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Snow Roses

Page 9

by Taryn Tyler

The bear turned a pair of round gold eyes toward me. They shifted to Rose, then to me again. He shook his head, releasing a shower of snow out of his red fur. Pieces of ice melted against my skin and hair, dripping down onto the cottage floor.

  Thick globs of fur almost as long as his ears stuck up around the bear's neck. He lowered his nose to the ground, crossing his legs almost like a bow, and stepped past me. He placed his jaws over the fire, carefully removing the bits of rabbit meat one bite at a time.

  Rose and I watched as he chewed and swallowed the fruits of our day's work. A pair of half cooked rabbits appeared to be easier prey than two live girls. When he had finished he laid down next to the fire, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

  I looked at Rose. She looked at the bear, then me. She lowered the fire tongs.

  I strode past her and slammed the door shut. I re-bolted it with a loud clang, not caring if it would wake the bear. I turned back to face Rose, livid. “Why did you open the door? You could have got us both killed.”

  Rose straightened to her full height, thrusting her chin out. Her eyes locked with determination. “To kill the wolf. It killed Gran.”

  “Does nothing scare you?” I demanded.

  Both our eyes darted toward the bear, sleeping like a baby on our hearth. Even with his heavy jaw and sharp claws he didn't look much like a monster with his eyes closed and his tongue sticking out from between his teeth. He let out a loud, short snore.

  Laughter bubbled in my throat and lungs like a stew left on too long. I clasped my hand over my mouth to hold the sound back but it broke through the barrier, gushing past my fingers and into every corner of the cottage.

  “You're mad.” Rose said but she was laughing too.

  I leaned back against the door, clutching my side, unable to stop giggling. My whole body gurgled and hiccuped in rhythm with the noise. I hadn't laughed –I had hardly smiled –since before . . . I couldn't remember when.

  Since before the wolf. Since before Lucille.

  Rose

  Snow and I climbed the loft. We pulled the ladder up after us so the bear couldn't follow. Snow went right to sleep. If she had nightmares I didn't hear them. Not even a whimper. She hadn't woke screaming since that first night but most nights I could still hear her sobbing in the straw across from me. I lay awake, listening to the bear snore down by the fire. The pangs of Gran's death lay reopened in my chest. Why couldn't I cry? Why did Gran already seem so far away?

  I must have slept eventually. I woke a little after dawn to the scuffling of dishes, followed by a grunt and a crash.

  “Listen here.” It was Snow's voice. “If you want to stay in and keep warm I won't shove you out but you can't have our breakfast.”

  I sat up, not even bothering to shake the straw out of my hair. Snow stood between the table and the fireplace with a wooden spoon, dripping with porridge, in her hand. The bear looked up from two overturned bowls on the floor. His nose and chin drizzled with white sludge.

  “Snow.” I jumped for the ladder. “What are you doing? He has claws. And teeth.”

  Snow looked up at me. She raised an eyebrow. “You believed you could kill him with a poker last night.”

  “I was angry.” I said.

  Snow shrugged. “I was hungry. Besides . . .” She bit her lip. The charming traces of a blush spread behind her ears. “I forgot he was here.”

  I dropped off the ladder onto the ground just a few inches from the bear. He hadn't moved. He looked down at the overturned bowls. The still steaming porridge smeared over the wooden planks. He blinked then licked his nose as if attempting to hide the evidence. He didn't look like he planned on attacking either of us any time soon.

  I laughed. Only Snow would wake up with a bear in the cottage and make breakfast, business as usual. It felt good to laugh with all the cracks in my heart reopened.

  Snow made more porridge. We left the door open while we ate it. The bear lapped the first two bowls up off the floor then wandered out into the yard. I jumped up to close the door after him. It slammed shut beneath my hand, blocking out the draft. I turned around with my back pressed against the door. “He must have thought our flesh wasn't worth the trouble.”

  “He must have.” Snow agreed. She hesitated. “Pea soup tonight?”

