The charcoal tip of Wynne Ashford's pencil hovered a hair's breadth above the parchment, and she held her breath against the wind that clawed at the ridge. Below her, the Deadlands stretched in their usual tableau of grey ruin: the collapsed granary of Harrowfield, the blackened spire of what had been a watchtower, the half-buried causeway where cattle carts once rolled toward market. Familiar desolation. What was not familiar were the flowers.
She touched pencil to page and drew them in quick, sure strokes. Six petals, each one a delicate lattice of white spreading from a core that glowed faintly blue even in the grey morning light. They bloomed in clusters along the southern lip of the old causeway, rooted in ash that had been barren since Wynne's grandmother's time. Frost flowers. She had heard Old Thom speak of them in his rambling way, had read of them in the cracked leather grimoire her mother kept beneath the floorboards, but she had never seen them with her own eyes. They smelled faintly of pine resin and something metallic, like the edge of a blade before it bit. When the wind shifted, Wynne caught a colder note beneath it, the mineral tang of ice that had not yet formed, a promise of cold yet to come.
The pencil moved. She captured the curl of the nearest petal, the way it rolled inward against the wind. Her fingers were stiff inside her woolen gloves, and she flexed them once before going back to work. The sketch was important. Maps were her family's trade, and the Ashfords had been drawing the Deadlands for three generations. Every season brought changes. Frost scars where there had been none. New sinkholes in the permafrost. And now, these flowers.
"Wynne."
She did not look up. The voice carried across the ridge with the particular weight of a man who expected to be obeyed, and Wynne recognized Elder Borin's cadence the way she recognized the creak of the village hall's door. She added three more strokes to the nearest bloom, gave it a stamen she had almost missed, then lifted the pencil and tucked it behind her ear.
"Borin." She straightened from her crouch, brushing ash from her knees. The wind caught her braid and pulled it across her shoulder, and she caught it back with a mittened hand. "You're a long way from the village square."
The elder stood four paces behind her, his breath a pale ghost in the frigid air. He was a broad man, gone slightly to fat around the middle in the way of men who spent more time indoors than out, and his beard was trimmed close to his jaw in the fashion of Thornmere's council. His coat was the deep blue of his office, lined with rabbit fur that had yellowed with age. He did not smile. Wynne could not remember the last time she had seen him smile.
"You were to report to the hall an hour past," he said. "The council meets at midday."
"The council can wait. This cannot." She gestured toward the flowers. "Tell me what you see, Borin."
He did not look. His gaze stayed on her face, unreadable. "I see a young woman who has forgotten her station."
"I see frost flowers blooming where nothing has grown in a hundred years." Wynne stepped aside, forcing his attention toward the causeway. "Blooming in the south field. Blooming in the open air, not under the ice. Blooming in autumn, two months before the first frost is due." She let each fact fall like a stone into still water. "When did you last see a frost flower, Elder?"
The wind filled the silence between them. Borin's jaw tightened beneath his beard, a small motion she caught only because she had spent a lifetime learning to read the faces of stubborn men.
"Frost flowers are not your concern."
"They are my family's concern. They are the Ashfords' concern. We are the hearth-keepers, Borin. We have been since before your grandfather's grandfather wore that blue coat." Wynne felt the old heat rise in her chest, the Ashford stubbornness that her mother had called a gift and her grandmother had called a sickness. "And I am telling you that the cold is creeping south faster than any winter I have known. The frost line at Harrow's Bend has moved eleven leagues since the equinox. Old Thom says he remembers when it did not move at all."
"Old Thom is a fool who tells stories to children."
"Old Thom has lived through two frosts and remembers more than the rest of us put together." Wynne held her ground. The ridge was narrow here, a knife-edge of compacted ash that fell away to the Deadlands on one side and to the living forest on the other. There was no room for two people to pass without one yielding. Neither of them moved. "You sent me out here to survey the boundary. I am surveying it. And what I am finding is not what the council expected."
Borin's mouth flattened into a line. "What you are finding, girl, is the business of the council to interpret. Not yours."
"Then interpret it. Look at those flowers and tell me they mean nothing." Wynne turned her back on him, a small breach of courtesy she knew he would note, and crouched again over her sketch. She picked up the pencil from behind her ear and resumed drawing, her strokes harder now, more deliberate. The wind picked at the corner of her parchment. She weighted it with a chunk of blackened granite. "I am finishing this sketch. Then I will come to the hall and lay it before the council. And if the council chooses to ignore it, I will lay it before Old Thom, and he will put it in a song, and the whole village will know before supper."
