McKillip, Patricia A - Winter Rose

by Winter Rose(Lit)

  Blane, the apothecary, looked surprised to see me. "What are you doing out of bed?" he asked. "Salish said he found you nearly frozen on a slab of marble; he thought you had died, too."

  "I came back," I said tiredly. He eyed me closely, but did not ask from where. "I need something for Lau­rel. "

  "Laurel?"

  "Is there any news of Corbet?" Maybe, I thought without hope, she had cast him adrift in time and winter, to account on human terms for the dead man in his house. Blane shook his head.

  "Nothing. But they've barely begun to search. What's wrong with Laurel?"

  "She's having trouble sleeping."

  He grunted and finished straining a tincture into a bottle. "She's not the only one. I've had all the old folk in the village who can still walk in here this morning, wanting to tell me their nightmares, wanting potions and gossip, wanting to see the face of the man they think they recognize after fifty years."

  My eyes slid past him to the closed door of the room where he examined the dead and prepared them for bur­ial. I felt my eyes burn, and swallowed words because I could not say them, and sorrow because she left him for us to bury in the smallest room, in a world he hated. Maybe she had kept his ghost.

  "Rois. Do you want to see him again? Is there something you need to tell?"

  I looked at Blane. His lean face was ageless in a birdlike way, without a line to spare on it. His eyes, pale and cool, had seen our lives by daylight and by the dark of the moon; there was nothing that he hadn't heard by now. Almost nothing. And I knew exactly what would go into the potion he would make me if I told him.

  "No," I sighed. "I wish I could be more help. I heard they think it's Corbet's brother."

  "That's not what they think, the oldest of them." He corked his bottle and picked up wax to seal it. "They think it's Corbet's father. And that Corbet killed him and fulfilled the curse and vanished."

  "But- "

  "I know, it makes no sense, but the oldest memories are the clearest, at that age, and they all remember Nial Lynn's tormented son. There's no getting around one dead man in Lynn Hall and another vanished: an echo out of the past."

  I asked hollowly, "Did you find signs that he was murdered? "

  He shrugged slightly, baffled. "He may have been struck before he fell. Maybe his heart stopped and he hit his head falling. There are no other signs of violence.

  Maybe he simply did not get out of the cold fast enough ... He came out of the storm, saw your embers, left the door open behind him and fainted on the hearth. The wind got in, threw a few things around, and Salish found you both. It could be that simple. Except - "

  "Except."

  "Where on earth is Corbet? And if he did kill the stranger, why didn't he just bury the body in the woodpile until spring? We'd all be sleeping better."

  "What are you going to do with the body? The only place you can bury him, with all this snow, is in the family vault with Nial Lynn."

  The apothecary snorted. "I'm not going to put any­one wearing that face in with Nial Lynn. I wouldn't trust either of them to stay dead. I'll put him in the icehouse out back. Someone will most likely come looking for him soon and solve our mystery for us." He turned, set the tincture on the shelf behind him. "Now, what can I give you for Laurel? What have I got that you haven't?"

  A bottle with the apothecary's seal on it, was what he had. The potion in it might work better, he said, than the same thing pulled out of the cupboard at home.

  I thanked him and went home by way of Lynn Hall. Snow on the fields was churned by tracks of horses and sleighs, but I heard no voices; the searchers had gone deep into the wood. The hall was silent and bitterly cold. Except for the dead, nothing had been touched. Candles and shards of glass still littered the floor; the frozen splash of blood shadowed the white marble. I paced on broken glass, shivering and trying to see through stone, to make it shift under my eyes into another world. I could see nothing beyond this one. The tapestry between the rooms caught at my attention, its pale, glittering threads sug­gesting patterns, landscapes, faces, that you could only glimpse out of the corner of your eye; they vanished into formlessness when you looked at them. I stared at it for a long time, trying to see into it, beyond it, to the place where I last saw it hanging above the mantel. Finally, impatiently, I pushed it aside.

