Snow Roses

by Taryn Tyler

  “But they were tainted with sorrow” Otto said “because Mother was weak and died three days after the birth and when the beautiful witch came to the feasts the second time it was with an army behind her. She called lightening and hail out of the sky, smashing the castle to bits while the soldiers flung fire into the gardens. The trees charred black, the violets and roses turned to ash, and the frogs and tadpoles choked to death on the smoke, their damp bodies shriveling in the heat.

  “I fought with father's soldiers on the outer walls, pouring hot oil down on the attackers, but even if none of the men had been drunk from the feasts' wine they could never have withstood Lucille's men. The castle was ravaged, Father killed, the servants beaten until they agreed to serve Lucille, but when she came to me she ordered her soldiers to stay their hands.

  “And she sang.

  “She sang of bones and ashes. Of flesh and fear. Of running and of chasing. Of cold winter nights and long lonely marches in the wilderness. I felt my breath deepen. Smoke filled my lungs, scratching at my throat and turning to a growl. The tips of my fingers itched, bleeding and swelling around the nails. Just before I turned I heard her speak. A whisper that seeped into my lungs and memory.

  “'So that you will be a wild beast. So that you will never love again as you loved your foul, common nurse.'”

  “So that you will never love again.” Snow repeated. She rose and pulled the kettle off the fire.

  “I remember the battle.” Otto turned to look at me. “I saw an iron stake drive through father's back and everything else I had ever known crumble into nothing. But it's . . . distant. Like a dream or another world. I never saw what happened when they reached your nursery. How did you escape?”

  I stared at him. I'd thought he'd finally found some shreds of sanity in the details of his story but perhaps it was still too soon. “My nursery? You mean your sister's.”

  “You are his sister.” Snow said. “You have the same hair, the same nose and your eyes are only a few shades lighter.”

  How could she possibly know what shade his eyes were in this dim light? I shook my head. “He's the same age as me ---perhaps younger. My mother and father were never royalty. They died in the village when I was a baby.”

  Had Greta told me that or had Gran? I had never thought to ask who exactly they had been. Perhaps they hadn't died. Perhaps they simply hadn't wanted me. Or couldn't want me.

  “Your clasp.” Otto took the wooden clasp Gran had made off my cloak and handed it to me. “It bears our family's insignia. So does that necklace.” He pointed to the string of pearls still clutched in my other hand. “It was Mother's. I think that's what changed me back. Touching something from my life before. It made me remember who I was.” His nose twitched. Parts of him were still having trouble remembering.

  “I've touched your fur these last two winters.” I said. “If I were from your past wouldn't that have turned you back?”

  “You were a baby.” Otto said. “I never held you. It's not something princes do, hold babies.”

  “That's mad.” I said.

  He shrugged. “Just a custom.”

  “I mean you're mad.” The idea that a prince could be my brother was mad. The idea that I could have any brother.

  “Our family is quite sane.” His round dark eyes misted over, tainted with memory the way Snow's were when she talked about Lucille. “What's left of it. You and I.”

  I shook my head. “That's a lot to believe based on a clasp.”

  Otto twitched his nose again. “I remember flashes from the last seventeen years. Ideas. Smells. Feelings. Things I know I didn't know before but now I do, only I can't remember how I learned them. Like this cottage. I knew it was home the moment I saw it. I felt safe. I felt welcome.”

  “You are welcome.” Snow assured him. She was calmly steeping dried chamomile in three mugs as if the entire world hadn't just been turned on its head.

  Otto nodded. “I know. And I know Rose is my sister. Animals know their own blood. They don't have to be told and it doesn't have to make sense. I think that's why I came here at all. When I was a bear I knew who she was and now I know because . . . I knew then.”

  Then I remembered. I remembered the gold spindle locked up in Greta's cupboard. I remembered the way she had pressed her lips and gritted her teeth when Gran had brought me the cloak, hiding it from sight as if it were deadly. “Like your name.” Gran had said, throwing it over my shoulders.

