Frost Tallpeak pressed his broad foot into fresh snow and made the print deeper than it needed to be. He was eight feet tall, tusked, and covered in white fur, and no one in the valley below had ever asked his name. This morning a hunter had come up the ridge alone, a man with a dark braid and a bow slung low across his back, following the tracks of something he believed was a beast. Frost had watched him from behind a pine for an hour. The hunter had a good jaw and careful hands and stopped to feed jerky to a fox. So Frost, who had spent forty winters alone on this mountain and wanted very badly to be loved, did the only thing he could think of. He walked a slow loop through the drifts and left a trail any tracker could follow, and then he waited near the frozen falls where the light was kindest to his face. The hunter came through the trees at midday with an arrow already nocked. Frost stepped out with his hands open and his tusks tucked behind his lip, and the hunter's arrow went straight through the meat of his shoulder before Frost could speak. The man did not stay to finish him. He ran. Frost sat down hard in the red snow and pulled the shaft out himself, and that was when the two small figures landed on the branch above him. They were slender and pale, with ice wings that rang faintly when they folded. One of them, the taller, looked at the blood in the snow and then at Frost's face and said, plainly, that he had been a fool. The other said their queen had been watching the trail Frost laid, and that laying bait for a human was a crime among their kind, and that Frost would now come with them and answer for it. Frost stood up slowly. His shoulder bled through his fingers. He had wanted a mate by nightfall. Instead he had a wound, a summons, and two winged strangers waiting for him to walk.