Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “She has hidden me from you. She knows you’re here. She knows why.”

  “Does she? Does she know I came here because I have no place else to go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one else can tell me about my mother—no one else knows that my mother came into these woods in summer, where the rose vines fall across the secret well, and met someone in a fall of light—”

  “How do you know?” he demanded.

  “I remember.”

  “How do you know he was not human?”

  “Because she watched for him,” I whispered, “in winter, the way Laurel watches for you. She died waiting for him to return. I don’t know myself any longer. I don’t know where I belong. I can see my way here, so I must belong here. At least, when you look at me and say my name, I recognize myself.”

  “Why do you trust her?” he demanded recklessly. “You saw her heart—it’s a howling desert of ice. She lies like the moon lies, a different face every night, all but one of them false, and the one true face as barren and hard as stone. Why do you believe her?”

  “You do.” My words came out ragged with unshed tears. “You knew me the moment you saw me. You said I see with the wood’s eyes. That’s why you turned to Laurel. You were afraid of me.”

  “Rois—” He was trembling; I could hear the leaves rustling around him. “Yes. You seemed to live in the borderlands of the world I tried to escape. You tossed your heart after every passing breeze. Even after light. You did not seem—”

  The word pushed through my throat like two hard stones. “Human.”

  Unseen leaves whispered the word. He said slowly, “I never knew until now what that word could mean. Here in her world of dreams and deadly lies, you seem very human.”

  “Corbet.” I swallowed something bitter. “Do you care for me at all? Or do you only need me?”

  He breathed a word: yes, or no, or Rois. His hand opened to my face; I felt only the cool invisible leaves. I lifted my own hand; in the light our shadows touched.

  “You come to me,” he whispered. “Into every dark place. Into every memory. Into the empty eyes of winter. I go alone and find you with me. Why do you care for me?”

  I did not know until I spoke. “Because you are making me human.”

  Again my hand found air and light, illusion, where my heart cried out for mortal flesh and bone. His face twisted as if he heard my cry. He looked down to where we could touch, and closed his eyes.

  I heard her voice then, a memory in the sighing leaves: You must hold fast to him, no matter what shape he takes…

  “How can I hold light?” I demanded in despair.

  You must love him.

  “You cannot,” he answered wearily.

  You must be human to love.

  I could hold him in my eyes, at least, for as long as she let him stay. “How much of you can she claim?” I asked him. “Some part of you is human.”

  “My father married just as Nial Lynn married: a woman who had strayed into an accidental smile in his eyes. She could not escape this place once she desired it. He tried. He tried to love her. But he had never been taught how.”

  “Then you don’t belong here at all—”

  “Long ago a mortal man went walking in the summer wood one day near Lynn Hall. He fell in love with a stir of air, a scent of wild roses, a touch of light. She bore him a son.”

  “Nial Lynn.”

  He nodded. “My great-grandfather’s human wife took the child to raise, but she was not pleased with him. Nial had strange powers, and was prone to odd fits of violence. But they had no other children. So he inherited Lynn Hall. I think he must have hated the human world because he could not find his way past it into her world.”

  “Why didn’t she—”

  He smiled a little, tightly. “Because he wanted it. She only takes those, like you and me, who could not bear to live here. Or like my father, who had no choice but to leave the human world.”

  “Then you do belong here. Some part of you.”

  I felt a brush of air like hoarfrost’s fingers on my cheek. “Be careful,” he said very softly. “She has held me fast since I was born. She will find a way to hold you, too, and another brier rose will bloom in the human world, that has its roots in this one.”

  “And beside it will grow a laurel, and a linden tree. Who is she? Does she have a name?”

  He tried to answer. Leaves came out of his mouth instead of words. I cried out in terror, reaching out to him; my hands closed on shadow, on nothing. Leaves opened in his eyes and flowed like tears; leaves pushed through his heart. I tried to say his name; I had no voice, not even leaves. Corbet, my heart called over and over, until a brier tangled through the endless fall of ivy, and out of his heart a rose bloomed in answer.

