“It might. It is still young for weaning, and it may never be as strong as its siblings. You will need to feed it every few hours, and chew the meat. The mother throws it up,” she added, perhaps sensing my distaste. She passed the pup back.

I stroked its skull, noting the round curve of the ears. “You will live.”

•   •   •

“Rub its belly,” the Huntress told me on the second day when she came across me trying to feed the pup more crudely chewed meat.

“Why?” I said, exhausted from a night of little sleep.

She knelt beside me, massaging the pup’s taut abdomen with smooth, downward strokes of her thumb. “Because it can’t eat if it hasn’t shat.”

Her head was bent towards the wolf, and I noticed the intricate knot that bound her hair at the nape of her neck. She smelled today of pine, not snow, and beneath the pine lingered a remnant of roses. My breath caught, and the world spun, then steadied, light frozen as it played over the smooth skin of her cheek.

“Here.” She took my hand, mimicking the slow stroke. The pup squirmed, flailing paws that seemed larger today than they had been yesterday, and tried to mouth my fingers with the beginnings of needle-sharp teeth. I let her guide me, and I thought inexplicably of Sara.

“Like this,” I had said, adjusting Sara’s position on the quill as she struggled to form letters on the scrap of parchment I had smuggled out of my father’s study.

“I feel like I’m going to break the damn thing,” she’d said, staring at the quill in her calloused fingers.

I felt that way now, touching the pup’s delicate skin, my eyes glancing off the Huntress’s lips. Nothing natural is that perfect, I told myself.

At the nape of the Huntress’s neck, tangled in that dark knot, I saw a flash of red. I reached for it, pulling my hand out of hers without thinking, and plucked the rowan berry from her hair.

She flinched at my touch, then stilled, her body taut, her breath silent. The berry rolled to the center of my palm and settled over the scar-that-wasn’t-a-scar.

“There was something in your hair,” I said in a voice so soft I barely heard it myself. She raised her eyes to look at my hand. It was the only part of her that moved.

The pup rolled over and began worrying the leg of my pants, but the Huntress remained kneeling, her eyes raised to mine, every muscle in her body tensed. I closed my hand slowly around the berry, my own breathing so shallow it barely brushed my lips.