McKillip, Patricia A - Winter Rose

by Winter Rose(Lit)

His hands began to move again, measuring, grinding. "I don't know much more than that," he said slowly. "If I had been able to put a name to why she died, it would have spared me some grief. It was hard, not knowing how to help, not knowing why."

  "Did she tell you anything?"

  He looked back across the years again; I saw bewil­derment and sorrow, but nothing hidden, nothing locked away behind his eyes. "She wanted some other place," he said finally, "that was not life. We don't have that many choices: We either have this world or not. She lost interest in it." He shook more leaves into his mortar. "It was some kind of sickness, of course it was. Maybe someone with more experience would have recognized it. But I had never seen it before, and I have never seen it since." He paused then, studying me. "You do look like her. Very much like her. No wonder you stir up memories. I wish I had a better answer. I had just begun to work on my own then; my father had taken to his bed and left every­thing to me. I hadn't learned yet that I didn't have a remedy for everything. I didn't have a remedy for life." Tears of sorrow and frustration burned behind my eyes, because I never knew her, because no one ever had. I forced them back. "Thank you."

  He shook his head without looking at me. "How's Laurel? "

  "No worse."

  He looked at me then. "But no better." He straight­ened, perhaps to suggest something; the door opened abruptly. Crispin, none the worse for marriage, father­hood or the weather, came in trailing whiffs of pipe smoke and beer. He gave me the sweet, generous smile he still gave to every woman who hadn't yet lost her second set of teeth.

  "Rois."

  Blane reached for a jar, poured a simmering concoc­tion into it. "Tell your grandfather to follow this with tea, not brandy. Have they solved our murder yet at the inn?"

  Crispin's smile faded, left a line between his fair brows. "We were trying to remember. . ." he said, then stood a moment trying to remember what it was they had been trying to remember. "Oh. Where it was Corbet said he lived before he came here. Do you know?"

  "I never asked him," Blane said.

  "Nobody did, it seems. But somebody must have. It's one of the things everyone thought they knew until they were asked. He must have told someone." Crispin turned to me hopefully. "Rois. You'd know. You were neigh­bors."

  "He never said."

  "You mean you never asked?"

  "We might have. I don't remember that he answered. You saw him more than anyone--"

  "I thought I knew," he answered simply. "I thought we all knew."

  "The way we all knew his father was dead," I said without thinking.

  He only looked at me blankly. "He is dead. That's why Corbet came here. Nobody," he added a trifle chal­lengingly to the apothecary, "can tell me that Corbet Lynn killed anyone anywhere for any reason. I worked with him, I knew him - "

  Blane interrupted patiently. "Someone's going to look for him in the place where he came from? Is that it? "

  "Yes." He blinked at Blane a moment. "Yes. Except that nobody can lay a finger on exactly where. . ." Blane melted wax on the jar and set his seal into it. "It's a good idea, though."

  "It is," Crispin agreed. "I thought of it. And I'll go, no matter the weather, the moment anyone remembers. He was kind to us, Aleria and me. I don't believe he killed anyone, I don't believe he's dead in a ditch, and I don't believe that Nial Lynn's ghost had anything to do with it.

  The apothecary's brows flickered. He passed the jar to Crispin and added his grandfather's name to a list of unfinished business. "What do you believe?" he asked cu­riously. I listened for the answer, too. But Crispin did not seem to know.

  "He was called away suddenly. And then this stranger happened into his house wanting shelter from the storm. . ."

  The stranger from nowhere without a horse . . . I turned to Blane, who was busying himself with his pestle. "Thank you," I said again. He frowned slightly, absently, as at an old and familiar ache.

  "Come and visit me again," he said. "Let me know how Laurel is."

  "I will. Goodbye, Crispin."

  That smile broke through him again, like sun through cloud, that warms you while it has nothing to do with you at all. Then he dropped the jar into his pocket and leaned over the counter. "Anyway - the stranger is nearly dead with cold, and he sees Rois' dying fire. . ." I closed the door.

