favorites, but you will always be my firstborn daughter, and there was a time when I loved you more than anything else in the world. You must love your sisters now for me and forgive your father, for he is a good man, but he does not have your strength.”

I had tried. I had given them all I could, but I had run from it in the end, just like my mother had warned me I would.

A stick fell, sparking, and I shielded my eyes against the light.

She would have understood, I thought. She too had fled from a life she hadn’t wanted. She had left the village of her birth to live in a city by the sea, carrying only the cutting of the mountain rose she’d planted in a stranger’s garden. That she had come to love that stranger did not make her choice any easier, or the risk any less great.

Now my father was dying, and the only thing that would save him from himself was my forgiveness.

The wind roared through the trees. I listened for the howl of wolves, but only the branches of the pines replied. I bit down hard on my cheek and on my disappointment. For all the pain it would have caused me, I had not wanted the Huntress to let me go.