Winter Rose

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Thank you.”

  “Not so long ago I wished Corbet Lynn off the face of the earth. Now I’d give my heart to see him back, because that’s what it would cost me. But I’d give it, for her sake.”

  He kissed my cheek, and went down our father’s path to the barn.

  The next morning, Laurel did not get out of bed. She apologized to our father when he came up to her. He clamped his teeth around his unlit pipe, glimpsing another nightmare; I saw the terror in his eyes.

  “I’ll be all right,” Laurel said to him. She seemed genuinely sorry to trouble him by doing something that only I did in the winter. “I just need to rest a little. I just feel tired. I don’t know why.”

  She didn’t sleep, though. When I brought her tea, or soup, or one of Beda’s ginger cakes, I found her awake watching the snow, her face calm, remote, as colorless as snow. I wished desperately that she would pace, or weep, or curse Corbet for leaving her, and consign him to the death’s-head smile and pitiless embrace of winter. I wanted to throw her teacup across the room, shout at her for being so blind to herself, so selfish and cruel not to choose to live for our sakes, if she could find no other reason. But she would only tell me that it was winter and I was imagining things again; she was fine; she was just not hungry now.

  I sat with her in the late afternoon, brushing her hair which was longer, unpinned, than I remembered. It looked thin now; it had lost its polished darkness. The winds died finally, leaving an eerie stillness over the world. I saw Perrin in his sleigh, a long way down the road, looking, with his furs and painted runners, at once courageous and powerless as he moved between the vast white planes of earth and sky. He had brought Blane with him.

  The apothecary came face to face with the same nightmare, though he hid it better. He pulled up a chair beside the bed, listening expressionlessly as Laurel apologized for bringing him out for no reason in such bad weather. He sent our father and Perrin downstairs while he examined her; then he sent me down while he questioned her.

  I found my father chewing memories and his unlit pipe beside the fire. Perrin sat with the flute in his hands, turning it slowly, watching firelight streak silver along it and vanish. “Play,” I begged. He tried; a few sweet notes whistled into air and he lowered it again, wordlessly, to watch the light.

  Blane came down finally. His eyes went first to my father and then to Perrin. “Corbet Lynn,” he said. It was a question.

  My father made an effort, then waved the entire question at Perrin and reached for a taper.

  “He caught her off-balance,” Perrin answered wearily. “He caught us all.”

  “And then he vanished.” Blane rubbed his eyes. “Or he died. Unfortunately, he’s the only cure I can find for Laurel.”

  “That’s all?” my father asked incredulously. “Corbet Lynn?”

  The apothecary looked at him silently a moment. “It’s more,” he said carefully, “than we had before.” He moved to the fire, stared at it, his spare face bloodless, haunted. He added reluctantly, “I don’t know if it’s even Corbet she wants now.”

  “Well, then, what—” My father stumbled a step toward him, his own face tallow; Blane held his eyes wordlessly.

  Perrin’s hands clenched. He said abruptly, “He’s all she wants and if he’s what she wants, then I’ll find him if I have to shovel out the wood. Somebody must remember where he came from. There must be a letter from someone around the place. Other people have such things in their lives, even Corbet must, though it seems he might as well have lived in another world for all the ties he has to this one. There must be something.”

  “Yes.” Blane turned to get his cloak. “I gave her nightshade,” he added to me, “to help her sleep. I’ll come again tomorrow.” Perrin, his mouth tight, rose to take him home. The apothecary dropped a hand on his shoulder. “The most important thing is for her to begin to eat again. Once she takes another look at life, she might start thinking the better of what she thinks she wants out of it.”

  Perrin took him back to the village. I sat with my father while he smoked, and watched the fire, and I watched the firelight and shadows flow across his face like expressions I could not read. I knew that in strangely different ways he had reached the same thoughts about my mother. Had she? the shifting shadows asked. Was that what she? Why she? He did not go farther; I went alone into that dark question. Are you? I asked him silently, searching intently for some hint of myself in his face. Or am I winter’s inhuman child?

