Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  It was a kindly way of looking at Shave, who once stayed in bed for a week while he lost a toenail he had stubbed on a harrow. I poured my tea and tried to ignore my own restless feet fidgeting in their boots. Outside Anis’ thick window panes the distorted sky hung low and dove’s wing-grey; the intermittent rains felt icy, and the wind had a sharp, testy mutter to it.

  I said, turning her back in time, “How could you remember that curse all these years?”

  “How could I forget it?” she asked with a certain, skewed reasoning.

  “Other people remember different curses.”

  “It’s as they remember.”

  “Did you see Nial Lynn die?”

  She sipped tea almost as pale as cream. Her eyes seemed the same cloudy pale; she saw faces, she said, as blurs of shadow, though things farther away became, like memory, more detailed.

  “I had a houseful then, and it was winter. That meant water boiling for laundry in one pot, soup simmering in another, bread rising, children everywhere underfoot, the littlest trying to walk, and apt to fall in the fire or out the door in a moment.” She sipped tea. “Not,” she said calmly, “that I would have stepped in to rescue him if I had seen it. He came here, sometimes.”

  “Nial?” I asked, startled.

  “No. Young Tearle. Some years after his mother died and we ran free as rabbits that summer night to spy on Lynn Hall. I married young and already had my hands full, with my own and others’ children come to visit them. Tearle would walk in, just come in like a wild thing out of the cold at odd times. He never said much. He would just sit and watch the others running and shrieking and laughing, watch me sewing, or cooking, or trying to catch one of them to bathe. I’d look up and there he’d be, like a ghost in the shadows, watching the children. He was much older than they, but young enough still to miss what he’d never had. They’d say his name, but they never teased him or bothered him. I’d go back to work, and look up again, and he’d be gone.” She paused; entranced, I did not even blink. The lines on her face rearranged themselves, her thin mouth all but disappearing before she spoke again. “Once or twice I’d see bruises on him. He wouldn’t let me touch them; he would not admit they were there. Once he ate a piece of plum cake I handed him. He ate it so slowly, crumb by crumb, as if he marvelled at every taste. Once he reached out and caught the baby when she tripped over her feet. Once she came and put her face on his legs and went to sleep. He watched her, not moving, until she woke again.

  “And then he came.”

  “Nial,” I guessed, as fine seams and wrinkles knotted.

  “He came in without knocking, bade me good morning with a smile, and walked to where Tearle sat in a corner. He put his hand down, as if to help the boy up off the floor, and then—I don’t know—Tearle started to stand, and was sitting again, his eyes closed, his head rolling limp against the wall, as if he had fallen asleep. Nial spoke his name, not sharply, and he struggled up, looking dazed. He stumbled a little, walking past me. I didn’t see a mark on him. But something happened. He left without speaking. He never came again.”

  She lifted her cup delicately with both hands and drank. Neither of us spoke. The wind shrieked suddenly under the eaves and she started as at a child’s voice.

  “I never saw him much after that; I only heard the tales of him running wild with the wildest of ours. And then Nial cursed him and died and he ran away.”

  “Who heard the curse?” I asked. “Who saw Nial murdered?”

  She was silent again, gazing at the clouds in her tea, watching a face form in them. She blinked; it swirled away. “I don’t know that anyone saw it. Til Travers brought the news, though. He was broad as an oak, and burly, a great bullock of a young man, who would walk through a blizzard and not feel it, and not lose his way. He had a bird’s sense of direction. He had taken a sleigh with provisions from the inn for the hall, a standing order every twelve days. I knew because my Nysa liked to ride with him, and I always fretted in bad weather. But she had sent him off into the storm that day. They had a quarrel, and she was red-eyed and scowling, and watching for him to come back anyway.

  “And he came. He had Nial Lynn slung on top of his provisions, covered with sacks and two inches of snow. Nysa saw the blood on the sacks and rushed out into the snow to Til. He said there was blood on the marble floor, and Tearle Lynn had disappeared. He said something else, and then the children were wailing and Nysa was crying again, and Nial was sliding out from under the sacks, so I sent him with Til to the apothecary, who would know what to do if there was any life left in him.” She paused; her eyes, pale as they were, fixed on her cup, reminded me of ravens’ eyes.

