Page 20 of Rose's Untamed Bear

A roar tore from my throat, Magnus’s and mine both. I bared my teeth and hauled upward; every movement was agony. More stakes snapped beneath me, driving splinters into my flesh, but I forced myself higher. Always higher. Smoke curled from my fur, acrid and choking, but her face was there—Rose’s face—cutting through the haze like dawn through fog.

I dug in deeper. My claws tore the dirt where the stakes fell away, my muscles strained to the point of ripping, Magnus raging with me now instead of against me. With a final lunge, I heaved myself over the lip, collapsing in the dirt above.

For a moment, I lay there shaking, the stink of pitch clinging to me, my lungs dragging in ragged air. But I was free.

When I lifted my head, Grimbalt was gone. Only his laughter lingered, carried on the wind, needling at my ears. I staggered to my feet. Whatever it took, I would hunt him down. I was closingin on him, closer than I had come in a long time, and I was ready to finish him.

"That's right, little monster," I roared, not caring if he heard. "Run. But I'll find you. And when I do, you'll tell me how to end this. Or I'll tear the forest down around your ears." My voice was thick, half Magnus, half man, but the words were my own. The wind swallowed them and spun them away, but I spoke for myself now, and for her.

The pain hummed in my limbs, but I ran faster than I had in years, following the scent over brush and through thorns. The troll was weakened; I could smell it. A nick, maybe, or just the coward's sweat of fear. I followed, even when the woods closed in and tried to turn me aside.

Each step dragged at my wounds, but I did not slow. I followed the path the troll had left in his panicked flight, broken twigs, bent grass, a smear of black pitch on a birch trunk. There was no subtlety to him now, only terror and haste. And something else: a faint, sour reek I recognized as fear. Human fear, not the distilled venom Grimbalt usually radiated. I grinned, a bloody, animal grin. The tables had turned.

I stalked him, keeping to the shadows, letting my wounds scab over in the cold air. I circled wide around the next bend, careful of more traps. Twice I found them—a snare looped low for my hind foot, and a branch rigged to swing a blade at neck height—but I was wary now, and I dispatched them with a swipe or a careful step.

Ihad been walking for hours under the grayish sky when the path narrowed into broken stone and thorn. My boots were soaked through already from melted snow that had turned the path into mud, my cloak snagged where brambles clung, but still I pressed on.

I’d left Mother and Snow behind without a word, only a hastily written note promising that I wouldn’t be gone long. Guilt pinched me even now. I could picture Mother frowning at the empty hearth, Snow glancing nervously at the door. They would worry. Of course they would. But the thought of freeing Derrick was too tempting, too bright to resist. If Alarion held the antidote to undo the curse, then every step I took toward him might be the step that gave me Derrick back.

That thought burned in me, steadier than any fire.

But guilt wasn’t the only thing clawing at my chest. The name haunted me like a splinter: Alarion—my father.

A wizard.

A Bluebeard.

It hardly seemed real. To know that his blood, his legacy, ran in me. I wanted to spit it out, to carve it from my veins, but there it was all the same. What did that make me?

I shook the thought away and gripped my bow tighter. Derrick needed me. That mattered more than curses, more than lineage, more than anything.

Still, I wished Snow were with me. My brave, quiet sister with her sharp tongue when it mattered most. She would have steadied me, reminded me to breathe, to think. The silence of the woods pressed heavier without her; each crow’s cry was a little too sharp, each shadow stretched a little too long.

But I wasn’t turning back. Not now. Not when Derrick’s face—his human face—still burned in my mind, golden eyes fierce with love even as the curse dragged him away from me again.

So I kept walking deeper into stone and thorn, guilt and dread chasing at my heels while hope drove me forward.

Suddenly, a loud shriek split the air.

I froze.

“Curses! Blasted rocks, villainous stones! I’ll grind you into dust and drink from your marrow!”

The voice was unmistakable.

I stepped around the boulder and there he was again— the troll—flat on his stomach, half-buried beneath a rock that had rolled down the slope and pinned his beard and the hem of his tunic tight to the ground. He was red-faced, kicking and thrashing, his stubby arms straining uselessly at the weight.

I couldn’t stop myself. “You’re stuck… again?”

His head snapped up—as much as it could—and his eyes flashed like coals. “Don’t stand there like a crow gawping at carrion! Get me out, you pine-brained goose!”

I set my bow and quiver down and folded my arms. “You know, for someone who calls himself clever, you’re remarkably clumsy.”

“Clumsy?” he sputtered. “Grimbalt is not clumsy. Never. This was sabotage! A rock crept up behind me like a thief in the night, treachery of the highest order, I tell you! And you mock me?”

I rolled my eyes, crouched down, and first shoved my shoulder against the stone, while Grimbalt, as he called himself, wailed the whole time.

“Careful, you brute! Don’t tug the beard, it’s worth more than your miserable life! Mind my tunic, it’s a rare weave, stolen from a king’s back, I’ll have you know!”