What she would give to see a different flower. What she would give, still, to lay Rowan down in a field of budding clover, with the sun hot and high above them as she lifted Rowan’s shirt and kissed the soft curve of her stomach, the breeze soft and gentle and free of any memory of ice. What she would give for another life.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Two

Night fell. The bear ran, tireless and silent, through the thinly treed upper slopes. Juniper nodded off behind me, her arms wrapped around my waist and her head lolling against my back while I tightened shaking legs around the bear’s withers. My eyes burned with cold and exhaustion, but the bear showed no sign of stopping, and neither did the wolves.

Snow swirled around us. It was thick and heavy, the kind of snow that melts and soaks through clothing before accumulating, and water dripped off the front of my hood before freezing into long, thin icicles that clinked together as we rode on. The bear took us away from the avalanche’s path, down narrow gullies and along high ridges spotted with rock. My eyes adjusted to the starless night slowly, and I saw the world in a haze of black and gray and cold.

Cold. There were not enough words for cold in our language, the Huntress had told me. She had a book in her library that claimed the people of the northern wastes had a hundred words for snow alone, and we had spent an afternoon trying to come up with our own language.

“We need a word for the kind of cold that splits trees in two,” she’d said.

“And the cold that doesn’t feel cold at first, until you’ve been out in it too long and your hands and feet and lips stop working,” I had said, shivering.

She’d kissed me.

“Your lips still seem to be working.”

“Do you even feel the cold?” I’d asked, watching a gust of wind blow snow across her cheek.

“Sometimes.”

Now, as an icy finger snaked inside my hood and down my neck, I realized we’d forgotten one: the kind of cold that slipped inside the heart, one part winter, two parts fear, a cold that froze the blood with creeping terror until even the mountains shrank beneath the weight of the ice inside me. Faster, I urged the bear.