Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “I know. But if I turn away from you, where will I go to find Laurel? Tell me how to be careful. Tell me how not to see what my heart sees. Tell me how to live without you both.”

  He was silent; I saw him gather breath and loose it, in a pearly mist that filled the water and flowed around him until I could barely see his hand, still reaching out to mine against the ice. “Corbet,” I cried, and felt the cold, as if the mist had seeped into my bones. I turned suddenly, as it touched my heart; a brier seized my hood, another clung to my shoulder.

  “Rois,” she said. She wore glittering air and spindrift snow, and a mantle made of tiny living animals in their winter white. She stroked one or two, smiling; their eyes were wide and terrified, their crying voices mute. “I know what your heart sees. I will show you.”

  “Who are you?” I whispered. Cold racked through me; the thorns tightened their hold. She was something wild in my wood, the glint of an eye on a lightless night, the formless shadow the moon reveals tangled in the shadow of a tree. “Who are you?”

  “I am night,” she said, and it was. “I am winter’s song,” and I heard it. “I am the shadow of the bloody moon and all the winds that harvest in it.” I felt them. “I am the dead of winter.”

  She wore my mother’s face.

  Nineteen

  Salish and Furl Gett and Willom Travers found me stumbling through the trees, and gave me a ride home. Packed in the sleigh among fumes of beer and wet wool, I watched the dark wood slowly close around itself behind us, hiding its secrets. The searchers, frustrated, perplexed, passing the last of the beer among them, tried to piece together a tale from scraps.

  It was Corbet Lynn’s brother, with their father’s face and their grandfather’s evil ways, who had come to force a quarrel with Corbet over his inheritance.

  It was just some stranger who had lost his horse and his way, who crawled in to escape the storm and collapsed beside the dying embers.

  Corbet Lynn was Nial Lynn reborn—you could see it in his face—and the stranger on his hearth was an innocent relation who had the bad luck to wear something resembling Tearle’s face into Lynn Hall on the night of the curse.

  Corbet Lynn was a generous man who couldn’t slap a gnat without remorse—look how he helped Crispin and Aleria—and the stranger wandering in from the cold had betrayed Corbet’s kindness by dropping dead in his house while he was away.

  Both Corbet and the stranger were ghosts—look how they came out of nowhere and had no ties—who had roused out of their graves on the eve of the curse, and this time Nial had gotten revenge on his son after a raging brawl that overturned all the candlesticks in the house.

  Corbet had left just before the storm, on business matters, and he was ignorant as a fence post about what he was going to find on his plate when he got home.

  Corbet Lynn was a man cursed from the day he was born to repeat his father’s murder and vanish like his father, and it was the stranger’s misfortune to turn up at Corbet’s door on that fateful winter night.

  “Corbet wouldn’t kill anyone,” Salish insisted. “Even if he was cursed. Anyway, Rois said Corbet was never even there.”

  “Rois was asleep,” Willom argued, wanting violence and mystery to wile away the winter.

  “She wouldn’t sleep through a murder. Not if they were breaking things around her. What do you think, Rois? You’re his neighbor. You know him.”

  “The stranger died of cold,” I said shortly. I could barely think, even to rescue Corbet’s reputation. “Blane said that may be true. Corbet went away on business and he can’t get back because of weather.”

  They looked at one another and at me, unconvinced. You know something, their eyes said to me. Nobody could sleep through that. Willom shook his head, turning the sleigh into our yard.

  “Why was the stranger dressed like that? Like he’d come to stay, not just appeared at the door? Why did Corbet leave his house and his stable open unless he left too fast to bother about them and he wasn’t coming back? And why does the stranger look like Corbet’s father?”

  “Nobody knows that except our grannies,” Furl Gett said. He corked the beer and pulled me out of the jumble of fur and snowshoes. “And they just see to suit themselves. Truth is, we don’t know what we’re looking for, or what we’ll find under the snow. There’s something buried there, though, if nothing but a dead horse. There’, something hidden.”

