Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Perrin left early; Laurel walked him to the door. It had stopped snowing; the moonlight tossed uneasy shadows on the silvery ground. Perrin brushed Laurel’s lips with his; his eyes asked a wordless question. She seemed to have no answer; he turned away quickly. She watched him ride out of the yard. I lifted my face to the milky sky, but nothing rode that moonlit path to earth.

  I asked Laurel later, when we turned down the lamps and banked the fire, “What will you do?”

  The fierceness in her voice startled me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I do not know.” She put a lamp down and opened a curtain, gazing at the moon above Corbet’s wood. Her eyes glittered with tears of frustration, bewilderment; she gripped my wrist hard, as if she were falling, and looked at me finally. I did not recognize the expression on her face. “It’s so hard to think in winter. The world seems confined in the space of your heart; you can’t see beyond yourself. How can I change in a season what I have wanted for years? How can I bear to hurt Perrin?”

  I was silent, chilled, remembering the rustling of the ivy in that room, those cold winter eyes. “You must wait,” I forced myself to say, “until spring.” Until the curse is past, I wanted to say. Until we find the path out of the wood. She listened to me, her eyes wide, intent, as if she thought I had pulled up wisdom along with the mandrake root. “You’ll think more clearly then. And you’ll know Corbet better.”

  She gazed at me, her fingers still tight on my wrist. “Rois,” she whispered, and kissed me swiftly. I felt my throat burn. I shrugged impatiently, looking at candlelight, the moon, the white fields, anything but her face.

  “It’s you he wants. Not me. I know that. I have always known. But you must wait.”

  “How can I?” she demanded. “How can I sit night after night making lace for a wedding with a man I don’t know if I can—”

  “Hush,” I breathed, hearing our father’s step above our heads.

  “And how can I tell him? Our father?”

  “Don’t. Don’t tell him anything, not yet. You hardly know Corbet. He’s a stranger; he’ll catch at all our eyes until we’re used to him, and by then maybe you’ll—”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know him,” I insisted. “He could hurt you.”

  She was silent again, her eyes wide, dark. “I know,” she whispered, surprising me again. “He is such a mystery. He could pick my heart like a rose and watch it wither in his hand. Sometimes I think he is like that. At other times I think he is as simple and golden and generous as our father’s fields. And then I see things in his eyes—things that I have never looked at, and I know that I have walked a short and easy road out of my past, while he has walked a thousand roads to meet me. I know Perrin’s past; the same road runs into his future. I don’t know Corbet. But I feel his hand upon my heart, and I wake wanting to say his name. I don’t know, Rois, how much longer I can wait.”

  The hard winds sang their way into my dreams again that night. Long, white, insistent fingers of snow brushed against the window glass until I saw the storm out of memory, snow falling endlessly, hiding the moon, the earth, and any footprints in the frozen ground. Come to us, the winds called. Come. And I rose and saw the light from Lynn Hall flickering like a star among the wind harrowed trees.

  So I went there, walking through that wild storm, scarcely feeling it, finding my way by the light I watched, the lodestar in the screaming night. Winds shook me apart piecemeal, flung a bone here, a bone there. My eyes became snow, my hair turned to ice; I heard it chime against my shoulders like wind-blown glass. If I spoke, words would fall from me like snow, pour out of me like black wind.

  As I drew close to the light in the wood, I began to hear the words they spoke. Fear sharper than the cold shook through me, but I had to see, I had to know the path that Corbet Lynn had taken out of the world.

  Winds shaped their voices—one desperate, wild, passionate, the other silken and biting, a blade of ice. Winds swirled into words; I did not want to hear them, but there was no place to hide, no haven but one from the storm they made between them.

  You will never leave me, said the silken wind.

  I am leaving you. Now. Watch me.

  You will die out there.

  You are colder than any winter night. You are more cruel than any wind.

  I will not let you leave. The door will not open for you. The window will not break. There is no way out of here.

  My mother found a way.

  Wind roared through the dark; I caught a straining tree and clung to it. Birch, its smooth, papery bark told my cheek. I closed my eyes, felt the sting of snow against them, and heard a sound like ice shattering.

  Then the winds died. Trees stood in a silence like the silence on the face of the moon. I turned, bewildered at first, then desperate; as I stumbled through the snow, the light seemed to move to meet me. And then the wind struck again, with terrible, icy force; I felt its bitterness in the hollows of my bones.

  You will never find your way out of my heart.

  The door opened; firelight fluttered across the threshold into the snow-streaked winds. I watched, trembling like the frail wings of light. A figure leaned against the doorway. I heard his uneven breathing, saw him racked with winds. He did not notice me as I crept out of the night into his shadow. His eyes clung to all the pale, beautiful riders in the wind.

  Come, they said.

  A horse as white as buttermilk came out of the dark, stood before him, looking at him out of still, onyx eyes. He mounted it. Then he bent down low, his hand outstretched to me.

  “Rois,” he said. I saw the color of his hair.

  I drew myself up behind him, held him as tightly as any brier rose.

  We rode into the winter wood.

