She lay with the girl in her arms long into the cold, dark blue of the night. Past the roof, if she closed her eyes, she could see the stars: the Hunter with his bow striding across the heavens, the Great Bear foraging along the crest of the mountain, and the Wolf prowling the horizon. They looked down at her out of glittering eyes.

She knew what they saw.

In the violet sprawl of the heavens, she felt the earth shift beneath her, the ice thinning, a hint of thaw breaking free from the snow to blow over the lake, redolent with long-dead leaves and moss.

She wanted to run.

She wanted to stay.

She wanted to hold this girl like this forever, winter stretching into eternity in a long breath of frost while Rowan’s dark hair brushed the Huntress’s cheek.

“Freedom will bring you no joy,” the witch had said.

She did not want freedom.

This was enough, this small moment, this brief promise of respite from an ache she had not thought to name till now.

I will teach you to hunt, she told Rowan in the quiet of her mind. I will show you the beauty of my wilds, the glory of the heights, and then you will not leave me.

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

The Huntress led me down a spiral staircase near the stables, holding a torch.

“Are you taking me to your dungeon?” I asked, only half joking. I hadn’t explored this part of the keep for a reason, I didn’t want to encounter anything large and hairy that might dwell here.

“Not quite. In here.” She opened an iron-bound door into a room that smelled of steel and leather. My jaw dropped when she held the torch aloft. The room was ringed with rack after rack of weapons: swords, shields, bows, arrows, spears, axes, knives, and other things I didn’t have a name for.

“You could raze a village with this,” I said in a hushed voice.

“We did.”

She walked to the far side of the room and ran her hand across a row of spears, selecting a tall, narrow-shafted length of bright-tipped ash and tossing it to me. I caught it. The wood felt strange beneath my fingers, more like metal or bone than branch.

“You need a spear for larger game. An arrow will only irritate a bear or boar unless you get it in the eye, and you can defend yourself against almost anything you’ll find out there with the shaft. Come here.”

I obeyed, stopping before the wall of bows. The Huntress selected a few, measuring them against my height with a critical eye before selecting a smaller bow made of some sort of dark polished wood.