I had a hard time picturing this woman performing a single careless act. Even now, submerged in water and her skin in tatters, she carried herself with more grace than I could hope to achieve in a lifetime.

“Have you lost many wolves?” I said, registering her words.

“I lost two to your villagers this past month, and tonight I may lose another.”

Her face did not move, and her voice was even, but there was pain there beneath the ice. I remembered the pelts piled high on the sledge and a realization rose from the corpses like the steam from the pool. “That was the price. That’s why you killed them. A life for a life.”

“Yes.”

“Is the life of a wolf the same? Those men had families. Wives.”

“It is the same to me.” She opened her eyes in time to see me shiver, the towel doing little to ward the chill off my skin. “Leave me,” she said, her eyes almost black against the water. “If you truly want to help, start heating the wine.”

Her blood stained the water of the pool.

Pain.

It was one of the things that bound her, her blood a reminder that all things could feel, all things could suffer, and nothing the witch had done could change that.

Now, as the steam rose and white stars burst in the cavern depths, she wondered how much of this the witch had foreseen. Perhaps the girl would have come anyway, even if she had killed the father. Perhaps it was woven into the fabric of her prison that she would never be at peace, and that always the mountain would rise, sending another of its envoys to the heights to break what should be left unbroken.

I could have brought winter down on all of them.

The thought drove away the pain, filling her with a savage longing. She could have let him keep the rose. She could have let it take root, there in that scrap of a cottage on the edge of Lockland land, and put out tendrils of frost, eclipsing all hope of spring.

She smiled, the bitterness rising like bile.

She could have driven cold into the marrow of their bones before the end, regardless of the cost.

Instead, she had Rowan.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

The Huntress winced as the hot wine hit her back. I winced with her. The wounds looked even worse in the light.

“Give me the wine,” she said, taking a long swallow when I handed the jug to her. I sopped up the last of the boiled wine in the wounds with a clean rag as she drank, my hands still shaking. I was beginning to regret my offer. This was far beyond my skill to heal.

“This would be easier if you were on the table,” I said for the third time.