The fire died again, and my mind slipped away, sliding down the mountains to the hard-packed dirt road that led to the gray gates of the city.

I had seen the gates only a few times. We had no cause to leave the city, at least not by land. Sometimes my father took us out in a little boat, rowed by the bear of a man he kept with us for such outings. Henrik was his name. He had a long, blond mustache that Aspen liked to tug. We didn’t see that many blond men in the city, but not many people stared at Henrik for long, with his scarred face and his massive fists, imposing in their strength when wrapped around the oars, but gentle enough when he lifted us one by one onto the docks.

The Ice Bear, my mother had called him.

My thoughts skidded away, fleeing those crowded wharfs and the bright skirts I’d worn and taking shelter in the stables where my father kept his horses. A big red roan for riding, and a matched team of blacks for the carriage, stabled side by side in the wide, clean barn that smelled of hay and the occasional salt breeze from the ocean. My mother’s horse flickered in and out of memory, golden, with a mane as white as snow.

No.

Father had sold that horse when she took sick, to help pay for the doctors and later the magicians and finally the funeral. Sara had held me as they led my mother’s horse away. Sara, whose quick laugh and quicker hands taught me how to mend and clean the black leather harness and braid the black ribbons into the team’s tails. Sara, who had found the brown gelding and the cart for us when no one else had dared touch my father’s ruinous debts.

“For you,” she’d said to me, pulling me out of sight. “Get the hell out of here, Rowan.”

And then she’d kissed me, full on the lips, her dark eyes searching mine. Whatever she saw made her grin; a twist of her laughing mouth, the familiar tilt of her head, the sweet smells of hay and grain and horse clinging to her rough-spun tunic.

If I could only get a message to her now.

Sara, I would write, I need another horse, another cart, another traveling cloak to shield my face, only this time it’s not the banks I’m running from, but . . .

My mind skipped again, and I found myself in the garden of our town house, the walls built with smooth stones and covered in climbing roses. They had reminded my mother of home.

I stood, the furs falling to the floor and my chest heaving. There were no roses in my mother’s village. None that I had seen, at least.