Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

But that wasn’t the ghost in his head. “For a moment I saw your mother,” he said huskily. “The way your sister stands there… At least with Laurel, I know what she’s watching for. I wish she’d pull herself out of it. Should I get Perrin over here? Would that help her?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt the cold then, seeping up out of the ground into my bones. “She might only hurt him again.”

  “She might be missing him without knowing it.”

  I doubted it. “Maybe.”

  “She can’t go on like this. Brooding out at the winter, not eating.” He brooded at her for a breath or two, then reached out, still watching her, to take my shovel. “She looks like—she’s doing what—” But he couldn’t say it. His mouth tightened; he hefted the shovels under his arm. “I’ll give her a day or two,” he muttered. “But no more. Not the entire winter.”

  Still he lingered; he shifted, chilled, but he could not seem to turn away from Laurel. He was looking through her at his own past, I knew, and I could not say anything to comfort him; I could only stand frozen in the snow, terrified of what he might find there.

  I touched him finally, and he looked at me, an expression on his face that I had never seen before. He didn’t recognize me in that moment. He gave me a stranger’s blank, impersonal stare, as if he did not know whose child I was, or where I had wandered from into his life. He turned and walked away from me into the barn.

  I waited, shivering, blinking back tears, unable to move, wondering if I still had a name, a home, a father, or if he had seen what I must be, and had left me orphaned in his heart. He came back out in a moment, closed the barn door, and suddenly his face was familiar again: kindly, stubborn, perplexed.

  “Thank you, Rois. Now get in before you freeze.”

  I dreamed that night of gold falling from a slender hand, gold turning brighter and brighter as it fell, until it blazed like the sun in the night. Someone dropped the gold; someone else watched it fall. I saw no faces, but in the dream I knew that I dropped the gold, I watched it fall…

  The wind spoke to me just before I woke.

  I understood it in that instant, all its wild songs, its mutterings and shriekings, its warnings. Gold, it said, so clearly that I carried the word out of dreams into morning. Gold, I told myself as I opened my eyes, clinging to the word as fiercely as if it were the answer to all the wind’s enchantments, the word to free us from our spellbound world.

  But gold turned to nothing in the chill grey dawn; the world remained unchanged. Laurel drifted like a moth, silent and colorless, from window to window. Sometimes I stood with her, trying to see Lynn Hall within the trees. If I chose to go, winter would meet me there, she would take me into her heart, show me what I wanted to know. She had dropped the gold, she had watched it fall… But if I left this house I might never return to it, I thought starkly. I might see too much, see in a way that changed everything I knew. Even Corbet might be transformed in my eyes, in my heart. I would be trapped, like him, between worlds… My thoughts crossed the fields again and again; I lingered beside Laurel, silent and afraid, while searchers appeared and disappeared around Lynn Hall, the only movement in the world.

  Perrin rode over that afternoon. I didn’t know if our father had sent a message to him, or if, in the charmed way of lovers, he had heard her name coupled with his, and had put down his axe or his leather needle to come to her. Laurel saw him out the window, so his knock at the door did not present her with a moment of mystery or hope. She turned to sit, picked up her strange embroidery without a flicker of interest, as if he were Salish come to deliver a dozen bottles of wine from the inn. I opened the door. Perrin gave me a brief smile, his face, with its winter pallor, becoming suddenly whiter as he saw Laurel.

  She had grown thinner, colorless, her movements random and without energy. But the remoteness in her eyes, as if we were all barely visible, as if she could not remember that she had ever kissed Perrin or why, was most disturbing. I felt the shock that ran through Perrin; for an instant he could not move or breathe. I saw her through his eyes then, and the same thought snapped through the troubled air around him into me: Her eyes looked already dead.

  I am the dead of winter.

  “Laurel,” he breathed, fumbling with his cloak ties; he aimed the cloak at a peg and it fell into a damp heap on the floor. He went to her. I hung up his cloak and, too restless to sit still, I left them alone and went into the kitchen to chop onions for Beda’s stew.

