I wrapped my furs around me, breathing in the steam from my breath to thaw my face. I was cold. Dangerously cold, with the sweat from my flight drying on my body. I looked up at the sky, still light against the dark of the pines. A snowflake landed on my lashes.

More flakes fell, whirling through the pines and dancing in gusts across the lake. From this distance, the keep looked like something out of a tapestry, woven by a hand whose only experience of cold was what could be glimpsed beyond the warmth of the hearth.

I did not remember sitting, but the snow mounted on my knees, a dim pressure that reminded me of the wolf pup. For a moment, through the fast fall of night, I thought I saw the front door of our little house in the village. It had looked so bleak in the early spring when we first arrived. Our town house had been brightly painted, and the garden full of my mother’s roses. This cottage was all hewn timber and thatch. Dead stalks had poked out of a large rectangle in the yard, hinting at the remains of a kitchen garden, and the barn was full of old manure. It was the kind of place a peasant girl might dream of, and my heart ached for a moment as I remembered Sara’s parting words.

“What am I supposed to do without you?” I had asked her.

“This would have happened either way,” she said. “Do you really think the Duke, or whoever your father decides to marry you off to, would have let his wife run wild with a girl from the stables?”

“Do you think I would have given him a choice?”

Sara had put both hands on my shoulders and looked me in the face. “I forget, sometimes, that knowing how to read and write doesn’t make you smart. There are a thousand ways he could have prevented you, many of them legal, some of them not, but no one would have dared question him. At least this way you can still write me letters.”

If I could send a letter now, what would I say to her? That I needed her to raise an army to come rescue me? Or would I tell her the truth, the truth that burned colder than the cloud-covered stars, which was that the only thing worse than my captivity was what awaited me on my return?