I woke without opening my eyes, clinging to a dream in which snow whirled up and down among the branches of evergreens that marched up black-and-white mountains, at whose feet nestled my flickering village. I'd dreamed I was cold, hungry, desperately in love, and with a battle ahead of me. I'd dreamed of uttering hopeless prayers into the wind and sky and of that first gleaming shred of hope as the wind finally answered my plea.
       I lay still until the real world rushed back in like a flood that my closed eyes could no longer dam. Then I remembered that I still lived in the suburbs outside Seattle, and I was somehow supposed to be a respectable lawyer, and I only had ten thousand left to pay on my student loans, and I had a mortgage and a five-year-old daughter and some sort of milestone wedding anniversary coming up. I had everything anyone could ever ask for; so many people fought to have this type of life and never got it.
       I balled up the dream, chucked it out the window, and dragged my ass out of bed.

       My day was as standard as they come. I got Kaya ready for school and sent her off on the bus, went to the office and churned my mountain of document reviews and memoranda, yelled at my assistant, placated my nutjob clients, went to the courthouse and ran around, then managed to head home around nine.
       It had suddenly become late fall, hitting the point where the sky just turned the taps on full blast, and the water came down. They'd already started putting pumpkins on things weeks ago, and now the kitschy Christmas decorations had shown up: revolving fake trees in shop windows with flashy red-and-blue lights, porcelain dolls in Victorian costumes, stuffed reindeer in impractical-looking saddlery, a little fake snow here and there. I passed by some sort of Scandinavian-themed window display that brought last night's dream rushing right back for five hot seconds before it all slipped back into the dark. I ate a drive-through burger for dinner on the way home and got back in time to put Kaya to bed.
       My husband and I didn't talk much; we never did. Levi lumbered around the kitchen, tall, unshaven, and more gaunt than in past years, as if our perfect suburban life wasn't feeding him enough. He'd gotten home at a normal time and weathered the evening of "kidding" without me, as always.
       I'd been mulling it over for a long time, but that night I decided that it was time to finally get started on leaving him. Levi and I hadn't gotten along in years due to the stupid stuff that just builds up over time: fatigue and workaholism and the real world that you realize is still there once the moonlight fades. At the time, it felt like a rational choice made over several months. In retrospect, though, I know I was in a weird frame of mind. We were like a couple of caged animals with teeth and claws meant for a much different life, with nothing to retaliate against except each other. If you bite out your cage-mate's throat, you might feel that you're doing something of use--now you won't have to share food and space--until you realize afterwards that you've done nothing but destroy your one ally. That was me and my divorce-planning.
       I went to bed early, but was accosted by the snow-dream again and had to tear it away from myself once more before getting up the next morning.

       I didn't tell him I was planning to leave him, but I did open a separate bank account, shut myself up in my office and call a realtor friend to talk about apartments. I'd take Kaya as best I could; I'd have to get an evening nanny to cover the hours between her getting home from school and my return from work. I'd manage.
       Once those affairs were in order, I clammed up and let it sit for a week. I fantasized vaguely about "freedom" while coaxing myself into avoiding thinking too much about the day-to-day of my new world. Thanks to these efforts, the feelings didn't change.

       But that Sunday morning, the world stopped making sense, starting in Kaya's playroom.
       Kaya was an odd kid. I mean that as a parent who wouldn't change a thing about her, even if I could. But she'd always lived in a beautiful little world of her own making, rather than the world we've all been dumped in. Somehow, too, the real world only ever seemed to bow to her fancies rather than beating her over the head with its realness like it did to me. All animals were her friends; tree-squirrels ate out of her hand, butterflies landed in her hair, and even the neighbor's sonofabitch pit bull would roll over and croon whenever she skipped by.
       Weekends were the only time I could really see her. That doesn't mean that work didn't invade weekends ninety percent of the time, but I tried to keep Sunday mornings free. That morning I managed, and we had time to play: tea party, Lego castle, make-believe. It was the make-believe part where things got weird.
       She was pretending to be a girl who was kidnapped by a magic bear, who takes her to his castle, but every night he turns into a man (she had me playing the bear by wearing her bear-hooded snuggie and casting it off dramatically once in a while).
