I kissed her, gently at first, the barest touch of my lips against hers, but when her lips parted under mine a roaring filled my ears, and it was all I could do to stand as the axis of the world shifted beneath me. She tasted like pine and snow and the sweet, sharp bite of winter apples. She moved then, her hands pulling me closer and her lips flushing the cold out from underneath my skin, while the pack fed at our backs and somewhere deep inside me the rose put out more roots, tightening its grip around my heart.

Three wolves ran in a line along the hills, threading in and out of trees and memory while snow filled their prints and an owl hooted somewhere in the forest, setting out on silent wings.

Isolde.

The name followed the wolves, and the Huntress caught it, fluttering against the bars of her fingers like a moth, or some small brown bird. The bird spoke her name with the witch’s voice, and with that voice came fear.

“For your pride, you may keep your castle and your forests, but only beasts will roam your halls, and all those you love will turn to tooth and claw and cloven hoof, save you. You shall be just as you are, colder than a winter star and just as lovely, and you shall live among them, a huntress, a queen among the bones, until the day comes when you learn what it is like to love helplessly, hopelessly, and truly. Only then will you be free, but freedom will bring you no joy, because the price of freedom will be the loss of one you cannot bear to lose.

“Until then, I will bind you and yours with ice and thorn, until the years have stripped the memory of warmth from your bones and the only thing that blooms around you is the winter rose. As long as those roses grow wild, you shall reign over winter and all her beasts, but beware: where the winter rose takes root, it grows, and its blossoming will mark the end of everything that you now hold dear.”

Rowan.

She saw the symmetry of the trap, the way it had sunk into her flesh each time she’d touched the girl, how it had closed so slowly she had not felt the steel beneath soft skin.

She saw a rose on a bloodstained breast and blue eyes wide with an understanding that was blissfully cut short by death.

Helplessly.

Hopelessly.

Truly.

She was going to lose her.

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

I pulled the red dress from the chest with shaking hands and laid it on the bed, my hair still steaming from the baths.

You will not run from me, I thought, stroking the dark wool. You will not run.

But she had.