Most people can’t see me. The tales told about me say that this is because I’m not meant to be seen by ordinary eyes. The truth is slightly different, I think: I’m not intended to be seen by ordinary hearts.
Nevertheless, over the years I have learned to be careful, learned it’s best to keep out of sight. Sudden revelations that bedtime stories might actually be real are unsettling, to say the least. I’m here to mend hearts, not to stop them with fright.
For obvious reasons, it’s easiest for me to conceal myself when the world around me contains a lot of snow or ice, but even on a warm summer’s day I can usually find a pocket of air in which to hide. The trouble with being concealed, of course, is that sometimes you witness events you wish you hadn’t. This is precisely what happened with Grace and Kai.
That was his name, the young man with her. Kai—to rhyme with sigh. And Grace was giving him plenty to sigh about, I soon discovered.
With both hands, Grace was pushing away love.
I don’t get angry very often. There’s just no purpose in it. Getting mad about something usually makes whatever caused your anger in the first place even worse. But the sight, the sound, of what was happening between these two made me angry, angrier than I’d been in a good long while. Angrier than I could ever remember being, in fact.
Grace was doing two things no one ever should: She was denying the possibilities of her name, and she was denying the potential of love.
Gently putting love aside is one thing. None of us can accept all of what we may be offered in this life. Sometimes we must say no, even to love.
But this girl named Grace was pushing love away with both hands, arms straight out in front of her, elbows locked. With all the force of her being, she was pushing away a great gift, and the worst thing of all was that it seemed to me she was doing it without truly consulting her heart.
Oh, she thought she was. She thought she was doing just what her heart wanted. Her words made that clear enough. But with a name like Sorrow, I can always spot it in another. I have to. It’s part of my job.
And so I knew that this girl, this Grace, had sorrow and pain and fear in her heart, and I also knew she was denying they were there just as fiercely as she was refusing love. In spite of all her words about freedom, her heart was bound.
You are just like my mother, Grace, I thought. A name and a heart so at odds that one could not find the other.
And with this realization, I felt my anger fade. I watched as the argument reached its conclusion and the young man spun on one heel and set off for home. The wind hurried after, barely taking the time to swirl around Grace before dashing against Kai, plastering the shirt he wore against his back.
He stopped, and my heart began to beat so hard and fast the sound of it rang in my ears. I watched as Kai’s head turned quickly from side to side, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of something he was sure was there but could not quite see.
And suddenly, I was dizzy. Possible paths opened before me only to splinter and then re-form like the colorful pieces of a kaleidoscope. That was the moment I understood, even as Kai was hunching his shoulders against the wind and continuing to walk. As Grace was standing alone, her expression stricken and desolate as she watched him.
The three of us were not finished with one another. Not by a long shot. We all had a very long way to go.
EIGHT
I waited until the middle of the night. When the world grows still and the hearts of dreamers lie wide open. This is when I do most of my work.
Most people never even know I’ve touched their hearts. They simply wake up the next morning feeling better than they had when they closed their eyes the previous night. Usually, it’s only after many such mornings have come and gone that those whose hearts I’ve mended recognize there’s anything different about themselves. Even then, they might not be able to tell you what it is.
It isn’t happiness, not quite yet. Instead, it’s a lessening of that for which I am named, a lessening of sorrow. It is the creation of a space so that something else can come and take sorrow’s place, the thing for which my mother was named but which she could not find within herself. I create a space for joy.
Every once in a while, though, I encounter someone who can truly see me. Not just the traces that I leave behind, like the frost on the windowpane that children are taught denotes my presence. I mean my actual form. There’s a reason for this, I think: These are the hearts that have been willing to believe I exist, against all logical odds.
I’ve only met a handful of them during my journey, but each and every one holds a special place in my heart. For it is these hearts that have schooled my own to hope. They remind me to hold fast to the belief that there is a heart that can help me mend my own.
Standing in the narrow street that divided Grace’s tall building from Kai’s, I gazed at her dark windows high above. The full moon that had been playing hide-and-seek among the buildings abruptly gave up the game and leaped over the rooftops to hang like a great white plate in the sky. The street around me was flooded with its pale light.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I thought.
I turned and directed my upward gaze toward Kai’s windows. Like Grace’s, his were dark. Sensible people were asleep, even if what they dreamed wasn’t sensible at all.
What do you dream, Kai? I wondered. He’d come so close to seeing me that afternoon. Dared I hope his dreams were of the Winter Child?
I spread my arms. Instantly, the wind appeared, filling my cloak. Up, up, up into the air the wind carried me, until I could place my hands against Kai’s windows. Beneath my palms, the panes of glass grew cold. I knew this because I could see a thin film of ice begin to form, spreading out, then cracking like sweet sugar glaze.
Wake up, Kai, I thought. Wake up! And then the window opened and I was looking straight into Kai’s eyes. They were blue. I could see this by the light of the moon. Not a pale blue such as mine, but the deep blue of an alpine lake after the sun has gone down behind the mountains. They gazed out steadily, though the expression in them was startled. I could hardly blame him for that. It’s not every day you literally come face-to-face with someone straight out of a fairy tale.