  I nodded. I wasn't in the mood to go tromping around in the wood again today and I didn't want to send Snow out alone. Not with a bear roaming through the trees. We stayed inside most of the day. Now that we could leave if we wanted to the cottage didn't seem so small. Night fell with us sitting together by the fire while I tried to make sense out of Gran's journal.

  Snow had only just begun to show me how to find the words the letters made. I stared down at Gran's soft, messy letters, mouthing their sounds. Slowly at first. Some were hard to tell apart from the others. A 'B'. An 'O'. That one was probably an 'N' but could have been an 'M'. The dark inky swirls curled over the page, leaking into my eyes. I could hardly tell where one ended and another began. I closed my eyes then opened them again.

  Something scratched against the door. The bolt rattled.

  Snow looked up from the herbal in her lap. “The bear.”

  “He can't get in.” I reminded her.

  “I know.” She looked down again but her eyes didn't move across the page. Her forehead didn't wrinkle in concentration the way it did when her mind was floating off to a different world.

  I looked back down at the journal. I knew the letters. I knew their sounds if only I could concentrate on them hard enough. I plunged forward, ignoring the grinding pain steeping into the front and back of my head.

  The bear moaned. He scratched harder against the wood outside. Snow looked up at the door. “He's probably very cold out there.” She said.

  “Probably.” I agreed.

  “And lonely.”

  I nodded.

  “He didn't try to eat us.”

  “Just our rabbits and porridge.”

  She looked back down at the herbal, biting her lip.

  I laughed. “Oh, just let him in already.”

  She looked up again, hesitant. “Do you think it's safe?”

  “Of course it isn't. He's a bear. Just let him in.”

  The bear came in covered in ice flakes. He shook them out of his fur, scattering bits of melting snow through the room. He followed Snow to the fire then sat down with her, pressing his damp, warm body against both our backs. He sniffed my fingers then licked them with his big wet tongue.

  “He doesn't seem wild.” Snow said. “Not the way other animals do.”

  I shrugged. “He must have already eaten.”

  “No. Look at his eyes. They don't look like . . .” She stopped. I could see ghosts rising behind her eyes. Fear. The memory of pain.

  “The wolf.” I finished for her.

  She nodded then touched her shoulder, biting her lip again.

  I touched her sleeve where I knew her scars were. Long silver slashes like fingers brushing dangerously close to her neck. “Does it still hurt?” I asked.

  Snow shook her head. “Only when I remember.”

  Then I wouldn't make her. I pulled my hand away, brushing my fingertips for a moment against hers, and looked back down at the journal. I knew the letters. If only I could stop looking at them like a riddle and more . . . more wild. Like a song. Like Gran's songs. Something that did not need an answer because it had a rhythm.

  B. O. N. E.

  “Bone.” The word slipped out of my mouth smooth and clear like the sharp edge of a jewel. “Bone of earth and root of flesh. Hidden where the shadows steep. Finger vines and heart strings mesh. Come to me from woodland's deep.” I looked back up at Snow. “What do you think that means?”

  Snow stared at me with her wide, dark eyes. The flames from the fireplace flickered shadows over the side of her face. “I never taught you that.” Her voice came out a whisper.

  “You showed me the letters.” I said.

  She shook her head. “Two nights ago you coul
d hardly make out your name. The writing in that journal is impossible. I can't even make out most of the rhymes.” She reached for the book then drew her hand away as if she thought it might bite her.

  The bear released a long gentle snore and rolled his snout over behind us.

  Snow buried her fingers into the bear's red hair –almost the same color as mine –as if she were looking for a distraction. Something else to touch. “Don't bears sleep in the winter?” She asked.

  “He is asleep.” I ran my hand along his great spine, feeling the rough locks of his fur between my fingers. They were still wet and looked like they would be so much softer than they were.

  Snow wrinkled her forehead. “I mean in a cave. All winter long without stopping. That's what Hans said. He said the best time to hunt a bear is early spring when they're too hungry to be cautious.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe this one doesn't like caves. I've never even heard of bears in this wood before. Just ghosts and wolves.”

