Chapter 1

“Write to him?”

Vivian leaned on the silver-fox fur couch as if she had heard a joke. She glanced at the parchment on the table and casually pushed it toward me.

“The North is all ice, dead men, and vampires. What could I write? Ask him how many heads he chopped off today?”

That was the third month since Rowan Blackwood had left Wolf Keep. The betrothal between the two families had long been settled, but when he marched out, Vivian had not even gone to see him off.

I stared at the blank parchment and thought of the abandoned herb shop in the southern district. It was the only thing my mother had left me. Repairing the roof and replacing the medicine cabinets would cost at least three hundred gold coins. And I, the lord’s bastard daughter, had neither inheritance rights nor any way to save much monthly allowance.

“I’ll write for you,” I said. “Ten gold coins per letter.”

Vivian raised an eyebrow at me. “You?”

“Only greetings. He won’t notice.”

She laughed and tossed ten gold coins onto the table.

The first time I put pen to paper, I was very cautious.

Respected General Blackwood, may the Moon Goddess protect you, and may the Blood Wall never fall.

I imitated the tone a noble lady ought to have, asking about military affairs, the weather, and wounds, then signed Vivian Reed’s name.

Half a month later, Rowan’s reply arrived, only two lines.

The Wall still stands. I still stand. Do not worry.

After reading it, Vivian laughed. “He really is as dull as the rumors say.”

She threw the letter to me, not even bothering to put the wax seal away properly.

The second and third letters were still written by me. Rowan’s answers remained short, like a knife thrust into snow, without warmth and unwilling to bend.

Until a messenger brought news—the Frost Fang Legion had lost three hundred men in one night.

That night, thunder pressed down over the bells of Wolf Keep. I sat by the attic window, holding my pen, and for a long time could not write a word.

I thought of those soldiers. Perhaps they lay beneath the cold city wall, bleeding from their wounds, unable even to receive a single letter from home.

So I crossed the line I had drawn for myself.

I wrote that I was afraid of thunder, that as a child I always hid in my mother’s medicine cabinet; that bloodstanch grass in the southern district had sprouted, and that its leaves, crushed and applied to wounds, were more effective than the gray moss military physicians usually used; I also wrote that the kitchen had burned honey bread last night, and the whole of Wolf Keep smelled of sweet smoke.

At the end, I paused for a long time before adding:

Please live. There is always someone waiting for your reply.

This time, Rowan wrote back half a page.

He asked whether bloodstanch grass could grow in frozen soil, and whether I still hid in the medicine cabinet when it thundered. He also said that the North had no honey bread, only black rye bread hard enough to break teeth.

When I saw that joke, I could not help laughing aloud.

“What did he write?” Vivian did not even raise her head; she was choosing a necklace for the ball in front of the mirror.

I folded the parchment. “He asked about home.”

“Then reply for me.”

From then on, waiting for letters from the North became my most secret hope.

I told Rowan how to identify rotting silverleaf, reminded him to dry bloodstanch grass before crushing it; I also wrote about the first snow in Wolf Keep, about a broken-winged gray finch I had saved in the stables, and about how, when thunder sounded, I no longer actually hid.

Under Vivian’s name, for the first time, I spoke of things no one else had ever been willing to hear.

Rowan’s replies gradually grew longer.

He told me that the moon beyond the Wall looked like a frozen silver coin; that young soldiers would gather around the fire and take turns reading letters from home; that once, returning from patrol, the military physician treated wounds according to what I had written and saved the lives of two werewolves.

I read every letter many times, then locked them in a wooden box under my bed.

Vivian never asked. She would only take out ten gold coins and toss her betrothed’s reply to me.

I knew perfectly well that the girl Rowan remembered—afraid of thunder, able to identify herbs, saddened by a broken-winged finch—bore Vivian’s name.

Yet whenever a messenger was due, I still waited by the window before the bells rang.

One deep night three years later, a Northern messenger arrived at Wolf Keep through the snow.

I did not even bother to throw on an outer coat. I ran downstairs barefoot and pulled the parchment from the silver tube in the messenger’s hand. Blood had congealed on the seal, and the edges of the paper were stiff with wind and snow.

For the first time, Rowan filled the entire page.

I read from the cracks in the Wall to the newly replaced military physician, from the names of fallen soldiers to the bloodstanch grass he had buried with his own hands. The ink of the last line was darker than the rest, as if the writer had paused there for a long time.

“If I return alive, would you be willing to plant that bloodstanch grass for me yourself?”