       I don't like fairytales. I think they're misogynistic, backwards medieval fables designed to keep women in their place, starting in the nursery. But as only a weekly visitor to her playroom, I didn't have the heart to impose my tyranny over her flowery little kingdom.
       "But oh no! The girl lights a candle so she can see him in the dark, and he's a handsome prince, but then he has to go away and MARRY a WITCH!"
       "Kaya, what do you know about handsome princes?!"
       "And then the girl has to go riding and riding and riding across the ice, and she asks the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south wind to help her find the prince so she can rescue him from marrying the witch! (Can you blow like the wind?)"
       I tried to play the wind, but my lungs got too tired. I turned her fan on instead.
       "And then the girl gets to the witch's castle because the north wind blew her there, but that's the day that the prince is supposed to marry the witch! So the girl tricks the witch and gets to take the prince home and MARRY him!"
       "Why do these stories always end with people getting married? Are we sure they know each other well enough? Are we sure the girl doesn't have other life goals to achieve first?"
       "What? No, it's a happy ending! Mommy, you should go back into those dreams of yours and see for yourself."
       I laughed. "What dreams of mine?"
       "The ones where you go back where you're from."
       I didn't laugh. "What do you mean?"
       "The fairy world!"
       "I, uh... I'm not sure I want to go back to the fairy world," I said, not sure how to play along with this odd new game. "I'm pretty happy where I am. Besides, I'm not from a fairy world. I grew up in... um...."
       "Hmph. Well, I'll make sure you go." She pouted, and a robin fluttered in through the window and landed on her shoulder.

       My mind was a distracted mess for the rest of the day. I gave incoherent answers to questions, couldn't work, couldn't play. Unknown shadows knocked on the door of my mind; I double-bolted and chained that door shut, but couldn't ignore their presence. When Kaya went to bed that night, I sat down in front of the blank TV (avoiding Levi, who was either gaming or weekend-working in his den) and cried.
       Eventually, my eyelids drooped from straight-up exhaustion, and with them dropped my resistance against those unknown things in my head.
       The images came rushing in, vivid as memories, their chronological order scrambled, full of snow and whipping winds and coarse white fur, hunger and reindeer sweat, and the harsh clatter of harness bells (not the sweet "jingling" people sing about at Christmas). And the time that my reindeer almost passed out from exhaustion, and I had to walk him--nothing in sight across the flat white tundra except the wall of mountains behind me and the half-imagined pull of something evil ahead.
       I remembered, before that, the feel of a fire's warmth against frostbitten fingers and toes, of rough wool clothes against my skin, the earthy smell of a huddle for warmth with siblings and parents in a one-room hut, the snorting and stomping of reindeer and the white clouds of their breath.
       And I remembered the famine years that brought the great bear padding out of the woods and slowly circling our village all night, unafraid of fires or human voices or weapons. We all gathered out in the cold, watching him and muttering. Some parents locked their children in their houses and stood guard outside, clutching wood-axes or bows. My siblings and I followed the bear with grim faces, anxious to protect our livestock.
        Our old shaman, who had seen the birth of my grandmother and perhaps even her grandmother, parted our makeshift formation and approached the bear. She was unarmed, with magic runes painted on her face. She stood right under the great beast's chin, and they watched each other for a long moment. When the woman turned back to us, her eyes were blank, and she spoke in a growling voice that was stronger and more youthful than her own, in an archaic language that none of us understood. Then she collapsed.
       I looked up too far and met the bear's eyes, which were as black as the shadows in the forest, intelligent and unreadable. I stared, too amazed to be afraid. Then he left.
       The next day, when the shaman woke up, she interpreted the message and explained to us that the bear was one of the old pagan gods, come out of the forest to demand the blood that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had always given him in exchange for success in the hunt and for the health of the reindeer herds, long overdue since the missionaries from the South had spread their influence. This god wanted a maiden sacrifice to compensate.
       I offered myself. I was an obvious choice: unmarried, youngest of many, insignificant. The shaman nodded her approval. My mother and sisters wept.
       I rode alone into the forest the next day, on a buck reindeer whose birth I had midwifed four summers ago, wearing the bridal gown and fur cap that my mother had painstakingly decorated for my someday-wedding. My family and friends assumed that the Bear-God would devour me as meat, but I remembered his eyes and wondered if things would somehow turn out differently. Perhaps, too, I was afraid of the longevity that lay before me otherwise: marriage and childbirth and endless cooking pots, and then old age and sickness and toothlessness. I had chosen an unknown death over a certain one, and it was my choice alone.
       And then the forest palace appeared before me, where the Bear-God waited, not to slaughter me, but to love me: he who ruled the fortunes both of hunters and wild beasts, from the moose to the robin; he who raised the snowstorms and chose when to bring the summer. He could do anything, absolutely anything, except shed his bearskin in the light of day, but he shed it in the blind dark. I knew him only by the naked warmth of his young human flesh against mine, meeting me under my furs night after night: first humble and tentative, asking for permission as if afraid of being turned away; then ardent and hot after I gave him my yes. The maiden sacrifice had brought me life, not death.
       That month, my village grew prosperous. As a bear, he took me to visit it again, carrying me on his back. I saw the newly-fattened herds with glossy coats, many of the reindeer burgeoning with pregnancy. My mother had color on her cheeks, which were no longer sunken as in the hungry days when I left for the forest. The hunters had brought home capercaillies, ptarmigans, wild boar, and roe deer. I greeted my family, kissing their faces and wiping away their tears, but I longed soon for my lover's home and bed again.
       I was happy, but I was blind, and I had to see--if only to calm my one last nagging doubt that my hands and mind could have made a man out of a monster. I asked him, one night, to let me see his face in the light. He whispered, "No," in my ear.
       I asked why.
       "Because I'm an ugly old troll," he said. I felt a little laugh run through him.
       "I have trouble believing that. You feel handsome enough to me," I said, stroking his face.
       The next night, I asked again.
       "But the light would make me go blind, and then I couldn't see your fine face," he murmured against my neck, amused at my insistence. "Three days from now. Three days, and then you can see me. Can you wait that long?"
       But I was suspicious, and I knew I was being deceived in some way. And so, the next night, I hid a candle under my furs and lit it after I'd heard his breathing turn long and slow.
       I remember the spell that his sleeping face put on me--noble-featured and young, stern but innocent, glowing and divine in a way that no human being can ever match. But he awoke to my gaze with a start and a look of betrayal. I wanted to kiss him and press him against me and make it all right, whatever it was, but he pulled away from me. It started to snow outside.
       "So be it," he said.
       "What?"
       "I thought you could save me."
       I reached out and touched his face, and he let me. "Whatever it is, I...."
       "I made a pact. Not my choice, but... two more days, no looking, and you would have had me. Not her."
       "Her?"
       He looked away. "I can't stay. I have to go North."
       "Where are you going? What did I do? Whatever it is, let me fix it!"
       He leaned forward and gave me a kiss, sweet and regretful. During that kiss, the snow became a blizzard. When at last he broke off, I held fast to his shirt. He took my hands in his, kissed each of them, then pried them away. Then he turned from me into the flying white, and the winds took him, and he vanished.
       When night turned into a cold, gray morning, I found myself lying alone in the snow, with no furs and no palace around me, only my now-tattered wedding clothes and coat, and my reindeer nosing at my face. I grabbed his bridle and pulled myself up with shivering fingers. I could still feel that kiss on my mouth.
       Everything around me whispered, "North, North, North." The trees and the snowdrifts; the calling white bird and the darting fox; the embracing wind and the flat gray ice on the lakes and rivers; they all told me North, and North I went.
       It was a long, brutally hungry week in the forest. Sometimes I rode, sometimes I led my reindeer while stomping through the snow. At night, I slept against his belly for warmth. I ate buried nuts and chewed bark and was once blessed with a precious rabbit. It was pure luck, as I prayed to the stars and the forest spirits and the winds for guidance, that brought me to another village, where I managed to barter my bridal jewelry for a feast of bread and dried fish before pushing north again.