  Greta had always kept me from the other villagers. Always alone. Always apart. Could she have known who I was? Could she have been hiding me?

  I turned from Otto and stepped toward the cupboard on the other side of the room. Next to the door where Gran's bed had once been. My feet clopped against the floor in the dead silence. The cottage was small. I reached it much too soon. I pulled it open and dug under the folds of our extra clothes, our basket of needles, Gran's books.

  There. My hand closed over the hard, cold object. I pulled it out so that Snow and Otto could see it in the dim burn of the fire. Light danced off the surface. I ran my fingers over the engraving. The wide, curved petals of a single rose.

  “That was nurse's.” Otto said. “She used it to spin while she told stories.”

  I looked up at Snow. “You're the princess.” There was panic in my voice. “You're the one with the mysterious past. I'm . . . just Rose.” I dropped the spindle. It landed on the floor in front of me with a loud, heavy thud, then rolled to the side. “We're the same age.” I said. “How can we be the same age?”

  Otto smiled weakly. “The curse must have held me frozen in time.”

  I felt cold, smothered in evidence. I couldn't breathe. I turned toward the door. “I'm going for a walk.”

  “Take my cloak.” Snow said.

  I didn't. It was a cold night. I stopped when I reached the fence and considered going back for it. Traces of firelight twinkled from the cottage's windowpanes, dark but full of life like the pupil of an eye.

  I didn't dare go back in. Not with my mind spiraling out of kilter the way it was. The cottage was too constricting. Too warm. I climbed over the fence and stepped into the wood where there was no one to ask me questions, no one to tell me I was wrong about who I thought I was. There wasn't even a road. Just me and the night.

  The moon was bright but I didn't need it to see by. I knew where the trees were. I knew where the bramble and ditches and rabbit burrows were the same way I knew where my hands and feet were. They were a part of the wood. They were a part of me. Ghosts drifted past me. I pulled my mind away from the gentle lapping of their grief. I ignored the whistle of wind in the leaves, the soft trickle of the stream, even the deep thrum of the trees themselves.

  Greta had vanished like a ghost in the night. Had that been because of me? Because of who I was. Had she been . . . found?

  But she had taken her spinning wheel. No soldier would have allowed her to take her spinning wheel.

  A fox drifted past me a few feet away. I stepped around a rotting log, grinding my feet into the twigs and leaves beneath the snow.

  I wished I'd never asked the hobgoblin about the necklace. I wished we'd never disenchanted Otto. I'd been much fonder of him when he was just our red bear.

  I closed my eyes, listening to the pulse of the earth. Another night it might have soothed me. Another night its calm might have enveloped me. I might have absorbed its stillness like a draught of fresh rainwater. Tonight it only fueled my anger. Tonight its strength intertwined with my being like a vine. Fire gushed through my veins, filling my eyes and my lungs with a song I was too furious to release.

  The ghost girl who Snow had seen alive, whose heart Lucille had eaten, flitted across my consciousness. This time I let her come, pouring her pain and anger into me like hot smelt. Fear turned to hate as a knife cut into my chest. I felt the cold edge of the blade, the firm sweaty grip of hands around my wrists, and elbows pushing down against my shoulders. A scream boiled in my throat but I couldn't move. My arms,
my limbs, my whole body was stiff and unable to move.

  Only it wasn't because I was stampeding through the wood like a soldier off to battle. I opened my eyes so I could see the twigs and snow as I stomped down on them. So I could see the branches as they brushed against my face, damp and cold. I breathed deep, letting the ghost's pain seep out of my chest. I placed my hand over my breast as if to remind myself that my heart was still there, beating as quick and strong as it always had. I had never let any of the ghosts in that far before.

  “You feel that.” I said to the ghost girl. “Every day.”

  “Gone.” A child I couldn't see hissed into my ear. And then, in soft wispy syllables hardly distinguishable from the wind. “For . . . got . . . ten.”

  I shook my head. “Not forgotten.”

  But they were. No one had even known the girl's name. A nameless morsel brought in out of the rain.

