Chapter 1

Rose

The cold is a thief.

It steals the air from my lungs and the feeling from my fingertips. It slips through the cracks in the walls of this tiny cabin, a constant, unwelcome guest at the table of our meager existence. My fingers, stiff and chapped, move over the dwindling supplies on the rough-hewn shelf. One sack of flour, half-full. A small barrel of salted fish, the brine level dropping with alarming speed. A handful of withered apples, their skins puckered and sad. It is never enough.

Three weeks until Christmas, and the gnawing anxiety in my gut is a more constant companion than the winter wind. I press the heel of my hand against my stomach, a useless gesture against a hunger that is more than just physical. It’s a hunger for peace, for a moment—just one—where I don’t have to calculate and ration and pray.

A small sound, a soft, tuneless humming, drifts from the corner of the room. I turn, and the tightness in my chest eases, just a fraction. Lily. My Lily. She sits on the floor near the hearth, her small body cocooned in a threadbare blanket, her fingers carefully arranging a collection of pinecones into a miniature forest. Her hair, the color of spun gold, catches the firelight, a beacon of warmth in the grey gloom of the afternoon. She is eight years old and knows more of hardship than any child should, yet she carries a light within her that the encroaching darkness of this life has not yet managed to extinguish. It is my one sacred duty to keep that light burning.

“I’m making a Christmas town for the squirrels, Mama,” she says without looking up, her voice full of childish solemnity. “So they have somewhere warm to go, too.”

My heart gives a painful squeeze. I force a smile, a brittle thing that feels like it might crack my face. “That’s very kind of you, little bird. I’m sure they’ll love it.”

I cross the small room, my worn boots silent on the floorboards, and kneel beside her. I run my hand over her hair, the strands soft as milkweed fluff under my calloused palm. She leans into my touch, a small, unconscious gesture that says home. That says safe. I am neither, not really, but I am all she has.

“I was playing outside earlier,” she says, her brow furrowed in concentration as she places a pebble path between two pinecone houses. “Near the old stones.”

Ice trickles down my spine, slow and cold. “Lily, you know you’re not to go near the ruins. They aren’t safe.” The words are sharper than I intend, and she flinches. Guilt, swift and hot, floods me. I soften my voice, forcing a calm I don’t feel. “The snow is deep, and the stones are loose.”

“But I saw something,” she insists, her blue eyes wide and earnest as they finally lift to mine. “I saw a knight. A big one, made of stone. He flies. He had wings, Mama, but they were broken. He looked so… sad.”

A stone knight. I let out a slow breath, the tension in my shoulders easing. A child’s fantasy, spun from old tales and a lonely afternoon. Her imagination has always been a vivid, vibrant thing. It’s how she escapes. “A statue, then. It’s just an old carving, little bird.”

“No.” She shakes her head back and forth, her golden hair flying. “He felt real. I touched his hand, and it was so cold. Colder than the snow.” She shivers, a genuine tremor that runs through her small frame. “I think he’s lonely.”

I pull the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Well, he’ll have to stay lonely. You are not to go back there, Lily. Do you understand me? Promise me.”

She looks down, her lower lip pushing out in a familiar pout, but she nods. “I promise.”

The promise of a child is a fragile thing, but it will have to do. I have enough real monsters to worry about without chasing after imaginary ones. Here in the frozen wastes of Protheka, the real monsters don't sleep in stone. They hunt. And we humans are the easiest game.

Later, as the sun bleeds its last light across the snow-choked peaks, a heavy thump against the cabin door startles me from my mending. It’s a solid, fleshy sound, one that makes the whole doorframe shudder. Lily, who had been dozing by the fire, sits bolt upright, her eyes wide.

My first thought is a falling branch, heavy with ice. But the wind is still. My second, more chilling thought, is a person. A traveler, lost? Or someone from the village, come to collect a debt I cannot pay? Dark elves? Monsters? My fingers find the smooth, cool surface of the worry stone in my pocket. Its familiar weight is the only solid thing in a world tilting on its axis.

“Stay here,” I whisper to Lily, my voice a strained thread of sound.

I take the heavy iron poker from the hearth, its weight a poor comfort, and creep toward the door. The wind whispers through the chinks in the logs, a mournful sigh. Peering through the small, grimy peephole I’d drilled myself, I see nothing but the blue-grey twilight and the endless, silent snow. No person. No tracks leading away. Nothing.

