It did not get easier. The second day brought more snow, and the wind pushed against me, roaring up the mountain towards the keep and threatening to take me with it. The wolf’s ears lay flat against her skull, her eyes yellow slits between her lids. Each step cost me something, but by the end of the day neither the Huntress nor what awaited me in the village was at the forefront of my mind.

It was cold. There was no way I could light a fire in a storm like this, and so I burrowed under the sheltering branches of a pine, scooping out a hollow for me and the wolf. I forced myself to crawl back out once more, knife in hand, to cut pine boughs to lay upon the snow. They would at least prevent the ground from leaching the heat out of my body.

The smell of the needles sent a stab of longing through me as I lay with the wolf pressed against my back.

The storm continued into the third day, and again we stumbled down the mountain, the words of the Huntress echoing in my head. My three-day journey was nowhere near its conclusion. I could not see where I was going, and so I trusted to the wolf, hoping she had the sense to avoid triggering an avalanche or walking us off a cliff.

We found game by accident. I stepped on the rabbit, and its back broke beneath my boot. It must have been scurrying along some hidden tunnel, thinking itself safe beneath the snow, just like I had been before the old woman found me. I finished the job, then fed it to the wolf. I would have to make do with the dried meat in my pack, since there was no guarantee tonight would yield a fire on which to cook the rabbit and I was not hungry enough to eat raw meat quite yet.

I regretted the decision a few hours later. The snow slowed enough for a small blaze, and by dawn the sky had cleared and I roasted a few vegetables in the coals, softening a strip of dried meat in my mouth while I waited. I tried not to think about the meal I would have eaten back at the keep. In the howling darkness, free from the spell of the Huntress’s presence, I wondered if the food there was enchanted like the stories old women told about the forest fae who tempted lost children with feasts that lasted a thousand years and made the children forget where they had come from while their mothers wept over empty cribs. It was always the mothers who suffered most in those stories. The children seemed happy enough.

If only I had stayed away from the boundary, I thought, the dull ache in my chest spreading. If only I had stayed asleep.