Winterling

by Sarah Prineas

  In the stillroom, Grand-Jane climbed on the step stool and reached onto a high shelf, pushing aside cobwebby bottles. She pulled down a small box and brushed dust from it, then held it out to Fer. “Here.”

  The box was made of light-colored wood and had the name OWEN carved into the lid. Owen. Her father’s name.

  “You asked me why I am always afraid for you. I have to keep you safe, Jennifer. Your father went through the Way,” Grand-Jane said quietly. “And he never came back.”

  Fer grabbed the box from her grandma’s hands and raced up to her bedroom so she could have a good look at it without Grand-Jane hovering over her like a storm cloud.

  Grand-Jane had painted the sloped ceiling in Fer’s room blue, like the sky, and she’d painted the walls green, like the cornfields that surrounded the house. Yellow curtains hung over the window at the end of the room, framing the gray sky outside and the rain streaming down the windowpanes. The bed was covered with a quilt made of patches, just like Fer’s jacket. Grand-Jane had stitched herbs into the patches and had embroidered spells along the edges of the quilt. It smelled like dusty lavender. It smelled like home, and like safety and protection.

  Protection from the Way, Fer was starting to realize, and maybe from the people on the other side . . . in the other place. The Way was real, and the puck-boy had come through it, and maybe the lovely woman from her dream had come through, and her own father had gone through it, gone away forever.

  Fer sat on the bed, lifted the hinged lid of the OWEN box, and picked out the contents one by one.

  A blurry photograph. On the back, written in smudged blue ink, was the word Owen. Fer had never seen a picture of her father before. He was tall, lanky, honey-haired, and not very old. In the picture he stared squint-eyed at the person holding the camera and looked like he was about to open his mouth to speak. What did his voice sound like? And what would he tell her, if he could?

  Fer pulled the next thing out of the box. A cloth bag of musty herbs that her nose couldn’t identify. The herbs were old and probably didn’t have any protective magic left in them.

  A black feather. Fer frowned. It was just like the one pinned to the puck-boy’s bloody sleeve. The feather should have been dusty and bedraggled, jumbled up in the box as it was, but it shone glossy and bright against the patchwork bedspread. Fer smoothed it with her finger, then set it aside.

  The next thing was a flat, round, gray stone about the size of a silver dollar, with a hole in the middle. She held the stone up to her eye to look through it. Blue ceiling, green walls, yellow curtains. Her room, ordinary.

  At the bottom of the box was a folded piece of paper, yellowed with age. Scrawled on it in black ink was writing. A letter from Owen, Fer realized. A letter to Grand-Jane from her son.

  Mom—

  I’ll try to explain. You know I never belonged there. I feel right when I am with Laurelin, like I am in the right place for the first time ever in my life. Being with her is like being tangled up in a net of love, and I can’t get free even if I wanted to. She is more beautiful and more wonderful than you could ever imagine, even without the glamorie, even though she’s a girl, too, just like any girl. Now she is threatened, and so is the land, and I have to help her, because I can’t come back to living there like I did before.

  Fer looked up from the page. A girl? Like the one from her dream? She read on.

  She will close the Way after I go back, and you wouldn’t find me anyway, so don’t try to come through. Take care of our baby for a little while and I swear an oath to you that I will come back for her as soon as I can, once we have settled this and it’s safe. The baby has as much of the others in her as human, so she’ll be even more out of place there than I was, and she won’t be happy. She’ll need to grow up here. You know this, Mom. You know the rules of this land. I bound myself to Laurelin. I have to stand by the oaths I made. The horse is waiting for me, so I have to go back now. If I don’t come back, it means we failed. Keep our daughter safe then.

  I love you.

  Owen

  Fer finished reading the letter. Then she read it again.

  Owen talked in the letter about her. Laurelin, who lived in the other land, the place through the Way. A young woman who was beautiful and wonderful. The woman Fer had seen in her dream, she felt sure.

  And a baby. Owen had asked Grand-Jane to take care of our baby. The baby had to be herself. And that meant . . .

