Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  I felt his eyes then, as if my clawed hands held his heart. “Rois,” he said, and nothing more. I did not look at him; I did not know how to change the shape of his heart.

  “Rois,” Laurel said from the other side of that shadowland. “Are you all right?”

  “She’s eaten nothing,” our father grumbled, and raised his voice. “Beda! Bring her some roast fowl.” He poured more wine into my cup. The wine was blood-red now, and the cup fashioned of bone that had lain season after season in the wood, scoured clean by water and light. I drank it and heard Corbet say again,

  “Rois.”

  I looked at him, finally. The woman had disappeared. Or perhaps she had changed into the rustling ivy sliding over his chair, until he was enthroned in green and bound to it, leaves circling his wrists and hair and throat. I stared, my heart aching at all that green shining in such a dreary season.

  A shadowy Beda put something down in front of me; I started. Birds flew from my plate, leaving bone behind. Corbet made a soft sound. His eyes closed; he leaned back into the wood’s embrace, all but vanishing into leaves.

  “Rois,” he whispered. And then, so faint I might only have heard him with my heart, “Please.”

  I felt the red rose bloom in my heart then; thorns scored it, thorns pricked behind my eyes. I could no longer see him, only a blurred, fiery green. “All right,” I said, to whatever he was asking, though I did not know why he wanted time and Laurel when he could have the timeless wood in all its mystery. “But I don’t understand.”

  “I will show you,” his heart’s voice said, a promise or a warning. “If you will come with me.”

  “Rois,” Laurel pleaded, “where are you? Are you wandering through the summer wood in winter? Corbet, call her back. She’ll hear you. She must eat.”

  He said my name. I saw the candlelight glide along the silver in Laurel’s hands; her hands were young again; so was her voice. I raised my head, saw our father’s plump, anxious face, and Beda watching me, her fingers twisting the cloth of her apron. I looked at Corbet, for the green that had embraced him and bound him; green was a memory, a longing, nothing real in this dead world.

  I picked up my fork, blinked at what lay on my plate. A chicken wing, my eyes told me finally, sprinkled with tarragon, a roast onion, braised carrots. I speared a piece of carrot grimly, as if I could pin the world into place on the end of my fork. “I’m all right,” I said. “The wine made me dream.”

  “It’ll take you like that,” our father said, relieved, “on an empty stomach.”

  “Yes.” It took as much effort to lift that carrot to my mouth as it would have to chop down a tree. It took more not to sit mutely staring at Corbet, waiting to be shown the tangled paths that lay behind his eyes.

  I ate what I could, silently, keeping my eyes on my plate, while Corbet spoke to Laurel and our father, inviting, in his light way, tales of the past, of Laurel’s childhood on the farm, memories of our mother, who was only a vague word or two, a touch, an indistinct face, in my own past.

  “Laurel raised Rois,” my father said, “though she was so young. She took to her responsibilities early. Beda did all she could, of course.” He frowned at his plate; I wondered how much of her face he remembered by then, how much of his youth he had buried. “I was no help,” he added, and sighed. “No help at all. I would look at Rois and see her mother’s face, and that would be the last I could do. I let her run wild; I never checked her. She’s been in and out of the wood in all seasons since she could walk.”

  As if he could have stopped me. I asked, to remind him I was still there, “Did she love the wood, too? Our mother?”

  There was a little, odd silence, as if an answer hung between us in the candlelight, but no one would say it. Then Laurel and our father spoke at once.

  “She took us walking in it—”

  “No. She never went into it.”

  They stopped. I raised my eyes, found them looking perplexedly at one another. “But I remembered,” Laurel said. “She would carry Rois—”

  “While I was in the fields,” our father interrupted a little abruptly. “It must have been. She seldom mentioned it.” He studied his plate, jabbed without interest at a slice of onion. “Anyway, she never foraged, like Rois does. She never ran barefoot.”

  Laurel opened her mouth, closed it. Her eyes sought Corbet’s. Something passed between them, and the little, puckered frown appeared between her brows. She glanced at me, then at her plate; she changed the angle of her knife a degree or two, and finally spoke. “No,” she said. “She wore shoes and only picked the wildflowers.”