My heart hammers against my ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. I take a steadying breath and slowly, carefully, lift the heavy bar. The door groans open on its leather hinges, complaining against the cold.

The air leaves my body in a sharp hiss.

Sprawled on my doorstep, so large its magnificent antlers nearly scrape the lintel, is an elk. A massive bull, its thick winter coat a rich, dark brown. Steam still rises from its fur in the frigid air, and a single, clean wound in its neck has painted the pristine snow a shocking, vibrant crimson. It’s freshly killed. Impossibly fresh.

My gaze darts from the carcass to the surrounding snowfield. Nothing. Not a single footprint. Not a drag mark. It’s as if the beast simply fell from the sky and landed on my porch. My stomach plummets, a sickening lurch that leaves me hollow. This isn’t a gift from the gods. This is a message. A display.

But from who? Or… what?

Practicality, that old, brutal master, shoves the fear aside. This is meat. More meat than we’ve seen in a year. This is sinew for thread, hide for new boots, fat for tallow and a hundred other uses. This is survival. This is Lily making it to spring.

Clenching my jaw against the tremor in my hands, I grab my butchering knife. The work is hard and bloody, my arms aching as I drag the colossal beast inside, barring the door behind it. The metallic, coppery scent of blood fills our tiny cabin, thick and cloying. I work quickly, my knife sure and practiced, separating hide from muscle, joint from bone. 

Lily just stands there for a long moment, a small, frozen statue herself. Her gaze is fixed on the mountain of meat that now covers our floor, her knuckles white where she grips her blanket.

“Mama?” Her voice is a small, trembling thing, barely a whisper above the scrape of my knife on bone. “Will… will this last all winter?”

I glance at her, my own throat tight with an emotion I refuse to name. I nod, unable to speak.

A single, perfect tear traces a clean path through the grime on her cheek. Then another. But her mouth curves into a wobbly, disbelieving smile. “We can eat until we're full?” she asks, her voice breaking on the last word. “And we won't be hungry tomorrow?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer. The blanket drops to the floor. She grabs a spare bowl from the shelf, her movements suddenly full of purpose, and kneels beside me. With a fierce concentration that belies her age, she begins scraping the precious rendered fat into the bowl, her small face illuminated by the firelight, a portrait of desperate hope.

All the while, a new sensation prickles at the back of my neck. A feeling of being watched.

It’s not like when my husband, Torvin, used to watch me, his eyes full of spite and calculation, weighing my worth and finding it wanting. This is different. Heavier. Ancient. It’s a gaze that feels like aweight, pressing in from the oppressive darkness of the forest. It’s not malicious. It’s… proprietary. As if I, and everything in this cabin—the fire, the child, the very meat on my butchering table—belong to whatever is out there.

A low hum starts in my chest, an unconscious act of defiance, a tune without a name that I hum to chase away the shadows. But the feeling doesn’t fade. It intensifies, a low thrum of power in the air that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.

By the time the last of the meat is salted and stored, my nerves are shredded raw. Every creak of the cabin, every howl of the wind, sends a jolt of ice through my veins. After I tuck a wide-eyed Lily into her cot, I do something I haven’t done since Torvin died.

I check the bar on the door, making sure it’s secure. Then I drive wooden wedges into the window frames, sealing us in. It makes the cabin a tomb, a trap, but the thought of that gaze piercing the darkness, finding me through the window, is unbearable.

My prison feels safer than the world outside.

Just before I bank the fire for the night, a compulsion I can’t explain draws me to the very window I just sealed. I pull the wedge free and scrape a small circle of frost from the pane with my fingernail. The forest is a wall of impenetrable black, a void where anything could be hiding. I see nothing but the swirl of wind-driven snow.

I’m being foolish. It’s the hunger, the isolation. It’s playing tricks on my mind.

I’m turning away when I see it. Out there, in the deepest dark of the treeline, two points of light flicker into existence. They are not the yellow-green of a wolf or the red of some lesser demon. They are silver. A cold, intelligent, lunar silver. They stare directly at me, unblinking, unwavering.

My chest seizes, locking the breath in my throat.

As quickly as they appeared, they blink out, plunging the world back into absolute darkness. But I know, with a certainty that freezes the very marrow in my bones, that the watcher is still there.