  My father grumbled at me when I walked in; Laurel picked the despair out of my expression and turned away.

  “They didn’t—” our father asked as I hung my cloak.

  “No.”

  “Is there any—”

  “No.”

  I sat close to the fire after supper, brooding and trying to warm the chill out of my heart. I kept seeing my mother’s face, recognizing it, or thinking I did; maybe it was a lie, a reflection, my own face with a few subtle changes. I had seen such tricks before. But I could not stop thinking about my mother, and what she might have watched for, as Laurel watched now, during her last winter. She died longing for spring, our father said. If she had known the spring she wanted would return to her she would have waited. But that last winter told her such a season would never come again, not to her in this world. So she had gone elsewhere.

  How far, I wondered with bleak horror, had she gone?

  “You’re looking,” our father said abruptly, picking thoughts out of my head, “more and more like your mother every day. Except that her expression was sweeter.”

  He was frowning again. Beside him, Laurel picked up the cup of tea I had made her, and took a bird’s sip.

  “You said I was unlike my mother.” I felt the cold fear in my fingers, my face, but somehow I answered calmly. “That she never ran wild in the wood. She never would have gotten trapped in the roses. She wouldn’t have even stayed out past twilight.”

  “True,” he admitted. Somehow that did not comfort him. “But you did, so I’m never sure what you might do next. At least you’re not lying weak and silent, gazing out a window for something that never comes.”

  I heard the unspoken words in his voice: something I could not bring her, though I would have given her everything. I gazed at him, at the familiar furrows and hillocks of his face, his round eyes the color of smoke, that saw simple things he put simple names to.

  Am I your child? I asked him silently, urgently, my lips caught hard between my teeth so that the words would not break out. Or am I the wood’s?

  But he did not know how to hear such questions. He could not bring her spring, he thought, and so she died.

  “Was there a name for it?” I asked softly, trying to keep my voice steady. “What she died of?”

  He shook his head, his eyes on the fire, seeing memories. “The apothecary couldn’t give a name to it. She did not seem to suffer. She told him something, though, that he didn’t tell me until later. After. That she just did not feel comfortable in this world.” He raised his eyes bewilderedly. “What other world did she want? What world did she dream of? You’re like her there,” he added accusingly. “You dream too much. You see too much into things; you get too close to them, make them into something else. Imagination.” He pounced on the word with grim satisfaction. “You have too much of it. So does everyone around here in winter. Too much cold and too much beer. People start hearing curses, seeing ghosts.”

  “Something happened in Lynn Hall,” Laurel said, startling us. She had turned her still eyes from the window to his face. “What do you think happened?”

  He was silent, studying his pipe before he lit it. He said finally, “I think the whole task became too much for Corbet—rebuilding that old wreck. Winter brought him to his senses and he went back to wherever he came from. The stranger was just that; he was lost and half-frozen, and he died of natural causes, accidentally spilling blood all over a murder half a century old. That’s what I think.” But he frowned uncertainly at the smoke he puffed. Laurel rose abruptly, her linen and needle sliding unheeded to
the floor. I picked them up; she turned restively to a window, stared out at the wailing dark. I watched with her, listening to the ruthless wind that had called our mother’s name, wondering if Laurel heard it, too.

  That night I dreamed of Corbet trapped in the well. I couldn’t break the ice between us, but my hand passed through it as if I were made of air, and he reached up through the deadly cold toward me. I gripped him, and as I drew our hands out of the ice I saw that winter had stripped our fingers bare; we held each other’s bones.

  Awake, I could not sit still, I could not think. When my father hitched the sleigh after breakfast to take Beda to the village, I pleaded with him to let me drive her. She wanted a day with her younger sister’s family, she’d said, to gossip and cook a meal for those who would enjoy it instead of worrying it into crumbs. I would leave her at her sister’s house, I promised my father, and make one stop at the apothecary’s and then come home so quickly I would meet myself going. He didn’t bother to ask me why I wanted to go to the apothecary’s. If news of Corbet was anywhere to be had, it would be there.