       I lost track of the days and weeks. The towns grew stranger and rougher as I went, their people sometimes dour and unfriendly, sometimes kind to a traveler's hunger in exchange for an entertaining tall tale (my own). Soon there were no more of them. The nights grew longer, and the days grew shorter until the passage of the sun was only a narrow arc from the southeast to the southwest, flinging my shadow out far ahead of me in the cold white light. The forests gave way to white tundra. I tried to eat the sparse lichens and mosses under the snow, as my reindeer did, but couldn't digest them. I begged the gods of every rock and hill to have pity on me and help me to nourish myself, but none would listen anymore. My legs weakened in the saddle, and the world began to spin and fade around me.
       Finally, I had ridden until I could ride no more--the frigid sea stood in my way, crashing below me against the unforgiving cliffs. And the stars and that same cruel sea and my own heart kept pushing me forward, calling me out past the waves, telling me that my lost forest king lay out there beyond the waters of the Barents Sea.
       I sank to my knees on that cliff and wept while my reindeer snorted and paced behind me in the cold, while I prayed to anything and everything that would listen--the forest, the sea, the wind, the sky, the clouds.
       It was the god of the winter winds who finally listened, and it was his North Wind that carried me forward.

       I woke up alone on the couch in front of the TV, around three in the morning, shaking and cold, covered in sweat. The details of the dream began to fade and shift as soon as I opened my eyes, but I pressed its overall shape into my mind until a vague impression remained.
       I cried because I was in Seattle and had everything anyone could ever ask for, and somehow it still wasn't enough. Instead of going to the room I shared with my husband, I curled up in Kaya's short bed and clutched her like a doll until my phone alarm woke me up at five to go to work.

       The next night, a sopping wet night, I told my husband that I was going to take Kaya and leave. I didn't feel like it, but I reasoned that while I might have been going crazy, in the one area of life that I could control--my family--I would hold order and stick to the plans I had made earlier from a place of sanity.
       He was not happy. He got up and paced, with that controlled expression and quiet reserve that always tells me he's actually spitting angry.
       "After everything," he kept muttering. "All the times you could have left me, and it winds up being now?"
       Then it turned into a screaming fight, probably because I was pissed that he didn't have a bigger reaction, and I baited him until he did. I'm not proud of it; I felt unloved, and some twisted ghoul in me wanted to see just how badly I could hurt him because that hurt would prove that he still cared about me. But we took it to the garage so we'd only wake up the neighbors instead of Kaya, and then we just ripped into each other.
       That was when the bizarre thing happened, right as I told him I was through with his worthless ass on my couch, and I was going to make sure that he got nothing except his PlayStation out of the divorce settlement, no custody of the kid either. He stopped yelling and stared at me.
       Then his face started to change. His features slowly smooshed together and elongated, his flesh changing shape like wet clay. His head rose as if he'd grown five feet taller, and his shoulders and arms shot out. His clothes ripped apart, and there was white fur underneath, and he was a bear.
       My soon-to-be-ex had turned into a freaking bear.
       I didn't scream; I couldn't have run or even moved. The world was not real, and I was distant from my body, and all I could do was stand there.
       We stared at each other for minutes and minutes. Then, gradually, he began to shrink back into himself, the fur receding from his body, the features moving back through their awful transition, and after a few seconds, he was a man again.

       The next two days were awkward and weird. That night had thrown me into a reeling limbo, disorienting me so much that even my divorce plans sat untouched. We didn't have much to say, but he did start trying to spend time with me: as soon as Kaya was asleep at night, we'd pour glass after glass of bourbon and drink together until nothing mattered anymore.
       The reckoning came when, three nights after that fight, it started to snow.
       The storm hadn't shown up on the weather forecasts. It started with little white dots meandering down from the mile-thick clouds in the middle of the night, soon forming beautiful swirling flakes. At five a.m., the school district announced a full closure. I woke up with a pounding headache, wrote an email to my work pleading for a remote day, then dragged myself downstairs and made pancakes while trying to steel my skull against Kaya's excited, shrill voice as she pranced around her father, waving a plastic fairy wand and chanting, "Abracadabra! Daddy turn into a PRINCE! Abracadabra!"
