The wolf did not return. I cast anxious glances back over my shoulder as I struggled to balance sword and bucket while also navigating thigh-deep drifts. It was in one such backward glance that I saw them. A few yards from the door, perfect and clear in the lightening yard, was a set of prints that did not belong to a wolf. I set the bucket down and edged closer.

The print was larger than my hand, larger than three of my hands, with long, dark gouges in the snow from impossibly long claws. I stared at the bear prints and felt my heart freeze over. No door could have withstood an assault from paws that size. Not the door to our house, not the door to the barn, and not even the door to the city gates that had closed shut behind me, forever altering the course of my life.

The tracks circled the yard, obscured here and there by a drift before retreating back into the forest. “Father,” I whispered into the cold, clear air. “What have you brought with you?”

•   •   •

My father slept most of the day, his skin hot to the touch and his eyes fevered. When we removed his clothes, we discovered three long gashes on his thigh that glared angrily out of his puckered flesh.

I didn’t mention the bear prints to my sisters, and I didn’t dare draw comparisons between the wounds on his leg and the claws in the snow. The wolf had been alarming enough. Instead, I ground herbs into a poultice and prepared more broth, taking a mental inventory of our larder and cursing the forebearer who had built the house out of sight of the village. I was not walking down that wooded lane.

The wolves returned that night. I lay awake long after my sisters’ ragged breathing subsided into the calm, measured breaths of sleep, listening to the mournful howls and the sound of my father coughing.

Tomorrow I would have to go in search of the village herbalist, and someone had to find Avery to discover whether his father and brother had returned by a different route. I had contrived to keep my sisters in the house for today, which was easy enough, given my father’s health and the bitter cold that had descended, and I had taken a broom to the prints near the door as if erasing them would erase their maker.

Tomorrow, the frozen bubble that had enveloped our house would burst, thrusting us back into the world.

Frost spread outward from the vase on the table, and the rose opened a new bud, the faintest pink visible in its veins. I gave it a wide berth. I was beginning to think there was something very wrong with that rose.