Chapter Twelve

 

 

 

Warmth.

The thought drifted through the dream of spring, echoed in the rush of meltwater. I soaked up the feeling. It had been a while since I’d been warm, because . . . my mind hesitated, as skittish as a wild animal.

Snow. Wolves. The Huntress.

I tried to move. Something heavy lay across my chest. I opened my eyes to a dark room, lit only by the light of the roaring fire. Furs covered all I could see of my body. I was lying on my side, and the weight on my ribs was comforting rather than claustrophobic, as was the smooth, soft warmth behind me. I leaned back into it, my body craving the heat, my mind still drowsy from cold and fatigue.

The warmth moved, too.

Awareness poured into me, mercilessly informing me that my toes and fingers still ached with frostbite, and also that I was very, very naked. The body beside me, that wondrous source of warmth, was also naked, and there was only one person on this mountain to whom that body could belong.

“Skin to skin. It is the only way to save someone as cold as you are.”

I froze as her words drifted across my ear. Something moved at my feet, and I saw the tip of a white ear. The wolves were here, too. My pack. Leaves rustled just outside the edge of hearing, and I tried to sit up, but her arm weighed a thousand pounds and my muscles refused to obey me. There was a strange clacking sound, like old bones knocking together, and as she pulled me closer, I realized the sound was my teeth chattering.

“You are safe. I promise.”

Her body was as soft and hard as she was. I could feel the muscles of her stomach move as she spoke, and the curve of her breasts pressed against my back. She was wrong. I was not safe. In fact, I had never been more in danger. I remembered the decision I had come to in the snow. My heart beat faster, stuttering in my chest.

“Breathe slowly,” she said. “Cold can weaken the heart.”

I closed my eyes against the bitter irony of her words. My heart stuttered again, then resumed its beat, and I took a deep breath of warm air. The breath brought me closer to her, and the torpor that clung to my limbs prevented me from rolling away from the heat of her skin and the cool, piney scent of her hair. I shuddered as she held me while the nearness of my death passed over me like a winged shadow, and the feel of her arm around me was all that kept the ice at bay.

“It will pass.”

“The storm came out of nowhere,” I said, grateful that she could not see my face.

“Rowan.” She pulled away from me, leaving me once again out in the snow, and I shivered uncontrollably as she propped herself up on one elbow to look into my eyes. I saw the accusation there.

“I didn’t,” I said, my body shaking uncontrollably. “I didn’t want to die.”

“You didn’t?”

I wanted to touch her then, but all I could do was lie there while the last of the cold left me in great, shuddering tremors.

“No.”

“Then why did you run?”

Hold me, my mind screamed. “It’s all I know how to do,” said my mouth.

“You should not have stopped running.”

I closed my eyes against her words, hurt seeping in around the cold.

“If you had kept running, you would not have frozen.”

“If I had kept running, you would not have found me.”

“Open your eyes, Rowan.”

I refused. If I opened my eyes, I would see her skin, glowing rose-gold in the firelight as light spilled over her shoulders and breasts and the little pool of shadow between her collarbones, and she would see everything.

“I’m cold,” I said, hoping she mistook the shaking in my voice for a different kind of need.

“Here.” She lay back down beside me, pulling me against her.

I continued to shake, but this time with the effort of keeping my heart inside my body. She ran her hand down my arm the way I had seen her stroke a wolf, or the bear, and I bit my lip against the longing that followed her touch.

I am sick with cold, I tried to tell myself. I did not come back for this. I came here to escape Avery.

The denial lasted all of another heartbeat as I lay, trembling, seeing stars behind my eyes and hearing the quick draw of my breath as she swept her fingers over the curve of my shoulder and down to my wrist, then up, careless, unaware of the desire spreading from her fingertips like fire.

I wanted to turn, to feel her hands on the tips of my breasts, on my lips, on the smooth skin of my stomach and the hard line of my collarbones, but I didn’t dare with my heart so close to hers and winter still gripping my marrow. I lay there until the last shudder of desire faded, and the world went soft around the edges as warmth, real and lasting, flooded me like wine.

“Tell me about the roses,” I said from the center of this new, warm world.

“You’ve never heard the story of the Winter Rose?”

“No.”

A wolf rose, stretched, then flopped back down on the floor.

“Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes,” I said, remembering with a twinge that was almost bittersweet the contempt I’d felt for Avery’s stories.

“In the mountains, we believe that the Earth was born in Winter. Everything was cold and dark, and the sun only rose for a few hours each day, too weak to manage much else. Winter might have been beautiful then, and she might have been cruel, but there was no one there to see or feel, and so instead she was just lonely. She watched the Sun coming and going and asked him one day why he didn’t stay.

“‘There is nothing for me here,’ he said to her. And so Winter thought long and hard about what she might do to keep him in her skies. First, she made the North Wind. She was a powerful thing, and for a time her company was all that Winter wanted. Eventually, however, she remembered why she had breathed the North Wind into life, and so she sent her daughter on a journey far across the world, to see if there was anything that caught the Sun’s attention. The North Wind was gone a long time, and Winter began to worry until her daughter returned one day just after sunset.

“‘I have watched the sun for a year,’ she said to her mother, ‘and nothing pleases him.’

“This grieved Winter, and Winter’s grief cut the North Wind to the quick, for she loved her mother.