  He felt my eyes and met them finally; for a moment we questioned each other wordlessly. Then his hard face melted under a caress of light and he shifted, shaking his head. He could see no one in those distant, empty fields that had held my mother spellbound. No one she could possibly have cried out to, longed for, until longing pared her down to bone, and then to earth, and only her longing was left to haunt us all.

  “It’s eerie, though,” he breathed, as if all this time we had been talking. “It’s as if Laurel inherited some weakness from her mother. And since she knows no other name for it—” He broke off, rising restlessly, leaving the name for it troubling the air between us. “Do you remember how you and Laurel used to ask about his past? What was it he said? Where he had come from?”

  “He never said.”

  “He must have said something, some hint. I’ll go to the village tomorrow with Perrin, help him ask…”

  I left my father drinking apple brandy beside the fire, and went upstairs to Laurel’s room. She slept without moving, so quietly I had to stand over her to hear her breathe. She made so little noise now; she used so little air. She willed herself smaller, smaller; soon she would take nothing from life, neither air nor space nor time, and life would have no claim on her. I felt a wild grief rise in me at the thought that my eyes would look for her, since I had looked at her every day of my life, and she would leave me nothing to see. I would not know that new world in which she did not exist. I heard the winds in the dark, and I knew they called her; if I looked out the window, I would see ghosts of shimmering snow drifting around the house, peering in every window, whispering her name. The dead of winter.

  I went downstairs, made myself a tea to keep me awake so that I could guard her against the dead. I sat beside her in the dark, ignoring the thin fingers shaking the window, the impatient shrieks, the luring calls. As long as I could hear her breathe, we were all safe. In spite of the tea, my eyes grew heavy. Once I thought she opened eyes like cold sapphire stars to look at me, and I started awake, spilling tea. I put the cup down finally, and knelt on the floor, resting my head in my arms beside her pillow, where I could hear her even in my dreams.

  I stood in the wood. Now it was a grim and shadowy tangle of thick dark trees, dead vines, leafless branches that extended twigs like fingers to point toward the heartbeat of hooves. The buttermilk mare, eerily pale in that silent wood, galloped through the trees; tree boles turned toward it like faces. A woman in her wedding gown rode with a man in black; he held the reins with one hand and his smiling bride with the other. She wore lace from throat to heel; the roses in her chestnut hair glowed too bright a scarlet, mocking her bridal white. Black swirled around the bridegroom as he slowed the horse; the hood of his cloak slid back to reveal his golden hair, his cold, cold eyes. When they stopped, her expression began to change from a pleased, astonished smile, to confusion and growing terror. What twilight wood is this? she asked him. What dead, forgotten place?

  It is our home, he answered. He held her tightly as she began to struggle. She screamed, and he laughed, and so did all the gnarled, twisted faces watching within the trees.

  “Rois.” I lifted my head, hearing Laurel’s voice. We are in the same dream, I thought, terrified. It is no dream. “Rois.” Her fingers found my wrist and gripped it with more strength than I thought she had, to take me with her into that dreadful wood, or to cling to life so she would not have to go alone. Then she turned away from me. I felt the hard floor under my knees, heard her breathing again, so
faint it would barely disturb cobweb.

  Wind rattled at the door; I got up, shivering, as cold within as if I had died. I went downstairs quietly, so quietly that my father, still awake, staring into the fire, did not stir. I opened the door, watched the swirling blackness slowly shape itself into a restless hoof, a starry eye, silvery harness, the snow-trimmed edge of a hooded mantle. I could not see the rider’s face; I did not know who watched me: she with winter’s icy fires, or he with the bridegroom’s cold, familiar eyes.

  I said to both of them, “Let her stay. I will go with you.”

  The rider bent, held out a hand. I closed the door, and rode the dark winds into midnight.

  Twenty-three

  She took me to Lynn Hall.

