His Human Queen

The Eupine Mountains

I found myself shivering as he jerked me from the snow. “Get dressed, we leave in twenty minutes. Pack light, the trip over the mountains isn’t for the weak.”

I found hope in those words, maybe that meant I would die before I even made it over the mountains.

Twenty minutes, that ogre of a man gave me twenty minutes to pack up my entire life.

When I got back inside, my mother shook me violently, “Maeve, what have you done?!”

“I saved you all, again.” I growled, prying her boney fingers from my shoulders.

“Saved us? How are we supposed to live if he is taking you?” She growled back, reminding me where my looks came from.

I finally stopped, my knuckles white on the handle of the knife I would strap to my leg in a few minutes. I turned to face them, to face the wreckage of my sacrifice. “You will,” I said, my voice low. “You will eat the meat I brought. You will sell the pelts at the spring market. You will live.” I looked at Jacob, a man trapped in a boy’s body, his silence a constant, aching reminder of all we had lost. “He needs you. Lori needs you. You will be strong. Because you must be.”

That was all the goodbye I could give them. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. But some part of me wondered if they deserved anything else. I had been hunting and feeding them for six years now, six miserable years that I had to be the one to take care of everything. Maybe this was the universe screaming at me to let them care for themselves for once.

I stuffed all my clothes in the only bag I had and shivered as I looked around my tiny room. Nothing in here was worth taking, nothing in here was worth hauling across those mountains on my back, a truth that simply broke my heart.

“Times up,” the man growled from the door.

Suddenly, I was very self-conscious of him seeing the room, seeing how I lived, though, I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why it mattered. Then, he said something that made those feelings of inadequacy that much worse.

“Is that it?” he motioned to my bag as I nodded once.

“It is, now let’s go before I decide to let you put us out of our misery,” I nearly winced as my thoughts turned to cold words that sat heavy between us. I passed him in the doorway before I could change my mind, before I could acknowledge those words.

I forced my footsteps, each heavier than the last as if my body were fighting not to go back out into the cold. I walked by my family, all three wide eyed with terror, wide eyed and trembling with feelings I couldn’t make myself feel.

I felt no terror toward the situation, only terror toward the cold.

I looked at my boots as I slipped them back on. There was no way I was getting across that mountain without the kiss of frostbite stealing my feet, yet I slid them on anyway. I wrapped myself in my cloak, though tattered and torn, warm enough to get me back to the base of the Eupines.

I wasn’t making it over those mountains alive, and if the wolf knew that he would never let on, so I wouldn’t either.

Instead, I burst into the night, my pack at my side, and I strolled straight into the forest line that was lit with the eyes of beasts who were pissed that I had killed one of their own.

Maybe they would do me a favor and take me out before the elements did.

It took us only two hours to get back to the base of the mountain, even in the darkness I shivered in its presence.

“Keep moving,” the wolf growled, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to climb such a bluff.

“What’s your name? I keep calling you ‘an ogre of a man’ in my head, but it is starting to feel impolite” I asked, breathless and unsteady as I climbed the base of the mountain.

“Caspian Oberon,” he muttered unamused by my joke.

“Maeve Harlow,” I grumbled, grabbing a low hanging branch to boost myself upward.

“I know who you are, I know everything about you.” He grumbled again making me laugh.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, clearly thinking I had lost my mind.

“You said you knew everything about me, and I laughed because that just isn’t true.” Before I could say anything more, he cut in.

“Your name is Maeve Harlow; your mother’s name is Penelope. You are the youngest of three, Jacob was born first, then Lori, then you. You have lived in the home I just took you from for the last eight years after your father lost his job in the-“

It was my turn to cut him off.

“You know facts about me, let me add another, Caspian. If you mention my father ever again, I will slit your throat, too.” I passed him in a huff of white-hot rage, anger bristling the hair on my arms while he stood in pure shock at my threat.

It was good, this was good. Let him know I meant what I said to him earlier. I would not die quietly, not to him, not to this god forsaken mountain, not in the clutches of a single creature out there.

Caspian:

The wind had teeth by the time we made it high enough that the tree line thinned to brittle fingers clawing at the moon. Maeve kept pace behind me, but the sound of her steps had been faltering for the last hour—an uneven drag, a faint stumble she tried to swallow every time I paused.

She thought I didn’t notice.

I noticed everything.

The temperature dropped fast near the top of the Eupines, almost cruelly, but she didn’t complain. Not once. I kept waiting for the inevitable—whining, begging, tears—but what I heard was only her breath, tight in her chest, like each inhale was shattering her lungs.