  I wished I could remember. Corbet sat silently, his eyes on Laurel, then on our father, as if he could see what they did not say. I gave up trying to guess why our father took comfort in her shod feet.

  “How did she die?” Corbet asked, with an unusual lack of grace, I thought. But our father seemed to want to talk about it. Perhaps he felt that Corbet should know these things about our family, our blameless, unmysterious past, but there his reasoning fell apart. He refused to consider that Corbet might be in love with Laurel, but that left me, his fey daughter who drank roses, an even more unlikely choice for the heir of Lynn Hall. He dreamed a double wedding in spring; he would be lucky, I thought starkly, to have one, and in this world.

  “She died,” he said heavily, “of some strange wasting illness. She could not eat. She fell sick during the autumn rains and died on the longest night of the year.” He looked at me reproachfully; I stirred myself and ate another piece of carrot. “She had me shift her bed to the window so that she could look out. But there was nothing to see, just bleak winter fields and starless nights. I thought she watched for spring. But she died long before the crocus bloomed.” He stared at his cup a moment. “Maybe it was not spring she watched for. Maybe she saw, finally, what she wanted; maybe she didn’t. I’ll never know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Corbet breathed.

  “At least I had my daughters to comfort me.” He drank wine; the shadow eased out of his face. “My sweet Laurel and my wild rose.” He smiled a little. “Rois kept bringing me things to cheer me up—some of them walked, I recall. A caterpillar, once, and a beetle with bright wings. A hummingbird’s egg.” He took a bite of chicken. “That was long ago.”

  “Your mother died young, too,” I said abruptly to Corbet. “Do you remember her?”

  He nodded. “Oh, yes. Very clearly.” He touched his cup as if to lift it, but paused. His eyes, meeting mine, held a warning; I could almost hear the rustle of the ivy that held him in thrall. “She was tall, with very white skin. Her voice was gentle; she sang old ballads to me.”

  “How did—”

  “I was never sure,” he said, and drank before he continued, frowning a little, his eyes on the candle between him and Laurel. “For a long time, my father only said that she had gone away. He grieved terribly; he spoke very little, and I could not bear the look in his eyes when I asked about her. So I stopped asking. Years later, I asked; he only said that she had died, as his own mother had, of being too delicate to live in the world.”

  I swallowed dryly, pulling the husk loose from his answer to find the truth: She had been too human to live in the wood. Or too fey to live in the world.

  Or was it all chaff? Had his true mother stood behind him with her skin as pale as moonlight, her hand on his shoulder, fingers flowing into the ivy that bound him to her world?

  I watched him then, searching for her in his face, forgetting to eat while he watched Laurel, sometimes forgetting to eat, himself, at the way she spoke a word, or the way her face, under the shifting candlelight, changed every time she met his eyes. Our father, oblivious, and cheerful now, spoke of Perrin and his good nature, his hardworking ways, and of the grandchildren who were to overrun his old age.

  “Eat,” he urged me now and then. “Eat.” But I could barely do more than watch the rich tapestry they wove of their glances and slow smiles, the words they spoke that said one thing
to our father, and another to me, while the ivy, growing secretly all around us, whispered its warnings.

  I bequeath all to the wood.

  I drank more wine from my silver cup. It was pale sunlight now, and tasted of roses and blood. Snow whirled outside the window when we finished eating; Corbet, glancing out, said to Laurel,

  “I should leave now. While I can.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, and went to stand beside him, so closely they might as well have touched. “Later, it may not be possible.”

  “Perhaps it is no longer possible.”

  “Or course it is,” our father said, lighting the iron lantern. “Only an inch or two on the ground yet. Follow the field wall when you leave the road—that will take you to the edge of the wood.”

  Corbet drew his eyes away from Laurel to look at me. “We Lynns walk on snow,” he said, smiling; his eyes held no smile. I smiled back, learning from him and Laurel how to say secrets in idle commonplaces.

  “What winter path will you take from place to place through the wood?”

  “I’ll dream one up,” he said, and swung his dark cloak over his shoulders. He turned again to Laurel, his face set, withholding expression. “Thank you for asking me.” He touched me lightly before he left. His fingers burned like the touch of the briers; I looked for the rose they must have left, but saw nothing. “Finish the wine,” he suggested. “There are dreams and more in that.”