  I saw her face as we entered; winds slammed the door open ahead of us, pulled at her cloak, her hood, until it slid back. With odd relief I saw her eyes, less terrible than his, because she was nothing I had ever loved. Lynn Hall had changed again. This time she showed me how her secret wood devoured it, in a monstrous tangle of root and vine that wove into its stones and massed across its gaping roof. Past and future and the timeless wood scattered broken pieces of themselves within two rooms. Nial Lynn’s marble floor lay broken and weathered by the years, even while his blood or Tearle’s flowed darkly across it. A curve of tree root so thick it must have circled the world had pushed through the floor beneath Corbet’s table, on which someone’s stale beer stood growing staler in a cup. The tapestry flickered in and out of existence, now solid, swarming with white, gold-eyed owls; now transparent, glinting threads of light. The bed was a heap of brambles on which pillows lay neatly encased in lace. Here and there among the brambles wild roses bloomed and withered, bloomed elsewhere.

  Ivy grew up the wall beside the hearth, gripping the stones, flowing along the ceiling, as if its leaves were fingers feeling for escape. I stared at it, searching for Corbet in the green, since he was nowhere else in the hall. She spoke his name. Ivy trembled and breathed, sighed a human sigh. On the mantel, misshapen candles of wood and wax flamed suddenly. Light touched him into shape; leaves became his eyes; leaves turned into words.

  He looked dazed, waking out of his green dream, as if he couldn’t remember why he had a human shape. Then he saw me and remembered how to speak.

  “Rois.”

  “Rois has come to stay with us.”

  He looked from me to her silently, and waited. Her cloak had fallen; she wore, I saw with horror, the dress that Laurel had worn in my dream, only torn, faded, and stained with blood, as if it had been used long ago at some disastrous wedding. I said quickly, “I will do whatever you want, if you promise me that Laurel will be safe.”

  “You will do what I want. And then perhaps I’ll tell you about Laurel.”

  I could not run away from her this time; she would reach Laurel faster than I could. She smiled, her face the color of bone, her hair as white as cobweb now, something very old and very beautiful, nameless in the human world, and as dangerous as anything we could not name.

  I said what I had to. “I will do what you want.”

  “No,” Corbet breathed. “Rois, no—” She glanced at him; he swallowed, then spat out a word in green.

  “Rois chose to come here,” she answered. “To be with you in place of Laurel. She would have found her way back to you and to this place with or without me; this is her birthright. I will give you what you dreamed of, Rois. You will marry Corbet in Lynn Hall.” I stared at her. Leaves came out of Corbet, the same word endlessly repeated. She only said to him, “You can fill this hall with leaves until you no longer see her, but you will wed her here and now. Living in your father’s house, raising children for me, you won’t be tempted to leave me again.”

  My name bloomed, blood-red, out of his mouth. I put my hands over mine. “Please—let him speak—”

  “Not until that no becomes yes.” She waited; he shook his head mutely, swallowing leaves.

  “Please,” I begged her again. His eyes, holding mine, were narrowed as against the fiercest of winds; his face held no more color than the stone behind him. “Maybe—maybe he doesn’t love me.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t, but he will never leave you. The rose will wed the ivy in Lynn Hall, and they will be so tightly bound that to uproot one will be to uproot the other, and both will live or die together.”

  He stopped struggling to find words then; his face grew very still. I saw the word in his eyes before he spoke. My own eyes burned with bitter tears. A shadow marriage in a shadowland was all we would ever have; we had left truth behind us in another time. His head bowed; he did not look at either of us.

  “Yes.”

  She smiled her feral smile that held no trace of love or laughter. “Then light the tapers and prepare the hall. I will bring the wedding guests.”

  It took me a moment to realize that she was no longer with us. Corbet gazed without moving at the air where she had vanished; his eyes held a bleak despair as he contemplated our future. Then he looked at me.

  I saw the ghost of his grandfather, in his pale, cold face, his mouth set in a thin, bloodless line. I do not know you, I thought suddenly, as fear rilled through me. I do not know you at all in this place.

  He saw my fear; he only turned away to light a line of tapers pinned on thorns along the wall. “You tried,” he said to the wall.

  “I didn’t know—I had to, for Laurel—”

  “I know.”

