Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “What is it?” she asked one afternoon, when we both sat sewing in the grey light from the window. “You’ve grown so quiet.”

  “I’m trying to be like you,” I said.

  She stared at me, amazed. “Why?” she asked finally. But I could not tell her why without telling her all the ways we differed, without painting pictures out of wind. She added, when I did not answer, “Usually by now you’ve paced a path across the ceiling, and it takes you the rest of autumn to settle muttering into winter. Or else you just go out in any weather, and come back wet as a fish, with your hands full of whatever isn’t dead. You used to love the rain.”

  “You used to worry about that,” I said shortly. There seemed no pleasing anyone.

  “Rois—”

  “I’m just trying to be civilized.”

  “But I miss the way you were.” I huffed a sigh, and she said quickly, “I mean, I miss you being happy. You are never happy, housebound. Why are you forcing yourself so?”

  “I can’t be wild all my life.” I missed a loop with my hook, aimed for it, missed again. I let lace and hook fall into my lap finally, and leaned back. Across the room, the window framed white birch, a muddy field, distant trees, looking ragged with the last of their leaves. I saw smoke rising above the trees, and I looked down quickly. Laurel, watching the same smoke, did not.

  She said slowly, “I wonder what he cooks, in there. Probably half-raw meat and burned bread.”

  “He might eat at the inn.”

  “He might eat here.” She stood up suddenly, briskly. “Tonight. You go and invite him. I’ll tell Beda.”

  “Tonight?”

  She threw a quizzical glance at me. “He must eat. And our father and Perrin like his company. Maybe he’ll tell us more about his past. Go on.”

  “But it’s raining.”

  She laughed at me incredulously. So I put my lace aside and contemplated my shoes. I hesitated; Laurel looked away discreetly.

  I decided to ride to the hall. It suited my state of mind, which, like my feet, seemed both agitated and constrained. What expression would be in his eyes when he looked at me? I wondered in terror as I sorted through them in memory: his polite lack of expression, his remote smile, the way he looked at me without seeing me, or worse, saw far too much. But riding my calm dark mare, I was armed and in disguise: shod, braided, cloaked and hooded in green wool against the rain. His first expression would be surprise.

  I rode around the ruins and found a door near the smoking chimney. I heard no noise inside. I dismounted and knocked: still nothing. I stood listening, wondering if he slept, or had ridden to the village. Then he said behind me, “Rois.”

  I whirled, my heart hammering. He walked among the old rose trees, his hair wet, leaves clinging like hands to his grey cloak. His shoulders and boots and the hem of his cloak were dark with rain; it did not seem to bother him.

  “How could you recognize me like this?” I demanded. He would only have seen the back of a hooded cloak, and a pair of boots, and he did not know my horse.

  He shrugged slightly, his eyes saying little, neither surprised nor unsurprised. “How could I not?” he asked simply.

  I did not pursue that. I didn’t want to be even more confused. I gave him Laurel’s message tonelessly, adding dourly, “She thinks you eat raw meat.”

  He smiled at that. He walked to the door then, and unlatched it. “Come in and see.”

  Surprised, I followed him.

  He had roofed two rooms and had hung a tapestry between them, a glittering fall of gold and silver thread, so ancient the threads had worn through in places, making the design dreamlike, imprecise. Roses framed it, deeply red, like old blood. The marble flagstones had been cleaned of moss and weed and half a century of grass. Some stones had broken, but he had mortared and smoothed the cracks, and scrubbed the stones to the color of old ivory. A velvet couch and a needlework chair stood beside the marble fireplace. Both trailed threads, but the dark wood had been polished until light caught in all its graceful scrolls and turns. Great raw beams spanned the ceiling above our heads; the roof, I realized, would become the underpinnings of another floor, next spring. Now rain tapped on it, soft at first, then harder, with insistent fingers, the wood wanting its own back.

  “I had those brought from where I used to live; they belonged to my mother.” He lifted the tapestry and let me see: a bed of the same dark wood, the cloths and canopy so precisely spread and hung that they seemed frozen into place, as if no one really slept there.