"You threaten me?"
"I inform you." She did not look up. "There is a difference."
Borin's boots crunched against the ash as he shifted his weight. Wynne tracked the sound without turning her head. The elder had a habit of closing distance when he felt cornered, of bringing his bulk to bear like a siege engine. She had seen him do it to her mother, to her grandmother, to every Ashford woman who had stood where she stood now. It was a tactic, nothing more. She had learned it from him, in fact, during the years she had served as hearth-keeper before the council stripped the title and gave it to someone with a more pliable spine.
"Frost flowers are a sign," Borin said slowly, as though choosing each word from a locked box. "A sign of great disturbance in the deep places. They do not bloom without cause."
"Then there is cause." Wynne's pencil paused. "What cause, Borin? What does the council know that I do not?"
For a long moment there was only the wind, and the faint crystalline chime of the frost flowers themselves as their petals brushed one another in the current. It was a delicate sound, almost musical, the kind of sound a child might follow into the woods and never return from. Wynne filed it away. She noted everything. Cartographers had to.
"The council knows what the council needs to know." Borin's voice had gone quieter, and that was worse than his bluster. The quiet Borin was the dangerous one. "Your family's place is at the hearth, Wynne. That was the bargain. The bargain keeps Thornmere safe."
"The bargain keeps the Ashfords in chains, you mean." She set down the pencil and rose, turning to face him. The wind caught her braid again and this time she let it whip across her shoulder. Her eyes were grey, the color of the ash beneath her boots, and she fixed them on his. "My grandmother told me what the bargain really cost. What your council has taken from us, year after year, in the name of safety. I have read the grimoire. I have seen the tallies. The frost was not so fierce before your grandfather's time, Borin. It did not creep. It did not bloom. Something changed, and your council changed with it."
Borin's face went still. Then his hand moved, quick as a striking snake, and caught her wrist. His grip was not cruel, but it was firm, the grip of a man accustomed to being obeyed. Wynne did not pull away. She met his gaze without flinching, and something passed between them, something old and complicated, the weight of a hundred years of Ashford women standing on this same ridge and being told to go home.
"The cold is the cold," Borin said, very quietly. "The cold does what it does. We endure it. We do not fight it. We do not draw its picture and wave it at the council like a flag. We do not put ideas into the heads of frightened people." He released her wrist. "Come to the hall. Sit in the back. Listen. Learn your place."
"My place is here." Wynne crouched again, her back to him. "I will come when I have finished."
She heard him stand there for a breath, two, three. She did not turn. The pencil found the parchment and she resumed her work, her strokes precise, her hand steady despite the wind and the anger and the cold that crept into her bones a little deeper with each passing moment. Behind her, Borin's boots ground against the ash. Then she heard him turn, heard him begin the long walk back toward the treeline and the village beyond.
Wynne finished the last of the six flowers. She sat back on her heels and studied the sketch in the grey light. The petals curled like small hands reaching upward. The cores glowed their faint impossible blue. She had drawn them as she had seen them, but she knew the drawing could not capture the smell, the pine resin and the blade-edge, nor the chime of their petals, nor the way the ash around them had gone hard and glassy underfoot as though the ground itself were turning to ice from the inside out.
She tore the page from her pad and tucked it inside her coat, against her ribs where the warmth of her body would keep it supple. Then she stood, shouldered her pack, and began the walk down the ridge toward Thornmere, her boots leaving prints in ash that would not be there tomorrow because the frost would take them, the frost was taking everything, and the council could sit in its hall and pretend otherwise until the cold came through the walls.
The bells began before she reached the treeline.
Not the small iron bells that hung from the goats' collars in summer, nor the wind chimes the children strung from the widows' porches. These were the deep ones, the cast bronze that had hung in Thornmere's single stone tower since before her grandmother's grandmother was born, the ones whose tongues Wynne had only ever heard struck on the night of the worst frost she could remember. They carried down the ridge through the falling ash, muffled and slow, three notes and then a pause, three notes and then a pause, the rhythm of a heart that had forgotten how to beat properly.
Wynne stopped on the path. Her hand went to her coat, to the folded sketch warm against her ribs. The ash settled on her shoulders and on the wool of her cap and in the hollows of her collarbones. She listened, and the bells counted out their warning, and the wind that had harried her up the ridge dropped for a moment as though the air itself had caught its breath.
She began to run.