  She was there, waiting, in her winter wood. Her head swiveled on her shoulders like an owl's and I froze, stunned by the eerie movement. Her eyes caught mine; I felt my bones change shape. I was the mouse in the shadow of the owl's wing; I was snow drifting to her winds.

  Come, they said, come, the winds that harvested dead leaves and froze the birds in flight. Come with us. You belong with us.

  I could barely remember a human language. My lips were made of ice; they spoke ice instead of sound. Corbet formed between us, a glittering question.

  He is waiting, her winds answered. Come.

  I felt them pull at me, felt myself fray into them. But they had not told me if he was among her living or her dead. I pulled my bones out of the snow, shrugged my skin back over them, and saw her again, wild and beau­tiful, with her feral, dangerous smile, and her eyes like midsummer night.

  "I want to see him." Even human, I could barely speak; words chattered piecemeal out of me. "I want to talk to him."

  Somewhere behind me a door opened. Wind snarled; a white owl flew into a pale shimmer of light. I saw pris­tine folds of linen, the empty washbasin that held nothing, not even dust.

  I let the tapestry close, and turned. Snow fell lightly over me, burned away like falling stars. I recognized Perrin's voice before the white mist faded and he caught me and I could see his face.

  "Rois!" He opened his cloak, tried to bundle me under it. "What are you doing back here? You're like ice-"

  "I was looking-" I had to stop, shudder something colder than the air out of me: the splinter of ice, maybe, that she had left in my heart. "I was looking for something-"

  "Laurel went all through this place," he said grimly. "She didn't find a word. Can you drive home alone? Or shall I take you back?"

  "I'll drive. I'm all right. What are you doing here?"

  "Searching the wood. I saw your sleigh."

  "Has anyone found anything?"

  "Just more snow." His mouth tightened, holding back words. I saw the sudden bleakness in his eyes and wondered what he hoped to find: a body for Laurel to grieve over, or a silence that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. "And more of that on its way," he added finally, "just so things won't be too easy for us." He paused, his eyes straying over the scraps of story we were left with: the broken glass, the bloody hearth. I felt a shiver run through him, as if she had laid an icy finger on him. "It happened all over again," he breathed. "If you think about it the wrong way. Best get home, girl, before you freeze here and start haunting this place along with Nial Lynn."

  I gave Laurel a stiff dose of the apothecary's potion that night, but still I fell asleep to her soft weeping. I found Corbet in my dreams, not where he might be, but in a time and place I wished we could return to. He stood again in that golden fall of summer light beside the rose vines, a slightly darker shade of gold, barely formed yet, something mysterious happening in a streak of sunlight that you would miss if you glanced at it and away, and not back again. The scent of roses hung in the still air, sweet and heavy, slowing time until summer seemed to stop, even in my dream, just at that moment: when I knew he was coming but just before I saw his face.

  I woke in the dark with tears on my face, still smell­ing roses. I heard winter howling across the fields, singing in the eaves, casting some incomprehensible enchantment around the house. Down the hall, both Beda and my fa­ther snored, one frugally, fussily, the other in explosive, brandy-soaked mutterings. Through all that, one faint sound stopped my heart: Laurel, awake or weeping in her dreams for Corbet.

  By morning we were cut off from the world; not even gossip could reach us. I stayed close to the fire with Lau­rel. Our fat
her, shovelling out the cow stalls, came in for an occasional mouthful of brandy against the cold. He smelled of cows and wind; he molted snow as he stood at the fire, great crusts that he kicked into the hearth with boots tufted with frozen, dirty snow. Each time he came in, he would cast an absent glance at Laurel, worried without knowing it. She would lift the linen in her fingers and add a stitch. Each time he went out, she would let her sewing fall and stare out the window. Her face seemed calm, despite her swollen eyes, but it was pale as whey, and she had eaten almost nothing. I had no idea what she was making; neither, I suspected, did she.

