McKillip, Patricia A - Winter Rose

by Winter Rose(Lit)

  Our father stared at her. "Over a supper or two? A glass or two of wine?"

  "That's all you saw." She turned away from him to the dead world beyond the window. "That's all you ever saw. "

  "I don't know anymore what I saw," he admitted heavily, "but I don't like what I'm seeing now. It's too much to ask Rois to have any kind of common sense in winter, but you've always been the steady one. Stop grieving over a man who, alive or dead, left you without a word. Eat your breakfast, get your boots on, and go bring Perrin back. He'll play the flute and put some color into your face."

  She did not bother to answer. He grumped back out to find some common sense among the cows. Laurel turned to me then, despair welling under the icy calm in her face.

  "That's not why he left, is it?" she pleaded. "You didn't dream that, did you? He is not cursed, and he had nothing to do with the death of the stranger in his house. Tell me you don't believe that."

  "No."

  "And that wasn't all there was between us? Just a glass or two of wine? Just a way to pass the winter hours? The master of Lynn Hall dallying with the far­mer's daughters, making a little trouble to idle away the time?"

  I shook my head, swallowing. "That's not what I saw. "

  "Then where is he?" she whispered and turned back to the window.

  She sat down to breakfast later to please our father. I watched her push her spoon around a bowl of oatmeal, pull bread apart, lift milk to her lips and put it down, making all the small, constant gestures of eating, but never quite doing it. At first I thought our father did not notice. Then I realized that because it was Laurel, who didn't fall into rose vines or chase after winds, he thought he knew what to expect: She would find her way back.

  But he did not realize how far she had already gone. I glimpsed it later in the embroidery she was doing: the pattern less stitch of white on white, like footprints in snow that wandered randomly and went nowhere, crossing and circling themselves until they could not be followed.

  The search party crossed the fields in the early af­ternoon, looking like bears in their winter furs and hoods. The wind was still now; nothing in the pale sky threat­ened. I did not dare ask my father for the sleigh. I pulled on high fur boots and walked the tumbled snow that a couple of the sleighs had made following the path from Lynn Hall that Corbet might have taken to reach the road. By then the searchers had all dispersed into the wood, or farther up the road. I saw one or two on snow shoes, tramping through the trees, kicking at drifts and peering up into the bare branches as if they expected to see Corbet there. By the time I reached the wood, they had all disappeared.

  Others had been where I went; their snowshoes told me. Tracks passed all around the snow-covered vines; someone had kicked at the smooth mound of snow, found only briers instead of Corbet, and gone on. But they didn't know where to look, or how to see. I thought I did. Doors, he had said. Thresholds. Places of passage, where gold fell from one story into another, where time shifted across the boundary between worlds.

  I had nowhere else to look.

  I dug into the snow around the vines until they sprang loose and I could push them away from the well. Some, caught in ice, hung down like bars around the wa­ter. I couldn't break the ice with my hands. It was thick but oddly clear, like glass flecked with fine crystal stars, neatly fitted over the dark water. The spring was still now, frozen, I guessed, at the source.

  The third time I called his name, he came to me.

  I felt the painful shock of blood all through me, at the unexpected sight: his face, remote as a dream, gazing up at me out of the dark water. He must be dead, I thought wildly; he looked, trapped beneath the ice, in too terrible a place for any human touch to reach him.

  But I tried: I laid one hand flat on the ice, and his hand rose up through the cold to spread itself against mine. I could see so little of him-his face, his hair, his hand; the rest was brief, isolated needles of color flick­ering through the deep water.

  Tears rolled down my face, froze as they fell, and scattered like tiny pearls across the ice.

  "Corbet," I whispered. "Are you dead?"

  His voice seemed to come from a place that far. " No."

  "Can you come out of the well?"

  "This is as close as I can come to you. Rois, how did you know to look for me here?"

