I tore my eyes away from her and stared back at the fish. They didn’t blink. Then again, I was not sure if fish blinked at all. Their gills remained as stationary as the rest of them while my breath plumed in the air. I wondered how long they had been frozen there, and how long it would take them to thaw.

How long will it take me to thaw?

“Yes,” I said, and my heart broke at the shred of hope I saw in her face. This was what came out of a lifetime of frost. Fish, caught at the surface when it froze. Perhaps they had slowed, unaware of the grip of ice until it was too late, blood giving up ground vessel by vessel until scales flowed over solid ice instead of flesh, or perhaps it had been instant. Here, at the center of the lake, with the castle a red gleam behind her, I understood.

The Huntress had not brought me here to show me fish. I was looking at her heart.

The wind picked up again, bringing with it the sounds of pines so much like surf. A beam of sunlight caught the scales of one of the fish, painting it red and blue and green before it vanished, and the brilliance of her world became too much. I couldn’t breathe. There were truths here that hurt to look at even out of the corner of my eye, and the agony of a life spent in this place, with its beauty and its emptiness, cut me deeper than thorn or blade.

It was no wonder her heart had frozen.

The sun faded. Clouds wiped the red from the walls of the keep, painting it safely gray again. The wind shrieked a little louder and blew a little colder, and the howl in the back of my throat turned into a cry as the illusion of warmth bled to death on frozen pinnacles of snow. I turned and ran from her, away over the ice toward the distant forest, and the wind lifted my arms like wings. She did not stop me, and I did not look back to see what I had left behind or how much she might have seen in my face.

I was gasping for air by the time the trees began to cast their shadows at my feet, and the tears froze and cracked on my cheeks. I did not know who I wept for: the fish, the Huntress, or myself.

“Why?” I screamed. The sound reverberated around the bowl of the lake, and somewhere a wolf raised his head to howl. Another voice joined it, and another, until every hair on my body had raised in recognition and alarm, but the Huntress did not reply.