I touched her hand, and what she saw in my face made her turn away from me, reaching for the wine. “Thank you,” I added, somewhat lamely. She placed a horn of wine in my hand, then reached behind me and lifted the hood over my head.

“There.”

I reached up and felt the ridge of snout and curve of ears. The heaviness in the air between us lessened, and I tilted my head as I had seen her wolves do. She surprised me with a laugh, and then she did wrap her arm around my shoulders, pulling me close enough to whisper. I heard her words, muffled though they were by the hood.

“It suits you too well, Rowan.”

Rowan’s smile split the gray morning.

The Huntress crouched, readying herself for another lunge as the girl adjusted her grip on the spear. The Huntress had wrapped the spearhead at Rowan’s insistence, for all that the girl had yet to land a blow, but her last thrust had been close.

I’ve missed this.

She’d had too many thoughts like that, of late. The space between her worlds was shrinking, and Rowan stood at the center of that divide, her dark curls blowing in the snow.

“Strike. Pretend I am a bear.”

Rowan struck, and the Huntress stopped the point with her hand, letting it rest against her ribs.

“Well struck.”

Rowan pulled away, feinted, and struck again, and this time the Huntress was glad she’d wrapped the spear because it caught her underneath her left breast with a sharpness that took her breath away.

“Are you hurt?”

Rowan was at her side in an instant, and any resemblance between this moment and a moment from her past life vanished. None of her Hounds would have fallen to their knees in the snow beside her during a sparring match.

She stood up, brushing snow off the knee that had borne the brunt of her misstep, and raised the girl up with her.

“I am not hurt, because I am not a bear,” she said, touching a gloved hand to the girl’s cheek. “But if I were a bear I might be dead.”

The girl’s cheek flushed where her glove touched her, and something in the Huntress stirred. She could feel the girl’s pulse as her glove trailed down her throat, racing, insistent, and the part of the Huntress that had not remembered it was human wanted nothing more than to push Rowan down into the snow and nip at her throat, tangling that dark hair in her hands.

The part of her that was human wanted that, too.

The pressure of the spear brought her back, her own ragged breathing driving the point in closer, and her heartbeat thundered down the shaft and deep into the mountain, echoing down the slopes in warning and in need. She pulled away.

“Tomorrow.”