  "I found you here before," I said numbly. "I can see you in water, I can see you in light. I don't know how. And I don't know how to reach you. If I break the ice-"

  "You can't break into her world with a stone. You know that." Beneath the ice, his eyes reflected winter greys and shadows; I had to remember green. "Rois, leave me here."

  "No."

  "She killed my father." The expression frozen on his face splintered; his face twisted, and I saw a sudden flash of color. "He fought for me."

  "I know." My hand pushed against the ice, as if wishing could warm and melt it, as if his face would be there when I touched water. "She left him in this world. I found him on the hearth beside me when I woke."

  He made a soft, anguished sound, as if he suddenly felt the burning cold. "She left him there? In those two rooms?"

  "He still-he looks as he did in your world. Her world. The oldest villagers say they recognize him."

  He closed his eyes. "She still holds him spellbound."

  "They're searching for you. You vanished, just like your father, leaving a dead man in your house."

  "Nial Lynn's curse." He looked at me again, his eyes heavy, bitter. "She left me that to come back to, if I leave her. Do they think I killed him?"

  "No one knows what to think."

  "It doesn't matter. I might as well have killed him; I forced her to."

  "No -"

  "We would still be with him, you and I, and he would be alive if he hadn't fought her. She knows you now. If I make promises to her, she might leave you in peace."

  "What kind of promises?" I asked. He hesitated, choosing words. I found them for him. "To stay with her always? To forget that you ever tried to become human, or that your father died trying to set you free? She might leave me in peace, but you won't, because I will look for you in every fall of light. I will come there for you."

  "Rois," he breathed. "Don't say that in this place."

  "You may never find your way back into this world if I don't. How will I explain that to Laurel?"

  His face grew still, luminous in the dark water. "Lau­rel. "

  "She stands at the window waiting for you. She won't eat, she weeps at night, she barely remembers who Perrin is. It's as if she's under a spell, only what she knows and wants is no longer love but sorrow."

  He was silent, staring up at me; I wondered for a moment if she had turned him into his own reflection.

  Then I saw him shudder. "It's my fault. I tried to love in human ways-that's what Laurel expected. I pretended to be what she wanted, what she thought I was. I lied too well."

  My hand closed around cold; I was shaking, but if I moved my hand from the ice, he might vanish. "You lied to both of us. I believed you - "

  "You saw me." His voice sounded suddenly harsh with pain. "I could never pretend to you -you saw me too well."

  "I don't know what I saw. I thought I knew what you were, who I was, but you changed under my eyes, and so has Laurel and so has the wood, and I don't know anymore what I am except a woman who sees too much.'

  "I know. I always knew."

  "What did you always know?"

  "That you see with the wood's eyes."

  I had to swallow fire before I could speak. One hand outstretched to him seemed the only thing I recognized of myself; the rest of me seemed so far from human that no one I knew would know me anymore. "So you see - " I had to begin again. "So you see why I can't leave you here. Why I can't walk away from you. You are my shadow, the one thing I can't run fast enough in the hu­man world to escape. You knew me before I knew my­self." My hand opened again beside his face. "I need you.,

  "You must be careful," he whis
pered. "You must be so careful. Even need is a path to her."

  "I know. But if I turn away from you, where will I go to find Laurel? Tell me how to be careful. Tell me how not to see what my heart sees. Tell me how to live without you both."

  He was silent; I saw him gather breath and loose it, in a pearly mist that filled the water and flowed around him until I could barely see his hand, still reaching out to mine against the ice. "Corbet," I cried, and felt the cold, as if the mist had seeped into my bones. I turned sud­denly, as it touched my heart; a brier seized my hood, another clung to my shoulder.

  "Rois," she said. She wore glittering air and spindrift snow, and a mantle made of tiny living animals in their winter white. She stroked one or two, smiling; their eyes were wide and terrified, their crying voices mute. "I know what your heart sees. I will show you."

  "Who are you?" I whispered. Cold racked through me; the thorns tightened their hold. She was something wild in my wood, the glint of an eye on a lightless night, the formless shadow the moon reveals tangled in the shadow of a tree. "Who are you?"