  “Did Til hear the curse?”

  “He didn’t say.” She blinked and sat back in her chair. “What he said was that Tearle Lynn had vanished—”

  “Yes—”

  “But his horse was in the stable and there were no tracks anywhere in the snow except Til’s. They searched, later. The snow lay unbroken all around the hall, except for Til’s sleigh. Tearle Lynn had turned himself into a bird and flown…”

  I stared at her, bewildered. “Maybe,” I said finally, “he ran away before the snow fell. Maybe Nial Lynn’s heart gave out and he struck his head, falling. Maybe Tearle never killed him at all.”

  “We asked all those things,” she said. “They searched all over the house, the woods. They found no secrets, no hidden doors or passages. But no one could explain the bruises around Nial Lynn’s throat, or the table on its side, or the wine bottle smashed against the far wall. Nial Lynn had been murdered, and Tearle Lynn had killed him and had run. But out of what door and down what road no one could say.”

  I was silent. My hands were clenched under the table; I could feel my nails trying to hold thoughts still, but they ripped loose anyway, clamored like a flock of frightened birds.

  He had opened a door and fled down a tangled path into the wood…

  His son could not find the way back.

  I shuddered, hearing the true curse that Nial Lynn had laid upon his son: I bequeath all to the wood.

  And the wood had taken all.

  I finished my tea and stood up. Corbet built his walls and his stable, roofed his rooms, spoke of clearing fields and finding water, but he lived among us as if each action might make him human, as if each wish, spoken, might make itself true. But it was little more than his father had done, sitting in Anis’ house, watching, pretending that he belonged in that safe world, among those laughing, squabbling children, that the opening door would not lead him back to the cold and empty shadow world that claimed him.

  “I must go,” I said to Anis, but where, I did not know. I kissed her cheek; she drew a deep breath as I straightened.

  “I can smell the wind and wood on you,” she said, “as if you lived in them.”

  I opened the door and glimpsed, in the wild wind and sky, perhaps in her words, the next turn of the tangled path we walked.

  Eleven

  I went back to the well.

  It was the only door I knew, besides the boarded doorway in Lynn Hall, and I could not go there. I was afraid to find Corbet behind that door again, luring me in, warning me away, with his grandfather’s eyes and his father’s desperate voice. He was not in the hall when I crept past it at twilight; the makeshift stable, finished but lacking a door, was empty. The sight chilled me more deeply than the winds. He could have simply gone to the inn to eat. But I saw him sitting at our hearth, watching Laurel out of secret, firelit eyes, while Perrin spoke of cows and our father snored. Play, I wanted to beg Perrin. Don’t play cows and fields and next year’s planting. Make a flute of your bones and play the music of your heart.

  I had not been home all day. They knew I had gone to the village; they would think, when I did not return for supper, that I had stayed to eat with someone. What they would think later I could not pause to wonder.

  Above the wood, the twilight sky was a dusky lavender, fading into deep purples and the vibrant grey o
f storm clouds. The winds smelled of rain; they held an edge of winter cold. They pushed me here and there as I walked, jostling me like invisible horses; they seemed to spring from any direction. Night came swiftly, caught me before I reached the well. But I stumbled on, guided by the lowering shape of a lightning-split oak against a moment’s scattering of stars, by a pattern of stones underfoot, a sudden glint of water, the dry rattling of rose vines in the wind.

  I smelled wet stone, and an echo, a memory, of sun-warmed roses. I sank wearily down beside the little well. The leaves were sodden and crumbling; I could not bury myself in them, but I did not care. I wanted to be found. So I did what Corbet had done, that hot summer day. I pushed aside the rose vines with one arm and dipped my hand into the water and drank. The vines blew against me, snagged my hair and my cloak, until I could hardly move. I lifted water and drank, lifted water and drank, until I felt it run down my throat and breast, and the thorns wove into cloth and hair and skin, imprisoning me, but I did not care.

