My father groaned and stirred on the floor. “Rowan,” he whispered as the woman cast one last glance around the room.

“You wandered too far north, old man,” she said. “Out here Winter still has teeth.” She pulled me behind her, and I stepped out into the storm.

The blank security of shock abandoned me the minute I left the house. Waiting, its fur lit by the stray light of the moon, was the bear. I had seen a bear, once, from a distance. That bear had been small and black and comfortingly far away. This bear towered head and shoulders over me, its muzzle tipped with black and full of gleaming teeth. It shook its ruff and snorted, a deep, coughing sound that sent me scrabbling backward against the woman. She brushed me aside and laid a hand on the bear’s snout. It snarled once, then settled, turning bright, black eyes on me.

“Come here.”

I glanced around the yard, wondering how far I could make it before the bear ran me down. At the edge of the trees, a chorus of howls rose up in warning. The shaking that threatened to loosen my teeth spread to the rest of my body as the scent of the massive predator saturated my senses, and then the woman was in front of me, her eyes as black as the bear’s in the darkness. She lifted me, and I was too shocked to fight her, stunned into the same terror that leaves the rabbit trembling before the fox. She swung me over the bear’s broad back and I lay face down in the musky fur, my heart threatening to burst in my tight chest. Behind me, I felt the woman swing herself up. Her thigh pressed against my cheek.

I clung to it, because it was human and warm, and I prayed to all the gods I knew that she, at least, would not attempt to eat me.

“Sit,” she said.

My panicked mind refused to process her words, and I clung tighter to her leg. Strong hands pried me off, and I stiffened, terror turning me into the wood of my namesake.

“Sit,” she ordered again. Her voice was low and steady, the kind of voice you would use to calm a frantic animal that you were not above beating into submission if all else failed.

It worked.

She helped me straddle the beast. I felt the thick muscles of its shoulders bunching beneath me as it adjusted to the new weight and a sound escaped from the back of my throat that might have been a moan of terror, a whimper, or just my last desperate shred of sanity taking flight.

This was past understanding, past reason, and certainly past the limits of my imagination. My mind, presented with things beyond its ability to comprehend, shut down, leaving me with a pair of eyes and a frozen tongue and nothing even remotely resembling thought.