The path switchbacked through stunted pines whose needles had gone the color of old iron. She knew every stone of it, every place where the frost had cracked the bedrock and left a scar of pale quartz, every bend where a traveler would be surprised by the sudden view of Thornmere below. Tonight she saw none of it. Her boots struck the ash and she heard her own breath, ragged, and beneath that the bells, beneath that the wind picking up again with a thin high note like something metal being dragged across ice.
She came out of the trees at the top of the village. Thornmere spread below her, the low stone houses with their smoke still rising from the evening fires, the crooked street that ran down to the well, the temple with its wooden statue of the Old Woman in the Woods, the long hall where the council sat on its carved chairs and pretended the frost was a matter of weather. Smoke. Light in the windows. The ordinary shape of a village at dusk.
And at the southern edge, where the path came down from the Glasswatch Pass, a knot of figures had gathered in the road. She could see the bobbing of a lantern. She could see someone waving both arms. She could not yet see who it was.
Wynne ran down the slope, her pack bouncing against her spine. The bells kept their slow toll. As she drew closer she made out the figure at the roadside, and her lungs burned with something that was not the run.
Old Thom stood at the meeting of the paths. He was a tall man, or had been once, but the years had bent him so that now he walked with his knees always slightly bent, his shoulders curved forward as though listening for something beneath the earth. His coat was patched with a dozen different wools, none of them matching, and his beard, white and coarse as horsehair, hung nearly to his belt. In one hand he held an unlit lantern. In the other, his walking staff, its iron tip dark with ash.
He saw her and raised the staff, then lowered it when he saw who it was. "Girl," he said, and his voice cracked like parchment being unrolled. "Girl, I have been standing here since the light went. Get off the road."
"Thom." She slowed, drew up short of him, and felt the sweat on her face go cold as the wind found her. "The bells."
"Aye, the bells." He did not move from the path. His free hand came up and caught her sleeve, and she felt how it shook, the hand that had cut ice for forty winters and split more kindling than she could imagine. The fingers were thick and scarred, the knuckles swollen, the skin mottled where the cold had bitten him down to the bone and back again. "Inside. Now. Both of us. Bring nothing."
"I have my pack."
"Leave it."
"Thom, I have the drawing. I have to speak with Borin, I have to show him what I found, there were flowers on the ridge, six of them, growing in the ash, they glowed like coals and when I touched them the ground turned to ice and I think, I think they are the same thing, I think the frost is not coming down from the north at all, I think it is coming up from the ground and the flowers are part of it and I have to tell the council before, before, Thom, why are you looking at me like that?"
He had not released her sleeve. His eyes, deep-set and pale, were fixed on her face. He did not blink. The wind moved his beard across his chest and he did not notice. The bells went on counting.
"Because," he said, and his voice was so quiet she had to lean in to hear it over the wind, "I am looking at a woman touched by old magic standing in the road at dusk with a paper against her ribs, and there are riders at the Glasswatch. Crimson cloaks. They came down out of the north an hour before sunset and they are asking questions at the pass house, and one of the things they are asking is whether the Ashford girl has been seen."
She had not known she had stopped breathing. She discovered it now, in the small sharp pull of her chest.
"They know my name."
"They know your line." His grip tightened. The scarred knuckles pressed against her sleeve. "Wynne. Listen to me. Your mother was the last hearth-keeper before you. Your grandmother before her. Back and back to the first woman of the village, the one who made the pact when Thornmere was nothing but a few huts in a frozen valley and the Old Woman in the Woods agreed to leave the people be in exchange for songs and the burning of certain herbs. That is the truth Borin does not want spoken. That is the truth the council has kept from every child born in this village for thirty years and more. And it is the truth the riders are hunting. They want anyone whose blood remembers. They want anyone whose hands still know the old words."
"I am not my mother," Wynne said. "I never learned the words."
His eyes did not change. The wind moved ash across the road between them.
"You learned enough," he said, "to draw flowers that turn the ground to ice."
She looked at the road. She looked at the village. She looked at the lantern in his other hand, its wick dark, its glass still clean. She thought of Borin walking back through the pines, his shoulders squared under his coat, his face set in the way it set when he had said the thing he meant to say and would not unsay it. She thought of the council in its hall. She thought of Sera, who had braided her hair that morning and said nothing about anything, who knew more than she said and said less than she knew. She thought of her own hands, which had not done anything in years except stir the hearth and knead the bread and mend the torn hem of a coat that was not hers.
And she thought of the six flowers, curling upward in the ash like small hands reaching.
"Both of us," she said. "Now."