  I saw her then, standing still as a tree with a white owl on her shoulder, where the sheep grazed in fairer seasons on the green. She wore a mantle of white feathers that covered her from throat to heel. Only her hair flowed freely around her, blown by winds no human could feel on that dead calm morning.

  Her eyes were closed. The owl opened its eyes and looked at me. Its eyes were as gold as the sun I could only see in memory.

  It asked its familiar question.

  I closed my eyes. "I do not know," I heard myself whisper. "You tell me."

  When I opened my eyes again, there was only a tree standing in the snow, a white owl sleeping in the dark, airy swirl of its branches.

  Twenty

  I shaped her out of every drift of snow as I drove home; I wished her out of air and cloud to come to me and guide the sturdy, placid plow horses beyond the boundaries of this world, to the place where roses opened beneath water and white owls spoke with human voices. There she would tell me what no one else seemed to know. But because I wanted her, she did not come; the horses followed their own tracks home and turned into the yard.

  I saw my father there, reshaping his frozen, dirty path to the barn, paring it close to the ground before the next storm. I unhitched the horses, but left the sleigh out for my father to bring Beda home later. When I put the horses in their stalls and turned, I saw him again, framed in the open barn door. He leaned on the shovel, puffing tiredly. Beyond him Laurel stood at the window, watch­ing the distant fields.

  I closed my eyes, pushed my hands against them, against the fears swooping and screeching like rooks through my head. I couldn't face the silence in that house, the loneliness that Laurel left behind her as she went her way without us. I did not know what to do for any of us, except find another shovel hanging on a nail and start whittling up my father's path to meet him.

  He stopped a moment, shocked to find me working. I was not a great deal of help; though I tried, I couldn't shovel my way beyond the world, or even beyond my own thoughts. But my father didn't comment. As he drew closer to me, I heard his faint, breathy whistling.

  Our paths met finally, mine not far from the barn. He leaned on his shovel again, watching me pant. "What possessed you?" he asked mildly, a fair ques­tion since I had only a vague idea which end of a snow shovel was up. I shrugged, evading his eyes.

  "You looked tired," I said.

  "I was," he admitted. He reached out, tucked a strand of my hair back into my hood, awkwardly, with his blunt, gloved hand. "Odd how much better you can work with someone helping. I didn't expect you back yet. I thought you'd go off somewhere looking for Corbet, or messages, or roses, something."

  I shook my head. "I've run out of places to look." "No news in the village?"

  "No."

  He frowned, reaching out to give my shoulder a vague, comforting pat. "Strange. You'd think someone would be searching at their end for the dead . . ." His voice trailed; he was staring suddenly at Laurel in the window. I saw his hands tighten on the shovel, heard his startled breath. He murmured something I didn't catch; perhaps he was laying his own curse on Nial Lynn.

  But that wasn't the ghost in his head. "For a moment I saw your mother," he said huskily. "The way your sister stands there ... At least with Laurel, I know what she's watching for. I wish she'd pull herself out of it. Should I get Perrin over here? Would that help her?"

  "I don't know." I felt the cold then, seeping up out of the ground into my bones. "She might only hurt him again."

  "She might be missing him without knowing it." I doubted it. "Maybe."

  "She can't go on like this. Brooding out at the winter, not eating." He brooded at her for a breath or two,
then reached out, still watching her, to take my shovel. "She looks like-she's doing what-" But he couldn't say it. His mouth tightened; he hefted the shovels under his arm. "I'll give her a day or two," he muttered. "But no more. Not the entire winter."

  Still he lingered; he shifted, chilled, but he could not seem to turn away from Laurel. He was looking through her at his own past, I knew, and I could not say anything to comfort him; I could only stand frozen in the snow, terrified of what he might find there.

  I touched him finally, and he looked at me, an ex­pression on his face that I had never seen before. He didn't recognize me in that moment. He gave me a stran­ger's blank, impersonal stare, as if he did not know whose child I was, or where I had wandered from into his life. He turned and walked away from me into the barn.

  I waited, shivering, blinking back tears, unable to move, wondering if I still had a name, a home, a father, or if he had seen what I must be, and had left me or­phaned in his heart. He came back out in a moment, closed the barn door, and suddenly his face was familiar again: kindly, stubborn, perplexed.

