FrostFire by Zoe Marriott

sank beyond the mountains. I stopped once to eat and drink. Stars began to bloom in the sky, and the wind turned frosty.
    I heard singing.
    I stepped out of the trees. A sentry moved swiftly towards me, and I braced myself, lifting my hands to show I held no weapons. I could feel his eyes raking over me, although it was too dark to see his face. Then he nodded, pointing towards the centre of the camp. Towards the glow of firelight.
    A few torches flamed here and there, not enough to truly illuminate the camp. The stars seemed to hover just above the tents: constellations like handfuls of luminous silver sand scattered on a low ceiling of blue cloth. The same deep, beautiful voice I had heard the night I escaped beckoned me on, singing that same, haunting song. The melancholy wood flute rose up to join him.
    I came out from between two tents and found a group of people – twenty, twenty-five, maybe more – crowded around a sunken firepit. Some sat on long, stripped logs that gleamed white in the dark. Others sat in the grass. Their faces danced with flame colours; expressions masked. I didn’t recognize anyone. If Luca was there, I did not see him.
    Blue and orange sparks spiralled up into the sky like new suns being born. The people lifted up their faces as they sang, watching the sparks disappear. Even at this distance I could feel the heat of the fire radiating through the ranks of singers and warming my chilled cheeks and hands.
    “Goodbye, my love, remember well,
    My shadow on your door;
    I leave my heart, my love, farewell,
    And pray you cry no more…”
    I knelt down, unnoticed, at the edge of the gathering, and sang with them.
     

I
cannot feel my toes any more. I use my hands to drag me up the hill; nails splitting, skin breaking as I claw through the thin layer of snow to the stony ground beneath. My vision swims and blurs and my heart seems to choke me. I force myself on, heading for the rocks that jut up at the crest of the slope. If I can only reach them, maybe I can hide. Maybe I can escape.
    The wolves’ persuading voices have fallen silent now. Their paws crunch rhythmically through the snow behind me. Closer, closer, ever closer. Low, panting breaths. Sharp eager whines. The night is still, save for the sounds of their pursuit.
    They know when their prey is at its limit.

Ten
    W
ord of what had happened in my old village spread across Uskaand like ice spreads across a well in the winter: swiftly and inexorably. For a time, everyone had a story to tell of the wild wolf-girl who roamed the land with sharp, hungry fangs and glinting silver eyes. Few gave credence to the tales, though children gasped and giggled over the idea of such a creature, wondering if she might be hiding in the dark forest, or on the bleak loneliness of the plains. But never, of course, in a village very much like their own.
    It was four years before the Wolf ascended again. Four years of running, of struggling to find work in tiny villages where the people could barely afford to pay Ma for her services. Of giving false names. Of staying quiet. Staying out of trouble. And never, ever fighting.
    Many of the people we met in that time assumed I was simple in the head; I spoke so little, and met no one’s eyes. And I was always “falling down”. So clumsy for such a strong, strapping girl.
    They gave mother their condolences in hushed whispers. What a shame the daughter of a healer should be enfeebled! An illness no healer could ease. But at least I was quiet and obedient. At least I wasn’t … violent.
    The ice around my mother’s heart grew colder each time we were forced to move on: fleeing in the night like criminals whenever the villagers grew friendly enough to ask questions about where we had come from, whenever my unusual eyes provoked curiosity, whenever people began to suspect I was not such a clumsy idiot, after all. We became experts at packing our worldly possessions at a moment’s notice and discarding anything