Old Thom let go of her sleeve. He turned without another word and began to walk, not down into the village but along the path that skirted the treeline to the east, the path that led to his cottage on the far side of the well where the road gave up and the pines grew close again. Wynne followed. She left her pack where she had stopped. The bells counted behind them all the way.
His cottage was smaller than she remembered. The last time she had been inside, she had been a girl of perhaps nine, sent to fetch a story for her mother's winter keeping, and the place had seemed enormous to her then, a cave of bundled cloth and stacked wood and smoke. Now she saw how low the ceiling was, how the single room held everything the old man owned, how the bed in the corner was made up with a quilt so patched it was more stitching than cloth. A fire had been laid in the small hearth but not lit. Beside it, on a hook, hung a string of dried herbs that smelled of nothing, having given up their scent years ago.
Thom shut the door. He set the lantern on the table. He took a long breath, let it out, and then his hands began to shake in earnest, both of them, so that he had to press them flat against the table's edge to still them.
"Sit," he said. "There, on the stool. I am going to light this lamp and we are going to talk low, and if you hear hooves on the road you are going to crawl into the root cellar and pull the trap shut over your head and you are not going to come out until I say."
"Thom, the council will be looking for me. Borin will have told them I was on the ridge."
"Borin told the council you were fetching kindling." He struck the flint. The spark caught the wick and the lamp bloomed yellow, and in its light his face looked older than it had an hour ago, the lines deeper, the eyes smaller. "I was there when he came down. He came into the hall and he told them you had gone for kindling and he sent two of the younger men up to find you and bring you back. That was an hour ago. They have not come down yet."
"They would have come down the same path I came down."
"Yes." He sat on the bench across from her. The wood groaned under him. "And they did not. Which means they did not find you on the ridge. Which means you came down the back way, through the pines, where no one walks anymore because the frost took that path last winter and no one has cleared it."
"I came down the way I always come down."
"Aye. And that is why you are here and they are not. Sit still, girl. Sit still and do not speak until I have said what I have to say."
She sat. The stool was small and her knees came up high. She folded her hands in her lap because they had begun to shake too, and she was angry at them for it, and the anger was better than the cold fear that sat under her ribs like a stone.
Thom looked at her a long moment. Then he began.
"Your great-grandmother made the pact. I was not born yet, but my mother was, and she told me the shape of it. There was a winter so deep that the village lost a third of its people to the cold. The Old Woman in the Woods came up out of the pine forest and she stood at the edge of the last fire and she said, give me a keeper, give me a line of keepers, and I will give you back your winters but milder, and you will give me songs and the burning of herbs and the memory of my name. The Ashford woman agreed. The pact was made. The Old Woman went back into the pines. And for three generations the winters were kind, and the hearths burned, and the Ashford women kept the fire and sang the songs and burned the herbs and the village did not freeze."
He paused. The lamp flame bent sideways in a draft from somewhere. The bells, outside, had stopped.
"But a pact," he said, "is a thing with weight on both ends. The Old Woman wanted songs, and she wanted to be remembered. The Ashfords remembered her. The songs were sung. The herbs were burned. And then, in your grandmother's time, there came a winter when the Old Woman wanted something more."
Wynne's hands had gone still in her lap.
"The frost," she said.
"The frost." He nodded. "Your grandmother would not give it. Borin's father, who was elder then, stood with her. They held the old songs and they did not sing the new ones, and the Old Woman went back into the pines angry. And the next winter the frost came. And the winter after that. And every winter since, a little worse. Borin has told the village it is weather. Borin has told the village the old magic is a story. Borin has forbidden the songs. And the frost has walked in the doors the songs would have closed."
The fire in the hearth sat unlit. The dried herbs gave up nothing. Outside, somewhere, a dog began to bark and then stopped, as though something had silenced it.
"The riders," Wynne said. "Why would the riders come for me?"
"Because the Old Woman has kin," Thom said, "and the kin do not forget a broken promise. They have been sending riders south every few years to look for the Ashford line, in case any of the blood survived, in case any of the blood might be persuaded, or compelled, to sing the songs that were not sung. Borin has kept you hidden. Borin has kept your name out of the records. Borin has lied to the council and lied to the riders and lied to himself, and he has done it for thirty years because he loved your mother and he could not bear to see her daughter taken."
Wynne sat on the small stool in the small cottage in the lamplight that smelled of old wool and older wood, and she felt the folded sketch warm against her ribs, and she felt the cold that had been creeping into her bones all evening creep one step further, and she understood for the first time why the council had met behind closed doors, why Borin's face had always gone tight when the old songs were mentioned, why Sera braided her hair each morning without ever once asking what Wynne dreamed about.