  Beda fussed around me; what trouble she thought I could bring on myself with a knife and an onion, I couldn’t imagine. I was too busy listening through her anxious fluttering for other voices. After a while I heard the stairs creak. I did not hear the front door close. I made a cup of tea and took it to Perrin, who was alone, staring into the fire. I said his name. He started, then leaned down to heave a log into the lagging flames.

  I gave him the tea; he took a swallow and some color fanned into his face. He looked into the cup and grimaced.

  “What is this?”

  “Camomile.”

  “I thought it was beer.” He set the cup on the mantel and looked at me, his eyes still stunned. “All that,” he said unsteadily, “over Corbet Lynn. I wish I knew how he did it. There must have been some moment when I could have stepped between them and changed things. When I should have talked instead of playing the flute, or played instead of talking, or talked of love instead of cows—It’s like swimming down a river and suddenly finding it changed its course and ran somewhere without you, stranding you in mud and stones, leaving you wondering what happened, where all the deep, sweet water went.” Wood kindled and snapped; he added, staring at it, “I’d like to murder Corbet Lynn. If he’s not already dead.”

  That aspect had not occurred to me. “It’s not that simple,” I protested.

  “Then what is it, if it’s not that simple? He trifled with her feelings and who knows what else? It was just a game to him, seeing if he could take what she was giving someone else. And when he got her attention and her heart, he got bored with her and—”

  “Killed someone and left her.”

  “I could bear it better if he had been honest. If he were here now instead of me. But disappearing like that, no message, no farewell, nothing, just leaving her like that—”

  “Without a word, a message, a farewell to anyone, he got on his horse and rode away in the middle of the worst storm we’ve ever seen? Because he was bored?”

  “You were there, Rois.” He caught me with his clear, angry eyes, held me. “You were there. You dreamed yourself there, you said, and went back to sleep, then woke to find a dead man beside you. You’ve been digging up curses all winter; you’ve been watching Corbet, expecting some disaster. I think you’re protecting him. Maybe you don’t know where he is, but I think you know what happened at Lynn Hall that night and why a stranger died there. I don’t think you closed your eyes to anything.”

  He was near, but as far from the truth as any of us. “I didn’t see him die,” I said wearily. “If I had, do you think I could have fallen asleep beside him? And I’ve been out searching the wood for Corbet, too.”

  “Did you see the stranger before he died? Was Corbet there when he came in?”

  “No,” I answered to the second question; the first he wouldn’t want to know. He hesitated, perplexed and unconvinced; I veered away from the subject. “Corbet has been here for months, getting to know us, giving people work, even getting Crispin to work. There’s no one who didn’t like him—”

  “I could have lived without him,” Perrin said testily. “Maybe the stranger could have, too.”

  “So you believe he was a stranger?”

  “Well, he’s not Tearle Lynn, still looking like that after fifty years—”

  “And you think Corbet killed him?”

  “Not if he was a stranger, blowing in from the cold. If he was a brother, or a cousin, or something, then maybe Corbet had some reason.”

  “To leave the body there beside me wh
ere the whole village could know about it? Why didn’t he just hide it and send me home to bed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Or at least wash the blood off his hands and write Laurel a love letter promising to return after a few years when the fuss died down.”

  He was silent, his mouth tight. He picked up the poker, struck a swarm of sparks out of a log. “I don’t know.” He dropped the poker then, sighing. “It’s such a tangled mess, all those old tales we imagined colliding with what we know is true. And Laurel in the middle, caught between tale and truth. Sometimes I think he must be dead, and that’s what she really sees when she stares out the window: that he’s never coming back.”

  I frowned at the fire, my fingers closing tightly on my arms. “Our father thinks she is doing what our mother did. Wasting away in winter because she could not—she could not remember how to live. Or why.”

