I thought of my sisters and my father and the little house, a warm light set deep in the mouth of a trap I would spring no matter where I stepped. I belonged to Avery now, and if not Avery, some other man. I looked down at my body, hidden beneath my furs, and hated it. My body was the real prison, something to be bartered or sold or carried away on the back of a great white bear. This was the truth that Sara had tried to tell me, the truth I had not wanted to see, the truth that now was as clear to me as the biting cold.

You could stay here, whispered the part of me that I had never quite been able to silence. You could stay here with the Huntress and her wolves, and make something new.

My family already thought me dead, or at least lost forever. They would never need to know that I had chosen this life. I would fade in their memories as my mother had, until the pain of loss became bearable and I passed into mountain myth, the girl who was carried away into the winter night by the Huntress on her great white bear, and in time they would remember how to laugh, as would I. The snow fell harder, and I thought I saw the faces of my sisters rise up out of the white.

“I’ll miss you,” I told them, my chest constricting at the thought of never seeing them again. They would be happy, though, in the village. Aspen would marry, and Juniper was young enough to find a place for herself, with or without a man.

I would have left them anyway, I realized, tasting the truth of it in the snow. I might have lasted a year, wed to Avery, and then I would have packed a bag in the night and made my way back to the city, or killed him, or fallen in love with the wrong woodcutter’s daughter. I never had a future there that didn’t end in grief. Here, at least, the ending was uncertain.

I stood. My legs were numb and moved so slowly they might as well have been unresponsive. My arms were a little better, as I had kept them tucked beneath the furs around my chest, and I beat at my legs in a vain attempt to bring back feeling. When that failed, I crawled toward the shore of the lake, hauling my body through the drifts in slow, painful jerks as my knees remembered their duty.

Past the shelter of the pines, the wind stole whatever warmth I had left, howling with the force and fury of a blizzard, and I realized I had no idea in which direction the castle lay.