Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “He’ll have a rough winter,” Corbet said dispassionately. He slid away from me and arched our arms, for me to spin around myself. Then he pulled me back, holding me loosely, his eyes on my face, but seeing Crispin. “Winter, and a child coming. I told Aleria I would use him as often as I could; there are things that can be done as long as we’re not working with snow falling on our heads.”

  I tripped on his foot, feeling disoriented and clumsy, falling so abruptly back into myself. “Corbet,” I said again, bewildered, pleading for him to feel what I was trying to tell him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It was my fault—”

  “No, mine. I haven’t done this in a while.” He spun me again beneath our arms; his eyes, when he brought me back, were expressionless. “There. That’s better.”

  I drew breath, still feeling my heartbeat, feeling, for a moment, the well inside me, rising and trying to spill into my eyes. I was trembling, as if I had nearly fallen, though I was not sure from where or why. “It’s kind of you to care,” I said. His brow went up a little; I swallowed dryly. “About Crispin and Aleria.”

  “I’m trying to live beyond my grandfather’s face.” He smiled a little, tightly. “People see what they expect to see. Except for you. You simply see.”

  I was mute a moment, gazing at him. “But I am not sure,” I said, “what it is I’m looking at.”

  He did not answer, but his smile remained, still tight, thin; I realized then that he saw me all too well. The fine lady with roses in her hair and buckles on her dancing shoes was not the truth; truth stood in a ring of mushrooms in the wood; truth drank from a secret well.

  “You’ll miss the wood,” he said suddenly, “in winter.”

  “Won’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” His eyes left mine, to wander through the fiery leaves around us. “I’m told not to expect many more days like this.”

  “The rains will begin soon.” I thought of the well again, but now, in memory, more leaves fell between us, making him difficult to see. “There’s water for you,” I added.

  His eyes narrowed a little, turned darker. But he was only considering my suggestion. “Perhaps I could dig a pond…channel the underground stream into it.”

  “You’ll destroy the well,” I protested, amazed that he could not care. He shook his head.

  “Maybe not. Anyway no one ever knew it was there. Except you.”

  “And you.”

  He smiled again; his eyes did something else, still looking at me. “There are other places in the wood,” he said softly.

  “Other places?”

  “Doors. Thresholds. Places of passage. That little well is very pretty, but in this world it will not be missed. I will try to be careful, though, because you love it.”

  I stared at him. He spun me gracefully, more gracefully than any farmer’s son. I whispered, “Who are you?”

  His easy, open expression did not change. “I am Corbet Lynn,” he said. “I have returned to claim my inheritance.”

  “Returned,” I whispered, “from where?”

  He did not answer. His eyes had moved beyond me, again dark, intent. Impulsively, I turned us both half a circle, to put myself where he had been, to see what he had seen.

  My sister, Laurel, still dancing with Perrin, turned him as abruptly, and whirled away, her back to us. But not before I had seen her eyes.

  The music ended. I let go of Corbet. I did not know if he left me before I left him. I heard my name called once or twice as I walked among the dancers, but it was not his voice, so I did not stay. No one noticed me at the edge of the crowd. Perhaps no one recognized me; people see what they expect to see. I crossed the green and went into the empty inn, and out the back door.

  I began to run.

  Five

  A wind came up and snatched the roses from my hair, then pulled my hair loose as I ran. I did not care. I stopped an instant to throw off my shoes; they landed in a corncrib. I gathered my skirt above my knees and headed across a cornfield. The stalks had not been cut yet; they blew wildly around me, their yellow leaves like hands, reaching out to me. The sky was still cloudless, but its blue had darkened; twilight rode hard behind the wind.

  I was running from my own thoughts as much as anything. I simply wanted to untangle myself from the web I had touched. A single, sticky, quivering strand of it was all I needed to warn me away. I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.

  The trees were bending like great fans in the wood. Clouds of gold and red and brown sailed along the wind. I slowed as I reached the privacy of the trees. A woman running across the cornfield in her mother’s best dress is subject to human speculation; in the wood, the trees did not care. I could wear anything, think nothing. I walked until my hard panting eased, and then I began to run again, knowing what I wanted.

  As fast as I moved, dusk raced me there. Night’s season had begun; the days took what light was left them. I saw a last tender brush of sun slowly fade on the thick fall of rose vines over the well. Even stripped of leaves and roses, they would hide water, their naked thorns guarding against any touch. I did not dare get too close to the vines; the wind rattled through them, shook them, sent them whipping erratically in the air. One caught my hair, another my skirt, until I tore free and moved upwind, and settled down into the dead leaves.

  Leaves blew against me from all parts of the wood and clung; I did not care. I only wanted to sit there, at least until the wedding was over, and Laurel came back home and Corbet went elsewhere. I did not want to see them together; I did not want to think about what I had seen in their eyes. It had been an aberration of the moment, something broken that could be instantly mended. As it would be, before I went home.

