Rowan's POV
Consciousness returned in slow, painful waves.
The first thing she noticed was the absence of cold. Not the biting, river-deep freeze, but a deep, penetrating chill that had lived in her bones since… since the chains. It was gone. Replaced by a gentle, dry warmth.
The second thing was the smell. Pine resin, woodsmoke, roasting meat, and the faint, undeniable scent of wolf many wolves. Not the cloying, perfumed scent of the Sun-Stone pack, but something wilder, earthier.
She opened her eyes.
A ceiling of dark, polished logs swam into view, dotted with hooks holding dried herbs and bundles of feathers. Firelight danced from a stone hearth to her left, painting the small space in shifting oranges and golds. She was lying on a thick pallet of furs, buried under a heavy quilt.
A cabin. A warm, solid, real cabin.
Memory crashed back. The chains. The river. The shattering, reshaping agony. The ice. The massive, terrifying form. The scarred man with storm-cloud eyes.
Thorne.
Panic, sharp and immediate, shot through her. She tried to sit up, but her body was a foreign entity. Her limbs felt both too heavy and too light, disconnected. A strangled sound escaped her lips.
"Easy."
The voice came from the shadows near the fire. Thorne unfolded himself from a wooden chair, his movement silent and fluid. He looked different in the firelight. The scars on his face were more pronounced, valleys and ridges of past violence, but his eyes were the same: watchful, knowing, and devoid of the cruel hunger she'd seen in Marcus's.
"You're safe," he said, stopping a few feet from the pallet. He didn't come closer. "You've been out for two days. Your body was… rebooting."
"Where…" Her voice was a rasp, unfamiliar to her own ears. It sounded scratchy, thin. Human. The relief that brought was dizzying. She was in her human form. She still had a human form.
"The Forbidden North," Thorne said. He gestured vaguely with his chin toward a small, ice-encrusted window. "About as far from Sun-Stone territory as you can get without falling off the map. This is my village. Well. Our village. For exiles."
Exiles. Outcasts. Like him. Like… what she was now.
She looked down at her hands, resting on the quilt.
And her breath hitched.
Her skin was pale, so pale it was almost translucent, like the surface of milk. Veins of soft blue traced beneath the surface. But that wasn't what stopped her heart.
A delicate lacework of frost coated her skin from her wrists to her fingertips. It wasn't melting. It was growing. Tiny, perfect ice crystals blossomed over her knuckles, sparkling in the firelight. She watched, mesmerized and horrified, as a new fractal spiral formed on the back of her hand.
"What…" she breathed, lifting her hands closer to her face. "What is this?"
"That," Thorne said, his voice matter-of-fact, "is you. Or a part of you that's always been there, sleeping. The Frostborn doesn't go away when you look human, Rowan. It's just… quieter."
Rowan. He knew her name. Of course he did. The whole pack had known her name on the night of her betrayal.
The shame and anger that thought brought was a hot rush, conflicting violently with the cold emanating from her skin. She clenched her fists, wanting to hide the evidence of her monstrous change.
A sharp crack sounded.
She looked down. The quilt where her fists had clenched was now stiff and white, frozen solid in two perfect fist-sized circles. The frost on her hands had thickened, crawling an inch up her wrists.
A sob burst from her chest. She was a plague. A thing that destroyed warmth, that froze everything it touched.
"Don't," Thorne said, his voice firmer. "Fear fuels it. Panic makes it worse. You have to breathe."
"I can't control it!" she cried, tears now spilling hot down her icy cheeks. They felt like they should freeze solid too.
"You will," he said, with a certainty that brooked no argument. "But not today. Today, you rest. You're safe here. The walls are thick. The village is warded. And no one here will judge you for what you've become. Most of us are running from monsters. We know what it's like to become something you never wanted to be."
He turned and walked to a pot hanging over the fire, ladling something into a wooden bowl. The simple, domestic action was so jarringly normal it anchored her somehow. He brought the bowl over and set it on a stump beside her pallet. A rich, savory steam rose from it—some kind of stew.
"Eat. Your body needs fuel. The change… it takes everything."
He retreated back to his chair, giving her space. He didn't watch her like a curiosity or a threat. He just sat, staring into the flames, a silent, solid presence in the room.
Rowan looked from the frost on her hands to the steaming bowl. The contrast was absurd. Slowly, uncurling her frozen fingers, she reached for the spoon. Her frosted skin clinked softly against the wood.
She was in the Forbidden North. She was covered in ice. She was sitting across from a stranger who called her a legend.
But for the first time since the altar, since the chains, since the water…
No one was trying to hurt her.
Tentatively, she took a sip of the stew. It was hot, flavorful, and real. It spread a warmth through her that didn't chase away the cold inside, but sat alongside it, a truce.
She was safe.
Now she just had to figure out what to do with the storm she had become.