  “I came from the other place,” she whispered. “And my mother was one of them.” Outside, thunder grumbled and hail spattered against the windowpanes. Fer shivered.

  She blinked and read the letter again. I swear to you that I will come back for her as soon as I can, once we have settled this and it’s safe, her father had written. But he never had come back, even though he’d promised. Gone away forever, Grand-Jane had said. It still meant dead.

  Fer had never missed having parents because she’d never known anything different. They’d just been gone. They must have been killed by something or someone on the other side of the Way. No wonder Grand-Jane had refused to talk about them.

  But now she knew. She knew about her parents, and she knew she was from somewhere else, far away.

  And it wasn’t like being from Finland or Japan, either, but from a place of magic and danger and people that, maybe, weren’t really people at all. She’d told the puck-boy that she knew who she was, but now she didn’t.

  She had no idea at all.

  Chapter Four

  When Rook went back through the Way, the Mór was waiting for him, standing on the mossy bank with her three wolf-guards looming up behind her, no longer in their wolf shapes, but people. One of the Mór’s crows perched on her shoulder. The full moon shone down, filling the clearing with bright light and sharp, black shadows. The air was icy cold.

  Rook crouched at the Mór’s feet, his head lowered. He’d tried to get away, but she’d called the hunt down on him. Now he was at her mercy.

  And the Mór was not known for being merciful.

  “That Way has been closed for a long time,” the Mór said mildly.

  Rook looked up. She didn’t sound angry.

  In the moonlight her glamorie surrounded her like a glowing aura, making her look young and strong and dangerously beautiful. Her short black hair gleamed like a crow’s wing; her eyes were deep and filled with stars, like a winter sky at night. Rook caught his breath and blinked, trying to see through the glamorie to the real Mór.

  “And yet now the Way is open,” she said.

  So it was. Rook stole a quick glance over his shoulder. The water of the pool rippled under the silver moonlight. The girl was the one who’d opened it. But the Mór didn’t need to know about her; the girl would be safer if she didn’t.

  “Yet you went through,” the Mór said. “What did you find on the other side?”

  Rook shrugged, and he felt the burning ache of the wolf bites on his arms and chest. He didn’t want to tell her.

  The Mór frowned. On her shoulder, the crow shifted, watching Rook with a glinting eye. “Always resisting, aren’t you, Robin?” She sighed. “So I will make it an order. Tell me what you found.”

  The rule said that he only had to answer the question as it was asked. “The Mór must be obeyed,” he said bitterly.

  “I am the Lady now, and that is what you will call me,” she ordered. “And you will tell me what you found.”

  “I found trees, Lady,” he said, with a bitter accent on the word Lady. “A land on the edge of springtime. Bushes. Rain.” He paused. “Lots of mud. Lady.”

  “You are testing the limits of my patience, Robin,” the Mór said, her voice taut. “Let me rephrase the question. Who did you find on the other side of the Way?”

  Now he had no choice but to answer. “A girl,” Rook said sullenly. “A girl named”—What had the grandmother called her? A strange name—“Jennifer.”

  “Ah,” the Mór breathed. “Not Jennifer. Gwynnefar. At last. Very well d
one indeed, my clever puck.” She leaned down and took his arm, jerking him to his feet. Rook blinked the glamorie away and saw the true Mór behind it, bent and sunken-eyed and thin, with dull, black hair. He shuddered.

  Her sharp eyes noted his reaction as his puck vision saw through her glamorie. Then she took in the darker patches of blood on his torn shirt. Her clawlike hand gripped his arm tightly, right where her wolves’ teeth had bitten the deepest. “You have been punished enough, I think, Robin. Your wounds will be treated, and then I will tell you how you will serve your Lady next.”

  Fer tried asking Grand-Jane all the questions the letter had left her with. But Grand-Jane got quieter and more stern and finally snapped. “You read the letter, didn’t you, Jennifer?” When Fer nodded, Grand-Jane went on. “That means you know as much as I do.”

  “But how did they meet, if she was from the other side of the Way?” Fer asked.

