I made all of the "wrong" choices and got a very pleasant ending. I'm really happy with this game! Eventually I'll play through it again. This is something I can see myself returning to.
There's quite a lot of branching throughout: you can easily run through a second time without repeating a single encounter for the bulk of the game, after that it depends partly what sort of deck you get to begin with. The ending can play out in quite a few different ways too - based on your description, I'm actually not certain which you found!
Hmm, I don't think I can do spoiler tags here so uh... SPOILER WARNING FOR ANYONE WHO DOESN'T WANNA READ-
But uhh, so I avoided pretty much every nice-looking town and shelter and path. I just took the scary-looking paths. Had three unicorns, two spiders, four snakes. I saved a snake and came upon my destiny, but I didn't use it. So she thanked me and decided that she wanted to tag along with me and learn a thing or two.
It was very sweet. Also another playthrough ended with me giving her a horse. I haven't tried to kill her yet and at this point I like her too much!