Another gust. Another step. If the wind was pushing against me, that meant my path forward must be into the gale.

Winter screamed louder and in its multitoned wail I felt its anger. Fury. Pain.

I dragged myself forward. Again. Again. Then I fell. The ground beneath gave way and I tumbled down a slope and cracked my head on ice. Through the sluggish churn of my groaning thoughts, I caught Winter’s laughter. It was winning.

I lay on a frozen canal. A place I’d once called home more than Oma’s gable house. The wind gave a mocking poof, and my body slid along the ice like a soap bar on porcelain. No matter my will, my feeble form slipped and slid. Helpless.

Winter shrieked. Get away, you foul thing. Leave me be!

The plea felt familiar, like how I felt about my curse, my broken choices. My mistakes. About my heart’s insistence on beating when my worth and desire to live were trampled beneath the rhythmic feet of my traitorous pulse.

In that moment, as Winter screamed and frostbite’s rabid teeth dug into me, I felt a kinship with the cold loneliness. I was battling Winter, yes, but I also understood it.

“We’re alone, you and I! We have no one but ourselves!”

Winter’s wind took a breath—like the breath I’d taken when I felt seen by Bastiaan for the first time. A tentative relief.

“Even we can’t comfort each other! That’s our true curse. You, trapped here as a Trial. Me, trapped by the curse to live a half life. We pity each other, and we’re both helpless. You wish to destroy me. I wish to destroy you. And yet I also wish to destroy myself.”

Winter wailed again. Seen. Known. In this moment I would have cried if I could. But my eyes ached from the cold and nothing within me could maintain warmth enough to be set loose—certainly not a tear.

Winter attacked harder than ever. Slam. Slam. It didn’t like being seen. That only angered it more.

I flattened myself against the surface of the icy canal, my frostbitten cheek sticking to the pane of glass, then tearing free again. The wind fought for purchase, ripping at the folds in my clothes, sending sand-like snow into my eyes. Icicles shot through the air, landing near me like stray arrows.

One would find its target soon.

Blinded and covered with blood like cold tar, I managed to reach my skates tied to the strap of my pack. I kicked off my boots and they went flying down the ice, tumbling into the white gusts of the blizzard. I couldn’t bend my toes. Could hardly bend my knees up enough to pull on the skates.