Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  I watched for owls in the snow-streaked wind. Laurel watched for Corbet. Sometimes memories formed out of the snow instead of owls. I would see Tearle’s face untouched by time, see myself standing with Corbet in his father’s dream of Lynn Hall, and I would feel a spidery chill of fear and wonder glide over me, that I had gone so far out of the human world and come back. She has our eyes, Tearle had said. She has our eyes. She must have inherited them from someone. Wordless questions clamored in me; I did not know what to ask, or what Laurel knew, or if there was anything at all to know.

  As if she felt all my thoughts crowding around her, Laurel stirred and turned from the window. She startled me, seeing me, it seemed, for the first time in two days. She picked up her sewing; for a moment she looked almost perplexed by it. Then she let it drop again. But her eyes went back to me instead of the snow, and she spoke without being spoken to, surprising me again.

  “You’re looking better. I worried for a while…” Her voice trailed.

  I asked, to keep her talking, “Worried about what?”

  The faint frown came and went between her brows; she answered softly, “I was thinking of our mother. You look so like her.”

  I stared at her, wondering if I had spoken aloud without realizing it. Then an ember flared suddenly, briefly, behind my eyes. “You thought—”

  “Winter came, and she just stopped eating. She grew so thin. She would never say why. I would bring her things to eat—an apple, a cake—and she would smile at me and touch my hair and tell me how good I was.” She looked down at her hands, found cloth there, and produced a stitch, pale thread on pale linen. I watched her, mute, my own hands so tightly linked I could feel only bone. “Later, I would hear Beda complain about finding rock-hard cakes beneath the cushions.”

  I saw Laurel then, as a child, with those great grey eyes, watching the terrible and incomprehensible thing she could not stop. “I was so little—I forgot how you—how much—”

  “I forgot, too,” she said simply. “Until you began to look too much like her.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, and expression, quick and formless, wind over water, passed across her face.

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Maybe. But now I’m old enough to know what I missed. Not having her. I had you instead. I never questioned that. I never thought how hard that must have been for you sometimes.”

  Her needle flashed, dropped, too heavy. “I never thought about it either. It was just something that needed to be done. Like most things around here. And there was always Beda to help.”

  “Tell me about her,” I pleaded. “You all say I look like her, and yet all I know about her are sad things.”

  “I don’t—I’ve hardly spoken of her for so many years.” She was silent a little, then added helplessly, “It’s your face that stirs up memories. Sometimes I look at you and I become the child I was then, just for an instant, and I remember things. The old ballads she played on the flute. Picking berries with her, in the brambles along the edge of the pasture on a hot day. How bees as fat as blackberries droned around us in the light, and she taught me words to songs while I dropped berries in my bucket. How a trip to the cobbler to measure my feet would take an afternoon; everyone stopped her to talk. She kept things tidy; she always had flowers in the house. Wildflowers from the wood, if nothing else…”

  I hesitated, tried to ask one question by asking another. “Did—was she still happy after I was born? Was that when she changed?”

  “No.” Expression melted briefly through Laurel’s eyes. “She loved you. And I loved what she loved. She taught me to gather eggs while she held you, and embroider, and grow herbs…”

  “She was happy,” I said, oddly surprised. “No one ever told me that.”

  Laurel’s face grew still again, indrawn. “I think we forgot,” she said finally. “She was happy until that winter, and winter is what we remembered.”

  “What happened to her?” I touched Laurel’s wrist when she didn’t answer. “What do you think it was?”

  She raised her eyes from her hands, stared into the fire. “They never knew. She had no fever, no pain. She just…did not live.” She spoke silently then, looking at me. I stared at her thin, haunted face, her eyes that reflected all the emptiness she saw, and a sudden terror filled me because I didn’t know which of us she had told her memories to, which of us she warned.

  I heard my voice from far away, clear and steady, giving her words like a charm to keep her safe: “I have no intention of dying.”

  But she only answered, pulling the thread straight in another random stitch, “Neither did our mother. She just forgot to live.”

  In my dreams that night, I ran into the wild autumn wood. I heard the endless sigh of dying leaves, felt the tumultuous winds, the restless twilight riders. I found the rose vines and crouched beside them, making myself small, small, but still she saw me. Moonlight spilled from her eyes; the starry sky flowed behind her in her hair. I heard the silvery laughter of tiny bells. She bent toward me as I tried to bury myself in leaves. Gold dropped from her fingers. It glowed brighter and brighter as it fell between us, until in its rich light I saw her face.

  I woke, still staring into darkness.

  She wore my face.

  Eighteen

  The sudden storm had gone its way by dawn. Snow still fell, but fitfully; winds muttered now instead of shrieking. Waking, I wished I could understand their broken incantations. They knew something I needed to know; they teased and hinted, but they would not tell. I pulled a quilt over my shoulders and looked out the window. In the yard, my father had finished shovelling; he ran a rope down his path from the house to the barn, as if he were anchoring us to earth between storms. Along the road, sleigh runners had veered close to our gate, left their tracks in the new snow.

