He smiled again, pleased. "Yes. Of course. It was kind of you to come."
"Laurel asked me to."
I watched him pull the tapestry straight on its wooden loops. His hair was the exact gold of those pale gold threads; he seemed, for an instant, his head and arm uplifted, his shirt blending into the flickering threads, a part of the tapestry, just stepping free. I felt my throat close on words, on wonder. Have you seen the winds hunt? I wanted to ask him. Have you ever seen something as bright and heavy as gold turn into leaf by daylight? His face turned toward me then, as if he heard my thoughts; his eyes held mine.
Again I felt their green drain through me, as if that color had become my heart's blood. He said softly, before I could turn away, "What did you see when you ran in the wood that night?"
I had seen his face, pale and alien and beautiful as the moon. The winds rode over me again, dark, wild, their cloaks of golden leaves, their harness forged of moonlight. I swallowed; my voice barely sounded.
"Wind." "What else?"
"Water." "What else"?" "A leaf."
His eyes loosed me then; I turned away, feeling dazed. Then I cried sharply, "Nothing! I saw nothing! Why do you think I'm dressed like this?"
"All in green," he said softly, "on a black horse, to bid me come and eat with you." It sounded like an old song. He added lightly, "Tell your sister I will bring wine from the inn. What do you like?"
"Anything. Apple or blackberry. Laurel likes blackberry."
"Then I will bring both." He opened the door for me. It was still raining hard, but I forgot, passing him closely, so closely I heard his drawn breath, to pull my hood up. I rode across the muddy fields blinded by water, my braids sliding loose in the wet, so that when I came into our house, dripping water and tracking mud, my hair in my eyes, Laurel finally looked familiar again.
He came at twilight, riding his buttermilk horse. The rains fell everywhere from an iron-grey sky, silvery ribbons in the lamplight, a constant hollow sound beyond that, as if the world were slowly emptying in the dark. He brought sweet wines, one dark, one pale. We drank them with stew and salad and black bread, and then we drank more around the fire, my father's brandy passing with the wines, while Perrin talked about his harvest, and Laurel's lace inched down from her hook, and I sat in the shadows, watching how the shifting light in Corbet's hair flickered silver and gold like the threads in his tapestry. Perrin stopped talking after a while, and began to play softly on Laurel's flute. Laurel's hands stilled; she raised her eyes to Corbet's face.
"Where did you live," she asked, "before you came here?"
He seemed inclined to answer; there was little, in that winey warmth, worth hiding. "In the city. In other places. My mother could afford to live where she chose. Sometimes near the sea. She loved water; moving or still, it didn't matter."
"'I loved my love by water,'" Perrin said, breaking off a note. He was getting drunk. "'I loved my love by land. I loved my love by the green, green sea, and left her on the silver sand.' " Our father gave a ghostly snore. Perrin raised his flute again to play.
"Go on," Laurel said to Corbet. "Where did you live just before you came here? In the city?" He nodded, sipping brandy. "Is that where your father died?"
"No," he said, and nothing more. But his eyes, cool, still, waited for another question. Laurel asked it, leaning back, her face framed by her dark hair, by darker wood, her eyes holding his.
"How did he die?"
"No," he said smoothly. "You should ask, `Then where did he die?' "
"Did you love him?" I asked abruptly, and his eyes flicked to me, surprised.
"Now that," he said, "is a very good question. It would lay to rest any number of curses. But it will cost you an answer. " "To what?" "Any question I ask."
Perrin, grunting a laugh, blew a sharp note. Our father straightened, blinking. "What was the question?" he demanded sleepily. "I misheard."
"Nothing," Perrin said. "Laurel and Rois are playing a game."
"I wasn't," Laurel protested. "I'm being seriously rude. Corbet is changing it into a game."
Corbet smiled at her over his glass. "Truth is a simple place reached by many different roads. I will tell you, but you won't believe me. My father is still living, but for understandable reasons he never wants to return to Lynn Hall. He married late in life; my mother died young. I inherited her fortune, and with my father's blessing I came to repair the hall and the land. With his blessing. Not his curse."
