Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Perrin moved abruptly; so did the horses. “Don’t say that,” he said sharply. “Don’t toss me away so cheaply. Neither of us has a wayward heart. We love what we love and that’s that. That’s why you should wait, test whatever this is you think is love—”

  She brought the reins down hard then, and he lurched backward. He loosed the horses; she turned them, edged them around him until they faced the road and she had brought the sleigh up to where he stood.

  “Love is what we say it is,” she said fiercely. “That’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows about it. I’m sorry.”

  He must have seen something in her face, some breath of indecision, in spite of everything. He said recklessly, “Then let’s hear what Corbet Lynn knows about it,” and pulled himself into the sleigh beside her, even as she brought the reins down again, and the runners sheared a path out of the yard toward Lynn Hall.

  I went back to bed. I heard my father’s heavy tread on the stairs, slower and quieter than usual, even through my dreams. It stopped at my door. I woke again, near dusk, and heard him talking to Beda. I sat up and finished my cold tea, still listening, but I heard no other voices. The relentless pain in my head had finally subsided. My thoughts cleared enough to show me what I had to do in the next moment at least, which was to go downstairs and talk to my father before Salish’s tale, transformed into who knew what wonders on its way through the village, got to him before I did.

  I found him beside the fire, brooding over his cold pipe. He looked startled at my wild hair, my red eyes, but he lifted one arm bravely and I sat next to him, dropped my head against his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” I said wearily.

  “Sorry! Sorry can’t speak to this. You could have died out there.”

  “I know.”

  “Laurel said you were dreaming—walking in your sleep. How could anyone sleep through that kind of weather?”

  “Is she back yet?”

  He shook his head, chewed hard on his pipe a moment. “She went off to look for Corbet,” he said finally, “with Perrin along for the ride. Corbet Lynn.” He didn’t like it, but he could not say why. “Did you see that coming?”

  “From the first.”

  “I never saw it coming… Maybe Perrin is right,” he added without hope. “Maybe it will blow itself out by spring.”

  “Maybe. If she finds Corbet.”

  “Oh, he’s around somewhere.” He cheered up a little. “Maybe with some other woman. How far could anyone have got to in that storm?”

  “Maybe,” I said again. I shifted, wondering how to begin. “Did you see Salish this morning?”

  “Salish? No. Laurel said he found you.”

  “He found me, yes. He also—he also found a stranger in Lynn Hall. On the hearth. He was—he died there.”

  My father’s arm slackened on my shoulders. He pulled back a little, staring at me. “What?”

  “Corbet Lynn was gone. Someone died in his house last night. Salish left me here and went into the village to get the apothecary—”

  “What?” His voice rose. “What are you talking about? Laurel didn’t say—”

  “Laurel didn’t know. I didn’t tell her. My head hurt, I couldn’t think, and there was nothing she could have done—”

  “Who died? How did he die?”

  “I don’t—it looked like an accident. He might have fallen and hit his head on the stones. He was—”

  “Did you see it happen?”

  “No. I woke and he was there beside me on the floor.”

  “What are you telling me?” my father demanded sharply. “That someone died beside you while you were sleeping and you never noticed? Where was Corbet during all this? Some stranger walked into his house while he was away and dropped dead on his hearth? In the middle of a blizzard?”

  “So it—” I paused, trying to swallow my own tale. “That’s what it seemed—”

  The door opened abruptly; Laurel came in, with Perrin close behind her. She didn’t bother taking off her snow-crusted cloak; she came to us quickly, dripping and shivering, her eyes luminous and strained from trying to see beyond the world.

  “Rois.” She gripped my hands. “What exactly did you dream?”

  The blood pounded into my head; her face blurred. I told her what she already knew. “That he left Lynn Hall.”

  “You didn’t find Corbet,” our father said flatly. Perrin shook his head.

  “The place is cold, the stable is empty.” He stopped, started again. “It seems there was an accident—”

  “I know—Rois has been—he’s not in the village?”

