“This is mercy,” she said, and the shaft of the spear thrummed with anticipation.

“Rowan, Aspen, Juniper.”

Again, she paused.

“Trees,” she said. “The mountain sisters.”

“My daughters. Those are their names. Rowan is the oldest. Their mother died, two years ago. If you kill me, they will lose everything.”

His eyes were brown. The other men’s eyes had been blue.

“You should have thought about that before you crossed the boundary and hunted down my Hounds.”

“I— the boundary?”

She smelled fear in his sweat, and confusion. Did he lie? She crouched before him, the spear still steady. He lay on the ground and clutched the wounds the pack had given him.

“You are not a Lockland,” she said.

“No.”

The wolves snarled.

She watched his blood trickle into the snow.

She thought of more words she could say.

“I will not give you mercy,” she said at last.

He closed his eyes, swallowing once.

He did not beg.

She stood.

“Do not come back.”

Her words were stronger now, her voice sure. He opened his eyes when he heard them, and for all that her pronunciation was correct this time, he did not understand.

“You are letting me go?”

She brought the spear to rest against his heart.

“I am letting you go. But do not mistake freedom for mercy.”

The mountain would have its due.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

My father shivered by the fire, his eyes locked in ice while Aspen, Juniper, and I tried to coax warm broth down his throat. My hands shook as I stirred the kettle over the flames. I had been the one to see to his horse while my sisters carried him inside. Beneath the icicles, I had found deep scratches, either from claws or thorns or jagged rock, I could not be certain, but the blood had frozen with the ice, turning the familiar brown gelding into a strange blood bay. It had taken the better part of an hour for me to rub him down, and the harness had creaked like winter trees as I lifted it off his broad back.

“Where are the others?” I asked the horse, running a clean rag over him to dry the sweat that had not yet frozen. The horse leaned against me in response, blowing clouds of steam out of his bleeding nostrils.

The sledge loomed large in the darkness of the barn, death piled high atop its icy runners. I dropped the cloth in the straw. Sprawled above the others, its white fur gleaming even in the dim light, lay the largest wolf I had ever seen. It had not been skinned like the other carcasses, and its frozen, dead eyes watched me.