  The wood darkened; the winds poured from every direction, not wintry yet, still carrying scents of ripe apple, blackberry, warm earth. But they sang of storm and bare branches and cold, shriveled days. They were the harvest winds; they came to carry away the dying, sweep the earth for the dead. I had never heard them so clearly before; they seemed to have their separate voices, each wind its separate shape. I huddled in the leaves beside the well, watching the world darken, the moon rise slowly above the trees, leaves flying like flocks of birds across it.

  I began to see faces.

  Moonlight streaked the winds; in the mingling of moon and leaf I saw things that were neither, riding the wild winds. Night-black horses moved fluidly above the ground, silver harness sparked a silver light. Faces as pale and beautiful and distant as the moon flowed past me, as beautiful as Corbet’s face. I heard their voices, the heartbeat of hooves, indistinct in the fall and whirl of leaves, the tense, singing winds. I could not move; I could scarcely remember anymore if I were human, or something the wind would snatch up and carry away into the season’s end. Then a wind more fierce than any other blew the rose vines apart so that I saw the moon floating on the trembling water.

  A shadow detached itself from the wind, dipped its mouth to the water and drank. Harness rang with small bells. I lifted my eyes from spark to spark: light on a stirrup, a rein, light on a pale moonlit face chiseled of ivory and ice and night.

  I heard words, a lilting question, laughter as light and delicate as blown petals. I understood nothing. I crouched, staring, trying to make myself small, invisible, trying to turn into wind. The rider’s slender hand rose over me. Something fell, glittering gold, dropped into the leaves beside me. I did not move. The rose vines tangled together again, left no hint of water. The winds darkened, galloped past me, great dark steeds with streaming manes and tails, their eyes reflecting moonlight. The leaves flowed after them from the ground, from the trees, a dry river rushing into autumn.

  I did not move for a long time. Leaves piled agains
t me, and blew away in passing winds. Leaves hid a shining, then revealed it, then hid it again. I waited, feeling my heartbeat, thinking nothing because I did not know what to think; I did not know if there were words for what I thought. Leaf has no words, nor does dark. I tried to become both of them, while clouds hunted down the moon, and it escaped, and they caught it again.

  I felt my bones finally, aching to move, insisting on their human shape. I reached out then, still without thinking. I brushed away leaves until I found what lay buried beneath them.

  I could not see it well; cloud had captured the moon again. I stood up and slipped it into a pocket. I wore my mother’s dress, I remembered vaguely. I had danced at a wedding, in the sunlight. Then I had run across the fields into night, and I had seen, I had been given…

  I shivered and took the first step home.

  At some point, walking across our father’s fields, I moved back into time. I saw lights in the house. I had no idea how long I had been gone. Perhaps they thought I had slipped away with someone, and no one had wondered. Perhaps they had assumed the most likely: that I had gotten tired of the crowd, and had gone wandering in the wood. I would come home safely, as I always had… I walked slowly, wearily, following the path of the moon; it stopped above the farmhouse as I stepped onto the porch.

  I saw my sister turning away from the fireplace as I opened the door. Her face looked flushed, troubled. She had worried her hair loose; it tumbled around her face, only one ivory clip holding a wilted yellow pansy over her ear. She stared at me; I heard Perrin, sitting in a chair, murmur something. Our father rose and stepped toward me. Someone else moved in the shadows, and I closed my eyes a moment, for I had left nothing behind when I had run: It was all here waiting for me.

  Then I opened my eyes and looked at him. His eyes withheld expression. He stood silently, leaning against the stone mantelpiece, not far from where Laurel had been before she saw me.

  She breathed, touching my tangled hair, my torn dress, a weal on my neck, “Oh, Rois…”

  I saw her eyes redden. Perrin and my father said at once, explosively, “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened,” I said shortly. “I went for a walk in the wood.”

  “With who?”

  “No one.”

  “You left the wedding and you didn’t come back and you didn’t come here,” Laurel said. “You disappeared.”

  “I’m not good,” I sighed, “at weddings. I’m sorry.” I looked at our father and said again, helplessly, “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve been alone all this time?” He stretched a hand toward me. “No one—troubled you?”

  Nothing human, I thought. I shook my head wearily, his failed daughter, his fey child, who had left her shoes in a corncrib to go dancing with the night. “You know what I’m like.” I dragged leaves, the last rose, out of my hair. “I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  They were silent, gazing at me, sensing more, but I had no more to give them. Corbet moved, and my eyes went to him. I saw, in some timeless moment, the shifting shapes of human and inhuman in his face, as if he looked up at me from within the well and the water trembled constantly over him.

  He moved abruptly; my eyes dropped. I did not look at Laurel, but I felt her gaze. I moved closer to her, found her hand, and touched it.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  I heard her sigh. “Never mind. You’re safe, at least.” None of us were, I knew then. “You must be hungry. Come into the kitchen; I’ll find you something.”

  The men shifted, Perrin rising, Corbet moving from the hearth, my father turning down a lamp. “I’ll leave you, then,” Corbet said. “Since all is well.” There was effort in his lightness. He caught my eyes again, briefly, as he crossed the room. “I was worried,” he added, and I knew that he knew I had run from him. “I stayed to help search for you, if you did not come back.”

