On the fourth day, I came across the road. Ruts from logging teams turned my ankles beneath the snow, but I welcomed the pain. Where there were roads, there were people.

The clank of trace chains warned me of their presence long before they saw me. A woodsman and a young boy whom I took to be his son walked behind an old dray horse hitched to a log. The horse caught the wolf’s scent and shifted nervously, tossing its head. The wolf, for her part, took on a stalking stiff-legged curiosity that should have served as a warning to me, but did not.

“Which way is Three Elms?” I asked, stepping out from the trees with my hand on the wolf’s hackles.

The man shoved the boy behind him, fumbling for the crossbow dangling from the harness hames.

“Wait!” I put myself between him and the wolf, cursing my own stupidity. “I’m lost. I mean you no harm. Three Elms?”

He pointed down the road, his hands still gripping the weapon, and as I nodded my thanks I saw him make the sign against the evil eye. My shoulder blades prickled for a long time, waiting for his bolt to land. “I should not have brought you,” I told the wolf.

We stayed in the woods after that. It felt safer, and for all that the road was familiar it was also strange to see it cutting through the trees after so many weeks of unbroken forest. The woods were free of people, at least, and the snow lay heavy on the ground. Something about that bothered me, but I couldn’t place it, and I was too hungry to care too much. Game animals made themselves scarce this close to the villages and I was out of food.

We were on the trail of a pheasant when the woods opened before me, catching me off guard. I stopped at the edge of the clearing, my eyes wide as they took in the sweep of yard and the dark wood of the barn. Past the barn, past the well with its mound of snow, stood the cottage. It looked just as it had when I had left it, only without smoke in the chimney. No light escaped through the cracks in the shutters, and nothing stirred in the barn. The wolf sniffed the air once, then trotted over the snow, leaving large canine prints behind her. These too unsettled me, until I realized that I was standing where the wolf had stood the day I looked up from the well and saw the yellow eyes and white fur of Winter’s hounds.

“And now I’m back,” I told the silent clearing. The words felt even hollower than they sounded.