  Something stirred behind me. The familiar crunch of human footsteps.

  “Snow.” I said but the steps were too heavy to be hers. Too quick and hurried. Perhaps they were Otto's.

  The steps moved closer. I could hear breathing now.

  “Lost.” The ghosts lapped at my mind and soul but the girl's story had already taken too much from me. I couldn't bear to feel even the smallest trickle of their pain anymore. I pushed them away, shaking them off like droplets of water, and turned around.

  A familiar set of sharp cheekbones and amber eyes hovered over a ridiculously charming grin. “I almost didn't recognize you without your cloak.”

  I stared, searching my memory for his name. “Boris.”

  Boris laughed. “You don't sound pleased to see me.” His smile grew wistful, almost sad. “I suppose you wouldn't be, the way I disappeared on you.”

  I lifted my chin. The last time I had seen him I had found Gran's mangled body. I had screamed for help but he hadn't come. Snow had. I moved to step around him.

  “Wait. Rose. Please.” He placed his hand on my shoulder, then pulled it away as if I had burnt him.

  I was considering it.

  “I've never been as brave as I should be, Rose.” His voice was pleading, almost as if he were in physical pain. I winced, remembering the ghost girl's heart. “My nightmares are plagued with the memory of leaving you that night. I relive the horrors you must have gone through over and over. Not a day goes by that I don't wish I'd stayed. Then . . . when I saw you in Copshire I . . . I just wanted to come to make sure you were well and . . . and to apologize. I'm sorry, Rose. I should never have left you in danger.”

  I sighed. “I wasn't hurt. There probably wasn't much you could have done.” Not everyone was as mad and brave as Snow.

  Boris smiled again. A soft, crooked smile that almost glittered beneath the gibbous moon. “I'm glad you weren't hurt. Here.” He unclasped his cloak and flung it over my shoulders. “You must be cold.”

  I wasn't. Not anymore, but I let him hook the clasp anyways. His cloak was thick and heavy. I couldn't see the color in the dark but the fabric was soft like drying moss. “What were you doing that night?” I asked. “Why were you even in the wood?”

  He let out a long sigh, almost a whistle between his cheeks. “I was looking for excitement. I didn't know that when I found it I would run.” He touched the back of his neck, brushing his fingers through his curls. “I work at the manor. It's only a few hours walk from here. Do you live in the cottage we saw that night? The one your Gran lived in?”

  He wasn't telling the truth. Not all of it anyways. “I'm a witch.” I said to discourage anymore lies.

  “I know.” He grinned. “The red witch. You're a legend. The villagers near the wood say that they can hear you singing at night, laying a curse on anyone who would defy you. They say that last summer you nearly burnt down the wood in anger.”

  I didn't tell him that the rumors were false.

  “Rose.” His rich, smooth voice purred my name in a way I almost liked and almost hated. “The red witch. I'm not surprised she turned out to be you. I saw sparks of magic in you even then. And you told me you'd been talking to ghosts. Most people just scream when they hear them. Or run. They don't bother to talk back.”

  “Then most people are foolish.”

  He nodded. “Most are. And they're not nearly as --do you know the cliffs just after the creek turns into a river?”

  I nodded.

  “Meet me there next new moon. I want to show you something.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “The moon's darkest night?”

  He winked. “When else?”

  I laughed in spite of myself. The danger of being on a cliff with only the stars to light my way was enticing. “I have to go.” I handed him back his cloak and moved to step around him. This time he didn't try to stop me.

  “Rose.”

  I turned back.

  Boris clasped his cloak, letting the long heavy folds of the fabric drape around him in the shadows. He tilted his head to the side, smiling his ridiculous smile. His eyes danced with mischief. “When you come to meet me, don't trust me.”

  “I won't.” I promised, and left him there, staring after me as I disappeared into the wood.

  It wasn't until then that I wondered how he had found me when I hadn't even been on the path. Or how he had learned my name.

  I awoke the next morning to the sound of Snow's tender giggle. Straw scratched at my chin as I crept to the edge of the loft and peered down.