  I saw no dust or spiders anywhere, nor anything he might have picked up in the wood: no nuts, or bowl of apples, or bright spray of leaves. “You don’t eat raw meat,” I said. “You don’t eat anything.”

  “I eat at the inn,” he said absently.

  “And tonight?”

  He smiled again, pleased. “Yes. Of course. It was kind of you to come.”

  “Laurel asked me to.”

  I watched him pull the tapestry straight on its wooden loops. His hair was the exact gold of those pale gold threads; he seemed, for an instant, his head and arm uplifted, his shirt blending into the flickering threads, a part of the tapestry, just stepping free. I felt my throat close on words, on wonder. Have you seen the winds hunt? I wanted to ask him. Have you ever seen something as bright and heavy as gold turn into leaf by daylight? His face turned toward me then, as if he heard my thoughts; his eyes held mine.

  Again I felt their green drain through me, as if that color had become my heart’s blood. He said softly, before I could turn away, “What did you see when you ran in the wood that night?”

  I had seen his face, pale and alien and beautiful as the moon. The winds rode over me again, dark, wild, their cloaks of golden leaves, their harness forged of moonlight. I swallowed; my voice barely sounded.

  “Wind.”

  “What else?”

  “Water.”

  “What else?”

  “A leaf.”

  His eyes loosed me then; I turned away, feeling dazed. Then I cried sharply, “Nothing! I saw nothing! Why do you think I’m dressed like this?”

  “All in green,” he said softly, “on a black horse, to bid me come and eat with you.” It sounded like an old song. He added lightly, “Tell your sister I will bring wine from the inn. What do you like?”

  “Anything. Apple or blackberry. Laurel likes blackberry.”

  “Then I will bring both.” He opened the door for me. It was still raining hard, but I forgot, passing him closely, so closely I heard his drawn breath, to pull my hood up. I rode across the muddy fields blinded by water, my braids sliding loose in the wet, so that when I came into our house, dripping water and tracking mud, my hair in my eyes, Laurel finally looked familiar again.

  He came at twilight, riding his buttermilk horse. The rains fell everywhere from an iron-grey sky, silvery ribbons in the lamplight, a constant hollow sound beyond that, as if the world were slowly emptying in the dark. He brought sweet wines, one dark, one pale. We drank them with stew and salad and black bread, and then we drank more around the fire, my father’s brandy passing with the wines, while Perrin talked about his harvest, and Laurel’s lace inched down from her hook, and I sat in the shadows, watching how the shifting light in Corbet’s hair flickered silver and gold like the threads in his tapestry.

  Perrin stopped talking after a while, and began to play softly on Laurel’s flute. Laurel’s hands stilled; she raised her eyes to Corbet’s face.

  “Where did you live,” she asked, “before you came here?”

  He seemed inclined to answer; there was little, in that winey warmth, worth hiding. “In the city. In other places. My mother could afford to live where she chose. Sometimes near the sea. She loved water; moving or still, it didn’t matter.”

  “‘I loved my love by water,’” Perrin said, breaking off a note. He was getting drunk. “‘I loved my love by land. I loved my love by the green, green sea, and left her on the silver sand.’” Our father gave a ghost
ly snore. Perrin raised his flute again to play.

  “Go on,” Laurel said to Corbet. “Where did you live just before you came here? In the city?” He nodded, sipping brandy. “Is that where your father died?”

  “No,” he said, and nothing more. But his eyes, cool, still, waited for another question. Laurel asked it, leaning back, her face framed by her dark hair, by darker wood, her eyes holding his.

  “How did he die?”

  “No,” he said smoothly. “You should ask, ‘Then where did he die?’”

  “Did you love him?” I asked abruptly, and his eyes flicked to me, surprised.

  “Now that,” he said, “is a very good question. It would lay to rest any number of curses. But it will cost you an answer.”

  “To what?”

  “Any question I ask.”

  Perrin, grunting a laugh, blew a sharp note. Our father straightened, blinking. “What was the question?” he demanded sleepily. “I misheard.”

  “Nothing,” Perrin said. “Laurel and Rois are playing a game.”

