TWELVE
Rosa could delay no longer. The ashes from her grandmother's pyre were cold on the stone altar in the forest, and she had made more cheese than she could eat in a year. The mead would not finish fermenting for some days yet, and Alard's hunters had followed the wolf's trail to a clearing in the forest, before they'd lost it.
Treating the hunters' coughs and chills from sleeping in the snow had given her all the information she needed to head out on her own hunt, along with the certainty that no one else would be out in the forest, risking his neck against the beast. The Baron's hunters didn't dare cross the witch who was now the town's only healer, who'd ordered them to rest inside for a week.
She'd sacrificed four elderly hens to use as bait, or she intended to – the old broil