       I ran over and took the wand away, maybe too forcefully. "No more abracadabras, honey."
       "It's okay," Levi grumbled from the couch. "She abracadabras at me all the time." He hauled himself up, eased his way over to the kitchen, and pulled Kaya onto his lap to quiet her down while emailing and texting work frantically on his phone. She broke into a loud rendition of "Let it Go" and sang for about two hours straight.
       By eleven, the windowpanes showed nothing but sheets of white. I gave up trying to work. Kaya pressed her nose against the glass, her mouth open in awe.
       Around eight, after I'd gotten Kaya washed up and dressed in her pajamas, and once Levi had started reading her a bedtime story, the power went out with a sizzle and a zip. Kaya whooped and cheered, I groaned, and Levi rummaged around for candles.
       It took another hour for us to coax Kaya into falling asleep in the newly-candlelit house, as excited as she was. But once she was finally down, cocooned in several extra layers of blankets, Levi and I collapsed on the couch and drank ourselves into oblivion.
       The night grew miserably cold. I wasn't in a cuddly mood, especially not with him, but we had only one quilt out and I didn't feel like getting up to look for another one. I wound up gradually moving closer to him under the blanket until we were sharing each other's warmth. By then, I was too drunk to care and laid my head on his shoulder. That was when I realized he was weeping.
       "It's my fault."
       I straightened up blearily. "What's your fault?"
       He gestured around. "This. The... blizzard. The power out."
       "How's that your fault?"
       "I caused it." He took a long gulp from his glass. His words came out slurred. "The other day. Where I was so angry, I turned into a... I'm not making any sense. You know what I'm talking about?"
       I took his glass away and set it on the floor, almost falling over in the process. "Drink some water."
       He obediently got up and drank what was left in the tap, then came back to the couch and lay down.
       "I stole from her."
       "Stole from who?"
       "Her. The..." He gestured incoherently and said a name that slipped my mind as soon as he said it. "I was stupid back then, got away with everything. Spoiled brat. Figured I was a real trickster, sort of like Loki from Avengers, except Avengers wasn't around yet. I... I slept with her daughter to get her gold; the daughter had a lot of gold, a crazy inheritance. And then she caught me."
       "Uh, when was this?"
       "Before us! ...Really, really, really long ago." He paused, and something dark passed over his face. "They gave me this elaborate trial. They always liked their pomp and circumstance."
       "Who's they?"
       "The--" he gestured frantically, as if he'd forgotten an obvious word and couldn't believe it-- "The G... my people. And she--" he said the name again, but once more it didn't stick-- "she was so angry she wanted to... to... well, they wouldn't let her do it, at least, not without giving me a chance. So, the chance was to make me into a bear and set me loose. Man, I'd forgotten about all this. How did I forget? Like amnesia. It all started coming back when we had that fight the other night. How can you forget things like this?"
       He sat up, eyes as bright as if he were in the throes of a fever. "Anyway, the deal was that if I could find someone to, uh... sleep with me... for a whole month, without seeing my face, knowing me only as a bear, and love me anyway, I could go free. They knew I'd always weaponized the way I looked and used it to get my way, and they were sick of it. Ha ha. Told you this was long ago. I was an asshole."
       He stood up and started pacing around the room, stumbling a bit.
       "And if I messed up the conditions, then I'd have to go back up there to St-- Sm-- Svalbard! and meet her, and do what she wanted all along, which was the ceremony where she bleeds you out and casts a spell with the blood, and you become one with her, and she eats all your power, and your power becomes her power, but you're just a dead immortal thing inside her, and... and... shit, I don't remember what happened after that."
       "Wait, what ceremony?" Any other time, it would have just sounded like a drunk rant from a guy who watched too much Netflix, but I was spooked, and the whiskey-blanket draped over my brain somehow only made it worse.