  I heard the door open below. My father clumped in; wood clattered into the wood box. I went down, found him feeding the fire.

  “Who was here?”

  “Perrin stopped to leave some of his beer and ask about Laurel. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?” he said hopefully.

  “It’s a sign of something,” I agreed. “Did he bring any news with the beer?”

  “Nothing new. No one has appeared looking for the stranger, and Corbet is still missing. Perrin said they’ll search again today, when the snow stops.” He paused, scratching one brow with his thumbnail. “He won’t be still alive, if they do find him in a snowdrift. And if they don’t—”

  “I’m going to help look for him,” I said abruptly. “No one knows the wood better than I do.”

  “Not the winter wood,” he protested. “You never go into it.”

  “It’s better than both of us staring out the window watching for him.”

  He tossed a log with unnecessary force onto the fire, but refrained from saying what he was thinking about our taste. “He’s either frozen in a ditch along the road, or safely doing whatever business he left home for. Let them look. Stay with Laurel.”

  “She’ll be better when he’s found,” I said without conviction. “And I can’t stand being inside waiting.”

  He grumbled something dourly. But he couldn’t really imagine me staying out long among the bleak, pinched faces of the winter trees. He changed the subject, hoping that, ignored, it would go away. “Perrin says a couple of them—Furl Gett and Travers’ son, Willom—might be sent to the next township to find someone who knows how to look into these things. Some say it’s village business, and we don’t need to go digging up old trouble, curses and murders, and faces out of the past, for strangers to peer at. But we do have a dead body on our hands to deal with somehow.” His eyes slid to me; he added tentatively, “It’s you they’d question first, if we bring strangers into this.”

  “I know.” I stared at the fire, thinking of two tales, one simple, one beyond comprehension, both peculiar. I walked through a storm and fell asleep in an empty house; when I woke there was a dead man beside me… I heard the sta
irs creak, and turned to see Laurel drift down, dressed for the day, but not seeing it, her eyes already moving past us to the window.

  She unnerved our father; he lost his temper suddenly, for no other reason, I knew, than to change the expression on her face.

  “Stop watching for him. Whether or not he’s alive, he’s still a man with a cursed past and a fresh bloodstain on his floor. Look at you. He’s not good for you. Swallow your pride and go find Perrin.”

  She turned to him; but for that it seemed she might not have heard him. “Perrin,” she said, with faint surprise, as if Perrin were someone she had known in childhood and had long outgrown. I saw the blood rise in our father’s face, the confusion in his eyes.

  “The one you made all that lace for,” he reminded her. “The one who still loves you, and would marry you if you stop chewing your heart up over a dream of Lynn Hall. That’s all it ever was—only a daydream. Nothing solid. Nothing real, to start a life with.”

  “You don’t know,” she said softly. “You don’t know what there was between us. Perrin saw it, but you never did.”

  “Perrin said—”

  “Perrin.” She said the name without impatience, with an indifference far more chilling. “He’ll forget about me. Corbet will return. He can’t forget what we meant to each other.”

  Our father stared at her. “Over a supper or two? A glass or two of wine?”

  “That’s all you saw.” She turned away from him to the dead world beyond the window. “That’s all you ever saw.”

  “I don’t know anymore what I saw,” he admitted heavily, “but I don’t like what I’m seeing now. It’s too much to ask Rois to have any kind of common sense in winter, but you’ve always been the steady one. Stop grieving over a man who, alive or dead, left you without a word. Eat your breakfast, get your boots on, and go bring Perrin back. He’ll play the flute and put some color into your face.”

  She did not bother to answer. He grumped back out to find some common sense among the cows. Laurel turned to me then, despair welling under the icy calm in her face.

  “That’s not why he left, is it?” she pleaded. “You didn’t dream that, did you? He is not cursed, and he had nothing to do with the death of the stranger in his house. Tell me you don’t believe that.”

  “No.”

  “And that wasn’t all there was between us? Just a glass or two of wine? Just a way to pass the winter hours? The master of Lynn Hall dallying with the farmer’s daughters, making a little trouble to idle away the time?”

  I shook my head, swallowing. “That’s not what I saw.”

  “Then where is he?” she whispered and turned back to the window.

  She sat down to breakfast later to please our father. I watched her push her spoon around a bowl of oatmeal, pull bread apart, lift milk to her lips and put it down, making all the small, constant gestures of eating, but never quite doing it. At first I thought our father did not notice. Then I realized that because it was Laurel, who didn’t fall into rose vines or chase after winds, he thought he knew what to expect: She would find her way back.

  But he did not realize how far she had already gone. I glimpsed it later in the embroidery she was doing: the patternless stitch of white on white, like footprints in snow that wandered randomly and went nowhere, crossing and circling themselves until they could not be followed.