  But I didn’t go there to talk about Corbet.

  “You knew my mother,” I said to Blane. “You tried to help her, that winter when she died.”

  He looked at me silently. His shop empty for the moment, he was mixing oil, rosewater and dried leaves for someone’s cold. I smelled wintergreen and licorice. I had never thought about his age before; he had been in my life as long as I had. But as I watched his expression change, suddenly haunted by memories, I glimpsed the face my mother must have known. He was no older than my father, I realized. They had still been young then, watching their youth die slowly through the winter.

  “Yes,” he answered finally. “What is it, Rois? What did you come to ask me?”

  “Why she died. No one seems to know.” He waited, his hands still, until I gave him more. “Laurel and my father both say I look like her. I asked them both what she died of; they couldn’t tell me. Winter. That’s all my father knows. She died of winter. I don’t remember her. I wish I did. They try to tell me about her; they try to answer my questions. But I don’t understand the answers. People die of cold and sickness, they don’t die from looking at a season.”

  His hands began to move again, measuring, grinding. “I don’t know much more than that,” he said slowly. “If I had been able to put a name to why she died, it would have spared me some grief. It was hard, not knowing how to help, not knowing why.”

  “Did she tell you anything?”

  He looked back across the years again; I saw bewilderment and sorrow, but nothing hidden, nothing locked away behind his eyes. “She wanted some other place,” he said finally, “that was not life. We don’t have that many choices: We either have this world or not. She lost interest in it.” He shook more leaves into his mortar. “It was some kind of sickness, of course it was. Maybe someone with more experience would have recognized it. But I had never seen it before, and I have never seen it since.” He paused then, studying me. “You do look like her. Very much like her. No wonder you stir up memories. I wish I had a better answer. I had just begun to work on my own then; my father had taken to his bed and left everything to me. I hadn’t learned yet that I didn’t have a remedy for everything. I didn’t have a remedy for life.”

  Tears of sorrow and frustration burned behind my eyes, because I never knew her, because no one ever had. I forced them back. “Thank you.”

  He shook his head without looking at me. “How’s Laurel?”

  “No worse.”

  He looked at me then. “But no better.” He straightened, perhaps to suggest something; the door opened abruptly. Crispin, none the worse for marriage, fatherhood or the weather, came in trailing whiffs of pipe smoke and beer. He gave me the sweet, generous smile he still gave to every woman who hadn’t yet lost her second set of teeth.

  “Rois.”

  Blane reached for a jar, poured a simmering concoction into it. “Tell your grandfather to follow this with tea, not brandy. Have they solved our murder yet at the inn?”

  Crispin’s smile faded, left a line between his fair brows. “We were trying to remember…” he said, then stood a moment trying to remember what it was they had been trying to remember. “Oh. Where it was Corbet said he lived before he came here. Do you know?”

  “I never asked him,” Blane said.

  “Nobody did, it seems. But somebody must have. It’s one of the things everyone thought they knew until they were asked. He must have told someone.” Crispin turned to me hopefully. “Rois. You’d know. You were neighbors.”

  “He never said.”

  “You mean you never asked?”

  “We might have. I don’t remember that he answered. You saw him more than anyone—”

  “I thought I knew,” he answered simply. “I thought we all knew.”

  “The way we all knew his father was dead,” I said without thinking.

  He only looked at me blankly. “He is dead. That’s why Corbet came here. Nobody,” he added a trifle challengingly to the apothecary, “can tell me that Corbet Lynn killed anyone anywhere for any reason. I worked with him, I knew him—”

  Blane interrupted patiently. “Someone’s going to look for him in the place where he came from? Is that it?”

  “Yes.” He blinked at Blane a moment. “Yes. Except that nobody can lay a finger on exactly where…”

  Blane melted wax on the jar and set his seal into it. “It’s a good idea, though.”

