“After . . . after you left, Father went mad. That’s why no one believes him. He wouldn’t stop talking about roses and bears and a woman with a bone-white spear. Aspen tried to tell Avery the truth, but he didn’t want to listen. Aspen says he’s afraid of the truth. It was . . . it was easier after a while to forget what we saw and just go along with him.”

“What does he believe then?”

“He believes his father and brother were killed in an avalanche, and that Father was hit in the head. He believes you ran away to the city afterward because without Father nobody could force you to marry him.”

I might have done, I thought. “They crossed the boundary and killed the Huntress’s Hounds.”

Juniper looked at me like I, too, was crazy. “I don’t know what the Hounds are,” she said, her eyes beseeching me, “but Avery says that no one here would ever cross the boundary, which is why it could not have been the Huntress.”

“He called her a fairy tale. How can he not believe in her but believe in the boundary?”

Juniper took a deep breath. “Because if his father crossed the boundary, then that means it was his father’s fault he and Avery’s brother died, and his fault that you were taken, and Avery can’t accept that.”

“But you remember,” I said, reaching for her hand. “You remember the truth.”

“Of course I do.” She trembled. “I will remember it as long as I live. How did you get away?”

“She let me go.”

“Why?”

“I met an old woman in the woods. A hedgewitch, I think. She told me father was sick, and so the Huntress let me come back.”

Juniper gave me a wary look.

“She just let you go?”

“She’s not a monster, Juniper.”

“She killed people and stole you away from us because father picked a flower.”

“She—” How could I explain what the Huntress was, or why she had done what she had done, to someone who did not know her?

“Avery says that if the Huntress really did take you, then you must be bewitched.”

“I’m not,” I said, thinking of the rose in my palm.

“He said you wouldn’t know it, if you were. Don’t you see? Why else would you return, almost a year from the day you were taken?”

“Because the old woman told me father was dying. Do you think I’m bewitched?”

“I don’t know. I am so happy to see you, Rowan, but it feels too good to be true. Just like the dreams I had right after mother died, and then I’d wake up, and she’d still be dead. What am I supposed to think?”

“That I’m your sister,” I said, grasping her shoulders in my hands and looking her in the eyes. “And that I’m back.”