  Then I heard the voices on the wind, and the silvery ring of tiny bells. The winds flooded through the bare trees; I heard one snap like a bone and fall. Vines whipped wildly around me, opening to reveal the well, and the stones, and the rose as red as blood that bloomed in the dark water, more beautiful than any living rose.

  “Take it,” a voice breathed into the wind. I freed my hand from the thorns and reached into the water. It pricked me as I lifted it out; I smelled its perfume, all the scents of the summer that had gone.

  “I want him,” I said to all the dark riders crowded around me, who had ridden down the wind. “I want him in this world.”

  Silvery laughter mingled with the bells. “No one ever wanted him. And so he came to us.”

  “I want him.”

  “Then you must hold fast to him, as fast as those thorns hold you, no matter what shape he takes, what face he shows. You must love him.”

  “I do.”

  Again I heard the laughter, sweet and mocking in the screaming winds. “You must be human to love.”

  “I am,” I said, and the tiny bells rang madly amid the laughter.

  “Then take him.”

  His face appeared in the water, like the rose, as beautiful and as cruel, smiling his faint, secret smile, his eyes glittering with moonlight and as cold. I felt my heart pound sickly, for I did not want what I saw. But I reached down to him through the water, deeper and deeper, for he eluded me; deeper, until I felt the cold dark well up around me, and I saw nothing.

  When I woke, he was bending over me.

  The light burned my eyes, though it was only the misty grey of an autumn morning. His eyes were no longer cold; his brows were drawn hard. I raised my hand to touch his face, which looked as colorless and bleak as the sky behind it. Then I winced, and felt, all over me, the burning roses of pain.

  “She’s awake,” he said briefly to someone. Perrin answered.

  “I’ll lift her.”

  “She can’t ride.”

  Perrin’s trousers appeared beside Corbet’s face. “I’d best go back and get her father’s wagon,” he said.

  “I’ll do it,” Corbet said, and stood up; I lost his face. “And some blankets to lay her on. And I’ll bring Laurel.”

  “Yes,” Perrin said, and I would have sighed if the rose vines weren’t growing up my back. Nothing had changed. I felt a tear slide down my cheek. Perrin’s face appeared where Corbet’s had been. He took off his wool cloak and folded it, and slipped it gently under my head.

  “Easy, girl,” he said soothingly, as if he were talking to his horse. “We’ll have you home soon. Looks like you fell into the brier roses, wandering around in the dark. Your sister rode for me at dawn; she went into the village to ask around, and I came out to the hall. Corbet brought me here. He said you liked this place.”

  “Where’s my rose?” I asked, remembering it suddenly. Even my lips felt swollen. Perrin looked blank.

  “What’s that?”

  “Where’s my red rose?”

  His brows lifted worriedly. “There’s nothing blooming now, Rois. You’re feverish. Lie quiet now, try to rest.”

  But I made him help me sit until I could look around me. The stark, thick vines hid the well again; perhaps, I thought, if I parted them, I would see the rose floating just beneath the water. But I could barely move, and Perrin would have thought me crazed. Perhaps he already did. Perhaps, I thought dispassionately, I am.

  I pick roses out of water. I talk to voices in the wind. I see ghosts walk out of light.

  Corbet finally returned, driving the wagon as close as he could among the trees; Laurel leaped down before it stopped.

  She said nothing when she saw me; I saw her face drain white as cream. She bent down, touched my cheek gently. Perrin lifted me; she walked beside him to the wagon, holding the edge of my cloak between her fingers, not knowing where to hold me. Corbet helped him lay me on the blankets in the wagon. By then I was crying silently, partly in pain, partly out of frustration, because I could not tell them why I had gone into the wood in the dark, why I had impaled myself on rose vines. Laurel spoke at me as if I were a demented child; Perrin whistled, determined to be cheerful, and Corbet, wearing his calm human face, was not about to offer inhuman explanations to anyone. I hated him then. His eyes, touching mine, gave me nothing.