  “It is,” Crispin agreed. “I thought of it. And I’ll go, no matter the weather, the moment anyone remembers. He was kind to us, Aleria and me. I don’t believe he killed anyone, I don’t believe he’s dead in a ditch, and I don’t believe that Nial Lynn’s ghost had anything to do with it.”

  The apothecary’s brows flickered. He passed the jar to Crispin and added his grandfather’s name to a list of unfinished business. “What do you believe?” he asked curiously. I listened for the answer, too. But Crispin did not seem to know.

  “He was called away suddenly. And then this stranger happened into his house wanting shelter from the storm…”

  The stranger from nowhere without a horse… I turned to Blane, who was busying himself with his pestle. “Thank you,” I said again. He frowned slightly, absently, as at an old and familiar ache.

  “Come and visit me again,” he said. “Let me know how Laurel is.”

  “I will. Goodbye, Crispin.”

  That smile broke through him again, like sun through cloud, that warms you while it has nothing to do with you at all. Then he dropped the jar into his pocket and leaned over the counter. “Anyway—the stranger is nearly dead with cold, and he sees Rois’ dying fire…”

  I closed the door.

  I saw her then, standing still as a tree with a white owl on her shoulder, where the sheep grazed in fairer seasons on the green. She wore a mantle of white feathers that covered her from throat to heel. Only her hair flowed freely around her, blown by winds no human could feel on that dead calm morning.

  Her eyes were closed. The owl opened its eyes and looked at me. Its eyes were as gold as the sun I could only see in memory.

  It asked its familiar question.

  I closed my eyes. “I do not know,” I heard myself whisper. “You tell me.”

  When I opened my eyes again, there was only a tree standing in the snow, a white owl sleeping in the dark, airy swirl of its branches.

  Twenty

  I shaped her out of every drift of snow as I drove home; I wished her out of air and cloud to come to me and guide the sturdy, placid plow horses beyond the boundaries of this world, to the place where roses opened beneath water and white owls spoke with human voices. There she would tell me what no one else seemed to know. But because I wanted her, she did not come; the horses followed their own tracks home and turned into the yard.

  I saw my father there, reshaping his frozen, dirty path to the barn, paring it close to the ground before the next storm. I
unhitched the horses, but left the sleigh out for my father to bring Beda home later. When I put the horses in their stalls and turned, I saw him again, framed in the open barn door. He leaned on the shovel, puffing tiredly. Beyond him Laurel stood at the window, watching the distant fields.

  I closed my eyes, pushed my hands against them, against the fears swooping and screeching like rooks through my head. I couldn’t face the silence in that house, the loneliness that Laurel left behind her as she went her way without us. I did not know what to do for any of us, except find another shovel hanging on a nail and start whittling up my father’s path to meet him.

  He stopped a moment, shocked to find me working. I was not a great deal of help; though I tried, I couldn’t shovel my way beyond the world, or even beyond my own thoughts. But my father didn’t comment. As he drew closer to me, I heard his faint, breathy whistling.

  Our paths met finally, mine not far from the barn. He leaned on his shovel again, watching me pant.

  “What possessed you?” he asked mildly, a fair question since I had only a vague idea which end of a snow shovel was up. I shrugged, evading his eyes.

  “You looked tired,” I said.

  “I was,” he admitted. He reached out, tucked a strand of my hair back into my hood, awkwardly, with his blunt, gloved hand. “Odd how much better you can work with someone helping. I didn’t expect you back yet. I thought you’d go off somewhere looking for Corbet, or messages, or roses, something.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve run out of places to look.”

  “No news in the village?”

  “No.”

  He frowned, reaching out to give my shoulder a vague, comforting pat. “Strange. You’d think someone would be searching at their end for the dead…” His voice trailed; he was staring suddenly at Laurel in the window. I saw his hands tighten on the shovel, heard his startled breath. He murmured something I didn’t catch; perhaps he was laying his own curse on Nial Lynn.