Outside, the wind picked up. My sisters huddled closer together, and all four of us stared at the door. My gaze faltered on the rose. The entire table had frosted over in a sheet of ice, and the rose looked fuller, more alive than any cut flower had a right to be.

“Where did you get that rose?” I asked.

My father didn’t answer. The howling started again, closer this time than ever before, and something large and primal roared outside the door.

The beast did not use its claws this time. Instead, I heard the distinctive crunch of booted human feet landing on the doorstep, and the unmistakable sound of a human fist knocking, once, twice, three times on the wooden door.

“Get behind me,” my father said, straightening his now hunched back and brandishing the sword before him.

The stranger knocked again. Once, twice, thrice.

“Who is it?” Aspen asked in a shaky whisper.

I felt ice stir in my veins.

I remembered the prick of thorns in my palm.

I watched as the door burst open, shattered by a great white paw as the head and shoulders of an ice bear burst through the doorway, bellowed once, then retreated.

I heard the slow step of feet picking their way through shattered timbers, and a brutal gust of wind whipped snow into the room in frenzied flurries.

“Stay back,” my father shouted, and I loved him for his bravery even as I knew that there was nothing he could do to protect us against what was coming.

A tall figure emerged through the snow, dressed in a long, white fur cloak with a hood that shadowed its face. My hand tingled, the way fingers and toes do when they have been exposed to cold for far too long.

The figure raised gloved hands and lowered its hood.

My father trembled. Aspen screamed. Juniper staggered and clutched at my sleeve to keep from falling.

I stared.

I had been wrong to think that the colors of winter were merely silver and white, I found myself thinking. There was the black of wet tree bark; the bruised blue of shadowed drift; the deep, undimmed green of the pines; and the harsh shock of red blood across snow.

The woman standing in our kitchen was all of these and more.

Red lips curled in a mocking smile. Dark green eyes challenged my father from a face pale with the first flush of a winter sunset, framed with hair the brown of the last of autumn’s leaves beneath the snow, the darkness limning distant trees, and the blue-black fall of a winter night.

“Where is it,” the woman said. It was not a question. She examined each of us in turn, and when her eyes fell on me at last, a thrill went through me.

“Where is what?” I asked, my words little more than a whisper.

“My rose.”

I pointed.