  Laurel put a hand to her mouth. “No.” Her voice shook badly; kneeling close to the fire, she still shivered. “He’s nowhere. He didn’t even leave a message—”

  “He just left a dead man on his hearth? Did anyone recognize him? He must have had a horse, belongings with him. Nobody wanders around on foot in a blizzard. Except Rois.”

  “He didn’t—there was nothing…” Perrin’s voice trailed away again; he shook his head, his mouth tight. My father asked again,

  “Did anyone recognize him?”

  “Well—that’s just it. He must be some relation to Corbet, though they don’t look at all alike.” I stared at Perrin, amazed. “A brother, maybe, or a cousin, which makes things messier. But—”

  “But what?” my father pleaded.

  For once in his life, Perrin seemed reluctant to share gossip, even in the dead of winter, when there was nothing else to do. “Well, you know how news runs through the village, especially when everyone’s out shoveling after a storm. But the oldest swear that’s who surfaced out of their past to die where his father died—it’s who he must look like, anyway—”

  My father’s face smoothed in utter astonishment. “You can’t mean—”

  “Nial Lynn’s son.”

  In the silence, Laurel got to her feet unsteadily. Perrin reached out to her, but she did not notice. She went to the window, stood staring out. I saw the tears in her eyes finally melt, catch light as they slid down her face. She made no move to brush at them; she made no sound. She stood there, watching for Corbet, while Perrin watched her, and I heard the deadly winds ride toward us across the fields.

  Seventeen

  All night I heard them call me. In my dreams they cried my name in Corbet’s voice; awake, in the dark, I listened to her voice, the whisper of snow against glass, the murmuring and sudden, furious whine in the eaves. Sometimes I heard Laurel’s quiet, disconsolate weeping weaving into the winds, until it sounded as if she were out among them, a ghost of herself, mourning another ghost. I realized, in those black hours, that I didn’t know if Corbet was alive or dead. He had threatened; she had said… But it was Tearle’s body that she had left for us to find in the dead of winter, wearing his cursed, ambiguous face, trouble for Corbet to explain in our world if he managed to escape the trouble in hers.

  I had to find him. I had gone into her world and come out of it once; I could do it again, though I didn’t know how, or where, or what she would do when she saw me, except smile with her sharp white teeth and break my heart like a bone between them.

  In the morning, I found Laurel at the same window, watching the motionless fields. If I hadn’t heard her sobbing in her bed, I would have thought she had been there all night. Her pale, still face, her wide eyes that had always seemed to gaze beyond the world, frightened me; this emptiness was what they had found at last. She looked spellbound by Corbet’s absence, even more surely than she had been by his presence. But our father, coming in from milking, only shook his head and refrained from calling her to breakfast.

  “It’s the shock,” he said to me. He looked hollow-eyed himself, with daughters and neighbors disappearing in the night, a stranger with a face out of the past dying in a cursed house, lovers quarrelling, and whatever apple brandy he had drunk to comfort himself burning behind his eyes. He added, “At least when she tried to send Perrin away, he had more sense than to go.”r />
  I took my eyes away from the pale, still face of winter watching Laurel, and stared at my oatcakes, trying to think of some excuse to leave the house.

  “I should go to the apothecary’s,” I said finally, “while the weather is holding.”

  He lifted his head sharply. “What for?”

  “Something I need for Laurel. It will help her sleep. She can’t go on like this.”

  “She’ll get over it, and you’ve got every tea and root and dried weed—”

  “He sends for things I can’t find.”

  “No.”

  “He may have news of Corbet. They may have found out who the stranger is.”

  He hesitated, as curious as anyone; his “No” came with less conviction. He must have seen that I would go, anyway; I would walk if I could not ride, I would go barefoot if he hid my boots. How far I would go, he did not want to ask. He pointed his fork at me.

  “I want you there and back in the same morning and in the same set of tracks.”

