“Rois?” He touched me lightly. I opened my eyes.
“Yes.” I wanted to weep, I wanted to laugh, as I took my mother’s ring from him. “I know whose it is.” I slipped it into my skirt pocket; this time it would not turn into leaves. I met his eyes, filled my eyes with him, looking for all the small things I had loved. I found them still there. I could reach out to them or not; he could say yes, he could say no. He smiled at me suddenly, not understanding what he saw, but drawn to it. Freedom, I could have told him: a new word for both of us.
“What was the other thing you wanted to ask? About your garden?”
“Oh. The old rose trees. Some are still alive, I think. But so wild and overgrown with ivy I don’t know if they’ll bloom. I wondered if you might look at them.”
“They survived the winter?”
“Even that winter.”
I looked beyond him to the garden, where the buttermilk mare cropped placidly in a patch of grass.
“Rois? Do you think you might?”
Beyond the garden the young leaves on the trees had turned the wood a misty green. Shadows lay within the mist, and unexpected falls of light, the mysteries of its seasons, ancient, familiar, forever unpredictable.
“I might,” I said. “Yes.”
PATRICIA A. McKILLIP
is a winner of the World Fantasy Award, and the author of many fantasy novels, including The Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy, Stepping from the Shadows, and The Cygnet and the Firebird. Her most recent novels are Ombria in Shadow, The Tower at Stony Wood, Song for the Basilisk, Winter Rose, and The Book of Atrix Wolfe. She lives in Roxbury, New York.
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