  "I am night," she said, and it was. "I am winter's song," and I heard it. "I am the shadow of the bloody moon and all the winds that harvest in it." I felt them. "I am the dead of winter."

  She wore my mother's face.

  Nineteen

  Salish and Furl Gett and Willom Travers found me stumbling through the trees, and gave me a ride home. Packed in the sleigh among fumes of beer and wet wool,

  I watched the dark wood slowly close around itself be­hind us, hiding its secrets. The searchers, frustrated, per­plexed, passing the last of the beer among them, tried to piece together a tale from scraps.

  It was Corbet Lynn's brother, with their father's face and their grandfather's evil ways, who had come to force a quarrel with Corbet over his inheritance.

  It was just some stranger who had lost his horse an, l his way, who crawled in to escape the storm and collapsed beside the dying embers.

  Corbet Lynn was Nial Lynn reborn - you could see it in his face - and the stranger on his hearth was an innocent relation who had the bad luck to wear something. resembling Tearle's face into Lynn Hall on the night of the curse.

  Corbet Lynn was a generous man who couldn't slap a gnat without remorse - look how he helped Crispin and Aleria - and the stranger wandering in from the cold had betrayed Corbet's kindness by dropping dead in his house while he was away.

  Both Corbet and the stranger were ghosts-look how they came out of nowhere and had no ties -who had roused out of their graves on the eve of the curse, and this time Nial had gotten revenge on his son after a raging brawl that overturned all the candlesticks in the house. Corbet had left just before the storm, on business matters, and he was ignorant as a fence post about what he was going to find on his plate when he got home. Corbet Lynn was a man cursed from the day he was born to repeat his father's murder and vanish like his father, and it was the stranger's misfortune to turn up at Corbet's door on that fateful winter night.

  "Corbet wouldn't kill anyone," Salish insisted. "Even if he was cursed. Anyway, Rois said Corbet was never even there."

  "Rois was asleep," Willom argued, wanting violence and mystery to wile away the winter.

  "She wouldn't sleep through a murder. Not if they were breaking things around her. What do you think, Rois? You're his neighbor. You know him."

  "The stranger died of cold," I said shortly. I could barely think, even to rescue Corbet's reputation. "Blane said that may be true. Corbet went away on business and he can't get back because of weather."

  They looked at one another and at me, unconvinced. You know something their eyes said to me. Nobody could sleep through that. Willom shook his head, turning the sleigh into our yard.

  "Why was the stranger dressed like that? Like he'd come to stay, not just appeared at the door? Why did Corbet leave his house and his stable open unless he left too fast to bother about them and he wasn't coming back? And why does the stranger look like Corbet's father?" "Nobody knows that except our grannies," Furl Get t said. He corked the beer and pulled me out of the jumble of fur and snowshoes. "And they just see to suit them­selves. Truth is, we don't know what we're looking for, or what we'll find under the snow. There's something bur­ied there, though, if nothing but a dead horse. There', something hidden."

  My father grumbled at me when I walked in; Laurel picked the despair out of my expression and turned away "They didn't - " our father asked as I hung my cloak . , ,

  "No. "

  "Is there any-"

  "No."

  I sat close to the fire after supper, brooding and trying to warm the chill out of my heart. I kept seeing my mother's face, recognizing it, or thinking I did; maybe it was a lie, a reflection, my own face with a few subtle changes. I had seen such tricks before. But I could not stop thinking about my mother, and what she might have watched for, as Laurel watched now, during her last winter. She died longing for spring, our father said. If she had known the spring she wanted would return to her she would have waited. But that last winter told her such a season would never come again, not to her in this world. So she had gone elsewhere.

  How far, I wondered with bleak horror, had she gone?

  "You're looking," our father said abruptly, pick­ing thoughts out of my head, "more and more like your mother every day. Except that her expression was sweeter. "

  He was frowning again. Beside him, Laurel picked up the cup of tea I had made her, and took a bird's sip. "You said I was unlike my mother." I felt the cold fear in my fingers, my face, but somehow I answered calmly. "That she never ran wild in the wood. She never would have gotten trapped in the roses. She wouldn't have even stayed out past twilight."