  I lied; he was suspicious. But it was better, he must have thought, than having two daughters waiting mute and red-eyed at the window for a man who might be anywhere. He watched me turn the sleigh down the road toward the village instead of across the field to Lynn Hall. I watched half a dozen sleighs laying tracks toward the hall, overladen with searchers, snowshoes, and more than likely the beer they hadn’t finished through the night. They were looking for the path the wind had taken, I could have told them—the place where roses bloomed in snow. But they would never listen to me; they would go on searching snowdrifts for a man frozen to death in a storm, or his horse, or the stranger’s horse and his possessions, or any scrap of his cloak to tell them that he had not really wandered out of summer into Lynn Hall.

  Blane, the apothecary, looked surprised to see me. “What are you doing out of bed?” he asked. “Salish said he found you nearly frozen on a slab of marble; he thought you had died, too.”

  “I came back,” I said tiredly. He eyed me closely, but did not ask from where. “I need something for Laurel.”

  “Laurel?”

  “Is there any news of Corbet?” Maybe, I thought without hope, she had cast him adrift in time and winter, to account on human terms for the dead man in his house. Blane shook his head.

  “Nothing. But they’ve barely begun to search. What’s wrong with Laurel?”

  “She’s having trouble sleeping.”

  He grunted and finished straining a tincture into a bottle. “She’s not the only one. I’ve had all the old folk in the village who can still walk in here this morning, wanting to tell me their nightmares, wanting potions and gossip, wanting to see the face of the man they think they recognize after fifty years.”

  My eyes slid past him to the closed door of the room where he examined the dead and prepared them for burial. I felt my eyes burn, and swallowed words because I could not say them, and sorrow because she left him for us to bury in the smallest room, in a world he hated. Maybe she had kept his ghost.

  “Rois. Do you want to see him again? Is there something you need to tell?”

  I looked at Blane. His lean face was ageless in a birdlike way, without a line to spare on it. His eyes, pale and cool, had seen our lives by daylight and by the dark of the moon; there was nothing that he hadn’t heard by now. Almost nothing. And I knew exactly what would go into the potion he would make me if I told him.

  “No,” I sighed. “I wish I could be more help. I heard they think it’s Corbet’s brother.”

  “That’s not what they think, the oldest of them.” He corked his bottle and picked up wax to seal it. “They think it’s Corbet’s father. And that Corbet killed him and fulfilled the curse and vanished.”

  “But—”

  “I know, it makes no sense, but the oldest memories are the clearest, at that age, and they all remember Nial Lynn’s tormented son. There’s no getting around one dead man in Lynn Hall and another vanished: an echo out of the past.”

  I asked hollowly, “Did you find signs that he was murdered?”

  He shrugged slightly, baffled. “He may have been struck before he fell. Maybe his heart stopped and he hit his head falling. There are no other signs of violence. Maybe he simply did not get out of the cold fast enough… He came out of the storm, saw your embers, left the door open behind him and fainted on the hearth. The wind got in, threw a few things around, and Salish found you both. It could be that simple. Except—”

  “Except.”

  “Where on earth is Corbet? And if he did kill the stranger, why didn’t he just bury the body in the woodpile until spring? We’d all be sleeping better.”

  “What are you going to do with the body? The only place you can bury him, with all this snow, is in the family vault with Nial Lynn.”

  The apothecary snorted. “I’m not going to put anyone wearing that face in with Nial Lynn. I wouldn’t trust either of them to stay dead. I’ll put him in the icehouse out back. Someone will most likely come looking for him soon and solve our mystery for us.” He turned, set the tincture on the shelf behind him. “Now, what can I give you for Laurel? What have I got that you haven’t?”

  A bottle with the apothecary’s seal on it, was what he had. The potion in it might work better, he said, than the same thing pulled out of the cupboard at home.

  I thanked him and went home by way of Lynn Hall.

  Snow on the fields was churned by tracks of horses and sleighs, but I heard no voices; the searchers had gone deep into the wood. The hall was silent and bitterly cold. Except for the dead, nothing had been touched. Candles and shards of glass still littered the floor; the frozen splash of blood shadowed the white marble. I paced on broken glass, shivering and trying to see through stone, to make it shift under my eyes into another world. I could see nothing beyond this one. The tapestry between the rooms caught at my attention, its pale, glittering threads suggesting patterns, landscapes, faces, that you could only glimpse out of the corner of your eye; they vanished into formlessness when you looked at them. I stared at it for a long time, trying to see into it, beyond it, to the place where I last saw it hanging above the mantel. Finally, impatiently, I pushed it aside.