  And so I did. And so I dreamed his dream.

  Fourteen

  I stood in Lynn Hall.

  Corbet was there and not there. A man with his face, a boy with his expressions, watched something bubble in a pot hanging over the fire in the marble hearth. The boy was small yet, slender, with dark hair and wide grey eyes; he stared at the pot, trembling a little in hunger, in anticipation. His coat of fine blue cloth was patched at the cuffs. He wore a thin quilt over his shoulders; it trailed on the marble floor behind him like a king’s mantle.

  The man turned away from the fire and began to pace. But not before I saw the fine honed bones of his face, the heavy-lidded eyes, the hair spun out of light. He drank from a silver cup; roses spiraled up its sides. He moved out of the circle of firelight into shadows disturbed only by a thin taper here and there. The winds shook the door until it rattled on its latch, wanting in; they reached down the chimney, but they could not get past the flames.

  “Go and get more wood,” Nial Lynn said. Tearle shrugged the quilt to the floor and turned without a word. Nial Lynn paced back into light, and I saw that his eyes were not green, but grey, like his son’s, and his mouth was thin and bloodless, as if he never smiled, as if he drank the thorns out of his cup instead of roses.

  The boy opened the door, struggling to keep it from crashing open against the stones. He went out in his frayed coat, without gloves, without a light. Nial Lynn paced. A taper guttered and went out. I could see no expression on his face; he seemed oblivious of himself, the pot over the fire, the storm, as if, in his own thoughts, he paced a different season, a different room.

  The shadows fanned across the walls, deepening; I felt a chill where I stood, a shadow in a corner, or maybe only a taper’s eye. The fire was consuming itself, and still Nial Lynn paced without a thought for the boy he had sent into the storm. It was not until fire crawled into the last glowing log and fumed that Nial seemed to see the dark around him.

  He made an impatient noise, and kicked a flame out of the log with his boot. Then he went to the door and flung it open, calling. While he called, the boy, crouched against the door, slid into the room at his feet. Logs clattered out of his arms. He crawled, groping for them, shuddering. Nial Lynn reached for a log, tossed it into the fire, then, in the sudden brightness, resumed pacing, while the boy stumbled to his feet and brought the wood, piece by piece, to the fire.

  Nial Lynn spoke finally. “Where were you?”

  “I couldn’t unlatch the door.” He spoke without feeling, numb. “My fingers wouldn’t move.”

  “We’ll need more.”

  “I know.” Tearle stood at the fire, his fingers under his arms, shivering. “I thought I saw things in the wind,” he said after a moment. “Faces made out of wind and snow. Beautiful faces. Like my mother’s.”

  “Perhaps you did,” Nial Lynn murmured. “Perhaps you did.” His eyes were very wide, his head uplifted, as if he searched the shadows for that face. He turned abruptly. Something happened; I couldn’t see clearly. Nial Lynn stood near the door, his raised hand falling, and halfway across the room, at the hearth, Tearle lost his balance, fell against the pot above the fire.

  It splashed him. I saw his mouth open, but he made no sound. He caught himself on the hearthstones before he fell into the fire. He leaned against them, trembling, holding one arm tightly, his eyes closed.

  “She’s gone,” Nial Lynn said patiently. “Don’t speak of her.”

  He did not speak again; the boy did not move for a long time, though I heard his harsh breathing. He moved finally, lifted a porcelain cup beside the hearth, to dip it into the pot. In the shadows, Nial Lynn turned again.

  “No,” he said, and the boy froze. “Bring more wood before you eat.”

  Tearle put the cup down without a sound, rose and went back into the storm.

  When he had fought the door closed again, the rooms grew black. I still heard the winds, whining and snarling. I shivered, chilled to the heart by the cold stones around me, the iron cold in Nial Lynn’s voice. I saw Corbet, pacing the room as his grandfather had paced half a century before.

  I knew him, though his back was turned, though the only light came from the blood-red rose burning on the hearth. I said his name, and in my dream he came to me. He did not touch me; we seemed to stand together in different times, his past, my dream. He knew me, though; he said, “Rois.”

  “What has this—” I could barely speak, shaking with the cold. “What has this to do with you? Why did you come back here?”

  “To find my way out,” he said simply. “You know that. Look.”