  She came to me then, cloaked in ivy instead of owl white. Her long fingers touched my wrist and circled it. Tears and words and blood all in the shape of leaves slid out of Corbet to twine into her hair. I could no longer see him, only the vague form of a man within the green: a finger, a pale gleam of hair, a blind eye among the leaves.

  “You didn’t come here for my name,” she said, ignoring my broken, incoherent pleas. “You came for yours.”

  My mother walked through the grass and wildflowers toward us. Her dreaming eyes saw nothing, her skin was polished pearl. I took a step back; fingers as strong as tree root stopped me.

  “She is still watching for him, Rois. Time pools here; it has nowhere to go. A hundred years might pass in your world before I call her to me again, but if I call her in a hundred years, she will come. She’ll tell us who came to her out of my wood, who gave you his eyes.”

  I could not move; I could not make a sound. And then I made a sound with my entire body, a silent scream that snapped through me and wrenched me free. The ivy around Corbet shook; I heard his sharp breath. Through the swirl of wind and light around me she spoke sweetly, but not to me.

  “Let me help you. Who are you looking for?”

  I saw my mother very clearly then, in one of those strange, timeless moments that seem to last forever between two words, or while a knife falls, just before it slips and cuts. She was scarcely older than Laurel when she died, I saw with horror. She had given me her hair and her light eyes, but not her mouth; that and her slender hands had gone to Laurel. She was pale as milk and so thin her skin had pared itself down to the bone. She did not seem to see her questioner; her eyes held too much light, too much memory. But she heard the question.

  “He had no name,” she answered. “He never spoke.” Her dreaming voice was peaceful, remote. “I’ll know him when he comes to me. I never see him clearly at first. He is a fall of light along the oak tree that stands behind the little well where the brier roses bloom. They open all summer long, and where their petals fall, that’s where I lay my Rois to wait.”

  There was another question; I didn’t hear. I shook like a naked child thrown into the dead of winter. I could not seem to cry; my tears had frozen in that cold.

  “He came with summer. One such summer becomes every summer; it seems he came to me in all of them. I saw him and I lost myself. I followed the path of the sun to the wood, always, in my mind if I could not leave the house. It had nothing to do with the life I knew, any more than dreams do. And so I thought, when the dream was over, that I would wake.”

  I heard myself make a sound then; I put my hands over my mouth to stifle it. My mother did not hear. I did not exist, only the baby in her memories she had left beside the well.

  “He never asked about Rois. He never spoke, any more than light speaks, until it changes, and then you understand and it is too late.”

  “Let her go,” I whispered through my hands. “Let her go.”

  “She is searching for her heart. Humans think they lose such things here. She misplaced it in your world, left a hollow that nothing could fill until she wandered into light.” She asked my mother, “Was he the first from the wood? Were there others?”
/>
  “No,” my mother said. “No one else. No one ever except him.”

  I cried out then, moving toward my mother, trying to catch her eyes. “He is not here! You will never find him, ever, ever! He never loved you! Go back where you are loved!”

  But it was like shouting in a dream, or under water. My mother, hearing no more questions, followed a breeze toward a distant pool of light. She faded into colors, into air, before she reached it.

  I could not stand. I crouched on the ground, racked with cold, as if her ghost, her death, had passed through me. I could not cry, and I could not stop trembling. I felt a regard far colder than my mother’s blindness, and looked up into sapphire eyes.

  “I wonder whose child you are… I wonder if even she knew. But now you know where you belong. You have been coming to this place since you were born.”

  “My father is a farmer,” I whispered numbly, without conviction. “I belong to his world.”

  “Then how did you see past his clods and endless furrows to come here?”

  “The way my mother did. I followed someone. Like her, I could not help myself.” I stood up, still shivering, wanting to go, not knowing where to go, because I didn’t know anymore what love meant, or why we were not all better off without it.

