She took a drink, sitting on a stool by the fire, her long legs stretched out in front of her while the flames licked life into the dark leather of her boots. She was beautiful in the way that a blizzard is beautiful. It hurt my chest to look at her, and I knew if I gazed for too long frostbite would work its way into my extremities and the air would freeze in my throat.

“I’m Rowan,” I said. Maybe if I gave her my name, she would not feed me to the wolves.

“I know.”

I didn’t have any more questions after that. My bowl of stew was empty, and the table looked as likely a place to lay my head as any. I was dimly aware that she guided me to my feet, leading me up another flight of stairs and into a room with a bed and a fire. I tumbled into the bed and fell asleep before I had finished pulling the furs over me.

She paced. The motion was as natural to her as breathing, her boots brushing the stone as lightly as the pads of the wolf beside her. Snow spilled out around them, wreathed in freezing fog. Snow, ice, thorn. That was her world. Those were the boundaries. Those were her boundaries.

She growled, turning on her heel in frustration as she approached the end of the battlement.

Damn that man. Damn him and his reaching hands and damn her for her pity. She should have killed him. She should have ripped his throat out, as he and his hunters had done to two of her Hounds, painting the snow red and calling down the ravens to pluck out his sad brown eyes.

The girl had his eyes.

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

She turned again, her gloved fingertips brushing the fur of the wolf beside her, and pulled the rose the man had stolen from her breast pocket to stare at the crushed petals.

White. No hint of red. Her Hounds had found it in time.

She looked closer.

Did the palest hint of pink run through its veins?

She held it up, letting the full light of the moon fall over it.

No.

Fog kissed her cheek, curling her hair into ringlets of ice. For a moment, she had doubted. She closed her eyes. Memory pounced from beneath her lids, riding fear to the surface.

“Rose for a rose, thorn for a thorn,

That is the price of true love scorned.”

The witch had spoken with a voice chipped from the flint hills, laden with the promise of summer and heavy with snow.

“What do you want, old woman?” the Huntress had asked.

Her Hounds had quieted, and even the dogs stopped whining. Only the boy’s ragged breathing broke the stillness, and then that, too, was gone.