“Now, a northern woman who is beautiful and unattainable is called a Winter Rose,” the Huntress finished, “and mothers who have lost children leave carved figurines where the winter roses grow in midwinter, sharing their grief with the season.”

I looked up. Her hair fell around her face, but the firelight shone through, and the shadows it cast were dark and wild.

“Is that why the roses follow you?”

“No,” she said, and the bitter smile that twisted her lips told a story that I was no longer sure I wanted to hear. “You should sleep, Rowan.”

“Wait,” I said, fighting to keep my eyes open. I had decided to stay here, out in the snows, with a woman who I knew so little about, it wouldn’t have filled a half page of one of her books. “Tell me your name.”

I had almost given up on the question by the time she replied.

“Names have power, Rowan. Not power like this,” she touched my bandaged hand, “but still, power. What is your name to you?”

“My name? It’s just a name, I guess. Who I am.”

“Your mother named you Rowan?”

“Yes.”

“And your sisters, Aspen and Juniper. We call those trees the mountain sisters.”

“I know.”

“Your friends in the city by the sea called you Rowan.”

“Yes.”

“All of that is a part of your name.” She paused. “The woman I was, before. I don’t want to remember her. Or the people she lost.”

“And her name would be a memory,” I said.

“Yes.”

I burrowed deeper under the furs, struggling to decide how much to say. “I understand, I think,” I said at last. “There have been plenty of times these past few years where I would have given anything to be someone else. When my mother died, or when we had to flee the city, and especially when I realized that my father planned to wed me to some boorish villager who didn’t know one end of an abacus from another. It’s funny now, that that seems like the worst of it all.”

“A marriage is a lifetime.”

“My father was going to trade me. I was the price of our new life, of his stupid furs, of the house that I found at the bottom of my mother’s inheritance, and it didn’t matter what I wanted. I told Aspen and Juniper that it would be okay there. I promised them we would be happy, and then we got there and they fit in, and it was only I who hated everyone. I tried. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. It all seems so stupid now.”

Something warm and furry clambered over the furs and pounced on my face. A hot, wet tongue bathed my eyelids, and I struggled to free my ear from needle-sharp teeth as the pup whined her enthusiasm for my return.