  My father, horrified and speechless, helped them carry me up to bed. They left me there with Laurel and Beda, who drew off my torn, bloody clothing, washed me with comfrey water, and smoothed one of my own oils over my skin until it felt a little less like shredded paper and I smelled like a garden run wild. I was still crying; I refused to answer any of Laurel’s questions. She gave up talking, and left me with a cup of camomile tea, which was, I found when I lifted it shakily to my lips, mostly apple brandy.

  I slept without dreaming, except once, when a red rose opened in the dark and I smelled its scent.

  When I woke, Laurel was lighting a lamp in a corner of the room so that I would not wake in the dark.

  I said her name. She turned swiftly, bringing the lamp, and examined my torn wrists, my face. Then she sat on the bed and stared at me.

  “Rois Melior, what on earth were you doing?”

  I spoke cautiously; a thorn had caught my upper lip. “Nothing. It got dark sooner than I expected. That’s—”

  “Anis Turl said you came and asked her questions about Nial Lynn’s death, about his son, about the curse on Lynn Hall. And then you forgot to come home before dark, you stayed out all night, and Corbet and Perrin found you in the wood near Lynn Hall, half-hidden in brambles, so tightly covered they didn’t know at first if you were alive or dead. Perrin said it looked as if you were trying to drown yourself in thorns.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said shortly. “It was very windy—I got tangled, and the harder I pulled, the more tangled I got—”

  “You stayed in the wood to spy on Corbet. What you’re tangled in is that old moldering tale, which is nothing but memory now, in the few minds left to remember, and they don’t know the difference anymore between what was true and what was conjecture, and what was just stories tossed around the hearth or the tavern after too much ale. That tale about the boy murdering his father and running away without leaving a track in the snow—there’s nothing magical about it! Either he did or he didn’t, and if he did, by Anis’ account there was enough snow falling to bury the tracks of a harrow pulled by a dozen oxen. And I don’t know what confused ideas you have about Corbet—” Color flushed through her face at his name; she continued determinedly, “But you must stop playing among his ghosts—it’s stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He’s trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It’s not nice and it’s not fair.”

  I didn’t bother pointing out that she, along with most of the village, had been just as curious. Perhaps the tale I was unearthing had shed its colorful drama to reveal a
misery and dreary cruelty we all lived too close to. I stirred restively, then changed my mind about moving. My head ached; I wanted Laurel’s soothing hands, not her anger.

  “What does Corbet say?” I asked. “Does he complain about me?”

  “Of course not. He doesn’t complain about anything. But—”

  “What did he say about finding me in the rose vines?”

  “Nothing.” But there was something; I saw it in her eyes.

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know. He was with Perrin. He—” She brushed the air with her hand, making nothing out of something. But she liked to say Corbet’s name, and so she answered. “Perrin said the vines were so thick they had trouble freeing you. He wanted to ride back and get pruning shears, but Corbet did not want him to cut the vines. It’s a small thing, but Perrin thought it odd. He went back for work gloves, and brought the shears anyway, but by the time he reached the wood, Corbet had gotten you loose. He was bleeding, but he didn’t seem to notice. I put your oil on his hands when he came to get me.”

  I turned my face away from the light, feeling tears burn down my face again. Had he, I wondered, opened the vines to see the rose floating in the water? Had he been there among those dark riders to hear my plea?

  Had he laughed with them?

  “Rois.” Laurel touched my face with lavender-scented linen. The whole house smelled of me, I thought; I had brought the wood in here. “Don’t cry. Just promise me—just try—try not to be so wild.” I heard her take a breath. “If you think you are in love with Corbet, and you want him to take an interest in you, then you must see that with all the work he plans to do, he will need someone with a little common sense. Not a wild woman who roams the wood and flings herself impulsively into rose vines.”

  I looked at her. “But that’s what I am,” I said. “He knows it. He always knew. I can’t hide anything from him.”

  She was silent, her eyes lowered, the little frown puckering her brows. She couldn’t hide anything from him either. She reached for the jar of oil beside the bed.