I closed my eyes. Even if they got them out of the water, they were dead if they didn’t get warm. I forced Juniper into a sitting position and pulled her boot off her foot. She was lucky. The water had not soaked through, and the boot was already freezing over. I helped her get it back on, and she looked up at me with dull eyes.

“What if that was Bjorn?”

“It wasn’t,” I told her, willing myself not to let my voice shake. I hoped, for Juniper’s sake, that it hadn’t been her boy, but it had been someone. “We have to go. Be even more careful. If you feel the ice start to break, go back, not forward, and if we get separated follow our trail back to shore. Don’t think about Bjorn,” I added as her eyes strayed back towards the villagers. “We need to focus.”

The far shore was a just few yards away when the wolf yipped out her warning, leaping sideways as a great chunk of ice tilted up under my weight, nearly dislodging her and sending me plunging into the lake. Cold exploded against my lungs. It knocked the breath from my body and sent stars shooting across my vision. Juniper’s screams echoed strangely, and then my breath returned, blocking out all other sound in great, shuddering gasps that failed to mobilize my limbs. The ice shelf floated a few inches from my face, and from here I could see the striations and bubbles within the candled ice. This wasn’t something that had happened overnight. This was a thaw that had been a long time in coming, and in that cold, dark, space of water, I finally understood.

The cold.

The roses.

The horse in the meadow and the briars and the thorns that still pierced my heart. They were a language, just like my mother had told me so many years ago in the warmth of her summer garden. Juniper screamed my name again, but the sound was far away. I saw, through the rotten ice, a hundred years of cold. I saw a young woman astride a snow white mare, cantering through a forest green with the first leaves of spring and white with the last rime of frost, a pack of leggy wolfhounds at her heels, and I saw an old woman walking to meet her, snow filling up her footsteps. She turned to look at me through the ice. Wrinkles grazed her lips and folded her eyes, tiny lines that spread like the cracks in the ice, but the eyes beneath them were familiar.

Rowan, said the witch, and water rushed into my mouth as I tried to answer.

“Rowan. Rowan!” A hand seized my hood, pulling me back towards the surface. Juniper lay flat on her belly, arms outstretched, while my wolf stood beside her with anxious eyes.