  “And I don’t even know—” My hands closed tightly. “She won’t even tell me if Laurel—”

  “She never gives, she never yields.” He still faced the wall, but without moving, staring at the thorns. The taper was burning close to his fingers. He did not feel it, or maybe he did not care. He added softly, “I asked you for the impossible. I should never have done that. But I had no one else to turn to. And you were with me at every turn. I’m sorry.”

  I whispered, “And every turn led us here. Back into these two small rooms.”

  He felt the taper fire then; he shook it away from him into the grate. He said helplessly, “I tried—”

  “I know.” I shivered, bone-cold. “You warned me.”

  I moved to the hearth, where a log lay half-burned, eaten open to its heart, fuming sullenly. I knelt beside it. Corbet lit another taper and touched more candles caught on thorns, in the crook of roots, until it seemed that within the wild roil of root and stone fiery roses bloomed everywhere around us.

  Our eyes met. I heard the winter close around us, the shrieking, fighting winds racing toward us across a barren wasteland. His hand moved toward me, dropped helplessly, holding air and firelight. I did not try to touch him.

  And then I saw the shadows move around us, as if they had been silently listening, waiting for the moment when there was nothing left for us to say. Candlelight brushed an ivory curve of cheek, froze in a jewel, burned in an unblinking eye. I could see no one very clearly except her, moving slowly toward us, gathering a bouquet of burning roses from among the thorns.

  “You must have flowers.” She placed them in my hands. The flames grew still, shaped petals of cold fire. “And a veil.” She pulled the tapestry loose; it slid lightly down, silver and gold overflowing her hands. She drew it over my hair, my shoulders; it felt at once airy and clinging, like feathers. “And a ring.” She opened her hand and I saw the golden circle through which I had once watched the sky.

  I looked at her blindly, remembering it falling in the daylight, in the autumn night, from my mother’s hand, from her hand.

  “I gave this to you once before,” she said, and I listened for the faint, mocking laughter around her. But no one laughed. The smile in her eyes might only have been the light from Corbet’s taper. “This time Corbet must give it to you.” She took the taper from him. “Rois to wood, rose to ivy, maid to mortal man you will wed, in time and beyond time, and forever in my wood.”

  She dropped the ring into Corbet’s hand.

  I lifted my hand to take the ring
, and felt the unexpected warmth of time bound flesh and bone that mortals needed to continue their brief, drab, passionate lives.

  My fingers locked around his wrist.

  I felt him start. A word broke through the endless winter in his eyes. But she gave him no time to say it, except in leaves. Green wove through the air where he had been, and I felt tears burn in my throat because she had hidden him from me again. But I held him, vine and leaf and unspoken word, while gold slid through leaves to break the silence against the marble floor.

  “Yes,” I said, to the wood and all his ghosts.

  I heard the sudden, fierce cry of wind blasting through the door. All the candles spun crazily on their sconces and fell, burning out like stars. I could only see her face in the firelight, and her wild, hoarfrost hair streaming like snow on the wind. Around us, her following, her ghosts, shifted uncertainly and whispered. Some laughed; again I heard the tiny, silvery bells, their singing brief and oddly jangled.

  I tightened my hold on the ivy, racked by wind that should have torn the leaves from the vine and the vine from my fingers. Not even that wind was strong enough. I couldn’t speak, under the fuming, blue-black fire in her eyes. But I held her words fast, as fast as I held our lives. She had spoken, she had said; her own words challenged her.

  She minced no words now. “Laurel will die for this.”

  I swallowed, forced out words as dry as leaves. “Not if I bring Corbet back with me. She’ll see him and remember how to live.”

  “You will die here for nothing and I will keep your ghost. You will not free Corbet and you will never leave.”

  “I will.” My voice shook badly; again I heard the faint, tuneless laughter. “You told me how.”

  “I played with you. You were a foolish rabbit caught between worlds in my rose vines, blinded by moonlight and thinking you wanted the moon. You had no idea what you asked for.”

  “No, I didn’t then.” I shifted closer to the ivy; it clung to stone and thorn against her fury. “But you told me how to take it.”