  I watched for owls in the snow-streaked wind. Lau­rel watched for Corbet. Sometimes memories formed out of the snow instead of owls. I would see Tearle's face untouched by time, see myself standing with Corbet in his father's dream of Lynn Hall, and I would feel a spi­dery chill of fear and wonder glide over me, that I had gone so far out of the human world and come back. She has our eyes, Tearle had said. She has our eyes. She must have inherited them from someone. Wordless questions clamored in me; I did not know what to ask, or what Laurel knew, or if there was anything at all to know.

  As if she felt all my thoughts crowding around her, Laurel stirred and turned from the window. She startled me, seeing me, it seemed, for the first time in two days. She picked up her sewing; for a moment she looked al­most perplexed by it. Then she let it drop again. But her eyes went back to me instead of the snow, and she spoke without being spoken to, surprising me again.

  "You're looking better. I worried for a while . . ." Her voice trailed.

  I asked, to keep her talking, "Worried about what?" The faint frown came and went between her brows; she answered softly, "I was thinking of our mother. You look so like her."

  I stared at her, wondering if I had spoken aloud without realizing it. Then an ember flared suddenly, briefly, behind my eyes. "You thought - "

  "Winter came, and she just stopped eating. She grew so thin. She would never say why. I would bring her things to eat-an apple, a cake-and she would smile at me and touch my hair and tell me how good I was." She looked down at her hands, found cloth there, and pro­duced a stitch, pale thread on pale linen. I watched her, mute, my own hands so tightly linked I could feel only bone. "Later, I would hear Beda complain about finding rock-hard cakes beneath the cushions."

  I saw Laurel then, as a child, with those great grey eyes, watching the terrible and incomprehensible thing she could not stop. "I was so little - I forgot how you - how much - "

  "I forgot, too," she said simply. "Until you began to look too much like her."

  "I'm sorry," I whispered, and expression, quick and formless, wind over water, passed across her face.

  "It was a long time ago."

  "Maybe. But now I'm old enough to know what I missed. Not having her. I had you instead. I never ques­tioned that. I never thought how hard that must have been for you sometimes."

  Her needle flashed, dropped, too heavy. "I never thought about it either. It was just something that needed to be done. Like most things around here. And there was always Beda to help."

  "Tell me about her," I pleaded. "You all say I look like her, and yet all I know about her are sad things." "I don't-I've hardly spoken of her for so many years." She was silent a little, then added helplessly, "It's your face that stirs up memories. Sometimes I look at you and I become the child I was then, just for an instant, and I remember things. The old ballads she played on the flute. Picking berries with her, in the brambles along the edge of the pasture on a hot day. How bees as fat as blackberries droned around us in the light, and she taught me words to songs while I dropped berries in my bucket. How a trip to the cobbler to measure my feet would take an afternoon; everyone stopped her to talk. She kept things tidy; she always had flowers in the house. Wild flowers from the wood, if nothing else . . ."

  I hesitated, tried to ask one question by asking an­other. "Did-was she still happy after I was born? Was that when she changed?"

  "No." Expression melted briefly through Laurel's eyes. "She loved you. And I loved what she loved. She taught me to gather eggs while she held you, and em­broider, and grow herbs . . ."

  "She was happy," I said, oddly surprised. "No one ever told me that."

  Laurel's face grew still again, indrawn. "I think we forgot," she said finally. "She was happy until that winter, and winter is what we remembered."

  "What happened to her?" I touched Laurel's wrist when she didn't answer. "What do you think it was?" She raised her eyes from her hands, stared into the fire. "They never knew. She had no fever, no pain. She just ... did not live." She spoke silently then, looking at me. I stared at her thin, haunted face, her eyes that re­flected all the emptiness she saw, and a sudden terror filled me because I didn't know which of us she had told her memories to, which of us she warned.

  I heard my voice from far away, clear and steady, giving her words like a charm to keep her safe: "I have no intention of dying."

  But she only answered, pulling the thread straight in another random stitch, "Neither did our mother. She just forgot to live."