What I felt at my back was her stubbornness, matching my stride.

When the slope finally leveled out into a narrow ledge sheltered by two jagged boulders, I stopped.

“We camp here,” I said.

I expected her to collapse. She didn’t. She just nodded, jaw locked so tightly I could hear her teeth grind. She loosened the straps on her pack and lowered it to the ground.

I started the fire—dry shavings, a quick spark—and the flame licked upward, stuttering against the wind until I fed it enough to stay alive. Only then did I look at her fully.

Gods.

She was worse than I’d let myself see during the climb.

Her cloak whipped around her in torn strips, barely clinging to the shape of her body. Her face was wind-burnt to a raw pink that bordered on bleeding. Her lips were cracked, the lower one split in the center, a tiny bead of blood crusted there like she’d bitten through it hours ago.

I should have seen all this sooner.

She rubbed her hands together in front of the fire, and for the first time I noticed she looked small, not weak, nor fragile, just… worn thin, s tripped down by survival long before I stepped into that cabin and dragged her into something worse.

Her boots caught my attention next. They were an insult to the word. The leather had split at the sides, the seams busted and frayed. Snow had crystallized along the edges, melting only in the spots where her body heat forced it.

“How long have they been like that?” I asked.

She blinked at me, startled by my voice. “Hm?”

“Your boots.”

She looked down like she hadn’t even realized. “A while.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. A month? Maybe two.”

Two months.

Two months in the Eupine winter that she’d been hunting in them, trudging through drifts that could swallow a grown man.

I felt something unfamiliar dig claws into me.

“Maeve,” I said, stepping toward her.

She stiffened.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I added, hating that I even had to say it.

She didn’t answer, but she stayed still as I crouched before her. Up close, her boots were even worse—one sole peeling so far from the leather that snow had packed inside. No wonder her steps were uneven. She’d been walking on freezing slush for hours.

I reached for the first boot.

She jerked back. “What are you doing?”

“Taking them off.”

“No.”

“Maeve.”

She crossed her arms, chin lifting in defiance. “They’re fine.”

“They’re not.” My patience snapped sharper than I meant it to. “You’re not.”

Her glare cut up at me, furious and exhausted and still somehow proud. “I don’t need—”

But when I wrapped my hands around the boot and pulled gently, she flinched. Not from me. From the pain.

That undid me more than anything else.

“Let me,” I said, quieter now. Not an order. Not a threat.

Slowly—slowly—she lowered her leg.

The boot slid off with a sickening wet sound, and what lay beneath made my stomach drop.

Her sock was soaked through, half-frozen, the fabric stiff with cold. When I peeled it back, her skin was red and marbled with white patches where the cold had bitten deep. Not frostbite, not yet—but close enough to the edge that it made my skin crawl.

This didn’t happen tonight. This was from earlier. Before I took her. Before she should’ve been anywhere near the mountains.

How long had she been out there?

How far had she traveled in this condition just to bring home meat her family probably didn’t deserve?

I reached for her second boot. She didn’t fight me this time.

It was worse.

I swallowed a curse and forced my voice steady. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because it wouldn’t have changed anything,” she said flatly. “You still would have dragged me up this mountain.”

I looked up at her.

She wasn’t wrong.

But the realization that I had added to pain she’d already been carrying—that I had taken her from her home already battered by cold, hunger, sacrifice—landed inside me like a blow.

I wasn’t supposed to care.

But I did.

More than I should, and more than I wanted to.

I pulled off my gloves and pressed my warm hands around her feet. She hissed softly at the contact but didn’t pull away.

“Keep them near the fire,” I told her.

“And you?” she asked. The question came out hoarse, almost like she hadn’t meant to say it.

“I’ll manage.”

She stared at me for a beat longer than necessary, suspicion and something else flickering across her face.

I turned back to the fire, gathering embers inward, stoking the heat. Anything to escape the weight of her gaze.

The Eupines groaned around us, ice shifting on the peaks above. The wind howled, but the fire held, stubborn as the girl beside it.

I wasn’t used to feeling things about the people I took. Guilt wasn’t something I’d carried in years.

But seeing her cracked lips, her chapped skin, her feet raw and trembling near the flames, I felt it settle into me like the mountain cold, heavy and inevitable, and I knew with certainty that tasted like iron: Maeve Harlow was going to break something open in me long before this mountain ever broke her.