  With a sigh, Grand-Jane told Fer a little more. Owen had been a wanderer, she said, the way Fer was, and one twilit evening he’d stumbled onto the Way. The moon had shone down and the Way had opened, and a beautiful girl had stepped out.

  Fer could imagine it, like a picture from a story. The round moon-pool, her tall, sandy-haired father falling in love with the moonlit woman from the other place.

  Grand-Jane seemed to know what she was thinking. “Don’t fool yourself, Jennifer,” Grand-Jane said. “She bewitched Owen. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow she died, and she drew Owen to his death.”

  “But he loved her!” Fer protested. There was a whole story here, one she needed to hear. It couldn’t end with death, could it?

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Grand-Jane rubbed her eyes, as if weary. “The point is that in the letter, Owen swore an oath to return for you. He didn’t come back, so it is clear that he is dead, and so is she. Something happened there that killed them both and there is nothing more to be done about it. You know enough now. Just keep away from the Way, and stop asking questions. Please, Jennifer!”

  So Fer stopped asking. The chilly house on Sunday felt full of silence, full of old hurts and new fears because Fer could tell that Grand-Jane was afraid. She’d never known her fierce grandma to fear anything.

  But the more she thought about it, the more sure she was that Grand-Jane was wrong. There was more to this story. More that Grand-Jane didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Owen really had loved Laurelin; he hadn’t just been bewitched by her. And—his letter hadn’t said so—but Laurelin had loved him, too, hadn’t she? Grand-Jane didn’t want to know the real ending to their story. She liked silence better.

  By Monday, Fer was grateful for school, even though school was awful. Just to get out of the house, without Grand-Jane’s grim silence and without her keen eyes watching her all the time! Did Grand-Jane think she was dangerous, like the puck-boy? Or like she seemed to think Fer’s mother had been? Maybe she was dangerous, if she was one of them, as her father’s letter had said. She didn’t feel dangerous. . . .

  She wasn’t sure what she felt. Lost, maybe. Like she couldn’t feel the ground under her feet, like she didn’t know what was real anymore, and what was not.

  Outside, a cold rain drizzled down. Fer put on her raincoat and rubber boots and slung on her backpack.

  Grand-Jane wouldn’t let her walk to the bus stop alone today. She came too, under a black umbrella. The bare branches of the oak trees were slick and black with rainwater, the driveway muddy. Fer kicked through the puddles and stood shivering with her grandma at the corner, where the driveway met the gravel road.

  Grand-Jane frowned. “I don’t like the looks of this weather.”

  Fer stayed quiet.

  “And I don’t like the feel of it,” Grand-Jane muttered.

  Now that she thought about it, the weather didn’t feel right to Fer, either. She couldn’t feel, as she had before, the spring ready to burst forth, full of life and birdsong and bright sunshine. Everything felt dead, and too quiet. The land stretched out flat around them, straight roads leading to other straight roads, leading to town, laid out in its careful grid. Fer looked over the muddy fields. In the distance, a smudge on the flat line of the horizon was the Carsons’ dairy farm, the gray silos and outbuildings almost lost in the downpour. Past that was the wooded ravine where the stream wound across the square field.

  Maybe after school today . . .

  “I’ll be here to meet you this afternoon, Jennifer,” Grand-Jane said, as the bus pulled up in a spray of gravel. The doors creaked open.

  “Why don’t you just put a leash on me, if you’re so afraid?” Fer said, not quite loud enough for Grand-Jane to hear. Then she climbed onto the bus.

  Fer never felt like an oddball until she got on the bus or arrived at school with the other kids. The normal ones, with ordinary families. She didn’t really want to be like them, but they wanted her to be like them. The Jenny-furhead thing was bad enough, but even worse was the hairy eyeball they gave her whenever she did something that reminded them of how different she really was.

  Part of the problem was the bees. When she’d been in kindergarten, her class had sat outside to eat lunch, and the other kids had shrieked and swatted when bees swarmed around them and their sticky peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and purple juice. Fer had set down her tofu and watercress burrito and stood up to use the small magic Grand-Jane had taught her. She’d gathered the bees around her, and then with a flick of a finger sent them zooming in formation around the playground and then off into the blue sky. Fer had done it to help and to be nice, but the other kids didn’t think it was nice. They just thought it was weird, and they hadn’t forgotten it.

