I locked the pup in the kitchen and waded through the snow in the courtyard, blinking at the light. The storm had lifted, leaving a sky so brilliant it hurt my eyes. The roses on the gate nodded at me in greeting, dark stems indistinguishable from the black iron. I pushed the gate, fearing that it too would be locked and knowing that if it was, I would throw myself upon the thorns, both iron and wood, and claw my way either through the gate or into the next world.

It opened.

No, it did more than that.

It sighed at my touch, and the leaves rustled, perhaps the leaves on the gate, perhaps leaves somewhere else, both distant and close, leaves that I wanted to strip from the stem and stomp into the bleeding earth. Past the gate, the snow danced in glittering spirals as it blew across the lake. I closed my eyes against the unbearable brightness and sank into the snow.

How long would it take, I wondered, for the blood to freeze in my veins? The air was so cold it hurt to breathe. Hours? How long before I slipped into a sleep from which I would never wake? They found men frozen, Avery had told me, with smiles on their faces. I would die here one way or another. Why not now? I nestled deeper into the snow and waited for my mind to come up with an argument against it, but all I heard was the wind, whistling as it blew flakes of snow across the lake.

I opened my eyes a long while later, animal instinct forcing my lids apart. The bear swayed its massive head from side to side, and from atop its back the Huntress watched me, straight as the spear she carried, her eyes wilder than they had been before she left, and her mouth set in a high, untouchable line below cheeks that could have shattered clouds.

And her eyes.

I had thought they were green, but this was a green so dark I felt the ground lurch beneath me, the last green at the heart of winter, a shred of life in a place hostile to all things tender and growing, the green of pine needles in shadow and moss frozen on the banks of mountain streams.

She slid from the bear’s back. I didn’t stir. The snow was soft, and if I didn’t move, if I didn’t reclaim ownership of the body in the drift, I could watch her a while longer from the frozen center of the world where everything was color and light and only cold demanded feeling.

“No.” She held out her hand. No emotion crossed her face, but I knew that she knew what I was doing, lying in the drifts, and with that knowledge came everything I had tried to leave behind. The weight of the world pressed me deeper into the snow.

“Get up.”