  Snow sat next to Otto by the fire, stitching a pair of trousers out of the pale blue fabric we'd bought in town. She pulled the thread through and cut it with her knife. “I told Rose you had followed her here.” She said. “I knew you couldn't be an ordinary bear.”

  Otto smiled. Slowly. Shyly. I wanted to throw something at him. “When I'm near Rose I feel happy --glad that she's safe and glad that we found each other—but when I'm near you . . .” His neck and face turned suddenly very red “You must have been very kind to me when I was a bear.”

  Snow looked back down at the would be trousers in her lap. I shook the straw out of my hair and headed down the ladder.

  After breakfast I took a walk through Gran's gardens while Snow finished stitching together the trousers. I had grown used to the dormant plants in the winter. Most of them were all but buried in the snow with only the brittle edges of their thorns poking out. But something seemed different today. Sadder. Drearier. As if the tumbling, abundant life of summer would never return. As if the roses and lavender and ivy and chamomile weren't merely asleep this winter, but forever and irrevocably dead.

  When I slipped back into the cottage I found Otto sitting on the stool with Gran's journal in his lap. His head was bent over the pages, red curls smothering his neck and ears. Snow had finished the trousers. They looked especially soft and pale next to the bright sting of my cloak. Otto looked up when he heard the door close. He smiled. I wondered if his smile were anything like mine. I doubted it.

  “This is Nurse's writing.” He rested his hand on the pages of the journal, almost stroking them. “I recognize some of the stories but others . . . I had no idea she had such darkness in her. The way she tells of a simple fox out hunting. How the rabbit can't even shriek when he dies. Where did you get this?”

  “It was Gran's.” I said. How could his nurse be my Gran? But then, it made about as much sense as anything else.

  Otto's eyes softened with sadness. For a moment he looked almost like our red bear. “Was?”

  I nodded. “A wolf killed her. The night I came to live here.”

  Otto buried his forehead in his palms. He ran his fingers through his curls. “It's all gone then. Everything. I had hoped . . . I know it was seventeen years ago but it feels like it was yesterday. Like . . .” He looked up, gazing into the fire. His eyes reflected the bright orange and gold as it danced and rollicked like a witch in the night. “Like it never happened at all.”

  He wanted proof. Something to show him that he hadn't dreamed it all. I picked up the gold spindle from wh
ere I had dropped it the night before. I walked over to him knelt next to the stool. I placed the spindle in his hand, pressing it against his palm. He tightened his fingers around the cold, smooth gold.

  “Where's Snow?” I asked. She wasn't in the cottage and I hadn't seen her in the yard with her knives.

  “She went to the village.” Otto's voice was monotone, his mind still somewhere seventeen years into the past. “She said she was going to trade for a pair of boots so I could help her hunt.”

  I straightened, drawing my hand away from the spindle. “By herself?”

  Otto nodded.

  “It's dangerous.” My voice grew shrill with worry. “Did she tell you who she is? Who she's hiding from?”

  But it was more than that. It had been so long since either of us had gone anywhere without the other. She hadn't even told me that she was leaving.

  I stood and walked to the window. At least the sky was clear. It didn't look like there would be another snowfall today. “When did she leave? I should go after her.”

  “It must have been Nurse who saved you.” Otto said. “How else would you end up in the wood together miles and miles away?”

  I turned around to face him. I didn't want Gran to be his nurse. I didn't want to share her. “But why would she leave me to live in the village with Greta instead of keeping me here?”

  Otto shrugged. “Maybe she thought you would be safer there. Or happier.”

  I sighed and turned back toward the window. Ice glittered in the branches. A bird swooped down out of a tree and pecked at the ground, trying to unbury something to eat. “I wasn't. I should go after Snow.”

  But I didn't. Because I knew she would be safe. Because I knew that the villagers had already seen her and anyone who would report what they saw to the queen had already done it. Because I knew she had her knife with her and her aim had become swift and precise in the last two years.