I placed my hand on the Huntress’s chest as I had done to my father, only this time I did not send out vines. The Huntress’s back arched as the thorn pierced her heart, and I felt the whisper of the leaves rise into a storm that broke over me in a torrent of white-hot pain as the rose left me to take root in the Huntress’s breast. I collapsed beside her, my hand sliding onto the hard ground, empty, with not so much as a scar to mark where the magic had been.

“Where the winter rose takes root, it grows, and its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear,” the witch said, patting the Huntress on the shoulder. “That is what I told her, but people never pay attention to semantics. What she held dear then was power and her own arrogance, things she could not hold onto and still love you.” She rose, her joints creaking. “It gets tiring, always being right, in the end. But you see? I gave her the means to save herself, and perhaps her kingdom, if she still wants it.”

“She might have learned that on her own.”

“She might have, at great, great cost to others.”

“What about her Hounds?” I asked, my eyes straying to the dead wolf. “You punished them for her crimes.”

“That was part of the price she paid for power. They do not seem to have minded too much, however.”

My wolf limped into the room as she finished speaking and lay down against my back to lick her wounds. “Who are you?” I asked, at last, feeling the Huntress’s chest rising and falling slowly beside me.

“I am just an old, old woman.” The witch picked up one of the faded petals and held it between two fingers. “But perhaps now I will become something else.”

The petal fell, and I blinked. Where the witch had stood, I saw a young woman, with hair as fine and black as silk.

My jaw fell open.

“There is a king on the other side of these mountains in need of a lesson,” she said, and I heard the memory of a cackle in her lilting voice.

Then she was gone.

“Rowan?” The Huntress stirred. She looked just as she had before, only less bright somehow and more real. Her eyes remained the same piercing green, but they were human— human and alive and full of wonder. I burst into tears, unable to speak.

“I don’t understand.” She held her hands up to the gray light. A bolt of lightning flickered outside.