  “I wasn’t,” Laurel protested. “I’m being seriously rude. Corbet is changing it into a game.”

  Corbet smiled at her over his glass. “Truth is a simple place reached by many different roads. I will tell you, but you won’t believe me. My father is still living, but for understandable reasons he never wants to return to Lynn Hall. He married late in life; my mother died young. I inherited her fortune, and with my father’s blessing I came to repair the hall and the land. With his blessing. Not his curse.”

  We were silent. I glanced at Laurel; she didn’t believe him, either. “You told Crispin your father was dead,” I said.

  “I did not. Crispin assumed he was dead, since I returned to claim Lynn Hall.”

  “You let us all assume,” Laurel protested.

  “I didn’t intend to,” he answered gently. “It’s just that no one asked me. And I was too busy to listen to gossip.”

  “It’s a truth,” I said after a moment. “Are there different truths, the way there are different curses?” I could feel the dark sweet wine pulsing through me; I had drunk too much, and it made me reckless. His eyes changed as he looked from Laurel to me; they withheld answers, emotions, held only secrets. “Or,” I continued, “is each curse a different truth?”

  Laurel laughed. “Rois, you’re making no sense! Ask something he can answer, so we can understand.”

  “Yes,” he said to her, and my breath stopped; he had answered me. I drank more wine.

  “You ask,” I said to Laurel, dazed by too much truth, and suddenly afraid. I wanted to hide myself in shadows the way I had hidden myself in leaves that night. But he saw through the shadows into fear: A smile, distant and cold as a star, surfaced in his eyes.

  Laurel saw the smile differently; an answering smile touched her lips. He was a challenge to her, a teasing puzzle, something to unravel in the winter evenings, as long as he spun his riddles out. She contemplated him a moment, while Perrin played softly beside her, then asked, “Did your grandfather really curse your father?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, and I saw his fingers tighten a little on his glass.

  “And you?” she persisted. “Are you cursed?”

  He looked at her without answering, until her eyes widened slightly and dropped. Perrin had stopped playing; he waited, curious, for an answer.

  “I am cursed,” Corbet said, “with a leaky fireplace, mutton four times a week at the inn, a horse stabled in my woodshed, weeds to the horizon everywhere I look, autumn falling into all the roofless rooms of my house, and winter waiting to take up lodging after it.”

  “You could leave,” Laurel said softly, her brows crooked. “Come back in spring. Why don’t you?”

  “I have chosen to stay.”

  Our father stirred from his nap again, probably listening for the silent flute. “Good,” he exclaimed, having caught a word here and there in his dreams. “Mutton, four times a week, that’s terrible. You must come and eat with us, as often as you like. Come for the company.” His affable smile, fat and warm as our beeswax candles, flashed at me a moment, then back to Corbet. “For the company,” he repeated. “The winter nights grow old and thin and threadbare very fast, when you’re alone.”

  Corbet rose. “Thank you.”

  “I mean it—you tell him, Laurel. See to it he comes.”

  “I will,” she said, laughing. “If only to plague him with more questions, until he tells us the simple truth.”

  “I have told you,” he protested. But she did not listen to him. I listened, but I had heard nothing simple at all.

  He bade us good night. I left Laurel and Perrin talking, and went to bed. Sometime in the night he stood in my dreams, watching me out of his secret eyes, and I woke, shaken, still feeling his gaze in the dark.

  Seven

  I went to Lynn Hall again a few days later. I walked, but I wore shoes to leave at his threshold so he would find no wet footprints on his marble flagstones. The early rains had stopped. I had seen him riding out of the wood toward the village, a distant figure but recognizable to me in that unerring way your eyes find the one face you love or hate in the midst of a crowd. Sun broke between the thunderheads. Sheets of water on the muddy fields mirrored light, blue sky, great billows of cloud whipped to an airy froth, burning and paling as the sun passed in and out of them. I smelled wet bark, earth, rotting apples. Sun glittered everywhere in the rain-flecked wood. I caught drops on my fingertips, drank them from bare branches. My shoes and the hem of my cloak were drenched by the time I reached the hall. I left them on the doorstep and drew up my damp skirt in one hand as I opened the door.