  She was there, waiting, in her winter wood. Her head swiveled on her shoulders like an owl’s and I froze, stunned by the eerie movement. Her eyes caught mine; I felt my bones change shape. I was the mouse in the shadow of the owl’s wing; I was snow drifting to her winds.

  Come, they said, come, the winds that harvested dead leaves and froze the birds in flight. Come with us. You belong with us.

  I could barely remember a human language. My lips were made of ice; they spoke ice instead of sound. Corbet formed between us, a glittering question.

  He is waiting, her winds answered. Come.

  I felt them pull at me, felt myself fray into them. But they had not told me if he was among her living or her dead. I pulled my bones out of the snow, shrugged my skin back over them, and saw her again, wild and beautiful, with her feral, dangerous smile, and her eyes like midsummer night.

  “I want to see him.” Even human, I could barely speak; words chattered piecemeal out of me. “I want to talk to him.”

  Somewhere behind me a door opened. Wind snarled; a white owl flew into a pale shimmer of light. I saw pristine folds of linen, the empty washbasin that held nothing, not even dust.

  I let the tapestry close, and turned. Snow fell lightly over me, burned away like falling stars. I recognized Perrin’s voice before the white mist faded and he caught me and I could see his face.

  “Rois!” He opened his cloak, tried to bundle me under it. “What are you doing back here? You’re like ice—”

  “I was looking—” I had to stop, shudder something colder than the air out of me: the splinter of ice, maybe, that she had left in my heart. “I was looking for something—”

  “Laurel went all through this place,” he said grimly. “She didn’t find a word. Can you drive home alone? Or shall I take you back?”
/>   “I’ll drive. I’m all right. What are you doing here?”

  “Searching the wood. I saw your sleigh.”

  “Has anyone found anything?”

  “Just more snow.” His mouth tightened, holding back words. I saw the sudden bleakness in his eyes and wondered what he hoped to find: a body for Laurel to grieve over, or a silence that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. “And more of that on its way,” he added finally, “just so things won’t be too easy for us.” He paused, his eyes straying over the scraps of story we were left with: the broken glass, the bloody hearth. I felt a shiver run through him, as if she had laid an icy finger on him. “It happened all over again,” he breathed. “If you think about it the wrong way. Best get home, girl, before you freeze here and start haunting this place along with Nial Lynn.”

  I gave Laurel a stiff dose of the apothecary’s potion that night, but still I fell asleep to her soft weeping. I found Corbet in my dreams, not where he might be, but in a time and place I wished we could return to. He stood again in that golden fall of summer light beside the rose vines, a slightly darker shade of gold, barely formed yet, something mysterious happening in a streak of sunlight that you would miss if you glanced at it and away, and not back again. The scent of roses hung in the still air, sweet and heavy, slowing time until summer seemed to stop, even in my dream, just at that moment: when I knew he was coming but just before I saw his face.

  I woke in the dark with tears on my face, still smelling roses. I heard winter howling across the fields, singing in the eaves, casting some incomprehensible enchantment around the house. Down the hall, both Beda and my father snored, one frugally, fussily, the other in explosive, brandy-soaked mutterings. Through all that, one faint sound stopped my heart: Laurel, awake or weeping in her dreams for Corbet.

  By morning we were cut off from the world; not even gossip could reach us. I stayed close to the fire with Laurel. Our father, shovelling out the cow stalls, came in for an occasional mouthful of brandy against the cold. He smelled of cows and wind; he molted snow as he stood at the fire, great crusts that he kicked into the hearth with boots tufted with frozen, dirty snow. Each time he came in, he would cast an absent glance at Laurel, worried without knowing it. She would lift the linen in her fingers and add a stitch. Each time he went out, she would let her sewing fall and stare out the window. Her face seemed calm, despite her swollen eyes, but it was pale as whey, and she had eaten almost nothing. I had no idea what she was making; neither, I suspected, did she.