The witch watched out of eyes that reflected only sky and smiled, her nut-brown face as seamed as old bark and just as yielding.

“Do you toss away true love so lightly, Isolde?”

The Huntress’s hand tightened on the rose. She gasped as the thorns pierced her, in surprise more than pain, and a drop of her blood fell on the boy’s torn chest. The witch smiled.

“True love? He was a child,” said the Huntress.

The woman leaned on her stick, still smiling.

“A child willing to die for you.”

“That is not love. That is idiocy.”

“And yet you bleed.” The witch stepped closer, holding out her hand to take the Huntress’s.

“Roses,” the Huntress spat, tossing the flower aside and shaking off the old woman.

“You would scorn them, too?”

There was a storm brewing in the question. She had felt it even then, but had not heeded it.

“I have no use for roses.”

“No use for love, and no use for roses. Tell me, Isolde, what do you have a use for?” The witch raised a finger stained with a single drop of blood to her lips as she spoke.

“This.” The Huntress opened her arms, gesturing to the forest and shoving fear aside. “The hunt. My Hounds. Not roses, not the love of some pup, and certainly not you.”

“Ah.”

The hair on the back of her neck prickled, as it did before thunder broke over the mountains. When the witch spoke next, she had heard each word as a crack of lightning.

“For your pride, you may keep your castle and your forests, but only beasts will roam your halls, and all those you love will turn to tooth and claw and cloven hoof, save you. You shall be just as you are, colder than a winter star and just as lovely, and you shall live among them, a huntress, a queen among the bones, until the day comes when you learn what it is like to love helplessly, hopelessly, and truly. Only then will you be free, but freedom will bring you no joy, because the price of freedom will be the loss of one you cannot bear to lose.

“Until then, I will bind you and yours with ice and thorn, until the years have stripped the memory of warmth from your bones and the only thing that blooms within your kingdom is the winter rose. As long as those roses grow wild, you shall reign over winter and all her beasts, but beware: where the winter rose takes root, it grows, and its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear.”

The Huntress forced her eyes open, but the witch’s words still echoed off the moon-drenched mountains.

It did not matter.

The rose, idly plucked, had not rooted.

Chapter Five

Chapter Five