  He went to the door, opened it. I saw the boy crouched on the threshold again, weighed down by the wood in his arms, shivering too badly to stand. That is not what Corbet showed me. “Look,” he said again, and I saw the riders in the storm.

  They rode horses as white as hoarfrost. Snow and star and dark whirled around one another to etch a fine boned face, eyes of night and crystal fire. Their mantles were of dark wind and snow; their wild hair caught snow and falling stars. The boy watched them, too, longing for their beauty, their mastery over cold and storm. Come, the winds called. Come to us. This is not your true home. You belong elsewhere. You belong with us.

  “How?” I whispered; if I had not been dreaming, he never could have heard me. “How did your father find his way to them?”

  He looked at me out of Nial Lynn’s face, his cold secret eyes. “How did my grandfather?”

  Snow misted off the roof between us; he blurred. I reached out to him, trying to catch a shadow. My hand closed on a knife-edge of wind. “How?” I asked again. I saw only the boy on the threshold, huddled against the door, clinging to wood, watching the faces of the storm.

  I woke. It was still night; the winds in my dream sang their sweet, dangerous song around our house. Come to us. Come. Again I saw the frailness of our walls, how they could be broken by a thought, stone and board could sag like old web under a vision. I closed my eyes against the vision, and found my way back into the drift of leaves beside the well.

  Laurel seemed to have heard those winds, too. Some dream had disturbed her calm; her face, paler than usual, wore an unfamiliar frown. When Perrin came in for breakfast, she looked at him for a moment as if she did not recognize him.

  He had not slept well, either. “I kept hearing animals calling me from the barn—I’d wake and hear nothing but the wind.” He brushed her cheek tentatively. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” She averted her face abruptly, left him blinking at her. She turned back qui
ckly, feeling his dismay. “Those winds woke me as well. Only they had human voices.”

  “What did they say?” he asked, with an effort at humor. She only gazed through him.

  “Nothing human,” she said at last, and turned away again. “They left me out of sorts. I’m sorry. I didn’t expect you this morning.”

  “I missed you,” he said simply. He waited, holding the back of a chair as if for courage, while she stepped into the kitchen to tell Beda he had come. When she returned, he asked as simply, holding her eyes, “Was Corbet here last night?”

  “Yes,” she said, and the blood ran into her face, turning its winter pallor beautiful. His head bowed. He said nothing, just pulled out the chair in his hands to sit. I stepped into the room; his head lifted again.

  “Rois,” he said tonelessly, then made an effort. “You’re looking better. Tired, but better.” He stood up again suddenly. “Maybe I should help your father finish the milking—”

  “Sit,” Laurel said. She laid a hand on the crook of his arm. “Sit,” she said gently. She did not meet his eyes, but her voice reached him. “These winter winds have us all confused. I barely know what I’m thinking or doing anymore.”

  “What shall I do?” he asked her softly. He slid his fingers beneath her wrist a moment. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Just be patient with me. For now.” Her voice made no promises.

  “All right,” he said steadily, and sat again, not so steadily. Beda came in with a great tray of eggs and sausage, bread, milk, butter, cheese and oatmeal porridge. She looked at our closed faces and heaved a sigh.

  “These winds.” She unloaded the tray, rattling crockery. “And this is only the beginning.”

  Corbet did not come for supper that night, only Perrin. That fretted both Laurel and me, though Laurel did her best to hide it. She sat beside the fire as usual, making lace, or at least making some attempt to move the hook occasionally. Perrin did not play. He tried to speak to Laurel; she answered absently, listening for another voice. At least I had him in my dreams, I thought; perhaps she did, too. But I hungered for his presence, his quick, riddling eyes that saw me more clearly than anyone had ever done, his lean, supple body, the questions he raised and left unanswered in the air, the glimpses he gave us of the world beyond our small lives, of a world even beyond that. Our father, fortunately, was in a talkative mood; he asked endless, detailed questions about Perrin’s sick cows, until I could almost hear their plaintive bellowing and smell the barn. It made me want to walk into the snow, and keep walking, and keep walking, until I saw the faces in the wind and could follow them. Even Laurel looked haunted by her future; she threw Perrin a wide-eyed glance that he caught, mute and strained, while our father compared cow ailments.