The bodice of the dress was embroidered with roses, the thread only a few shades darker than the cloth so that I almost didn’t notice them at first. The skirt was elegant and loose, not full like some of the styles I’d seen, and it did not drag on the floor. It was a dress made for a woman who did not need clothing to emphasize her beauty, and I realized with a jolt who this dress had been made for, who the clothes in the chest belonged to, whose room I had been sleeping in all of these months.

The ghost of the woman the Huntress had been stared at me out of the mirror, then faded, leaving only my own dazed expression. I sat on the bed with my earlier confidence shaken.

How would I feel if the Huntress showed up to dinner wearing my clothes?

There is a reason this dress feels unworn, I thought, stroking the skirt. And there is a reason she brought me to this room, just as there is a reason the chest has contained almost everything I’ve needed so far. The rose in my palm bloomed a darker shade of red, and I pressed it to my exposed chest, resting the rose over my heart. And Aspen is right, I thought, not bothering to glance back at the mirror. Red is my color.

I wrapped my wolf-skin cloak around my shoulders to keep off the chill and descended the steps down to the keep proper where I would find the Huntress, even if it meant looking beneath every drift in her forest. I would find her, and then . . . I did not know what I would do then.

Do you think she is the sort of woman to be overcome by tricks of light and cloth?

I was almost to the kitchen stairs when the wolf pup appeared, her jaws open in a wolfish laugh. She trotted off in the opposite direction toward the part of the keep that held the locked tower room. I followed, the rose in my hand pulsing with the strange magic of the place.