  The next morning we made extra porridge to share with the bear. After he had eaten it he wandered off again into the wood. He returned after dark and again the night after that. We stopped bothering with the lock until he was already nestled behind us by the fire. He snored and melted snow all over the floor and Snow buried her fingers into his red hair. He ate like the wild animal he was but he was warm to lie against once he was dry and kind as a kitten.

  If kittens were kind. I hadn't seen many up close.

  At first the bear came only at night but as the days wore on I began to catch glimpses of him watching us from inside the wood, so far back that he looked almost like just another shadow behind the trees. Soon we became used to seeing him in the yard, pulling leaves and sticks out of the snow or sometimes rolling in it like a hog wallowing in the mud. Sometimes he would sit behind Snow while she was practicing her knife throws, just watching her with his big round eyes.

  “I think he's sweet on you.” I told her.

  Snow laughed. “On me? It was your footsteps he followed up to the cottage.”

  Some nights we didn't climb up into the loft. Instead we slept snuggled next to the fire with the bear, using his big padded paws for pillows. It was nice waking up with his warm fur against our backs but we also woke up in need of a bath which wasn’t much fun with the air inside the cottage getting colder every day.

  Winter seemed to last forever. Cold night after cold day after cold night. There were more storms than either of us bothered to count, more reading lessons than I needed, more lumpy porridge and pea soup than I had ever eaten in my life. We lit fires and set traps and played with the bear and hummed to one another while we waited for it to end.

  At last the trees began to dribble with melting ice and fresh shoots of greenery. The ground thawed so slowly we almost didn't realize how warm it had become until we stepped outside one morning and the earth was green instead of white. The bright tiny blades of grass were coated with frost but the thick blanket of snow was gone.

  That night our bear didn't come. We sat by the fire with the door unbolted well into the night, waiting, but there was no scratching against the door. No playful groans, no warm wet mat of fur, not even paw prints in the yard the next morning. Instead I found a ring of crocus stems blooming next to the white and red roses. I stooped and pulled damp bits of dead plants away from them. The hard, frostcoated earth scraped at my fingers.

  “We never gave him a name.” Snow said.

  “He never told us his name.” I corrected her.

  He didn't come that night either. Or the night after that. Snow burnt the porridge both mornings. She skinned and cut rabbits from our traps and cut firewood we didn't need.

  “He's not hurt.” I told her “He just went exploring now that the air is warmer. Bears roam in the summer. He's fishing and sampling berries.”

  “I know.” She swung the ax down, splicing a maple log in two. The pieces landed in the dry, brown earth with a dull thud.

  The crocuses were only the beginning. As the days passed life cascaded through Gran's flower garden. Deep, saturated red and winter white roses spread out among dark velvety violets, tall fragrant husks of lavender, and bright yellow tufts of chamomile. The single vine of red and white roses that had sprung up through the snow receded into the lush tangles of greenery, just another plant, no more spectacular and no more vibrant than the rest.

  The wood tumbled with strawberries and blueberries and blackberries and raspberries. It grew rampant with life. The creek teemed with trout and pike. We found walnuts and hazelnuts buried only a few short inches into the dark rich soil. Squirrels and rabbits and badgers and hedgehogs scurried through the constantly thickening nets of ferns and bushes and there was never a hint of ice. Song birds fluttered through the branches, warbling like drunks at a harvest dance.

  No wonder Gran had preferred living here to the stiff, drab village. I abandoned my shoes in the cottage and tended to the gardens, waded in the stream, climbed trees hunting for eggs, and stained my fingers with bright, sticky berry juices. I gathered plants off the forest floor, repeating their names from Gran's books. Meadowsweet for fever. Motherwort for melancholy humors. Sage for

  –well it smelled better than anything else I had ever held. Was it supposed to chase away ghosts?

  If only Gran had been there to teach me the names herself. If only I had come to live with her years and years ago instead of sitting next to Greta with a curding brush, listening to her spin thread all those years.

  At midsummer Snow and I lit a fire in the wood to thank the earth for its plenty. I whispered one of Gran's rhymes into the flames and the ghosts gathered in a circle around me. There was no moon but I could see their forms in the glow of the flames. I hummed a hymn of thanks into the night. The song spread through me and into the trees, brimming with promise and new possibilities.

