The growl in her voice lit into me like lightning. I grabbed her forearm, clumsy with cold, and stood.

She turned away to look out over the lake. A new bearskin cloak hung around her shoulders, and the beast’s claws crossed at the breast, the long, black nails nearly the length of my hand. What was left of its head hung at her back, a gore-stained hood with empty eyes still rimmed with red.

“I want to go home,” I told her, the wind catching at my voice.

“You have no home,” she said, as calmly as another person might have said, “dinner is ready,” or, “I don’t think it will rain.”

“I do. I have two sisters, and—”

“That life is over.”

I drew breath to argue, but the space between us was gone and the scent of the very-recently-parted-from-its-body bearskin overwhelmed me.

“Your life is not yours to throw away.”

“What?” I looked up at her, hating her for the way she looked right through me without seeing me, hating her for her indifference, for her secrets, for the story she would not tell me and the life she had stolen from me without any reason I could see.

“You belong to Winter now.” She fingered the claws crossed at her breast, and her gloves came away dark with blood.

“I belong to no one but myself.”

“Don’t you?” The scorn in her voice filled the space between us. “You are a debt, merchant’s daughter, here to pay for your father’s mistakes. If you throw your life away, I may consider that debt unpaid.”

“Then kill me yourself and be done with it. Or do you really have no mercy?”

She laughed. The sound forced me back a step, and I stared at her as she threw back her head, her pale throat gleaming until the mountains rang with her mirth. “Your father asked for mercy, too,” she said when she had finished. “But he was a fool. He did not understand what he asked for.”

“Understand what?”

“Death is mercy in the mountains.”

She was mocking me. I tore my eyes away from her and looked out over the mountains and into the clouds. “Give me mercy then.”

“No.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” My voice cracked as I faced her, and more than I hated her, I hated the way my hand reached out, desperate, searching, grasping for something I would never find here in this cold, bright place.

“Live.” She pulled her hand out of mine. Her mouth twisted again, but this time there was no cruelty in the line of her lips, and my hand ached where it had so briefly held hers.