  “You would know where to look,” I said softly. I watched Perrin kiss Laurel, and follow Corbet out. Our father closed the door behind them. He looked at me a moment, bewildered, anxious, wondering, I guessed, where the elegant woman he had danced with had gone, and what changeling child had taken her place.

  He came to me, patted my shoulder a little, awkwardly. “Are you sure—” he began gruffly.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  He turned away, darkening the house, leaving the matter to Laurel.

  I had nothing to tell Laurel, either. I ate cold ham and bread, and listened to her tell me how worried they all had been, how kind Corbet had been to stay with them, since he knew places where I went and no one else knew where to begin to look. I chewed wearily, waiting for her to stop talking. She poured wine, and watched me drink it.

  Then she said gently, “Don’t fret. Everyone runs from such things now and then; it’s only human. People gather, and drink, and dance, feelings begin to fly like trapped birds, things get spoken without words, music suggests things that simply can’t be… Lovers suddenly wear too familiar faces, and other faces promise other worlds…”

  I swallowed a dry lump of food. I couldn’t look at her. I said finally, “Maybe that’s all it was.”

  “I’m sure it was.” She touched my hair, stroked a strand back from my face. I looked at her then. She smiled, making me smile, though my throat burned, and I could feel the slight, secret weight dragging at my skirt. She drank her wine, and added, “You’ll never guess who caught the wedding bouquet.”

  “You?”

  “Beda.” Her smile deepened at my expression. “And Shave Turl caught the straw crown that Crispin threw. He wore it for the rest of the afternoon, and tried to dance with every woman who didn’t need a cane. Crispin’s brother, Salish, asked where you were, and so did Ley Gett, and Tamis Orley—they wanted to dance with you.”

  I said nothing; she might as well have offered me shadows to dance with, since that’s all they would have seemed after I had danced in Corbet’s eyes. She sighed slightly, and drank more wine. She seemed, despite her dishevelled hair and worried expression, to have grown even more beautiful: There was a look deep in her autumn eyes, as if she had sensed the storm in a cloudless sky and gathered her powers to head into it.

  But, in that quiet kitchen, it seemed impossible to believe what I had glimpsed. She loved Perrin, Perrin loved her; she would never hurt him, or our father. I would dance with everyone at her wedding, and I would run from nothing. I made a sound suddenly, a rueful laugh, wondering if I would dance barefoot.

  “My shoes…”

  “Where did you leave them?”

  “In Ley Gett’s corncrib.”

  Laurel laughed. “He’ll think they fell out of the sky.”

  She put the food away and lit candles. I trailed upstairs after her, feeling footsore and very tired, too tired, suddenly, for love or terror or even for dreams. I washed in a daze, and left my mother’s dress lying like a wilted rose on the floor. I crawled into bed with my eyes closed.

  A hand, pale and slender, reached into the numbing dark of the first moment of sleep, and dropped something that glittered gold in the moonlight as it fell toward me.

  I sat up out of sleep before it finished falling. I pulled myself out of bed, knelt beside my mother’s dress, and reached into the pocket. I could not see what I found there; the room was black, or else my eyes were still closed. I took it to bed with me, slid it under my pillow, and slept then, hidden in night, in leaves, without dreams.

  In the morning, I found only a dried, crumbled leaf beneath my pillow.

  Six

  The rains began.

  Hard, constant, they battered the fields, turned the roads to mud, crushed the gold leaves into the ground and turned them black. In the wood, the sodden trees and brambles bowed beneath the torrents. Leaves fell, clung limply to vines and wildflowers, slowly buried them beneath their sodden weight. Work in the fields, on Lynn Hall, stopped, though I heard him hammering inside, the time or two I ventured into the wood.
I went to the well once; the rain-kissed water gave me nothing, not even my reflection. Another time, near evening, when the rains had grown gentle, drops flecking the air like tiny fireflies, I went to gather the last of the crab apples for Beda. So I told myself: I had to pass the ruined hall to reach the tree. Smoke came out of a chimney, smelling sweetly of birch and maple. Crispin had brought him a wagon load of seasoned wood. I did not see him.

  Most of the time, I stayed in the house, sewing beside Laurel, or watching the rain. I had frightened myself in the wood: I did not know, anymore, what was true. If I had invented a world that none of us lived in, then the true world was Laurel’s, predictable, dependable, with no secrets and no stray midnight gold that turned to leaf by morning. Corbet Lynn had not walked out of light, but had ridden a horse into the village; Laurel loved Perrin as always, and I had seen wild horses in the night winds only because I wanted them there. I made myself teas of camomile and vervain to soothe my thoughts, and watched Laurel move calmly through her world. She never paced, or pulled a window open to feel the rain, the wind; she never moved without grace or purpose. She never went barefoot.

  So I wore shoes and braided my hair, and made lace for her wedding dress, as if I sewed time and promises into each airy loop and every inch of it bound Laurel more securely to her future. And then I began to notice how softly my father spoke around me, and how he walked as if I were recovering, as he and Perrin sometimes did, from a keg of apple brandy. The little, anxious frown seemed always in Laurel’s eyes when she looked at me. I had thought she still fretted over my stormy ramblings, but gradually I realized that my shod feet bothered her more.