“‘The Sun is warm,’ she said at last, trying to cheer her mother up. ‘And you are cold. Perhaps if you make something warm, the Sun will stay.’

“Winter thought about this, and at last saw the wisdom in her daughter’s words, and so she created the South Wind. The longer the South Wind blew, the longer the Sun stayed in her sky, and Winter rejoiced, for the Sun loved her and she loved him. Together, they made Summer, and life bloomed across the world.

“But as life grew, Winter faded, and at last she realized the terrible truth. The Sun’s love burned too hot, and if she stayed with him, she would die. So, Winter made a pact with the Sun. For the sake of their child, they would part, and Sun would visit Winter for only a short time each year. The children Winter bore in these times were Spring and Fall, and Winter loved them, but she was not happy, for the time passed too quickly and she never saw Summer again.

“The North Wind stayed with her, for she was Winter’s first daughter, and the most loyal, but her mother’s sorrow made her bitter and cruel. One day, tired of grief, she blew into the heart of Summer and plucked a rose from her bosom to bring back to their mother. The rose should have died, but the strength of the North Wind’s conviction froze death, and so it bloomed, spreading across the ice, Winter’s only living memory of her lost child.

“Now, a northern woman who is beautiful and unattainable is called a Winter Rose,” the Huntress finished, “and mothers who have lost children leave carved figurines where the winter roses grow in midwinter, sharing their grief with the season.”

I looked up. Her hair fell around her face, but the firelight shone through, and the shadows it cast were dark and wild.

“Is that why the roses follow you?”

“No,” she said, and the bitter smile that twisted her lips told a story that I was no longer sure I wanted to hear. “You should sleep, Rowan.”

“Wait,” I said, fighting to keep my eyes open. I had decided to stay here, out in the snows, with a woman who I knew so little about, it wouldn’t have filled a half page of one of her books. “Tell me your name.”

I had almost given up on the question by the time she replied.

“Names have power, Rowan. Not power like this,” she touched my bandaged hand, “but still, power. What is your name to you?”

“My name? It’s just a name, I guess. Who I am.”

“Your mother named you Rowan?”

“Yes.”

“And your sisters, Aspen and Juniper. We call those trees the mountain sisters.”

“I know.”

“Your friends in the city by the sea called you Rowan.”

“Yes.”

“All of that is a part of your name.” She paused. “The woman I was, before. I don’t want to remember her. Or the people she lost.”

“And her name would be a memory,” I said.

“Yes.”

I burrowed deeper under the furs, struggling to decide how much to say. “I understand, I think,” I said at last. “There have been plenty of times these past few years where I would have given anything to be someone else. When my mother died, or when we had to flee the city, and especially when I realized that my father planned to wed me to some boorish villager who didn’t know one end of an abacus from another. It’s funny now, that that seems like the worst of it all.”

“A marriage is a lifetime.”

“My father was going to trade me. I was the price of our new life, of his stupid furs, of the house that I found at the bottom of my mother’s inheritance, and it didn’t matter what I wanted. I told Aspen and Juniper that it would be okay there. I promised them we would be happy, and then we got there and they fit in, and it was only I who hated everyone. I tried. Or maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. It all seems so stupid now.”

Something warm and furry clambered over the furs and pounced on my face. A hot, wet tongue bathed my eyelids, and I struggled to free my ear from needle-sharp teeth as the pup whined her enthusiasm for my return.

“I let a boy die once before I became the Huntress, simply because he irritated me. Everything is relative.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at the Huntress. The pup licked my nose with an impossibly long tongue, then flopped down on my chest to chew a spot on her leg, apparently content once more with her world.

“How did he die?”

“I took him on a hunt. He was green, and the hounds found a bear.”

I flinched at the thought of the wounds on her back. I did not want to talk about death. “How are you healing?”

She sat, turning so that I could see her shoulder. Her skin had knitted over the gashes, and beneath the translucent flesh the rose still grew, green and black and white, like some sort of queer tattoo. I raised a hand to touch it, but the pup pounced at the movement, wrestling my wrist back down to my chest and growling fiercely.

“Let’s take a look at that hand before she chews it off.” The Huntress peeled off the bandage, and I looked away, not wanting to see the damage or what lay beneath the cuts. “There are advantages to magic, if you can learn to live with it,” she said.

I looked.

A rose bloomed at the center of my palm, but unlike the roses on the walls, this one was blood red, and the skin around it was almost totally healed. I touched it tentatively. Skin, not petals, met my fingertips, but I heard the rustle of leaves.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, because it was, no matter what else it meant, no matter what else it would bring with it. I held it up to the light, transfixed. When the pup lunged again, I batted her away without pain.

“Your pup is growing,” said the Huntress.

“Yes.”

“She’ll be ready for her first hunt soon.”

I looked from the red rose to the gold of the pup’s eyes in her black face, and wondered at the strangeness of it all. “You said she should have died.”

“She would have, without you.”

“You said she would only breed more suffering.”

“She might. Or she might not.”

I smoothed the fur on the pup’s face, thinking of bears and elk and all the dangers of the wild that she would face as she grew. I would be helpless to save her, then. “I am not a green boy,” I said, an idea forming in my mind. “Take me with you, next time you hunt.”

She placed a hand on my cheek, turning my face toward her, and searched my eyes for a long time. I did not know what she saw, or what, indeed, she was looking for, but when she let me go she nodded.