  He dropped a hand on my shoulder. “I remember that time,” he said gently. “A little. I remember sitting with Laurel once under the grape vines. She wouldn’t come out and she wouldn’t say what was wrong. And then I simply stopped seeing your mother. They tried to explain it to me, but it took me some time to believe that death didn’t stay in the fields or the barn with the animals, it could come into the house.” I felt his hand shift, heard him hesitate before he spoke again. “I never understood what ailed your mother.”

  “Neither did my father.”

  His hand tightened abruptly, finding bone, before he let go of me. I looked at him; he was gazing blindly at the fire, his brows knit, his mouth a thin line. Even animals, I thought numbly, did that sometimes: wasted away for someone, something, that never returned to them. I heard Perrin draw a breath unsteadily. He met my eyes finally, his own eyes shocked, bewildered, trying to see who my mother might have watched for in the empty winter fields.

  He said only, his voice catching, “You stay well, Rois. Laurel needs you.”

  “I will. And you’ll come—”

  “Yes. She won’t care,” he added with a touch of bitterness. “But I can’t stay away. And maybe, if I keep coming back instead of him, she’ll remember that once she cared.”

  He kissed my cheek and went to the door. I felt his eyes as he swung his cloak over his shoulders and tied it, as he opened the door. Did your mother? they asked. Did she watch the fields for someone? Who was he? Did he come like Corbet Lynn, a stranger riding in with summer to vanish in the winter? Or had they known each other longer? How long? You have her face. You are like her. You have your mother’s eyes.

  Where did you get your sight?

  Who are you?

  Who? the owl asked.

  Gold fell from the sky through my thoughts and I remembered.

  Twenty-one

  Her face, looking down at me.

  My face, which would become hers.

  The gold that fell between us, turning, turning, in the summer light: the tiny circle in which I trapped wind blown roses, leaves, flying birds, until she came back to me.

  Her gold wedding ring.

  My throat burned as if I had swallowed gold and it had stuck there, an O of astonishment. I stood stunned in the doorway, while Perrin rode away from me into winter, and in a world he did not see, the fields and barren wood turned to green and gold and shadow in the light of memory.

  She must have carried me there secretly, perhaps while Laurel stayed with Beda and our father worked the distant fields. I smelled the roses as she laid me down, and the cool, mysterious scent of hidden water. She took off her wedding ring for me to play with, while she shaped longing into light, and light into the still, blurred figure waiting for her. She turned away from me, growing smaller and smaller until she met him in my ring of gold, and they both vanished into shadow.

  She died trying to shape the barren light of memory into love.

  “Rois.” Laurel’s voice, so infrequent now, startled me back into our world. I was still standing in the doorway, letting winter in. “It’s cold.” I moved and she shut the door behind me. She had been lying down, but her heavy eyes, the reflection of empty fields in them, told me she had not slept. “Is something wrong?”

  Yes! I wanted to shout. I don’t know whose bones I have, whose eyes. If my mother had a lover from the wood when I was already born, then who gave me my sight? Or did she know him long before I was born? Had I come to life in secret, in a hot fall of light on a summer day, an idea so inconceivable to anyone that not even my mother questioned who my father was? I turned away from Laurel’s eyes, straightened a chair, and then a rug I had kicked askew, feeling my blood beat like tiny, frantic wings through me. I couldn’t ask Laurel; she didn’t know. No one human knew. She drifted to a window, but not even she could see, in the way our mother saw, past her human heart to what she loved.

  After a while, she spoke again. “Rois, you’re pacing.”

  I stopped. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s the season. You’ve always hated it. Everything one color, the coldest color of all.”

  Her voice chilled me. It had lost all its color, as if she could no longer see beyond white. “I need to do something,” I said. All my pacing would only weave a web around itself; I couldn’t walk out of the world. Laurel’s attention strayed away from me, and again I felt the urgent, desperate wings. She had so little time to give me, and what time she had I was afraid to find my way out of. I had no choice; I said tightly, “I’m going to Lynn Hall.”

  “No one’s there,” Laurel said wearily. But she had turned away from her own reflection to look at me.

  “Maybe he left some message we both missed.”

  “I looked. He left nothing.”

  “You were looking for words. There are other ways to leave a message.”