We were silent. I glanced at Laurel; she didn't believe him, either. "You told Crispin your father was dead," I said.
"I did not. Crispin assumed he was dead, since I returned to claim Lynn Hall."
"You let us all assume," Laurel protested.
"I didn't intend to," he answered gently. "It's just that no one asked me. And I was too busy to listen to gossip."
"It's a truth," I said after a moment. "Are there different truths, the way there are different curses?" I could feel the dark sweet wine pulsing through me; I had drunk too much, and it made me reckless. His eyes changed as he looked from Laurel to me; they withheld answers, emotions, held only secrets. "Or," I continued, "is each curse a different truth?"
Laurel laughed. "Rois, you're making no sense! Ask something he can answer, so we can understand." "Yes," he said to her, and my breath stopped; he had answered me. I drank more wine.
"You ask," I said to Laurel, dazed by too much truth, and suddenly afraid. I wanted to hide myself in shadows the way I had hidden myself in leaves that night. But he saw through the shadows into fear: A smile, distant and cold as a star, surfaced in his eyes.
Laurel saw the smile differently; an answering smile touched her lips. He was a challenge to her, a teasing puzzle, something to unravel in the winter evenings, as long as he spun his riddles out. She contemplated him a moment, while Perrin played softly beside her, then asked, "Did your grandfather really curse your father?"
"Oh, yes," he said, and I saw his fingers tighten a little on his glass.
"And you?" she persisted. "Are you cursed?"
He looked at her without answering, until her eyes widened slightly and dropped. Perrin had stopped playing; he waited, curious, for an answer.
"I am cursed," Corbet said, "with a leaky fireplace, mutton four times a week at the inn, a horse stabled in my woodshed, weeds to the horizon everywhere I look, autumn falling into all the roofless rooms of my house, and winter waiting to take up lodging after it."
"You could leave," Laurel said softly, her brows crooked. "Come back in spring. Why don't you?"
"I have chosen to stay."
Our father stirred from his nap again, probably listening for the silent flute. "Good," he exclaimed, having caught a word here and there in his dreams. "Mutton, four times a week, that's terrible. You must come and eat with us, as often as you like. Come for the company." His affable smile, fat and warm as our beeswax candles, flashed at me a moment, then back to Corbet. "For the company," he repeated. "The winter nights grow old and thin and threadbare very fast, when you're alone."
Corbet rose. "Thank you."
"I mean it-you tell him, Laurel. See to it he comes." "I will," she said, laughing. "If only to plague him with more questions, until he tells us the simple truth." "I have told you," he protested. But she did not listen to him. I listened, but I had heard nothing simple at all. He bade us good night. I left Laurel and Perrin talking, and went to bed. Sometime in the night he stood in my dreams, watching me out of his secret eyes, and I woke, shaken, still feeling his gaze in the dark.
Seven
I went to Lynn Hall again a few days later. I walked, but I wore shoes to leave at his threshold so he would find no wet footprints on his marble flagstones. The early rains had stopped. I had seen him riding out of the wood toward the village, a distant figure but recognizable to me in that unerring way your eyes find the one face you love or hate in the midst of a crowd. Sun broke between the thunderheads. Sheets of water on the muddy fie
lds mirrored light, blue sky, great billows of cloud whipped to an airy froth, burning and paling as the sun passed in and out of them. I smelled wet bark, earth, rotting apples. Sun glittered everywhere in the rain-flecked wood. I caught drops on my fingertips, drank them from bare branches. My shoes and the hem of my cloak were drenched by the time I reached the hall. I left them on the doorstep and drew up my damp skirt in one hand as I opened the door. I was looking for his past.
Except for a few smoldering coals on the grate, the place looked as if time never crossed that threshold. Was that, I wondered, where his grandfather had died? Beside his skinflint fire in the dead of winter? I searched the floor for a dulled shadow of blood; all I saw were the faint patterns the lichens left. I shifted the tapestry aside so that light fell into the small bedchamber. A chest beside the bed held clothes; the washstand held its bowl and pitcher, a razor folded into a handle of horn, a silver mirror. The mirror gave me back my face. Some part of me had hoped to find his face reflected there. The razor nicked me when I opened it; I put my finger in my mouth, caught my blood. I opened the bed curtains, drew back the fine wool blankets; I could not find, even in those soft linens, the imprint of his body.