  In my dreams that night, I ran into the wild autumn wood. I heard the endless sigh of dying leaves, felt the tumultuous winds, the restless twilight riders. I found the rose vines and crouched beside them, making myself small, small, but still she saw me. Moonlight spilled from her eyes; the starry sky flowed behind her in her hair. I heard the silvery laughter of tiny bells. She bent toward me as I tried to bury myself in leaves. Gold dropped from her fingers. It glowed brighter and brighter as it fell be­tween us, until in its rich light I saw her face.

  I woke, still staring into darkness. She wore my face.

  Eighteen

  The sudden storm had gone its way by dawn. Snow still fell, but fitfully; winds muttered now instead of shrieking. Waking, I wished I could understand their broken incantations. They knew something I needed to know; they teased and hinted, but they would not tell. I pulled a quilt over my shoulders and looked out the win­dow. In the yard, my father had finished shovelling; he ran a rope down his path from the house to the barn, as if he were anchoring us to earth between storms. Along the road, sleigh runners had veered close to our gate, left their tracks in the new snow.

  I heard the door open below. My father clumped in; wood clattered into the wood box. I went down, found him feeding the fire.

  "Who was here?"

  "Perrin stopped to leave some of his beer and ask about Laurel. That's a good sign, isn't it?" he said hope­fully.

  "It's a sign of something," I agreed. "Did he bring any news with the beer?"

  "Nothing new. No one has appeared looking for the stranger, and Corbet is still missing. Perrin said they'll search again today, when the snow stops." He paused, scratching one brow with his thumbnail. "He won't be still alive, if they do find him in a snowdrift. And if they don't - "

  "I'm going to help look for him," I said abruptly. "No one knows the wood better than I do."

  "Not the winter wood," he protested. "You never go into it."

  "It's better than both of us staring out the window watching for him."

  He tossed a log with unnecessary force onto the fire, but refrained from saying what he was thinking about our taste. "He's either frozen in a ditch along the road, or safely doing whatever business he left home for. Let them look. Stay with Laurel."

  "She'll be better when he's found," I said without conviction. "And I can't stand being inside waiting." He grumbled something dourly. But he couldn't re­ally imagine me staying out long among the bleak, pinched faces of the winter trees. He changed the subject, hoping that, ignored, it would go away. "Perrin says a couple of them-Furl Gett and Travers' son, Willom -might be sent to the next township to find someone who knows how to look into these things. Some say it's village business, and we don't need to go digging up old trouble, curses and murders, and faces out of the past, for strang­ers to peer at. But we do have a dead body on our hands to deal with somehow." His eyes slid to
me; he added tentatively, "It's you they'd question first, if we bring strangers into this."

  "I know." I stared at the fire, thinking of two tales, one simple, one beyond comprehension, both peculiar. I walked through a storm and fell asleep in an empty house; when I woke there was a dead man beside me.... I heard the stairs creak, and turned to see Laurel drift down, dressed for the day, but not seeing it, her eyes already moving past us to the window.

  She unnerved our father; he lost his temper sud­denly, for no other reason, I knew, than to change the expression on her face.

  "Stop watching for him. Whether or not he's alive, he's still a man with a cursed past and a fresh bloodstain on his floor. Look at you. He's not good for you. Swallow your pride and go find Perrin."

  She turned to him; but for that it seemed she might not have heard him. "Perrin," she said, with faint sur­prise, as if Perrin were someone she had known in child­hood and had long outgrown. I saw the blood rise in our father's face, the confusion in his eyes.

  "The one you made all that lace for," he reminded her. "The one who still loves you, and would marry you if you stop chewing your heart up over a dream of Lynn Hall. That's all it ever was-only a daydream. Nothing solid. Nothing real, to start a life with."

  "You don't know," she said softly. "You don't know what there was between us. Perrin saw it, but you never did."

  "Perrin said - "

  "Perrin." She said the name without impatience, with an indifference far more chilling. "He'll forget about me. Corbet will return. He can't forget what we meant to each other."