       "They always called it a wedding because they didn't want to call it by its real name," he said quietly, almost reverently, stopping in the middle of the floor. "I guess it made sense because two become one, only not in a good way. It was something that only she could do, absorb someone by bleeding them out and then eating their heart, gain their strength and power. Even though she was formless, she never walked on two feet like you and me. And anyway, I couldn't die, so I'd have just lived on, thinking her thoughts and living her life--"
       "Maybe you should just lie down and relax," I said, feeling seriously shaken up now. "You're not making any sense."
       He opened and closed his mouth as if he had more to say, but lay down reluctantly on the couch instead. I lay down too, as best I could, and blacked out for who-knew-how-long.
       When I woke up, he was gone. The candles had all either burned out or been pinched out. Clutching the blanket around my shoulders, I downed some bottled water and lugged myself to the bedroom, then noticed he wasn't there either.
       I found him in the garage. He'd brought a candle out there, but no coat or shoes. The garage floor must have been murderously cold. He stood in the far corner, wearing nothing but boxers. His face was turned up, and his arms were stretched out, his eyes closed, his chest unmoving as he held his breath.
       "What are you doing?"
       He let out his breath in a big, surprised gasp and gave me a look that was both angry and sheepish. "I... uh, I...."
       It all clicked then, in the nonsensical way everything fits together when you're drunk at two a.m. in a snowpocalypse. "You were trying to turn into a bear again! Why?!"
       "I thought...." He avoided my eyes, like a child caught trying to run away from home. "I just thought things might be better if I was a bear."
       I went over to him, cursing as my feet touched the freezing concrete floor. My candle died as I moved; his candle was barely more than a wick in a puddle of wax on the floor. I thought I'd know what to say, but I didn't, so I hugged him, holding the corners of my blanket and wrapping it around him like wings. His skin was icy and covered in goosebumps.
       "Try again." I let go of him and draped the quilt over his shoulders, feeling the cold air envelop me in place of the blanket. "Be a bear."
       He took a deep, shuddering breath, stretching out his arms again. His candle finally went out, leaving us with nothing but the muffled glow of a streetlight sneaking in through the window.
       And then it happened. I couldn't see much of the transformation, only the black silhouette of his form broadening and rising towards the ceiling, the sound of his shallow breath changing to something deep, growling and powerful. I saw the weak light glinting off pale fur. His shadow grew too tall for the garage's ceiling and he fell forward, huge paws falling onto the hood of the car for balance.
       "Easy, easy," I found myself saying, hopping over to the door on my numb, wood-like feet. I pressed the button to open the garage door, and a murderous blast of wind and snow whirled in as if it had been waiting to attack us this whole time. "Let me pull the car out, so you have room in here."
       Once I'd done that, I went back into the garage, closed the door, rummaged around for a flashlight, and took a good look at him.
       I'd never seen a bear that big in a zoo; I wasn't sure even polar bears in the wild could grow that big. On all fours, he still rose taller at shoulder-height than the top of my head. His silver-white fur flowed long, shaggy and clean. His eyes glinted tar-black, but when I looked into them, I could still somehow recognize him. I put a hand to his neck, and he bent down and pressed his forehead to mine.
       Do you remember? said the bear, in a voice that I heard only in my mind. It was you. It was you who saved me on Svalbard.
       I fell through a haze of new, old memories, so many that I felt as if I were falling backwards with no floor to catch me. I saw again the island in the Barents Sea, the dominion of the Witch-Goddess whose name I could not say, although it lingered in the back of my mind like a spider. I tumbled onto the white shore, seeing nothing but mountains and icy plains. Rubbing my arms ferociously in the cold, I dragged myself through the snow for what must have been miles until I was too exhausted to stand. Then I lay, numb, until I was too cold to lie still anymore, and I walked again until I saw something. Then I walked towards what I saw: a red blotch in the middle of a broad, empty snowfield. A bear's kill, I thought. Perhaps this lord or lady of the snow wouldn't begrudge me the scraps of their table.
       As I drew nearer, I saw that it was him.
       Around him lay an elaborate circular shape, as wide across as three men's heights, its red lines delicate and symmetrical. A magic rune. As I drew nearer, I realized that it was my lover's blood that fed those lines, flowing into them like paint from a brush.
       Although I could barely walk, here I ran.