I searched more carefully. He had left no trace of himself, not a single gold hair, not a smudged thumbprint on the polished wood. Perhaps he was unnaturally tidy. Or perhaps he did not sleep there. Perhaps he did not sleep.
Doors, he had said to me at Crispin's wedding. Thresholds. Places of passage.
I had not asked him what he meant; he had not wondered that I knew. He had seen me watching him when he passed between worlds. I had not questioned him. I wondered suddenly, intensely, what I knew, what I had stolen into his house to find. A bed that by night was a pile of leaves, a tapestry that hung between worlds, a bowl that held no water, a mirror that reflected ... What? I felt something shake through me: a premonition, a vision. But the mirror held no answers; it reflected only what I saw. I paced impatiently between the rooms, wanting to peel the masks of things away, find out what they hid. A razor, but no soap. A mirror, but no comb. Clothes, but no shoes. I straightened the bed, closed the razor, pulled the tapestry into place. I stood a moment, studying it. The ancient threads suggested faces, shapes, but only if you did not look straight at them. They vanished into formlessness, if you searched, like patterns in smoke. Doors. Thresholds. Passages.
Unless he came and went through the chimney, I could see no hint of a life lived between worlds, only a life lived in an eccentric fashion for any world. Perhaps,
I thought bemusedly, he slept in the woodshed, and kept his soap beside a stream.
Or he slept, as he ate, at the inn.
I left finally, having exhausted conjecture as well as his sparse evidence. Wind rattling through bare branches shook raindrops on my head. I lifted my face for more; it was as close as I could come to tasting wind. Halls and palaces drifted overhead, following the sun. Had he come from such an elusive kingdom? I wondered, and then: Why would he have left it?
Not for a ruined hall on land the wood had claimed. Not for any mortal maid; I was the first he saw, and he had not come for me.
I wandered to the well. Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart. I pushed the faded vines aside and dipped my hand into the water. Wind rippled it, and my splashing; it would not give me my reflection. But it tasted of those great dreaming clouds, and of the bright winds and broken pieces of blue sky its trembling waters caught. It tasted of the last sun before winter.
When I passed the hall again, on its blind side, I saw smoke blowing from the chimney, and his mare standing at the door, big, dark-eyed, still, as if she had just taken shape from something else waiting at the door, or had appeared too quickly from some place far away. I saw her look at me. But Corbet did not come out, and I slipped quickly and quietly away before he thought of me and I saw his eyes again inside my head.
Laurel laughed at me when I returned, windblown and muddy; she would not have laughed if she knew where I had gone.
I went to the village the next day, to take old Leta Gett some teas for pain and sleeplessness. Her hip had mended, but it still ached;' the cold weather fretted her bones, and brought small ailments, one after another, like passing storms. She was grateful for the tea. Caryl brewed us both a cup, and left us, grateful for a moment to herself. Leta Gett's face was a little withered moon, with restless black eyes, and soft ivory hair so fine it slid out of pins and braids. She loved to talk when she was not in too much pain. She rambled through memory as you would wander from room to room in an old house you once lived in, filling it with stories: This happened here, and this here. Maybe they did, maybe you only wished they had; wishes blur so easily into truth. So I said his name. I tossed it like a pebble into a pond, and watched the ripples.
She got confused quickly by the past, thinking of Corbet, and remembering his grandfather's face.
"I remember how the wild roses grew around that hall. Nobody cared for the gardens; he was too mean to keep a gardener, and he had no interest himself. He worked the men in his fields too hard; he never hired as many as he needed. So no one went back for a second season. He made his son work even when he was small. The boy grew up wild and shy, like an animal; he hardly spoke, in the village. Once I saw a bruise like a hand on his cheek. I asked him - we were both children then, and children think the world is their business. Who hit you? I asked. And he got angry - so angry." She shook her head a little, marvelling at the memory. "He said he had fallen off a ladder. I remember his eyes, that turned so dark when he was angry or frightened. And he was always one or the other, it seemed."
