I let her spin me away and bring me back, my feet finding the steps while the room blurred around me, the Huntress the only fixed point.

“Then why do you come here?” I asked, breathless.

“To remind myself.”

“But you’re not Isolde anymore.”

“Maybe not,” she said, wrapping her arms around me slowly, her steps sure and easy as she lifted me into the air. Snow brushed my throat, and I tasted moonlight like pale wine. “But I’m here because of her, and so are you.”

She lowered me, and I clung to her neck, still drunk. “Why did you run from me?” I said, my lips brushing her skin with each word.

She ran her hands down my side, and I moved against her, desire rising to meet her touch. “Run?”

“You changed earlier. And you’ve run from me before.”

“So have you,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. I can’t run from you now.”

“And why is that?” I struggled to focus on her words instead of her hands.

“Do you really have to ask?”

“It’s the dress, isn’t it,” I said, only half-teasing. There was power at work here. I could feel it in the beat of my heart, blood rushing through veins ringed with briars, and in the walls of this room with its tattered tapestries and old banners. The Huntress kissed me, and the wind picked up, whipping snow down through the moonlight.

“It’s not the dress.” She laced her fingers through mine and led me into another dance.

I was out of breath and flushed by the time our steps led us to the door.

“Wine?” she asked.

I didn’t want wine. I wanted the lips that had formed the word, but I nodded.

She did not offer me her arm, as Avery or one of my father’s acquaintances might have. I was glad of it. Instead, she took my hand with the same grace she did everything, making it look as natural as breathing. Maybe it was. I tightened my fingers around hers and did not look back.

“Wait here,” she said outside the kitchen door. “I’ll get the wine.”

But where will we drink it? I wondered as I waited in the dark of the hallway, thinking of the room above the stable and a bed piled high with furs.

The library, as it turned out.

The Huntress lit the fire in the grate, then laid a fur before it. I shivered. “Sit,” she said, as the silver and black hairs of the pelt rippled in the flames. She shrugged out of her leathers, leaving only the fine wool of her shirt between me and her skin as she settled onto the floor. I watched the cloth rise and fall with her breathing, the firelight warm on the exposed skin of my chest.

“Are you human?” I asked her.

“Would it matter?”