A few of the wolves stayed past the breaking of her power. The bear did not, and the Huntress watched her leave with a faraway look that I tried not to take personally, just as I learned to respect her occasional silences, and to expect that some mornings I would wake alone to find her gone, sometimes for a few hours, other times for a few days, and once or twice in the coldest months for weeks on end. There are different kinds of freedom. Each has its price.

The seasons passed. My pup grew gray hairs. The Huntress complained, every so often, of mortal maladies, her voice laden with indignation, and one summer I awoke in the middle of the night to a harvest moon so large it threatened to break open upon the peaks like a giant egg.

I slipped out of the keep and down to the shores of the lake to watch the moonlight spill out over the water. Footsteps, light and sure, followed me some time later, and neither the Huntress nor I spoke as she sat on the rocky shore beside me. I leaned my head against her shoulder and felt the certainty of happiness like a mortal wound. It was almost too much to bear, and yet we sat there, silent, two wild things caught in a moment of stillness that stretched out over the water like a held breath.

I say this, too.

Winter misses her. There is an agony to the way the winds howl around the keep in the darkness of the year. I think sometimes of the story of the winter rose, and I can almost believe it to be true. As for the Huntress, for all her longing for spring, for all that she loves me and I love her, there is an emptiness that will never leave her, a loss that runs as deep as the roots of these mountains. Sometimes I feel it too. Sometimes I think that there is a part of me that will always be frozen, a shard of ice lodged in my heart where a thorn used to be that a thousand, thousand summers will not melt.

A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

This is a fairy tale. Specifically, it is a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and a great many talented writers have been here before me. I read as many retellings as I could under the guise of research for this book, and what I found gave me hope. In almost all of these retellings, it was not beauty that defined Beauty, but bravery. So here’s to strong heroines, the writers who write them, and bravery in all its forms.