  They thought Fer smelled funny, too. Which she did, because of Grand-Jane’s herbal spells that she had to carry in her pockets all the time.

  And there was something else. Every time Fer stepped onto the school bus, her head started to ache. She could feel the oily exhaust from the bus settle onto her skin, making her itch. As the bus drove closer to town, farther from the open air of the country, the headache got worse. By the time she stepped out onto the cement sidewalk in front of the school, the tips of her fingers and toes had gone numb, and a gray fog swirled in front of her eyes. She tripped, stumbled; her tongue got twisted and she couldn’t quite speak what she meant to say. On a bad day, she got a rash that spread from her hands and up her arms, and then crept up the back of her neck. And the headache . . .

  It was always awful like this. She’d tried to explain to Grand-Jane that the bus and school and town felt wrong somehow, that it made her sick, but her grandma insisted that she go to school, and Fer was always better by the time she got home.

  Now she knew she really was different, and it was even worse. She stumbled off the bus, then trudged across the sidewalk and up the steps into the school. A push from behind, and Emily Bradley shoved past with her friend. “The bee girl’s not wearing the quilt with sleeves,” Emily said scornfully.

  Fer blinked. She had something fierce to say about the patchwork jacket Grand-Jane had made her, but as usual the noisy hallway and the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead made the words fly out of her head. She clenched her fists, ready to fight instead.

  But today would not be a good day to get into a fight. Fer slouched into her seat in the classroom, feeling slow and stupid and numb.

  After an endless day at school, Fer got on the bus for the ride home. Instead of getting off at her stop, where Grand-Jane would be waiting, she got off a stop early with some other kids.

  The bus door cranked closed behind Fer and the bus pulled away with a spurt of wet gravel and a smell of oily smoke. Fer waited until the silence had settled around her. The headache and dullness of asphalt and fluorescent lights and chain-link fences and linoleum slowly drained away. She took a deep breath. The sky stretched wide and gray overhead; the fields stretched muddy and cold to either side. Rain pattered down. Spring would come soon, and the farmers would start their planting, but now the fields looked brown
and dead. Fer closed her eyes, frowning. They felt brown and dead too, as if something was missing, or wrong.

  Fer headed down the road until she got to the place where the culvert let the stream pass under the road. She scrambled down. The stream bubbled and boiled, full of the day’s rain. Blinking raindrops out of her eyes, Fer headed downstream, toward the round moon-pool.

  Toward the Way. Grand-Jane’s spells and honey and herbs were magic, but it was homey magic, comfortable magic. It had nothing to do with a black dog that turned into a boy with yellow eyes. Or with snarling wolves. Or with a crescent moon in the sky that reflected full and fat in a perfectly round pool. Those things were real magic.

  Crawk!

  Fer looked up. On a dead branch over her head perched a black crow. It cocked its head, examining her with a sharp, silver eye. Crawk! it said again. Then it dropped from its perch and flapped away, heading downstream.

  Fer’s feet found the path that led along the stream and she followed it, her school backpack heavy, her boots crusted with mud. She looked up to see more crows. They perched in the trees, silent. Watching.

  She went on. The crows followed, flapping from perch to perch. The path ended, and Fer pushed through a clump of dripping bushes and brambles, and stepped out onto the bank of the moon-pool. Rainwater had filled it to overflowing; the moss around its edges was sodden. Falling rain hissed on the surface of the water.

  It looked like an ordinary pool of water, not a magical Way. Fer peered through the rain and saw three gray shapes on the other side of the pool. Like wisps of fog, the shapes floated around the pool toward her. She saw fur, bushy tails, gleaming eyes.

  The wolves!

  Fer groped in the pocket of her raincoat. No spell-bag of herbs—she’d left it in her patch-jacket pocket. And no heavy branch to swing at them, either.