       His face was as perfect as at our parting, but unconscious and pale. He lay bare in the snow at the center of the rune, covered in wounds--thin, delicate cuts as if from a perfectly-whetted knife, fifty or a hundred of them. His red blood ran easily into the lines of the rune's shape, although my own blood if spilled there would have frozen as soon as the frigid air touched it. How long had he been lying there? The whole of the days and weeks that I'd chased him?
       As my feet neared the circle, I felt hands seize my arms and shoulders, tearing at my clothes and hair. Half-formed shapes swirled around me in the glittering snow. I squirmed and fought. They dragged me backwards. Some of my hair tore out at the roots. I yelled and twisted, broke free and lurched forward, and set one foot inside the rune, smearing its perfect red lines.
       The hands dug into me ferociously, their fingertips sharp and clawed. I set another foot inside the rune, marring it some more, falling to my hands and knees and covering myself in his blood. I dragged myself towards him, and as I moved, the grip of the spirits slowly weakened and disappeared.
       I collapsed on top of him and opened my coat to share my warmth. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, trying to cover his wounds with my body, stemming the blood-flow as best I could.
       And I ruined the spell that would have made him part of her.
       Perhaps I thought I'd be able to take him home then, ordained as my own, earned, won. But I had no memories of seeing the mountains and fjords of northern Norway again, because the Witch-Goddess, in all her rage, brought a curse down on our heads as we lay in the red-stained snow. She whose powers encircled the horizon and the passage of Time sent us into exile: planting us in a world designed to sicken and wither the love between us, rearranging it around us to give us everything we could ever need, so that we'd need nothing from each other.
       I dug into my Seattle memories then. It's not easy to inventory what you have in order to piece together the shape of what you're missing, but that shape was so big that I did find it. And I realized that I had no childhood or high school memories in this world, few even of being pregnant with Kaya, not even a wedding. That was because there were none. I was born into this world as a full-fledged wife and mother, suburban homeowner, board-certified attorney. We'd been dropped here in a place designed to adjust around us as if we'd always been here, to plant its own lies in our heads as knowledge, and to sap our memories of who we'd once been.
       "Can you forgive me for the things I've done to you here, Leib-Olmai?" I whispered. Perhaps his name had been in the back of my mind this whole time, like old muscle memory. "I've drawn blood from you too. Maybe more than she did."
       I would do all of it again, said the bear. The bear-curse, and Svalbard, and the years in this place. Those things have made me yours.
       I dropped the flashlight and embraced him. Something about that embrace was a reunion, as if greeting him after years and years apart.
       Letting go, I went into the house and hastily pulled on layers of socks and leggings and sweatpants and coats, threw on some boots and called it good. I packed a bag for my husband too; mostly flannels, long underwear, jeans, and some puffy coats. Then I woke Kaya and dressed her in every warm thing she owned.
       When I took her out into the garage, she yelled, "Daddy!" and hugged the bear around one enormous forelimb. He nuzzled her face with his black nose, then guided her up onto his back.
       I stared at her, the little princess riding the giant bear. I'd given birth to her here, at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, with my husband holding my hand. Before that, I remembered a positive pregnancy test, followed by a doctor's visit and an ultrasound where they told me I was two months along. But before that, there were no memories. My life had opened up right there, fading in from black.
       Kaya had been born here, but she wasn't conceived here. I'd carried her inside me while I walked and rode through the freezing forests, while the wind lifted me across the northern seas, while I collapsed on Svalbard. She belonged to that world, not this one. A tiny forest goddess with power that no one could predict yet, power that the Witch-Goddess hadn't thought to take away. I wondered just how much of her influence had contributed to opening my memory to me in dreams, or even calling my Bear-Prince's power back into the light.
       I raised the garage door again, then climbed up behind her.
       "Ready," I said to the bear.
       We padded out into the street, hidden from the world by the swirling white blizzard. The bear broke into a loping run. I could feel joyful energy coursing through his muscles; he'd been cooped up far, far too long. We went faster and faster, as the light of a gray sunrise started to shoot through the blizzard's wall of white, as houses and parked cars blurred into oblivion and morphed into the shadows of tall trees and mountains.
       We were going home.