  Fifteen

  I thought I knew what cold was, before cold stripped me bare of thought, then blinded me and froze my heart. I could not feel such cold and live; cold forced me into something other, something not quite human, who held a dream with bones of ice, and did not remember names, only what we once had been: a flower on a vine, a fall of light.

  When I began to see again, as wind sees, or the moon, I had drawn cold as close to me as death. I did not feel it now, any more than ice feels the falling snow. Again I saw the elusive faces of wind and shadow, the wild riders of the night. An enchanted wood flowed past us. Trees, embraced by ice, spangled the night with whorls of crystal branches. The odd leaf that still hung on them flashed silver or gold like some strange jewel that only grew on trees, and only in the coldest night. Streams forged paths of wind-scoured silver through the snow, that grew harder, brighter, as we passed. Snow hares froze in our wake; the fox and weasel in their winter coats grew even whiter. We left no path for human eyes to follow beyond swirling, misty ribbons of snow. No one human watched us ride. Only the white owls saw us; only they followed.

  Then we rode out of the heart of winter into light.

  Light fashioned me into something more nearly human, and gave me back my memory. I had hair again, and skin; I had a name. But it could not reach my heart, still frozen by that cold, cold journey. I saw meadows and trees burning a young, fiery green, as if leaves had just opened, as if green itself had never existed before. I breathed heavy, golden air that might have pooled all summer over roses blooming in every color on a hundred trees. But I saw winter just beneath that scent, that green; I felt it just beneath my skin, and I didn’t know anymore what I was, or if I was alive.

  We had gone everywhere and nowhere; we had ridden from Lynn Hall to Lynn Hall. But in this unfamiliar country, the house was as I had only seen it in a dream. The buttermilk mare, following a single hooded rider on a horse as black as nothing, brought us back to the door we had left. Other riders flowed away from us, making little more noise than leaves; they went elsewhere, into the wood, maybe, or back into the wind. The hooded rider dismounted at the door; so did Corbet, slipping suddenly out of my hands. I felt something tear at my heart then, as if it had broken from the cold. />
  “Corbet,” I whispered, as he turned toward the stranger. “Where are we?”

  He looked up at me, his eyes empty of all expression; he seemed as far from me as he could go without leaving me. “This is the place where I was born.”

  The hooded rider loosed his cloak, shrugged it away from him like some winter skin, and I saw his face.

  Stunned, I felt his name in my throat, though I had only seen him in a dream, or in other people’s memories. His face had shed its childhood by a dozen years, grown leaner, harder. But I recognized that long dark hair, those eyes as grey as fieldstone that changed like water changes with every shift of cloud. He must have worn that face when he fled out of time after he killed Nial Lynn; it had been honed to an inhuman beauty and trapped there. I heard Corbet draw breath slowly, as if to still a fear, or gather calm against a storm.

  “Welcome home,” his father said, and went up the steps into the house. Corbet turned away from me, left me his shadow to follow.

  Doors were flung wide in this house; nothing was barred, nothing nailed shut. Rooms wandered into other rooms; light spilled through silk and linen, gilding marble floors. The summer breeze scattered the scents of roses, grasses, wildflowers everywhere. I heard voices in the garden, laughing, speaking lightly; I could not hear the words; perhaps I couldn’t understand them. Inside the house, I heard steps, a call, a door opening, closing. I saw no one.

  Corbet stood in front of a familiar hearth. I went to him, wanting fire, or at least a little human warmth. But the grate was cold and gleaming, and the barest recognition was all I got from him. Roses the color of new blood lay carelessly on the mantel behind him. Above us hung a tapestry of silver and gold and palest green that in my world had faded into white: a great oak so entwined with ivy it had died, its bare branches pushing through the leaves like bone. I stared at the roses, wanting to hold my hands to such red, but like the light, they burned cold.

  Air above the empty, polished grate ignited suddenly; I stepped back, startled, and turned to see Tearle Lynn close his hand and let it fall.

  “She is trembling,” he said to Corbet.

  “In her world, it is still winter.”

  “She should have left cold behind her.”

  “It isn’t easy,” Corbet said. “I tried.”

  His father made a soft noise, part laughter, part contempt; his eyes grew nearly black with bitterness. “You could have gone anywhere. Why did you waste time in the past?”

  “I couldn’t find my way out of it.” He spoke steadily, evenly, but his face was colorless as bone. He watched his father carefully, as if Tearle might vanish and reappear out of Corbet’s shadow; as if he might lift a careless hand across the room and crack the stone at Corbet’s back. “You never did.”

  Tearle shifted restively, a young man’s protest against a meaningless argument. “The human world is a cold and bitter place; nothing lasts in it. You must know that by now. You were nearly trapped there in its deadliest season. What did you imagine you were doing in those two rooms? Trying to turn yourself human?”

  “Yes,” Corbet said, so simply that for a breath he rendered his father incapable of moving. Then Tearle brushed away the noise his son had made, and paced a step or two.

  “You have learned better, I hope. In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built; the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away; light slides endlessly into night; fire and love consume themselves; the heart tries to warm itself with ashes. I brought you up in a world of changeless beauty. I could understand more easily if you had lingered for human love in a place that made some feeble attempt to reflect this. But instead you found the rotting bones of Nial’s house and crawled into his heart. Why? You knew we would come for you when you stayed too long. Why did you force me to find you there? What did you think you would find among my memories?”