  Snow stood beside me, silently staring into the fire. She said she could see the ghosts. She could hear them calling our names but she didn't feel how much they wanted to cry but couldn't, how they melted into the sound of my voice because I had claimed them. She didn't feel each of their lonely, forgotten deaths tangle around her soul like old, dusty cobwebs.

  Too soon the leaves faded from green to gold. They fluttered off the trees in thin, crisp flakes, blanketing the great tree roots against the cold. A chill crept into the air a little more each day. My toes grew stiff with cold and I had to remember where I had left my boots.

  The morning of the season's first snowfall Snow and I stood together by the window, watching the ice crystals drift like ash in the wind. They landed on the sleeping gardens, clinging to the thorns and gray wood. The red and white rosebush had sprawled through the other plants, winding its way around them and blossoming more brightly than ever. No mere winter could kill it.

  “My boots are tight.” Snow said. “We should go to the village and see if they will trade a pair for firewood.”

  “Or fresh game.” I said. “The villagers are afraid of the wood. We're bound to have any number of things they would trade for.

  I turned to look at Snow. The top of her head only came to my nose but she didn't look like a puppet in a costume anymore. She had stitched pale green vines along the edges of the dress that had been Gran's, pulling the laces tight over the bodice so that I could see the gentle curve between her hips and breasts. She had cut slits in the skirt too, letting the brown drape over the cream white of her shift. Her hair had grown, draping in swirls of black ink around her neck and shoulders. She had filled the top of her bodice with pale, curved breasts but her limbs and middle were still as thin as spinning needles.

  I wrinkled my nose, trying to decide if anyone in the village would guess that she was the princess who was supposed to be dead. Her lips were the same deep red they had always been, her eyes filled with the same unblinking gaze.

  “I'll go.” I said. “They won't ask me as many questions.”

  I tromped into the village late that morning dragging as much f
irewood as I could carry in the snow behind me. By midday every piece was gone. Instead I was carrying two pairs of boots only a little worn, a new flint, a sack of flour, a ribbon the same red as my cloak, and a purple ribbon for Snow. I asked if anyone had seen Greta since I'd gone but everyone seemed to have thought she'd gone into the wood with me. No one knew that Gran was dead but they weren't surprised when I told them.

  “It's that wood.” The miller's wife said, shaking her head as she handed me the ribbons. “Nothing that goes in ever comes out . . .” Her eyes lingered on my cloak then drifted up to my face, never quite meeting my gaze “the same as it went in.”

  When I arrived back at the cottage there were wide padded tracks leading up to the door. My heart jumped, thinking of the wolf creature, but I had grown used to the shape of a bear's paws. When I opened the door I wasn't surprised to see our very own red bear snoring on the hearth.

  Snow turned to me with an excited smile that could have melted iron. I handed her the boots and ribbon I'd brought her from the village and didn't even care that the tea she had made was weak and the porridge lumpy.

  When the red bear left again that spring we both knew that he would be back.

  The woods sang to me. A wordless song that spiraled with vines and whispered with wind. Some days when I was in the gardens I would close my eyes and just listen.

  “ Do you hear that?” I asked Snow one day when the trees were thrumming louder than usual. Each oak, each ash, each willow, had its own song. Their tones vibrated through me, reaching their roots into my being.

  “ I hear birds.” Snow said. “I hear the bubbling laughter of the brook and the swooshing whisper of the wind through the trees.”

  I heard those things too but they weren't as loud as the trees themselves. They weren't as loud as the earth the trees sprang from or the silent cry of the ghost children that rested beneath them. Each child's story grasped at me from the shadows of the forest floor. Their sorrows pattered against the edges of my mind, hungry, exhausted with want, but they didn't envelop me the way they had the first night. When the cutting pain searing a hole through the ghost girl's chest became too much to endure or the soft white hands that seemed to plague all of their memories filled me with unbearable terror, I drew my mind away, returning to Gran's gardens with Snow practicing knife throws across the yard. The rhythmic thump of her blade slicing into wood held me, just for a moment, in the present reality.

 

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