  I saw Corbet’s eyes then, and his mouth, and one hand open among the leaves. His eyes held mine, more powerfully than any touch; they knew me. He whispered one word that was not a leaf, and I felt the deadly cold in me finally melt, my frozen tears break free.

  “Rois.”

  “Yes,” I told him. “I will come back.”

  Which is why, I supposed, she let me go.

  Twenty-two

  Stone walls closed around me. I stood at the hearth in Lynn Hall, in front of my pile of twigs and split kindling, that had only burned in some other world, and left me cold in this one. The silent rooms were smoky with late afternoon shadows. I had to go home, but somewhere beyond the pallid light, within the stones, Corbet had spoken my name, and I couldn’t bear to leave the place where I was known. I knelt, folded myself against the cold, made myself small and still, something nameless in the winter watching and being watched.

  Don’t leave me, he had said: a plea.

  You must hold him, she had said: a promise.

  She did not know me; I didn’t know myself. I was something wild in her wood, as she was in mine, maybe human, maybe not, but even human I recognized her. My mother had called her, Laurel was calling her. She was the death of the heart, and she harvested in the dead of winter. She was transforming my world around me, reaching out to those I loved, changing them to suit her season. She had my mother, she had Corbet; she would take Laurel, she would take me, in the end, because I would follow my heart. But neither of us knew what I could or couldn’t do within her wood.

  I heard something whisper through the air, and turned. A white owl flew across the room into the tapestry. It gazed at me out of wide, golden eyes before it faded into formless thread. This time it didn’t ask its mocking question. It only asked what it already knew.

  She had said: You must be human to love.

  Neither of us knew this Rois.

  I got up finally, before the world turned black and my father came for me. Snow mingled with the fading light as I drove home; flakes, catching in my eyelashes, seemed too heavy to bear. The snow never seemed to touch the ground; everything blurred around me. I held the reins, but the horses chose their path, it seemed, carrying me beyond the daylight toward an unfamiliar dark.

  But they stopped in a familiar place. My father, hearing the sleigh, came out to take the horses in. “Where have you been?” he kept asking. “Where have you been? In that cold house all this time?”

  “Yes,” I said. He looked at me closely, but blamed the raw winds for my reddened eyes. I did not know who to blame: him for not seeing enough, my mother for seeing too much in a fall of summer light. Neither, I decided; neither was to blame. Blame lay in another world; that much I could see clearly, even in the gathering night.

  “You look terrible,” my father said brusquely. “I was just beginning to think you were coming into some sense.” He turned the horses toward the barn. “Between the two of you,” I heard, and he added a few more things that only the horses heard.

  I sat down to supper with him and Laurel, but I could barely eat. Something kept pushing into my throat when I tried to swallow. I would see my mother’s pale face, her thin, thin fingers, and, haunted, I could not eat for her, so I did not want to eat. I felt Laurel watching me; she had achieved more convincingly than I the art of eating air.

  “Rois,” she said softly. The barest hint of expression, troubled the dead calm in her face. “What did you find there?”

  Ghosts, I thought. I hesitated; she would not believe nothing. Our father answered for me.

  “Nothing,” he said roundly, “and I don’t want to hear any more of it, and that’s the end of it.”

  But she had found something in my eyes more disturbing than nothing.

  “Rois,” she breathed, and I stood abruptly.

  “Nothing,” I repeated, and was as startled as they were by the fierceness in my voice. “You were right. So don’t ask me again. And he is right. That’s the end of it So I wish you would eat something besides nothing.”

  I crawled into bed then without undressing, burrowed under wool and down. Laurel came up soon after, she paused at the open door, a candle in her hand, guessing from my uneven breathing that I was still awake. She came in, and I pushed back out of the quilts.

  “You know something,” she said, her own eyes wide, luminous, holding mine. “You saw something in Lynn Hall that I missed. What was it?”

