“We thought you were dead,” he said again. There was an odd emotion there. Anger, maybe, or regret.

“I’m not.”

“Tell me where you have been then, and I will let you see your father.”

“Don’t you know?” I asked, looking from him to Juniper. “Didn’t my father tell you?”

The emotions wrestling on his face coalesced into something more familiar: disbelief. “The Huntress is a fairy tale.”

I had nothing to say to this. It had never occurred to me, not once in the time since I had been taken, that the villagers might not believe the story told by my family. “Your father came down from the mountain sick with madness. It happens.”

“Your father crossed the boundary, Avery,” I said, speaking the first words that came into my head. The crowd gave a collective hiss.

“No.” Avery’s face darkened. “My father respected the old ways.”

“Who do you think the boundary protects?” I nearly shouted. “Why do you think there is a boundary at all, or old ways, if not for the Huntress?”

“Say you’re right then,” he said, his voice tight. “Say the Huntress killed my father and my brother, as your father claims. Why did she release you?”

“Because—” I broke off, mind racing. Because she loves me, but that was not something I could say to the man who I was once to wed.

“How do I know you’re who you say you are, and not some trick?”

“Trick? Avery.” His name burst from my lips, and he flinched as if I’d struck him. “You can’t explain me away, Avery.”

The sounds of the crowd faded, and for a moment it was just the two of us. I remembered, with a twinge of regret, the small things Avery had done for me over the months I had known him. The carved wolf, the walks around the village where his pride in his home had soured to bitterness each time I looked down on what I saw with scorn.

“I’ve never been able to explain you,” he said, but I did not have time for what might have been.

“Rowan?” Aspen appeared at Avery’s elbow, her dark eyes wide. He placed a protective arm around her shoulders, and I couldn’t help staring at the swell of her stomach. Aspen. Pregnant. It didn’t seem possible, and I reeled as I understood what my mind had tried to tell me. I really had been gone a year, from one midwinter to another.

“You’re alive,” she said. Then she saw the wolf. Something flashed across her face too quickly for me to read, but I saw her place a hand on Avery’s arm with a deliberation that held meaning, even if I could not tell what that meaning was.

“How is father?” I asked her.

The expression that I could not read flashed again, and she frowned. “Dying. You’re too late, Rowan.”