She understood, and she did not feel better for it.
"Sing the songs," she said, "and the frost stops."
"Sing the songs," Thom said, "and you give yourself to the Old Woman's kin. Refuse, and the frost takes the village. Refuse and the riders take you. There is no clean door out of this, girl. There never was."
The lamp flame steadied. The bells were silent. Outside, very faintly, Wynne thought she heard hooves on the road, but it might have been only the wind in the pines, and she could not be sure, and Thom was watching her face as though the answer to some question he had been carrying for thirty years lived there.
The hooves were not the wind.
Wynne heard them clearer now, the steady rhythm of horses moving at a walk on the frozen road, and she saw the recognition move across Thom's face like a shadow. He did not rise. He did not reach for his coat. He only lifted one gnarled hand and pressed it flat against the table, and the lamp flame bowed toward him as though listening.
"Three of them," he said. "Perhaps four. Riders from the Pale, by the sound. They have come before, when the frost grew bold."
"When?" Wynne asked.
"Three winters past. The winter before. Always in the deep cold, always when the Old Woman is hungry." His voice had gone quieter, the old parchment rasp reduced almost to a whisper. "They will come to the square. They will ask for the guardian. Borin will stall them. He is good at stalling. But not for long. Not this time."
Wynne stood. The stool scraped against the floor, and the sound was small and sharp in the quiet room. She felt the sketch against her ribs and the cold in her bones and the strange new weight of everything she had just learned, and she made her decision in the same breath she drew to speak.
"My mother's cottage," she said. "Where is the chest."
Thom's eyes flickered. "You know about the chest."
"My mother mentioned it once, when I was small. She said it held things she did not want me to find until I was ready." Wynne's voice came out steadier than she felt. "I was never ready. I am still not ready. But I will go."
Thom nodded slowly, as though he had been waiting a very long time to hear someone say those words, and perhaps he had. He rose from his chair with the creak of old joints, crossed the room to the peg by the door, and took down a short iron key that hung on a length of leather. He pressed it into Wynne's hand, and his fingers were cold, colder than the room, colder than they should have been.
"It is under the hearthstone," he said. "Lift the third stone from the left. The chest is small. There is a lock that knows her blood. You will have to bleed a little."
"And the dagger?"
Thom's face changed. Something moved behind his eyes that she could not read, something older than the winter, older than the village, older perhaps than the Old Woman herself.
"You know about the dagger."
"I dreamed of it. Last night, the night the frost came down. A blade of ice with a name on it." Wynne swallowed. "My name."
Thom was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the hooves grew louder, and she heard now the creak of leather and the low murmur of voices. Then the old man reached out and took her wrist, gently, with the careful grip of someone who had held many things that were fragile and was not ashamed to be gentle with them.
"Your mother made that dagger the winter you were born," he said. "She took a piece of the frost and she sang it into a blade, and she wrote your name on it in the old script, the script that is older than the village, older than the Pale, older than the Old Woman's reckoning. It is yours. It has been waiting for you. But Wynne, child, listen to me."
His grip tightened, just slightly.
"The dagger is a key. It will open doors that should stay shut. It will sing when you draw it from the chest, and the frost will hear it, and the Old Woman will know your name as surely as if you had spoken it into her ear. You will not be able to unsay it. You will not be able to go back to being no one."
"I was never no one," Wynne said. "I was just hidden."
Thom looked at her for a long time, and whatever he saw made him release her wrist and step back, and nod once, and say nothing more.
She went out into the cold.
The village of Thornmere lay under a sky the color of old iron, and the snow was falling still, though gently now, in slow spiraling drifts that seemed to hang in the air longer than they should have. Wynne walked the path she had walked a thousand times, past the smithy with its cold forge, past the well with its frozen bucket, past the cottages where she had kindled fires and mended shutters and heard the small griefs of her neighbors. She did not stop. She did not let herself look at the doorways where she had been welcome, because if she looked she would remember what she was leaving behind, and she could not afford to remember just yet.
Her mother's cottage stood at the edge of the village, set back from the others beneath a stand of black pines that bowed in the wind. It had been empty since the winter Sera died, and Borin had seen to it that no one entered, though Wynne had sometimes seen smoke from the chimney and wondered, and never asked. Now she understood. Someone had been keeping the fire lit. Someone had been keeping the place ready.
