Part of bookkeeping, my father had explained to me as a child, was seeing patterns. It was not enough to add neat columns of figures. A good bookkeeper could see stories in the numbers, just like a poem. A dishonest bookkeeper could tell stories with those numbers, making them lie, but there was an art to that, too. I wondered, my hands tracing a petal, if the answers I had sought about the Huntress had been waiting here the entire time. My mother’s roses had been nothing like the roses that grew around the Huntress’s keep. They were lush and warm and inclined to brown and die in winter, instead of breeding ice, but my mother was an ordinary woman. No magic ran in her veins, and yet . . .

“Why do roses symbolize love?” I had asked my mother one morning as I watched her pruning back the canes. She sat on her heels, pulling off one of the thick leather gloves she wore to protect herself, and showed me a scar.

“Love is beautiful, like the rose,” she said, still staring at her hand. “It blossoms with care, but requires tending. There are many different types of roses, just as there are types of love. Some large, some small, some fragrant, some merely decorative. There are roses that bloom by the sea in poor soil, and those that need rich soils and gentle climates. But the real reason that roses symbolize love is right here.” She had brushed a thorn with her bare finger, letting it dimple her skin.

“Thorns?”

“Indeed. You are too young for romantic love, but think about Aspen.”

“I hate Aspen.” Aspen had, earlier that day, pinched me hard enough to leave a bruise.

“You love your sister; you don’t hate her. But she is hard to love sometimes, isn’t she? Love is like that. Beautiful, intoxicating even, but sharp as broken glass. You must handle it as you would a rose. Gently, knowing when to prune and when to water, and you must never grasp a cane too tightly, or it will cut you.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“Love can be terrible.”

“But you love father. Is he terrible?”

“Your father is a wonderful man, Rowan. But you can love someone wonderful so much it hurts, just like I love you. And you can love someone terrible.” She had pulled me close and kissed the top of my head, and I had lost interest in the subject.

The words came back to me now with a wave of fierce grief. My mother’s garden, the thorn in my palm, the Huntress’s briars, her story about the winter rose— they were all connected somehow, only I wasn’t clever enough to see it.

Cold.