To feel? To desire? How? Who can be lonely, even, if never not alone? After that, each year, under cover of winter, she hovered on the verge of humanity. And men urged her over the threshold.

They beseeched her all season long until at last she came too close to fire. As the frost thawed from her, she melted with it, into clear water. Then the cold brace of winter would follow her, flowing down-river through closed forest into the unknown. Beneath the snow would emerge a new spring. Work would begin again, the cycle of sowing and reaping that consumed everybody most of the year. There was so much to be done, to bring bread to the table. The only able peasant permitted by the king to remain idle was the man who had tempted Ardour from her forest cover. That was the reward for ending winter.

Every year men worked harder to lure Ardour to her fate. They sang to her, played the fiddle or the flute. If once they’d been attracted to her, after a while you no longer heard them at the tavern talking lustily about her blizzard of hair, those breasts as steep as snow peaks. Each man thought only of himself.

Yet, the more trouble they took, the less their efforts worked to draw her near. The king watched as his subjects flattered and bribed Ardour, tended to her more unctuously than to his majesty. The winter, previously a period of rest, was more trying than a season of sowing, and what did it reap? For all but the man who ushered Ardour’s departure, another nine months of labor.

The wintertime clamor became almost intolerable, each man playing whatever instrument he knew, dancing, tendering bread, mead, gold. Ardour could scarcely choose which way to look, let alone who to let tempt her. One year she was drawn to the peasant who had the loudest horn, which she mistook — simple soul — for the force of his desire. Another winter, she went for the one who danced most gracefully, which she misunderstood — foolish girl — as a measure of his sensitivity. And then came the season that she fell for the man with the greatest goods, which she misinterpreted — dumb broad — as a token of his generosity.