  Corbet’s hands clenched suddenly on nothing. He whispered, “Hope.”

  “There?” his father demanded incredulously. His voice had risen only slightly, but something—anger or fear—snapped through the air around him. “The only hope I found in that house was death.”

  “How like mortals,” Corbet breathed, “to confuse the two.” Then his rigid face broke open, freeing expressions I had never seen; words, shaken loose by his father’s storm, came out of him in a sudden, desperate cry. “I hoped for something true! Something from my hands, from my heart, not Nial’s, not yours. I wanted to rebuild this house in the human world, with time, with earth, with new wood—”

  “Why? When you have this house already, and in this world?”

  “It’s not mine, it’s not yours; it’s Nial Lynn’s cold, cruel, loveless house—you brought everything he gave you with you when you ran.”

  “I brought nothing with me from that world!”

  “Yes! You brought nothing! That was all he gave you!” Tearle opened his mouth to answer; nothing came out. He looked astonished, as if Corbet himself had spun the soft summer air into lightning. “This is still Nial’s house. You don’t feel the cold here because that’s all you ever knew. You learned no human warmth from him, you only glimpsed it in others’ faces, beside other fires that warmed more than the air they touched. In the end you ran to what you knew best, instead of into the human world, where no one would have blamed you—”

  “No one helped me when he was alive,” Tearle said. “And when he died, I no longer needed help.” His eyes were very wide, a silvery sheen flashing across the grey, like ice or tears. There were warnings in his tense muscles, in his brittle words. “I left that world, and all I could of memory, behind me. Here I dreamed the house that Nial hated, opened the doors and rooms he nailed shut, and found a human who had fled her world to live with me—”

  “Did she truly escape what she ran from when she ran here to you? Or is that why she died so young here, because, like you, she found her only hope in death?”

  His father did not answer in words; he barely moved. Corbet flung back his head abruptly, a sound breaking out of him; the imprint of a hand left a thorn of blood beside his mouth.

  “Your mother came to me freely,” Tearle said fiercely. “She stayed here freely—”

  “No one does.” Corbet’s voice shook. “Look at the price you paid to come here. You took your father’s life, now you have his house and all his power. My mother died of winter in this summer world, and so will any mortal maid die who follows me here expecting human love. That’s why I tried to stay in the human world, why I tried to love there. But—”

  “Is that all I gave you?” Tearle took a step toward Corbet, looking unexpectedly lost, as if he had finally stumbled onto the twisted path his son travelled. “Is that all I gave your mother?”

  Corbet drew breath to answer. Then he closed his eyes and drew breath again. “Why do you think I left this place?” he whispered. “Why do you think I left? You gave us all you could. You gave me a glimpse of all you really wanted, and where I might go to find it. I tried to find that place, I tried to build a house, love a woman in the world where things are always dying, and there is never enough time. But all I did was rebuild Nial Lynn’s house, and open his door, and find you waiting to take me back.”

  Without moving, Tearle stepped into human time; I saw the young boy’s eyes, filled with terrible, hopeless longing for what he saw but never had. Then he opened a hand, slapped the memory away with the power that had replaced hope. Corbet stood motionless, holding his father’s gaze, while all around us and above us doors and windows closed, echoing one another through the house like a long roll of thunder. Wind roiled through the ivy in the tapestry; I heard leaves chatter.

  “I know that world too well,” Tearle said succinctly. “And you have learned too much.”

  “You knew—” Corbet stopped, started again, hopelessly. “You knew a piece of it.”

  “All anyone ever knows, in that timebound place. You will stay here.” His eyes flicked to me. “She will stay with you. Whate
ver she is. She has followed you this far out of her world. But she hasn’t followed you blindly. She has our eyes. Perhaps,” he added grimly, “being more than mortal, she will not confuse death with hope.”

  I felt the ice again, beneath my skin, at the core of my thoughts. I tried to shape words; they eluded me. There were too many, or too few, to answer what I thought I had heard. Corbet, gripping stone, seemed to have the same trouble untangling words.

  “No,” he said breathlessly. “She cannot stay.”

  “Why not? She’s here. She has eyes that see beyond the human world; she must have inherited them from someone. As I did. And you. She didn’t stray here out of innocence. She was looking for this place.”

  “I wasn’t—” I began, but I heard the lie before I finished. I had searched for it, behind the tapestry, within the reflection in the razor’s edge. I had known… My hands lifted, reaching for Corbet, for mortal flesh and bone. But his hand slid from the mantel; he moved away from the hearth and my fingers closed on air before I touched him. He went to Tearle, each step on the gleaming marble sounding longer than the last, until it seemed he had crossed some vast wasteland to reach his father. “This place is very beautiful,” he said softly. “And you did give me something of great value. You gave me a dream to take with me into the human world. You gave me far more than your father ever gave you. But I can’t stay here. You fought for your freedom and won a different kind of prison. I will fight for mine—”