A strange coppery taste filled her mouth, and she recognized it for what it was: fear. The girl could have met anything in the forest, stumbled upon a bear, or a lynx, or . . . The scent of roses flooded her nostrils, drowning out all else.

No.

The Huntress dropped her spear and ran, racing toward the boundary and the end of everything.

She found Rowan on her knees, staring into the thorns.

“I have to go,” she said, and the Huntress listened to the story that spilled from the girl’s lips, a torrent of words rushing like meltwater.

The Huntress closed her eyes. In the darkness behind her lids, she heard the sound she had been dreading since she followed an old man down the mountain to a tiny cottage on the edge of Locke’s old land. It was barely audible, more of a hush than a noise, a whisper of a whisper, the sound the wind makes before it starts to blow. It was the sound of a single petal falling.

She saw a body on the spring grass, roses red as blood across a broken chest.

“The price of freedom will be the loss of one you cannot bear to lose.”

The pieces fell into place.

“Go,” she told Rowan, gathering the girl into her arms. “Go to your father.”

She could not have designed a better trap if she had been given a century to think on it. If she refused to let Rowan go, the girl would grow to hate her over time, and the ending would be the same. She would lose her, just as surely as she was about to lose her now.

“I will come back,” said Rowan, tears in her eyes. “I will come back to you. I swear it.”

The Huntress kissed her. She tasted like spring and rain and roses, not the cold white roses that surrounded them, but the heady smell of wild roses blooming along hedgerows, heavy with summer, and the ponderous, many-petaled heads of the roses grown in the gardens of the wealthy, overflowing with abundance.

“I will be here,” she said, forcing herself to let Rowan go, forcing herself to smile. She removed the bundle of food she’d packed for the hunt from her belt and pressed it into Rowan’s hands. “This should last you. It is only a three-day journey on foot. Follow the slope of the hills, and bring the wolf. She’ll keep you safe.”

“Thank you,” Rowan said, kissing her one last time.

The Huntress turned away. She couldn’t stop Rowan, but she did not have to see the hope flare to life in the girl’s dark eyes. She did not have to see the reflection of her breaking heart.

A rose for a rose, a thorn for a thorn.

Rowan might return, but the Huntress would be gone, the curse at last unraveled.

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen