Chapter Eighteen

 

 

 

The setting sun cast my shadow before me as I followed the dirt track into the village and up to the Locklands’ door. I heard the whispers following me, and the sound of shutters and doors opening as I put one foot in front of the other, meeting my shadow with every step. The wolf stayed close. I had wanted to lock her in the cottage, but my hand had hesitated on the latch and she had bolted out, baring her teeth.

Let them see, I decided. I was thankful for that decision, now that the entire village had turned out to stare. If I had felt out of place here before the Huntress had taken me, it was nothing to how I felt today.

The Lockland lodge was a huge, sprawling house that had been added on to over the years as the family grew. At one point, I guessed, there had been real wealth here, but that day was long gone. What was left was carefully maintained, but rough, just like the rest of the village. I raised the stag’s head knocker on the broad doors and let it fall, once, twice, three times. The sound echoed in the stillness of twilight.

A young woman opened it a few heartbeats later, her cheeks flushed and her lips still wearing a lingering laugh that died when she saw the wolf. The smells of sweat and ale washed over me, and I felt my own hackles rise in response.

“I need to talk to Aspen,” I said, not bothering with courtesies.

The girl’s face paled, and she glanced over her shoulder.

“Who is it?” A male voice asked. The woman wet her lips, fear radiating from her pores, and didn’t answer.

“Aspen,” I said to her again, keeping my voice low. “Now.”

I had not thought about the consequences of my return. My father was dying; that was enough to compel me, but the fear in her face awoke an answering fear in my own heart. I had been gone for months. Long enough for spring to come and go and winter to come again. Long enough for Aspen to marry, and long enough for my family to mourn me as dead. Long enough for suspicion to take root where joy might once have bloomed.

“Just someone here to see Aspen.” She took a step away from me, her eyes glued to the wolf.

“It’s colder than the Huntress’s tits out there, girl. Shut the goddamn door.” Heavy footsteps approached, and then I was looking up into the blue eyes and bushy beard of one of Avery’s cousins. His glare turned to terror as the wolf growled, and I worried for a moment that he might piss himself. “Avery,” he called over his shoulder. “Someone get Avery.”

The girl slipped away, and I willed her to find my sister before this man thought to put a crossbow bolt through my heart. Behind me I could hear the gathering crowd.

“Rowan!”

I turned, my heart catching in my throat. A girl stood no more than ten feet away from me with her arms full of groceries. She was even taller than I remembered, and she wore her dark hair pulled over one shoulder in a long braid threaded through with ribbons. I took a half step toward her, then another, unsure. “Juniper?”

“It is you.”

My youngest sister looked at me out of a face that had lost the fat of childhood. Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she was in the process of putting down her basket when another familiar voice poured cold dread down my spine.

“Rowan.”

I turned to face my former fiancé, words dying in my throat. He, too, was taller than I remembered, and he had grown a black beard like his cousin’s. It suited him.

“Avery,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. As always, the dread I felt before seeing him had me trembling with doubt at the sight of his face. Beauty was so deceptive. He smiled his easy smile, looking every inch the headman’s son.

“We thought you were dead. Or ran off to your city. Some of us thought you’d run off to your city and died. But,” he said, looking me up and down, “here you are. Alive.”

“Where is my sister?”

“My wife is inside.”

“And my father?”

“I’m afraid your father is not well.”

“Bring me to them.” I dug my hands into the wolf’s fur as Avery’s eyes flashed at my presumption.

“Where have you been, Rowan?” he asked.

“I want to see my father.” I was all too aware of the rising murmur of the watching crowd.

“We thought you were dead,” he said again. There was an odd emotion there. Anger, maybe, or regret.

“I’m not.”

“Tell me where you have been then, and I will let you see your father.”

“Don’t you know?” I asked, looking from him to Juniper. “Didn’t my father tell you?”

The emotions wrestling on his face coalesced into something more familiar: disbelief. “The Huntress is a fairy tale.”

I had nothing to say to this. It had never occurred to me, not once in the time since I had been taken, that the villagers might not believe the story told by my family. “Your father came down from the mountain sick with madness. It happens.”

“Your father crossed the boundary, Avery,” I said, speaking the first words that came into my head. The crowd gave a collective hiss.

“No.” Avery’s face darkened. “My father respected the old ways.”

“Who do you think the boundary protects?” I nearly shouted. “Why do you think there is a boundary at all, or old ways, if not for the Huntress?”

“Say you’re right then,” he said, his voice tight. “Say the Huntress killed my father and my brother, as your father claims. Why did she release you?”

“Because—” I broke off, mind racing. Because she loves me, but that was not something I could say to the man who I was once to wed.

“How do I know you’re who you say you are, and not some trick?”

“Trick? Avery.” His name burst from my lips, and he flinched as if I’d struck him. “You can’t explain me away, Avery.”

The sounds of the crowd faded, and for a moment it was just the two of us. I remembered, with a twinge of regret, the small things Avery had done for me over the months I had known him. The carved wolf, the walks around the village where his pride in his home had soured to bitterness each time I looked down on what I saw with scorn.

“I’ve never been able to explain you,” he said, but I did not have time for what might have been.

“Rowan?” Aspen appeared at Avery’s elbow, her dark eyes wide. He placed a protective arm around her shoulders, and I couldn’t help staring at the swell of her stomach. Aspen. Pregnant. It didn’t seem possible, and I reeled as I understood what my mind had tried to tell me. I really had been gone a year, from one midwinter to another.

“You’re alive,” she said. Then she saw the wolf. Something flashed across her face too quickly for me to read, but I saw her place a hand on Avery’s arm with a deliberation that held meaning, even if I could not tell what that meaning was.

“How is father?” I asked her.

The expression that I could not read flashed again, and she frowned. “Dying. You’re too late, Rowan.”

The chill in her voice forced me back a step, and the wolf looked up at me with questioning eyes. “I—”

“You should go back to wherever you came from,” Aspen said. “There is no place for you here.”

“Aspen—”

“Go, Rowan. Juniper, get inside before that creature rips out your throat.”

Juniper obeyed, looking just as confused as I felt. Even Avery seemed taken aback, but he allowed his wife to pull him back into the warmth of the lodge. Aspen shut the door on me herself, and I heard the thud of a bar falling across it. I stared at the dark wood, stunned and aching and more tired than I’d ever felt in my life.

The crowd parted before me, and I did not dare to meet their eyes. They were not throwing stones yet, but I did not trust these people. The wolf pointed her nose toward the forest, and I hesitated, the temptation to vanish into the trees strong. I watched her lope into the woods, the wind rippling the fur along her back, while I followed the road back to the cottage.

I collapsed in front of the cold hearth. My eyes saw nothing and I heard only the rustle of thorn against thorn until a soft knock on the door roused me from a lapse in consciousness that bore little resemblance to sleep. I held my breath, listening, and then Juniper’s voice called my name.

“Can I come in?” Juniper’s lower lip quivered with suppressed emotion when I opened the door.

I stepped back, afraid to speak, afraid to break the spell of her presence.

“It’s freezing in here,” Juniper said. “Let me light the fire.” She checked that all the shutters were tightly latched, then laid a small fire in the hearth with shaking hands. “I brought you some bread and cheese and sausage.”

“Aspen,” I began, but Juniper cut me off.

“Ignore her. She didn’t mean it. Not really. I think she was trying to protect you.”

“Protect me? By telling me to leave?”

“You don’t know what it’s been like since you left.”

The accusation hurt.

“Since I left? Do you think I wanted to leave?”

“No! Of course not. Rowan, eat something, please. You look half starved. I brought something for your . . . your friend, too.” She pulled out another bundle, and I smelled the clean, coppery scent of blood as she unwrapped a meaty bone.

“Juniper.” I wanted to hug her, but something held me back. It was too strange, being back in this house without Aspen or my father. “What happened?”

“After . . . after you left, Father went mad. That’s why no one believes him. He wouldn’t stop talking about roses and bears and a woman with a bone-white spear. Aspen tried to tell Avery the truth, but he didn’t want to listen. Aspen says he’s afraid of the truth. It was . . . it was easier after a while to forget what we saw and just go along with him.”

“What does he believe then?”

“He believes his father and brother were killed in an avalanche, and that Father was hit in the head. He believes you ran away to the city afterward because without Father nobody could force you to marry him.”

I might have done, I thought. “They crossed the boundary and killed the Huntress’s Hounds.”

Juniper looked at me like I, too, was crazy. “I don’t know what the Hounds are,” she said, her eyes beseeching me, “but Avery says that no one here would ever cross the boundary, which is why it could not have been the Huntress.”

“He called her a fairy tale. How can he not believe in her but believe in the boundary?”

Juniper took a deep breath. “Because if his father crossed the boundary, then that means it was his father’s fault he and Avery’s brother died, and his fault that you were taken, and Avery can’t accept that.”

“But you remember,” I said, reaching for her hand. “You remember the truth.”

“Of course I do.” She trembled. “I will remember it as long as I live. How did you get away?”

“She let me go.”

“Why?”

“I met an old woman in the woods. A hedgewitch, I think. She told me father was sick, and so the Huntress let me come back.”

Juniper gave me a wary look.

“She just let you go?”

“She’s not a monster, Juniper.”

“She killed people and stole you away from us because father picked a flower.”

“She—” How could I explain what the Huntress was, or why she had done what she had done, to someone who did not know her?

“Avery says that if the Huntress really did take you, then you must be bewitched.”

“I’m not,” I said, thinking of the rose in my palm.

“He said you wouldn’t know it, if you were. Don’t you see? Why else would you return, almost a year from the day you were taken?”

“Because the old woman told me father was dying. Do you think I’m bewitched?”

“I don’t know. I am so happy to see you, Rowan, but it feels too good to be true. Just like the dreams I had right after mother died, and then I’d wake up, and she’d still be dead. What am I supposed to think?”

“That I’m your sister,” I said, grasping her shoulders in my hands and looking her in the eyes. “And that I’m back.”

She blinked up at me through tears. “Okay,” she said. “I believe you. But what are you going to tell Avery?”

I took strength from her presence and gritted my teeth.

“The truth.”