  I was looking for his past.

  Except for a few smoldering coals on the grate, the place looked as if time never crossed that threshold. Was that, I wondered, where his grandfather had died? Beside his skinflint fire in the dead of winter? I searched the floor for a dulled shadow of blood; all I saw were the faint patterns the lichens left. I shifted the tapestry aside so that light fell into the small bedchamber. A chest beside the bed held clothes; the washstand held its bowl and pitcher, a razor folded into a handle of horn, a silver mirror. The mirror gave me back my face. Some part of me had hoped to find his face reflected there. The razor nicked me when I opened it; I put my finger in my mouth, caught my blood. I opened the bed curtains, drew back the fine wool blankets; I could not find, even in those soft linens, the imprint of his body.

  I searched more carefully. He had left no trace of himself, not a single gold hair, not a smudged thumbprint on the polished wood. Perhaps he was unnaturally tidy. Or perhaps he did not sleep there. Perhaps he did not sleep.

  Doors, he had said to me at Crispin’s wedding. Thresholds. Places of passage.

  I had not asked him what he meant; he had not wondered that I knew. He had seen me watching him when he passed between worlds. I had not questioned him. I wondered suddenly, intensely, what I knew, what I had stolen into his house to find. A bed that by night was a pile of leaves, a tapestry that hung between worlds, a bowl that held no water, a mirror that reflected… What?

  I felt something shake through me: a premonition, a vision. But the mirror held no answers; it reflected only what I saw. I paced impatiently between the rooms, wanting to peel the masks of things away, find out what they hid. A razor, but no soap. A mirror, but no comb. Clothes, but no shoes. I straightened the bed, closed the razor, pulled the tapestry into place. I stood a moment, studying it. The ancient threads suggested faces, shapes, but only if you did not look straight at them. They vanished into formlessness, if you searched, like patterns in smoke.

  Doors. Thresholds. Passages.

  Unless he came and went through the chimney, I could see no hint of a life lived between worlds, only a life lived in an eccentric fashion for any world. Perhaps, I thought bemusedly, he slept in the woodshed, and kept his soap beside a stream.

  Or he slept, as he ate, at the inn.

  I left finally, having exh
austed conjecture as well as his sparse evidence. Wind rattling through bare branches shook raindrops on my head. I lifted my face for more; it was as close as I could come to tasting wind. Halls and palaces drifted overhead, following the sun. Had he come from such an elusive kingdom? I wondered, and then: Why would he have left it?

  Not for a ruined hall on land the wood had claimed. Not for any mortal maid; I was the first he saw, and he had not come for me.

  I wandered to the well. Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart. I pushed the faded vines aside and dipped my hand into the water. Wind rippled it, and my splashing; it would not give me my reflection. But it tasted of those great dreaming clouds, and of the bright winds and broken pieces of blue sky its trembling waters caught.

  It tasted of the last sun before winter.

  When I passed the hall again, on its blind side, I saw smoke blowing from the chimney, and his mare standing at the door, big, dark-eyed, still, as if she had just taken shape from something else waiting at the door, or had appeared too quickly from some place far away. I saw her look at me. But Corbet did not come out, and I slipped quickly and quietly away before he thought of me and I saw his eyes again inside my head.

  Laurel laughed at me when I returned, windblown and muddy; she would not have laughed if she knew where I had gone.

  I went to the village the next day, to take old Leta Gett some teas for pain and sleeplessness. Her hip had mended, but it still ached; the cold weather fretted her bones, and brought small ailments, one after another, like passing storms. She was grateful for the tea. Caryl brewed us both a cup, and left us, grateful for a moment to herself. Leta Gett’s face was a little withered moon, with restless black eyes, and soft ivory hair so fine it slid out of pins and braids. She loved to talk when she was not in too much pain. She rambled through memory as you would wander from room to room in an old house you once lived in, filling it with stories: This happened here, and this here. Maybe they did, maybe you only wished they had; wishes blur so easily into truth. So I said his name. I tossed it like a pebble into a pond, and watched the ripples.