When I spoke, his eyes widened. “Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” he replied. His voice was quiet and steady, the kind of voice made for making promises. Then, just like that, Kai’s eyes narrowed, as if the light of the moon had grown too strong for him.
“How do you do that?” he blurted out. And I discovered that even a girl named Sorrow can still smile. It was a reasonable question. He did live on the top floor. It just wasn’t the question I’d been expecting.
“I can do anything,” I boasted. “I’m a Winter Child.”
He shook his head in a quick, determined motion of contradiction. “No,” he said. “That isn’t right.”
I lifted my chin, as if in defiance, though, as it had that afternoon, I could feel my heart begin to pound. “What can’t I do?” I asked.
“You know the answer to that as well as I do,” Kai replied without hesitation. “You cannot heal your own heart.”
I felt a sharp pain as my heart contracted, then expanded, opening wider than it had known how to until this moment.
“Can you do it?” I asked. “Are you the one who can heal my heart?”
Kai looked at me for several moments, his eyes still narrowed in a slightly unsettling way. It was as if he thought he could figure out the way I was put together, how I worked, if only he could stare at me long enough. Again, my heart felt a painful, hopeful pang. If someone can see the way something works, they can see how to fix it when it breaks, can’t they? Wasn’t this precisely what I did myself?
“I don’t know,” Kai finally said. His voice was troubled. “Is that why I can see you, because you want me to try?”
“You can see me because you believe in me,” I answered.
He gave another quick shake of his head.
“No,” he sa
id. “There’s something more. It’s because you believe in me that I can see you, isn’t it? And because I want to try. I always have, I think, from the time I first heard your story when I was just a boy.
“I always knew there was more to the tale than just being a bedtime story. I knew that you were just as real as I was.”
“And so I am,” I said.
He smiled then, and I felt my own lips curve up in answer. “Yes,” he said. “I see that you are.”
My heart had become a rushing river. So this is what it feels like to hope, I thought. It makes you light-headed, and sets all your limbs to trembling with strength and weakness combined.
“And my heart?” I asked, amazed to hear my voice come out just as steady as his. “Do you want to try and heal it?”
“I think I must,” Kai answered slowly, as if the admission were welling up from someplace deep inside him. His eyes slid from mine to fix on something just over my right shoulder. At first I thought it must be Grace’s window, but when he spoke again, I realized I’d been wrong.
“I used to ask about your heart,” he went on softly, “when Grace’s oma would tell us your story. It always seemed so unfair to me, to give you the power to heal so many hearts but not enough to heal your own.”
The past. He is looking at the past, I thought. The past that has made him what he is now. A past that would give me a chance for a future. We stood in silence for several minutes. I gazed at Kai. He gazed at his former self. With an effort I could almost feel inside my own body, Kai shifted his eyes back to me.
“Where must we go?”
I pulled in a breath before I spoke. “Just like that?”
He made a sound that reached toward laughter. “Well, hardly. I have been hearing your story my whole life.”
“Don’t you dare ask me how old I really am.” This time, Kai did laugh. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he promised. “Besides, I already know. Grace’s oma used to say that you would stay the same age until your quest was done. You’re sixteen, just like Grace and I are.”
“Very cleverly answered,” I replied. “So what makes you think we have to go anywhere? Why can’t we settle things right here and now? Perhaps all you need to do is kiss me and be done with it.”
“I’m not a prince,” Kai said. “I think that only works for them. Besides ...”
He drew the second syllable out, as if he were formulating his answer even as he spoke. “Having an answer as simple as a kiss wouldn’t make sense. It wouldn’t fit with the rest of the tale. You’re on a journey, a quest, in search of all those other wounded hearts. So I think a journey must be the way to heal your heart as well.
“In which case I’ll repeat the question. Where must we go?”
That was the moment when I realized how very much I wished to be in love.
Certainly it was the moment that I felt the future begin to open up before me, as my heart had opened itself to hope just a few minutes before. Perhaps love and hope are one and the same. I don’t know. I do know this was the moment when the future ceased to be a desolate place, a place where I would always walk alone. By the use of a single pronoun, one simple “we,” Kai had created a path where two might walk side by side.
If I was very lucky, the two might even hold hands. I extended mine.
“Home,” I said. “We’re going home.”
I hadn’t known what the answer was until I spoke. But now that I had, I knew it was right. Home. Back to the place where my strange journey had begun.
“I’ll come with you,” Kai said. “But I’m not going out through the window, if you don’t mind. I don’t think I’m ready to fly through the air. I’m just a mortal who likes to keep his feet on the ground.”
“Suit yourself,” I said. “Though you don’t know what you’re missing. I warn you—someday I hope to change your mind.”
He turned from the window.
“Kai.”
He turned back. “What?”
“Will you tell her good-bye?”
