“What is there to live for?” I asked her, pointing out at the wasteland around us. She turned to follow the accusation in my fingertips. Her face eased, and the tautness in her shoulders lessened as her eyes took in the distant line of pines and clouds and falls of ice. She didn’t speak, but I saw the answer in the way her lips softened, parting slightly as a breath of snow danced along the lake. A hawk circled, spinning a trail of frost as it dived in and out of the clouds at our feet. I wanted to deny the beauty of her world. I wanted to deny the ache that had spread from my hand to my chest, tightening like a fist the longer I looked at her lips. I wanted to hate her, and I wanted her to look at me the way she looked at her mountains.

“There’s nothing here worth living for,” I said, summoning up the remnants of the vitriol still churning in my stomach.

She turned back to me and the tightness returned, sliding over her body like a second skin as the sweep of her cloak stirred the snow. My cheeks flamed in the cold as she walked away.

“Damn you,” I called after her.

She looked back over her shoulder, the bear fur framing her cheek, and gave me a smile that froze the air around it.

“I am already damned.”

Pain.

She saw it in his eyes, and she lay her hand against his head, smoothing the fur over his ears. The cuts were deep. She hummed softly under her breath, and with her other hand she held the cloth to his side to staunch the bleeding.

“I am sorry, my friend.”

He whined.

This one was one of Brendan’s grandpups, or great-grandpups. She had lost track, running with the wolves, of who they’d been. It hadn’t seemed important. Each wolf was its own, and they were all her Hounds.

It mattered now. It always mattered right before she lost one.

The loss of one you cannot bear to lose.

“The things we can bear then,” she said to the wolf and to the witch. “The things we can bear are terrible enough.”

The wolf sighed, pain taking its toll on his body, and she closed her eyes against the grief. Sometimes she wondered if she loved them more, these pale shadows of the human hunters they had been.

She did not think of the girl.

She did not think of the despair she’d seen in those dark eyes, the snow so bright around them, and she told herself she did not feel regret like a hammer, striking again and again and again.

“Would that we all were wolves,” she said to the wolf as pain from her own wounds clouded her vision until she slumped beside him, her hand on his bloodstained chest.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight