“Where is she?” I asked the wolf as I tried to think. My mind was still fogged with cold and sluggish, but the answer rose out of that blank wasteland unbidden: the room at the top of the tower. The room that had remained locked throughout my entire stay, no matter how many times I asked the Huntress what was behind its door.

I ran.

The stairs went on and on and on. I crawled toward the end, my nails digging into the stone while the last of the dying briars whispered around me. Too late, they said, petals of ice melting on the steps as I came at last to the locked door. I pounded on it, the jolt sending spikes of pain up my arm and into my shoulder. There was no answer from the other side, but I could smell the cloying scent of decaying flowers.

The rose.

I pressed my palm against the iron, and the sound of the lock tumbling into place as a tendril of vines tripped it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

No carpet graced the floor of the room beyond the door, and no tapestries adorned the walls. Instead, the entire room was hung with vines, and the floor was thick with drying petals. In the center, curled around each other like a pair of nesting birds, lay the Huntress and the alpha female of the pack. The wolf raised her head when I entered.

“No.” I fell to my knees beside the Huntress and placed a hand on her shoulder. It was cold to the touch through the wool of her shirt, as was her cheek, and her chest rose and fell with the barest hint of life. “No,” I said again, louder this time, and the sound went on and on, pouring out of the open window and over the lake where Avery and his armed mob waited to kill the woman who lay, nearly dead already, in a flood of roses. She did not move. I lifted her shoulders into my lap, cradling her head in my arms, and stroked her thick dark hair. “No. You can’t leave me.”

Her lips were pale and cold. I kissed them anyway, willing life back into her body. Nothing happened.

Shouts echoed from somewhere within the castle, and I heard the heart-stopping roar of the bear. Avery had arrived. I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered was that the Huntress was dying.

“Rowan?” Her eyelids fluttered open, the green of her irises like a slice of spring.

“I’m here,” I said, my voice breaking.

She raised a hand to touch my face.

“You came back.” Her voice was clear, like running water, but faint.

“Of course. Did you doubt it?”

Her smile broke my heart all over again.

“I was always cursed to lose you.”

“She believes she understands the curse, but she only sees what she fears,” the witch had said.