If Kai was surprised by my question, he didn’t show it. Nor did he ask whom I was talking about.
“No,” he said after a moment. He gazed past my shoulder, as he had done earlier. I knew he was thinking of Grace this time.
“I don’t think so. There isn’t any point. I used to think we’d always understand each other, that we would always walk the same path. I don’t think that anymore.”
His eyes shifted. Now they looked straight into mine. “I’m going to walk a new path,” he said, “and see where it takes me.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“So am I.”
And that is how it came to pass that Kai left his warm bed and all he had once held dear, and he embarked upon a journey with no milestones to guide him. A single line of footprints in an unseasonably late frost was all that remained to mark his departure.
Kai did not look back. So, just as he turned the corner at the end of the street, when he could not see me do it, I looked back for him. My gaze went straight to the rooftop of Grace’s building, with her darkened windows just beneath.
What will you do when you discover Kai is gone? I wondered. Will you find a way to follow? Or will you give in to pride and let him go?
I found the courage to venture my heart, Grace. Now let’s see if you have the courage to venture yours.
NINE
Story the Fifth
In Which Grace Makes a Choice
He was gone. Kai was gone. He had followed the Winter Child.
I stood in the street, staring down the trail his footprints had left in the frost until I could no longer feel my feet and the hem of my nightgown was soaked. Until I could hear Oma’s voice in my mind, clear as a bell:
For heaven’s sake, Grace, get back inside this minute before you catch your death of cold.
Though I never catch cold.
It’s the strangest thing. Not even Oma could account for it, which meant the familiar scolding was also something of a joke. But suddenly, catching cold was precisely what I feared. I feared my luck might run out just when I needed it most.
Kai had asked me to marry him, and I had turned him away. I had turned him away and now he was gone.
Oh, Grace, I thought as I finally began to shiver. What have you done?
It took all day to sort out my affairs. Unlike Kai, I didn’t simply walk out and leave everything behind me. There was the landlord to speak to, completed work to send to my patrons, and incomplete work for which I needed to make arrangements for others to finish.
“I’d feel better about all this if I knew when you were coming back, Grace,” the flower vendor, Herre Johannes, said late that afternoon.
He and I were standing together on the rooftop, my rooftop, among Oma’s pots and planters. It was still too cold to sow seeds, but I had turned the soil over on the first clear day in preparation for when it would grow warm enough.
I had given Herre Johannes all of the notes that Oma and I had made about what should be planted where, and I was sure the old flower vendor would have some thoughts of his own. He was moving into my old rooms and would care for the rooftop garden in my absence. This suited both Herre Johannes and my landlord well.
Oma’s garden had made our building famous. My landlord never lacked for tenants, even when times were hard. Standing on the rooftop now, I felt my first pang of regret. The rooftop garden was the one thing I would be sorry to leave behind.
“I’d be happier if I knew where you were going,” Herre Johannes continued.
“That makes two of us,” I said. I caught the worried expression on Herre Johannes’s kind and wrinkled face and bit down on the tip of my tongue.
I am going to miss him, too, I thought. Strangely, it made me feel better to know that I would miss not simply a place, which could not miss me back, but a living, beating heart of flesh and blood.
I placed what I hoped was a comforting hand on Herre Johannes’s arm.
“I spoke without thinking,
Herre Johannes,” I said. “I’m sorry. I have thought about what I’m doing, honestly.”
But I hadn’t been truthful with Herre Johannes, not entirely. I’d let him believe the obvious, that Kai had gone off in a huff following a sweethearts’ quarrel. I kept to myself the knowledge that he’d actually chosen to do something much more dangerous and difficult than that: He was walking the path of the Winter Child.
Herre Johannes reached to give my hand a pat, and I dropped my arm. He rubbed one set of knuckles against the stubble on his chin. It made a rough and scratchy sound.
“You’ve been dreaming of striking out into the world for a good long while, I think,” he said.
It was all I could do to keep my mouth from dropping open. Something of my struggle must have shown in my face, for Herre Johannes gave a chuckle. I laughed too, as I shook my head.
“Was it so obvious?”
“To someone who sees only the outside of you, no,” he answered promptly. “But for anyone able to catch a glimpse of the inside of you ...”
He broke off for a moment, gazing over my shoulder. It came to me suddenly that Herre Johannes was doing what I always had done when I came to the rooftop: He was gazing into the distance, his eyes seeking out the horizon.
“I have known you for a long time, Grace,” he said. “I have watched you grow up, and your grandmother and I were good friends. I think, sometimes, that you are like the plants in her garden, always turning your face toward the sun.
“But I want you to remember something,” Herre Johannes said, his eyes on my face now. “A plant needs to do more than stretch its leaves toward the sun. It also needs to send down roots deep into the ground. They hold on tightly in the dark, out of sight where it is easy to forget about them. But it is the fact that a plant can do these two things at once, anchoring itself to the earth even as it reaches for the sky, that makes it strong.
Once Upon A Time (8) Winter’s Child Page 6