The door was not locked. It opened at her touch, and the warmth that came out was the warmth of a banked hearth, the warmth of a room that had been waiting. Wynne stepped inside and closed the door behind her, and stood for a moment in the dark, breathing in the smell of her mother's house. Wood smoke and dried herbs and the faint mineral scent of the frost that lived in the walls, in the bones of the place, in the stones of the hearth.
She crossed to the hearth. The fire was low, barely more than a coil of embers, but it gave enough light to see by. She knelt and pressed her palm flat against the hearthstone, and she counted. One from the left. Two. Three. The third stone was no different from the others, but when she pressed, she felt it shift, just slightly, and she understood that her mother had known this moment would come, and had made it easy for her.
She worked the stone loose with her fingernails. It came up with a scrape of grit and a breath of colder air from below, and beneath it, set into the packed earth, was a chest no bigger than a loaf of bread. It was made of some pale wood she did not recognize, and bound in iron that had gone the color of a winter sky, and there was a lock on the front that seemed to be made of the same iron, except that it was not a lock at all. It was a mouth. A small iron mouth, closed, waiting.
Wynne took out the iron key Thom had given her, but before she could fit it to the lock, the mouth opened of its own accord, and a tongue of frost curled out, and the chest exhaled, and she understood that this was not a lock her mother's blood opened. This was a lock her mother's blood had been keeping shut.
She reached into her pocket and found the small knife she kept for paring kindling, and she drew it across the heel of her thumb without letting herself think about it, because if she thought she would stop, and if she stopped she would never start again. The blood came up bright against her skin, and she pressed her thumb to the iron mouth, and the mouth drank.
The lid of the chest swung open.
Inside, nested in a cloth of undyed wool, lay a dagger. It was not a large dagger. It was the length of her forearm from elbow to wrist, and its blade was the color of ice on a deep pond, that particular blue-white that seems to hold a light of its own. The hilt was wrapped in something pale that might have been leather and might have been something else, and the pommel was a single stone, clear as glass, cold as the heart of the frost.
Wynne reached for it. Her fingers brushed the blade, and the hum began.
It rose up through her hand and into her wrist and up her arm and into her chest, and it was not a sound she heard with her ears. It was a sound she heard with her bones, with the marrow of her, with the part of her that was her mother's daughter and her grandmother's granddaughter and the heir to a line of women who had given themselves to the frost so that the village might sleep. The hum was a name. Her name. Written on the blade in a script that looked like the cracks in river ice, like the branching of frost on a windowpane, like the pattern the wind makes when it blows snow across a field and the snow answers back.
She lifted the dagger from the chest, and the cloth fell away, and the hum rose higher, and the embers in the hearth flared once, bright as a struck match, and then steadied. Wynne stood in the small warm room with the dagger in her hand and felt the cold of it run up her arm and into her heart, and she did not shiver. She had expected to shiver. She had been cold all her life, or so it had seemed, but this cold was different. This cold was not outside her. This cold was part of her, and had always been part of her, and the dagger was only showing her the shape of it.
She thought of the riders on the road. She thought of the frost in the village square. She thought of Sera braiding her hair each morning without asking what she dreamed. She thought of Borin's face when he saw her across the square, the way his mouth had gone tight, the way his hands had clenched at his sides. She thought of the sketch against her ribs, the sketch of the village before the frost, the village that might be again if she was willing to pay the price her mother had paid, and her grandmother before her, and her grandmother's mother before that.
She thought of Old Thom in his cottage, watching the door, waiting to see which way the story turned.
Wynne slid the dagger into her belt, at the small of her back, where her hand could find it without looking. She knelt and put the hearthstone back in place, and pressed it down until it sat flush, and then she rose, and she crossed to the door, and she opened it onto the falling snow.
The riders had reached the square. She could see them from the edge of the pines, four of them on horses the color of bone, their cloaks the white of the Pale, their faces hidden. Borin was before them, his staff in his hand, his voice carrying across the cold air in the formal cadence of a man who was stalling and knew he was stalling and meant to stall as long as his breath would last. Behind him the village was waking, doors opening, faces appearing in windows, the slow frightened gathering of people who had heard the bells.
Wynne stepped out from the pines and began to walk toward the square. The snow fell on her shoulders and did not melt. The dagger hummed against her spine. The frost, somewhere far off, somewhere deep, shifted and stirred and turned its head, as a sleeper turns at the sound of a familiar song, and Wynne walked toward the riders with her mother's blood on her thumb and her name on a blade of ice and the choice that was no choice at all already made in the marrow of her, and she did not look back, because the only direction left was forward.