  Her eyes darkened, wandered past me then; she wanted simple answers, a message meant for her, not Rois’ winter imaginings. She moved to the stairs, began to climb them, her steps slow and isolated, like an old woman’s. “I suppose it might do you good to get out,” she said with listless indifference. “But it’s pointless going to Lynn Hall. He left nothing there for any of us.”

  Our father grumbled, but hitched the sleigh for me; even he was desperate for the straw that blew the direction Corbet had gone. “Everyone in the village has been in and out of that place for days. I don’t know what you expect to find that they haven’t. I want you back,” he added, “before I remember that you’re gone.”

  I left the sleigh in front of the hall and stepped into the twilight of an empty house. It was scarcely warmer inside. I left footprints across the threshold that did not melt. A corner of tapestry, or an edge of eyelet lace on a pillow, might have snapped like ice in my hand. Fire itself would have frozen on the grate. Others had been in here, left messages of one kind or another. Someone had written Corbet’s name in ash on the marble mantel; there was a swallow of stale beer in one of his glasses. Boot prints had tracked around the stain in the hearthstones, drawn to it as if the curse itself lay there, silent yet dangerous, winter’s unsolved mystery.

  I knelt beside it, piled bits of half-charred wood left on the grate, and kindling someone had spilled carelessly on the floor. I was trying to build a fire without a flame, with only a wish to light it. I couldn’t stay in that bitter cold, and I did not want to leave.

  “Corbet,” I whispered hopelessly, my hands to my mouth, warming my fingers with his name.

  A rose bloomed on the grate and burst into flame.

  The kindling caught and blazed, fire pouring out of the cold wood as if it had been trapped there, waiting to be freed. Through it the rose opened fiery petals, consuming but never consumed. I smelled both summer and winter in those flames: roses and the burning heart of applewood, the scent of wood in snow.

  The stones began to burn.

  I got to my feet then, backed away. Fire ate the hearth, the chimney stones, swarmed into the walls. Like a painting held too close to a taper, the room began to melt around me. I stood in the middle of it, staring at
what the weaving and parting strands of fire revealed: colors I had never seen in winter, colors I had never seen together in one season, every shade of green.

  I saw Corbet as the flames turned into gold. I stood on grass, feeling sunlight on my hair, my hands. I had not imagined any world he would have died to leave could be so beautiful. He stood beneath an oak tree; the ivy that wound up its trunk and through its branches trailed a tendril of green leaves to touch his hair. His eyes reflected a distant landscape. I said his name without sound. Something changed in his eyes then, light gilding a snowbound field, revealing cold, concealing cold.

  “Rois.”

  He lifted his hand to meet mine; this time light and air and invisible leaves separated us. I could hear them massed and rustling between us; he seemed as far from me as ever.

  “Corbet, where are you?” I pleaded. “Where am I?”

  His voice shook. “With me. Even here.”

  “But where?” Spring, I guessed, seeing a bank of purple violets spilling down into a rill. Then I saw burdock as high as my shoulder, and blue vervain, and yarrow the rich ocher-gold of late summer light. And then I saw leaves as golden as the yarrow.

  The air smelled of violets, crushed raspberries, wood smoke. If I could have dreamed a world to escape the winter, I thought dazedly, it would be this timeless nowhere, in which green trembled like water, even in deep shadow, as if we stood at the bottom of a translucent pool.

  “Is this where we came before?” I breathed. “The world you left to walk into my world?” I stopped, hearing myself. My world, I had said, drawing dangerous boundaries. Your world.

  He smiled a thin, bitter smile I remembered. “It’s one of her faces. One of her expressions. You’ve seen others; don’t lose your heart to this one.”

  “It’s tempting.” I tasted light on my lips as I spoke; a breeze shifted leaves and it filled my eyes. Corbet’s face blurred against the ivy as if it were just emerging, shades of gold against the green, as I had first seen it. My hand, reaching out to him again, closed again on nothing. “What has she done to you? She has hidden you somewhere—”