I met her eyes, and this time I didn’t see forests. I just saw her. “No,” I said, my voice rough. I didn’t care what she was or who she had been; I just wanted her.

She leaned back to look at me, and I did not blush under her gaze as it traveled down my throat.

“I don’t want you to leave,” she said, and I felt the swell of mountains in her voice. “I want you to stay here with me.”

I slid the sleeve of my dress over one shoulder, my heart racing as I spoke. “Always.”

She closed her eyes, her lips parted over words she did not say aloud, and suddenly I did not want her tenderness or the gentle heat of the flames. I wanted the Huntress, and the Huntress was ice and snow and shattered light. I pulled her to me, startling her eyes open, and kissed her hard as the weight of her body settled over me.

She answered, her lips moving down my neck to my shoulder, then farther down, and I wrapped my legs around her as she tugged the gown lower. The wool was sturdy and did not tear, and she let out a growl of frustration that sounded so much like a wolf I would have laughed if it had not unleashed a new wave of desire. She raised me up, her fingers as deft on the laces as they were on a bowstring, and I let her lift the dress over my head before lying back on the softness of the furs to let her look at me. I could feel her eyes, and at last I felt her hands, gentle again as she ran them down my sides and over the arch of ribs and hips until I ached for her to touch me with each shuddering breath.

“Please,” I said, and I remembered, as she slid inside me, that please was one of the first words I’d ever said to her, and then the world opened around me as she moved with my body and I remembered nothing else for a long, long while.

Days turned into weeks turned into months.

She had not kept track of time when the witch first brought her world to ruin, and there had been no point afterward. There were no seasons to mark the year, only winter, endless and unchanging and as familiar as loss. Time was inconsequential. She had so much of it.