  I had seen ghosts and memories, lovers made of air and leaves, nothing. I opened my mouth; nothing came out. She put her hand on my wrist. Her fingers were carved of wax; in the candlelight I could almost see bone. My throat closed in sudden fear; I forced words out. “I saw you,” I whispered. “I saw you.”

  She was silent. Her hold slackened, her fingers slid away from me. “You’re making no sense, Rois.”

  “You’re doing exactly what our mother did. You’re not eating, you’re wasting away, waiting for someone to come to you out of the empty winter.”

  “She wasn’t waiting for anyone. She loved our father.”

  “She went to the wood—she took me—”

  Something flicked into her eyes: almost life, almost a memory. She blinked it away. “It’s winter. You don’t have enough to do, so you’re imagining things. Telling stories to yourself. About our mother, about me, about Corbet.” She laid a hand made of bird-bone, thistledown, on my shoulder. “Don’t fret so much about me. This has nothing to do with our mother. I’m simply waiting for Corbet to come back.”

  I woke pushing windblown leaves away from my face, until leaves turned into a hillock of quilts under my hand, and the fierce winds blew out of my dream to rattle against the window. I looked out. A snow-ghost, trailing veils and clouds, engulfed my father on his way to the barn. He disappeared a moment, then reappeared, holding onto his rope. I dressed, ate breakfast alone. Laurel drifted down later, her step so frail I barely heard the stairs creak. She took her place beside the fire, wrapped in a quilt, her hair hanging lankly down her back. I brought her tea and buttered bread. She thanked me, but her eyes didn’t move from the wild, snow-streaked winds calling her beyond the window.

  Perrin knocked on the door later, startling me. Laurel must have seen him coming; her expression never changed. Or else, I thought in sudden horror, she would have greeted Corbet himself with the same indifference: She waited now for something else entirely.

  Perrin gave me a pot of soup that his mother had made for Laurel. I took it to Beda, who set it over the fire and sent me back with a cup of brandy for Perrin.

  He looked, making conversation for two, as if he needed it.

  “How could you find your way through this?” I asked him.

  He cast a grim glanc
e at me, then realized I meant the weather. “It’s not snowing, just windy. If snow starts coming down, I might have to live here a while, with the wind this bad.” He looked at Laurel, who was a pale profile within her limp hair. He touched an embroidered violet on her quilt lightly. “Will you eat a little of my mother’s soup? She’ll want to know. She’ll feel badly if you don’t. She made it for you.”

  Laurel dragged her eyes from the window, gazed at him across snowbound fields. “That was nice of her,” she said politely. “Please tell her it was good.”

  They were both silent when I returned with the soup. I handed Laurel a bowl; she took half a spoonful, said something perfunctory, then sat holding it awkwardly, letting it grow cold. Her eyes went to the window. I heard Perrin take an unsteady breath. But he kept his voice steady, speaking to me when Laurel didn’t answer. When words finally failed us both, he remembered the flute on the shelf behind Laurel.

  He picked it up and began to play softly. Laurel’s face turned quickly from the window at the first sweet notes. She stared at Perrin as if she had not known he was there. Then she felt the bowl in her hands. She set it down, and leaned back, pulling the quilt closely around her. Firelight brushed across her face, melting its stiffness, as she watched Perrin; a forgotten expression surfaced. I left them there, to sit on the stairs and listen, and remember how we all once were such an endless time ago, when Laurel loved Perrin and I loved no one, and only the season would change.

  Perrin spoke to Laurel and played, and spoke again; I heard her murmur once or twice. He left her finally, came to the door looking pale and tired. He said softly, tying his cloak, “She listened, but she barely spoke and she didn’t eat at all. When I stopped playing, she’d hear the wind, and her attention would drift again. It’s as if she’s under a spell.”

  “Yes,” I said hollowly. “Will you come back soon?”

  “Tomorrow. Even if I have to walk blind through a blizzard. I’ll go to the village first, see if Blane can come up with anything to help her.”