I crept down the hill, keeping to the shadows of the trees and trusting the snow to hide the sound of my passage. The wolf kept pace. I wondered if she could smell my fear, or if the stench was trapped beneath my furs. This was the first other human being I had seen since I was taken. I tried to remember how long ago that would have been. The effort hurt. I remembered the pup, but not when she had grown. I remembered her first kill: a rabbit, white of fur and dark of eye, but not when she had made it. I remembered the Huntress’s hands, guiding my own along the bowstring, but I did not remember when the bow had become an extension of my arm, or when reaching for an arrow had become easier than reaching for a word. The rose in my bloodstream stirred. I was used to that now too.

I should speak to her.

The thought made me tremble, and I could not stop the shaking. I put my hand on the wolf’s shoulder for support and stepped out from behind a tree.

She saw me. The hedge rose between us, but it was thin here and seemed to part before me the longer I stared at it.

“Lady,” the woman said, sinking to her knees and bowing her head.

I did not know what to say. I stared at her bowed head, wrapped in a thick, woolen scarf, and felt the icy walls I’d built up around my memories of home begin to thaw. Terror gripped my stomach. I needed those walls.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. The words felt thick on my tongue.

The woman looked up. She was older than my father, her skin the brown of ripe acorns and wrinkled from too many years in the sun and cold. “Remembering,” she said. Her eyes were Lockland blue.

“Remembering what?”

“Many things, child. Many winters.” She gestured to the ground before her, and I looked at what she had brought. Small bundles of sticks, almost doll-like, bound with scraps of cloth or bits of hair, lay in the snow. I recoiled.

“What are they?”

“The memories of others. I bring them here on midwinter.”

“Why?”

“Because that is my job, child. I carry the memories of the dead so that the people in my care may set them aside.”

“You are a hedgewitch.”

“Of course. This boy here,” she said, lifting a small figurine wrapped in a bit of green ribbon, “died of fever a fortnight past. The winter dead belong to the mountain.”

I remembered the story the Huntress had told me about the significance of the winter rose to mothers.

“Why did you call me lady?”