I would have preferred to be locked in a cell, I decided, staring at the roses rioting over the stone walls. I would have preferred to sleep on filthy straw and endure depravity after depravity, rather than this false freedom. I would rather have suffered at the hands of a brute, because that was knowable, predictable, and a simpler kind of fear. I would have preferred anything to the terror building slowly within me, along with gods knew what else. I pressed my bare hand into the snow, willing the cold to freeze away the throbbing pain.

I had imagined the rose moving in my hand. Hadn’t I?

I had imagined the ice covering the kitchen table.

I had imagined all of this, and soon I would wake up, damp and weak from fever, because this was the stuff of madness and fever dreams.

My tears froze on my face, and my hand began to itch and burn with cold. I tucked it under my chin, wary about bringing it too close to my heart. I did not want anything else taking root.

The shadows cast by the walls climbed the keep as the sun set. I shivered. This was a cold I had never endured. It stopped my breath and burned in my lungs, and when I tried to stand at last my legs were heavy with it.

Dread rushed back into the space the cold had vacated. There was hot stew waiting, and wine and a library and a warm bed— all the things another me would have cried out with joy to receive only a few days ago. I looked back over my shoulder at the snow, now turning blue with evenfall.

They said it was the gentlest of deaths. You felt warm at the end, and sleepy. It would not take long. I took a step back toward the drifts, and then a growl broke into my thoughts. I jumped, my heart forcing blood back into my extremities. There was nothing gentle about being devoured. I tried to determine where the growl had come from, but all I could see was the settling dusk, and that the stable stood between me and safety. I hurried toward it. My eyes could barely make out the stone arches that demarcated the stalls, and I fumbled in my pocket for the flint I’d taken from the mantelpiece in my room as I felt along the wall for a torch, letting out a prayer of thanks when my hands found one.