  "Thank you, Rois. Now get in before you freeze."

  I dreamed that night of gold falling from a slender hand, gold turning brighter and brighter as it fell, until it blazed like the sun in the night. Someone dropped the gold; someone else watched it fall. I saw no faces, but in the dream I knew that I dropped the gold, I watched it fall....

  The wind spoke to me just before I woke.

  I understood it in that instant, all its wild songs, its mutterings and shriekings, its warnings. Gold, it said, so clearly that I carried the word out of dreams into morn­ing. Gold, I told myself as I opened my eyes, clinging to the word as fiercely as if it were the answer to all the wind's enchantments, the word to free us from our spell­bound world.

  But gold turned to nothing in the chill grey dawn; the world remained unchanged. Laurel drifted like a moth, silent and colorless, from window to window. Sometimes I stood with her, trying to see Lynn Hall within the trees. If I chose to go, winter would meet me there, she would take me into her heart, show me what I wanted to know. She had dropped the gold, she had watched it fall ... But if I left this house I might never return to it, I thought starkly. I might see too much, see in a way that changed everything I knew. Even Corbet might be transformed in my eyes, in my heart. I would be trapped, like him, between worlds ... My thoughts crossed the fields again and again; I lingered beside Lau­rel, silent and afraid, while searchers appeared and dis­appeared around Lynn Hall, the only movement in the world.

  Perrin rode over that afternoon. I didn't know if our father had sent a message to him, or if, in the charmed way of lovers, he had heard her name coupled with his, and had put down his axe or his leather needle to come to her. Laurel saw him out the window, so his knock at the door did not present her with a moment of mystery or hope. She turned to sit, picked up her strange em­broidery without a flicker of interest, as if he were Salish come to deliver a dozen bottles of wine from the inn. I opened the door. Perrin gave me a brief smile, his face, with its winter pallor, becoming suddenly whiter as he saw Laurel.

  She had grown thinner, colorless, her movements random and without energy. But the remoteness in her eyes, as if we were all barely visible, as if she could not remember that she had ever kissed Perrin or why, was most disturbing. I felt the shock that ran through Perrin; for an instant he could not move or breathe. I saw her through his eyes then, and the same thought snapped through the troubled air around him into me: Her eyes looked already dead.

  I am the dead of winter.

  "Laurel," he breathed, fumbling with his cloak ties; he aimed the cloak at a peg and it fell into a damp heap on the floor. He went to her. I hung up his cloak and, too restless to sit still, I left them alone and went into the kitchen to chop onions for Beda's stew.

  Beda fussed around me; what trouble she thought I could bring on myself with a knife and an onion, I couldn't imagine. I was too busy listening through her anxious fluttering for other voices. After a while I heard the stairs creak. I did not hear the front door close. I made a cup of tea and took it to Perrin, who was alone, staring into the fire. I said his name. He started, then leaned down to heave a log into the lagging flames.

  I gave him the tea; he took a swallow and some color fanned into his face. He looked into the cup and grim­aced.

  "What is this?"

  "Chamomile."

  "I thought it was beer." He set the cup on the mantel and looked at me, his eyes still stunned. "All that," he said unsteadily, "over Corbet Lynn. I wish I knew how he did it. There must have been some moment when I could have stepped between them and changed things. When I should have talked instead of playing the flute, or played instead of talking, or talked of love instead of cows-It's like swimming down a river and suddenly finding it changed its course and ran somewhere without you, stranding you in mud and stones, leaving you won­dering what happened, where all the deep, sweet water went." Wood kindled and snapped; he added, staring at it, "I'd like to murder Corbet Lynn. If he's not already dead."

  That aspect had not occurred to me. "It's not that simple," I protested.

  "Then what is it, if it's not that simple? He trifled with her feelings and who knows what else? It was just a game to him, seeing if he could take what she was giving someone else. And when he got her attention and her heart, he got bored with her and -"

  "Killed someone and left her."