  "True," he admitted. Somehow that did not comfort him. "But you did, so I'm never sure what you might do next. At least you're not lying weak and silent, gazing out a window for something that never comes."

  I heard the unspoken words in his voice: something I could not bring her, though I would have given her everything. I gazed at him, at the familiar furrows and hillocks of his face, his round eyes the color of smoke, that saw simple things he put simple names to.

  Am I your child? I asked him silently, urgently, my lips caught hard between my teeth so that the words would not break out. Or am I the wood's?

  But he did not know how to hear such questions. He could not bring her spring, he thought, and so she died.

  "Was there a name for it?" I asked softly, trying to keep my voice steady. "What she died of?"

  He shook his head, his eyes on the fire, seeing mem­ories. "The apothecary couldn't give a name to it. She did not seem to suffer. She told him something, though, that he didn't tell me until later. After. That she just did not feel comfortable in this world." He raised his eyes bewil­deredly. "What other world did she want? What world did she dream of? You're like her there," he added ac­cusingly. "You dream too much. You see too much into things; you get too close to them, make them into something else. Imagination." He pounced on the word with grim satisfaction. "You have too much of it. So does everyone around here in winter. Too much cold and too much beer. People start hearing curses, seeing ghosts."

  "Something happened in Lynn Hall," Laurel said, startling us. She had turned her still eyes from the win­dow to his face. "What do you think happened?"

  He was silent, studying his pipe before he lit it. He said finally, "I think the whole task became too much for Corbet -rebuilding that old wreck. Winter brought him to his senses and he went back to wherever he came from. The stranger was just that; he was lost and half-frozen, and he died of natural causes, accidentally spilling blood all over a murder half a century old. That's what I think." But he frowned uncertainly at the smoke he puffed. Lau­rel rose abruptly, her linen and needle sliding unheeded to the floor. I picked them up; she turned restively to a window, stared out at the wailing dark. I watched with her, listening to the ruthless wind that had called out mother's name, wondering if Laurel heard it, too.


  That night I dreamed of Corbet trapped in the well. I couldn't break the ice between us, but my hand passed through it as if I were made of air, and he reached up through the deadly cold toward me. I gripped him, and as I drew our hands out of the ice I saw that winter had stripped our fingers bare; we held each other's bones.

  Awake, I could not sit still, I could not think. When my father hitched the sleigh after breakfast to take Beda to the village, I pleaded with him to let me drive her. She wanted a day with her younger sister's family, she'd said, to gossip and cook a meal for those who would enjoy it instead of worrying it into crumbs. I would leave her at her sister's house, I promised my father, and make one stop at the apothecary's and then come home so quickly I would meet myself going. He didn't bother to ask me why I wanted to go to the apothecary's. If news of Corbet was anywhere to be had, it would be there.

  But I didn't go there to talk about Corbet.

  "You knew my mother," I said to Blane. "You tried to help her, that winter when she died."

  He looked at me silently. His shop empty for the moment, he was mixing oil, rosewater and dried leaves for someone's cold. I smelled wintergreen and licorice. I had never thought about his age before; he had been in my life as long as I had. But as I watched his expression change, suddenly haunted by memories, I glimpsed the face my mother must have known. He was no older than my father, I realized. They had still been young then, watching their youth die slowly through the winter.

  "Yes," he answered finally. "What is it, Rois? What did you come to ask me?"

  "Why she died. No one seems to know." He waited, his hands still, until I gave him more. "Laurel and my father both say I look like her. I asked them both what she died of; they couldn't tell me. Winter. That's all my father knows. She died of winter. I don't remember her. I wish I did. They try to tell me about her; they try to answer my questions. But I don't understand the answers. People die of cold and sickness, they don't die from look­ing at a season."