At least the garden gave me something to do. It was heavily overgrown and in need of a firmer hand than whoever had been tending it. Each day, I brought my small harvest to the kitchen, and each day the stew was there, meat broth bubbling, waiting for me to scrub and dice the vegetables. There were knives aplenty; the Huntress did not seem to consider me a threat. She hardly seemed to consider me at all.

I saw her, now and then, from a window or in passing. Once she carried a young deer over her shoulder, another time a brace of hares. Twice I came across her frowning at something out of sight, only to have that frown transferred to me.

“Tonight, she will speak to me,” I told the carrots. They turned blank, orange faces towards me, their green tops brushing my forearms.

She was not in the kitchen when I entered, but the stew was there, simmering away.

“It would be nice to have something besides stew,” I told the pot as I set about preparing my harvest. “A roast, maybe. With roasted potatoes and herbs and garlic.”

The pot was as silent as the carrots, but the hair on the back of my neck prickled.

“I’ll lay out some boar, then,” the Huntress said.

I spun around, dropping the onion I was halfway through slicing onto the floor. Snow melted on her hair and shoulders, and her usual entourage of wolves ranged behind her, watching me with idle curiosity.

“Do you like boar?” she asked as I bent down to retrieve the onion. Thinly veiled mockery shone through her words. “Or would you prefer suckling pig? Maybe a rack of lamb?”

“Roast duck, actually.” I sliced the onion more viciously than was necessary, her tone getting under my skin. “With candied cherries in a wine sauce.”

Her lips twitched in what might have been a smile or a frown, and she pushed off from the door frame she had been leaning against to stand next to the fire.

“Wine, I have.” She poured some into a small pot and set it over the flames. “Care for it spiced?”

“Um, yes, please.”

At my halting reply, the mockery, and any trace of levity, vanished from her tone.

“Spiced it is then.”

I took a chance. “I was wondering where the wine came from,” I said.

“Someplace expensive, I expect.”

I narrowly missed my finger with the knife. “My father served a similar vintage.”

“He didn’t seem like the sort to keep a table that could support it.”

“He was a merchant,” I said, my pride stinging.

“Was?”

“Well,” I said, attacking a potato, “you don’t think I ended up in that village by choice, did you? Shit.” The knife nicked my finger.