  "I could bear it better if he had been honest. If he were here now instead of me. But disappearing like that, no message, no farewell, nothing, just leaving her like that - "

  "Without a word, a message, a farewell to anyone, he got on his horse and rode away in the middle of the worst storm we've ever seen? Because he was bored?"

  "You were there, Rois." He caught me with his clear, angry eyes, held me. "You were there. You dreamed yourself there, you said, and went back to sleep, then woke to find a dead man beside you. You've been digging up curses all winter; you've been watching Corbet, ex­pecting some disaster. I think you're protecting him. Maybe you don't know where he is, but I think you know what happened at Lynn Hall that night and why a stranger died there. I don't think you closed your eyes to anything."

  He was near, but as far from the truth as any of us. "I didn't see him die," I said wearily. "If I had, do you think I could have fallen asleep beside him? And I've been out searching the wood for Corbet, too."

  "Did you see the stranger before he died? Was Corbet there when he came in?"

  "No," I answered to the second question; the first he wouldn't want to know. He hesitated, perplexed and un­convinced; I veered away from the subject. "Corbet has been here for months, getting to know us, giving people work, even getting Crispin to work. There's no one who didn't like him-"

  "I could have lived without him," Perrin said testily. "Maybe the stranger could have, too."

  "So you believe he was a stranger?"

  "Well, he's not Tearle Lynn, still looking like that after fifty years - "

  "And you think Corbet killed him?"

  "Not if he was a stranger, blowing in from the cold. If he was a brother, or a cousin, or something, then maybe Corbet had some reason."

  "To leave the body there beside me where the whole village could know about it? Why didn't he just hide it and send me home to bed?"

  "I don't know."

  "Or at least wash the blood off his hands and write Laurel a love letter promising to return after a few years when the fuss died down."

  He was silent, his mouth tight. He picked up the poker, struck a swarm of sparks out of a log. "I don't know." He dropped the poker then, sighing. "It's such a tangled mess, all those old tales we imagined colliding with what we know is true. And Laurel in the middle, caught between tale and truth. Sometimes I think he must be dead, and that's what she really sees when she stares out the window: that he's never coming back."

  I frowned at the fire, my fingers closing tightly on my arms. "Our father
thinks she is doing what our mother did. Wasting away in winter because she could not-she could not remember how to live. Or why."

  He dropped a hand on my shoulder. "I remember that time," he said gently. "A little. I remember sitting with Laurel once under the grape vines. She wouldn't come out and she wouldn't say what was wrong. And then I simply stopped seeing your mother. They tried to explain it to me, but it took me some time to believe that death didn't stay in the fields or the barn with the animals, it could come into the house." I felt his hand shift, heard him hesitate before he spoke again. "I never understood what ailed your mother."

  "Neither did my father."

  His hand tightened abruptly, finding bone, before he let go of me. I looked at him; he was gazing blindly at the fire, his brows knit, his mouth a thin line. Even ani­mals, I thought numbly, did that sometimes: wasted away for someone, something, that never returned to them. I heard Perrin draw a breath unsteadily. He met my eyes finally, his own eyes shocked, bewildered, trying to sec who my mother might have watched for in the empty winter fields.

  He said only, his voice catching, "You stay well, Rois. Laurel needs you."

  "I will. And you'll come-"

  "Yes. She won't care," he added with a touch of bit­terness. "But I can't stay away. And maybe, if I keep coming back instead of him, she'll remember that once she cared."

  He kissed my cheek and went to the door. I felt his eyes as he swung his cloak over his shoulders and tied it, as he opened the door. Did your mother? they asked. Did she watch the fields for someone? Who was he? Did he come like Corbet Lynn, a stranger riding in with summer to vanish in the winter? Or had they known each other longer? How long? You have her face. You are like her. You have your mother's eyes.

  Where did you get your sight? Who are you?

  Who? the owl asked.

  Gold fell from the sky through my thoughts and I remembered.

  Twenty One

  Her face, looking down at me.

  My face, which would become hers.

  The gold that fell between us, turning, turning, in the summer light: the tiny circle in which I trapped wind blown roses, leaves, flying birds, until she came back to me.