"Where was his mother?" I asked.
"Oh, she came from far away, and died young. I only saw her once. She didn't seem real to me. Not like us. You know how children see things. Too full of light or dark, things are. She seemed made of lace or wings, nothing real. Not bones and weary skin - nothing that could ever be old." She paused, her lips twitching, her eyes suddenly too bright. "Nothing that would ache at the turn of the wind, or lose sight of her feet because she's too stiff to bend."
I put my hand on her hand. Lace, her soft skin said to my fingers. Wings. "How did she die?"
"Who knows, in that house? I saw his eyes, though we all went to see her buried. He wouldn't cry. You could see sorrow everywhere in him; he trembled at every wind, every spoken word. But his eyes were fierce as bitter winter night, and he would let no one touch him."
"His father?" I said, thinking of someone with Corbet's face standing beside such a furious and grieving child. His eyes would have been cold, ice over a running stream of secrets.
"Oh, he wept," Leta said, surprising me. "In front of us all. With no sound. No movement. The tears ran down his face, and he did not even seem to know what they were...."
I shivered suddenly. Corbet must have glimpsed, in his father's eyes, what a terrible, violent, loveless place the old hall had been. But why had he come back at all,
I wondered, if he had money and all the freedom in the world? Land, he had said. For the land. But he could have land anywhere. This village, like the hall, echoed with past. He had come to change an echo. Or perhaps I was right: He was cursed to return to the place where he had been cursed.
Leta drank more tea. Her eyes were drooping; she yawned. She moved more easily, comfrey and willow bark soothing her joints. She held out her cup, for me to take it, I thought, but she wanted more tea. She had not finished with her memories.
"One night after she was buried, one long summer night, warm like summer never is now, and with more stars than ever you see now, we snuck out of our beds and met on the green, and went secretly to Lynn Hall." "Who?" I asked quickly, greedy for different memories.
"Crispin's grandfather Halov, and Anis Turl, and the innkeeper's girl, who ran away to the city-Marin was her name. She had her eye on young Tearle Lynn." "On Corbet's father?"
"Yes. She wanted mon
ey, that one; she wouldn't look at the farmers' sons. Later she married someone with a ship ... I think that was her, who did."
"So you all snuck out of your beds and went to Lynn Hall. "
"Well, you know how children are, about places they're forbidden to go. Especially where someone has died ... I remember the scent of the roses. We could smell them on the sweet air long before we reached the hall. Roses and the smell of new-cut hay. So it must have been that time of the year, the golden side of summer. And there we all were, running barefoot through the fields, thinking of what window we would push our faces against, to see what happened there at night. The place was so big, there were so many windows, the thought of them lit up drew us fluttering across the fields like moths. Chandeliers, Marin promised us. And gold cups. And fireplaces as big as kitchens, guarded by stone lions. We were almost there before we realized it, because the hall was completely dark, and we were looking for lines and tiers of light.
"It was late, they had gone to bed. But Marin made us circle the hall; she pushed us and whispered, and made more promises, of velvet hangings, and wonderful things to eat, on porcelain dishes, left untasted on a table as long as the village green.
"Finally we saw one light, in a corner room closest to the wood. It was on the bottom floor. A kitchen, I guessed, or the housekeeper's room. She was a surly woman, that one. She'd say just what she needed to say in the village, one word at a time, as if her mouth was full of straight pins. She wore black, with a black hat that looked like bat wings. She never spoke to us. She nodded to everyone except the innkeeper. She said `Good day' to him. But never with a smile. Where was I?"
"You saw one light."
"Oh, Yes. So we crept to it, expecting her. We were trying not to giggle, or whisper, but we kept tripping on each other, or stepping on thorns with our bare feet. We kept waiting for her face to appear at the window. A long horse face, she had. Bony and colorless as wax. She left at summer's end without a word to anyone. We just stopped seeing her after that."
McKillip, Patricia A - Winter Rose Page 5