  The search party crossed the fields in the early afternoon, looking like bears in their winter furs and hoods. The wind was still now; nothing in the pale sky threatened. I did not dare ask my father for the sleigh. I pulled on high fur boots and walked the tumbled snow that a couple of the sleighs had made following the path from Lynn Hall that Corbet might have taken to reach the road. By then the searchers had all dispersed into the wood, or farther up the road. I saw one or two on snow shoes, tramping through the trees, kicking at drifts and peering up into the bare branches as if they expected to see Corbet there. By the time I reached the wood, they had all disappeared.

  Others had been where I went; their snowshoes told me. Tracks passed all around the snow-covered vines; someone had kicked at the smooth mound of snow, found only briers instead of Corbet, and gone on. But they didn’t know where to look, or how to see. I thought I did. Doors, he had said. Thresholds. Places of passage, where gold fell from one story into another, where time shifted across the boundary between worlds.

  I had nowhere else to look.

  I dug into the snow around the vines until they sprang loose and I could push them away from the well. Some, caught in ice, hung down like bars around the water. I couldn’t break the ice with my hands. It was thick but oddly clear, like glass flecked with fine crystal stars, neatly fitted over the dark water. The spring was still now, frozen, I guessed, at the source.

  The third time I called his name, he came to me.

  I felt the painful shock of blood all through me, at the unexpected sight: his face, remote as a dream, gazing up at me out of the dark water. He must be dead, I thought wildly; he looked, trapped beneath the ice, in too terrible a place for any human touch to reach him.

  But I tried: I laid one hand flat on the ice, and his hand rose up through the cold to spread itself against mine. I could see so little of him—his face, his hair, his hand; the rest was brief, isolated needles of color flickering through the deep water.

  Tears rolled down my face, froze as they fell, and scattered like tiny pearls across the ice.

  “Corbet,” I whispered. “Are you dead?”

  His voice seemed to come from a place that far. “No.”

  “Can you come out of the well?”

  “This is as close as I can come to you. Rois, how did you know to look for me here?”

  “I found you here before,” I said numbly. “I can see you in water, I can see you in light. I don’t know how. And I don’t know how to reach you. If I break the ice—”

  “You can’t break into her world with a stone. You know that.” Beneath the ice, his eyes reflected winter greys and shadows; I had to remember green. “Rois, leave me here.”

  “No.”

  “She killed my father.” The expression frozen on his face splintered; his face twisted, and I saw a sudden flash of color. “He fought for me.”

  “I know.” My hand pushed against the ice, as if wishing could warm and melt it, as if his face would be there when I touched water. “She left him in this world. I found him on the hearth beside me when I woke.”

  He made a soft, anguished sound, as if he suddenly felt the burning cold. “She left him there? In those two rooms?”

  “He still—he looks as he did in your world. Her world. The oldest villagers say they recognize him.”

  He closed his eyes. “She still holds him spellbound.”

  “They’re searching for you. You vanished, just like your father, leaving a dead man in your house.”

  “Nial Lynn’s curse.” He looked at me again, his eyes heavy, bitter. “She left me that to come back to, if I leave her. Do they think I killed him?”

  “No one knows what to think.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I might as well have killed him; I forced her to.”

  “No—”

  “We would still be with him, you and I, and he would be alive if he hadn’t fought her. She knows you now. If I make promises to her, she might leave you in peace.”

  “What kind of promises?” I asked. He hesitated, choosing words. I found them for him. “To stay with her always? To forget that you ever tried to become human, or that your father died trying to set you free? She might leave me in peace, but you won’t, because I will look for you in every fall of light. I will come there for you.”

  “Rois,” he breathed. “Don’t say that in this place.”

  “You may never find your way back into this world if I don’t. How will I explain that to Laurel?”

  His face grew still, luminous in the dark water. “Laurel.”

  “She stands at the window waiting for you. She won’t eat, she
weeps at night, she barely remembers who Perrin is. It’s as if she’s under a spell, only what she knows and wants is no longer love but sorrow.”

  He was silent, staring up at me; I wondered for a moment if she had turned him into his own reflection. Then I saw him shudder. “It’s my fault. I tried to love in human ways—that’s what Laurel expected. I pretended to be what she wanted, what she thought I was. I lied too well.”

  My hand closed around cold; I was shaking, but if I moved my hand from the ice, he might vanish. “You lied to both of us. I believed you—”

  “You saw me.” His voice sounded suddenly harsh with pain. “I could never pretend to you—you saw me too well.”

  “I don’t know what I saw. I thought I knew what you were, who I was, but you changed under my eyes, and so has Laurel and so has the wood, and I don’t know anymore what I am except a woman who sees too much.”

  “I know. I always knew.”

  “What did you always know?”

  “That you see with the wood’s eyes.”

  I had to swallow fire before I could speak. One hand outstretched to him seemed the only thing I recognized of myself; the rest of me seemed so far from human that no one I knew would know me anymore. “So you see—” I had to begin again. “So you see why I can’t leave you here. Why I can’t walk away from you. You are my shadow, the one thing I can’t run fast enough in the human world to escape. You knew me before I knew myself.” My hand opened again beside his face. “I need you.”

  “You must be careful,” he whispered. “You must be so careful. Even need is a path to her.”