Past the gate, whirlwinds of snow tore across the lake, and I leaned back and turned my head against the Huntress’s shoulder as one ripped into us. She wrapped her free arm around me and urged the bear into a faster gait while I gave up trying to ignore the feel of her hips and let the cold wind cool my face.

The wolves led us down the slopes to the tree line, where bearded pines and twisted firs clawed for purchase, their boughs too laden with snow for even the blizzard to stir. One of the wolves snapped at a passing hare but he did not give chase, and we rode like we were a part of the storm. The cold did not touch me this time as it had before. I tightened my grip on the Huntress’s arm, and if she noticed, she said nothing, just as she never spoke when she caught me watching her from across a room or brushed me aside when I stood too close.

The high, sparse slopes bled into rugged forest, thick with evergreens and a bumper crop of boulders half buried in snow save for where the wind had sheared the drifts, exposing frozen lichen and black rock. I tried to picture my father here, following the Lockland clan deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountains. I could not reconcile the man I knew with this untamed place, so far away from the sea. I thought of the ships in his office, encased in glass bottles, each a model of one of his vessels. He had smashed them, one by one, when they sank. I remembered coming across the splintered wood, lost in the shards of broken bottles, the glass as green as the sea and just as cruel. The trees here were tall enough for masts, if any man dared fell them so far from the coast. The Huntress shifted behind me, and I found I did not want to think of my father.

We rode for hours, or maybe it was only minutes. It could have been a year, for all I knew, tree after tree whipping past us through the storm. Somewhere out there was the boundary. I could feel it past the curtains of snow, an invisible pressure against my temples, different from the pressure building within me.

It was as if my very thought had conjured them. The hedge rose before us in a frozen tangle, taller than a man, taller even than the Huntress atop the bear. Snow piled up on the vines, but the thorns broke free, long, vicious things that put the bloom my father had brought me to shame. Against the thorns, the roses looked fragile, almost delicate, their petals somehow whiter than the snow, or perhaps the palest shade of pink. I tore my eyes away, sure I could hear them whispering.

A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.