Winterling

by Sarah Prineas

  Stupid, stubborn Rook. She took a shaky breath. Or, maybe, honorable Rook, holding to his oath. She wasn’t sure which.

  Getting out of bed, the wooden floor cold on her bare feet, she put on her bathrobe over her nightgown and went to the window. Rain streamed down the glass; beyond that was only darkness.

  Grand-Jane had said in her letter that things were bad. Fer hadn’t realized how bad. All because of the open Way and the wrongness on the other side of it. She shivered.

  Then her stomach growled. When had she last eaten? Breakfast before the hunt. It felt like days ago. Nine fifteen, the clock on her bedside table said. Not too late for dinner.

  She padded down to the warm, red-and-yellow kitchen, where Grand-Jane was sitting at the table stitching up the rips and the wolf bite in Fer’s patch-jacket, her sewing basket on the floor beside her chair. The bow and quiver were leaning against the wall by the door.

  Fer paused in the doorway. “Hi,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse.

  Grand-Jane looked at her over the rims of her reading glasses. “You’re up.” She set down her needle and thread and Fer’s jacket and got to her feet. “The kettle’s on the boil. Come and sit down and have tea, and then I’ll make you some eggs and toast.”

  Fer hobbled to a chair and creaked down into it. “How long was I gone?” she asked.

  “Just over six weeks,” Grand-Jane answered, setting a steaming mug before her on the table. “I was getting worried.”

  Fer could tell from the way Grand-Jane said it that what she felt went far beyond worry. “It didn’t seem like that long,” she said.

  “Time passes differently there,” Grand-Jane said. “But you held to your promise. You came back.”

  Fer remembered something that had bothered her on her way home. “Did something happen to the Carsons’ farm?”

  Grand-Jane nodded. “A tornado destroyed their barn. The storms have been very bad.”

  Yes, Fer could see that. Grand-Jane bent to kiss Fer on the temple. “What’s this?” She pulled something from Fer’s tangled hair.

  The Lady’s black feather. Fer took it from her grandmother.

  Grand-Jane sat down at the table, picking up her mending again. “Tell me what happened.”

  There was so much to tell. With shaking fingers, Fer smoothed the ruffled feather and set it on the table. She sniffed the steam rising from her mug. Nettle tea, for healing and protection. She took a sip. Honey in it too, made from nectar the bees had gathered from the fields of lavender. Leave it to Grand-Jane to know exactly what she needed. “Something is wrong there,” Fer said. Her voice shook a little. “That’s why things are so bad here.”

  Grand-Jane nodded.

  She told her grandma about the wildlings and how she’d cured them with spells and herbs, and after Grand-Jane had asked questions about which herbs and which spells, and approved what she’d done, Fer told about the bloody hunt that was supposed to bring the spring, and her guess that something the Lady had done was behind everything that was wrong.

  “And Owen?” Grand-Jane asked. “What did you find out about him?”

  Fer shook her head. “I think Rook knows what happened, but he couldn’t tell me anything.”

  “Rook?” Grand-Jane asked, and with scissors from her sewing basket snipped off a thread.

  “The puck,” Fer explained. “He’s—” She paused and took a shaky breath. “I think he’s my friend. He owes a thrice-sworn oath to the Lady.”

  Grand-Jane frowned. “Thrice-sworn?” She shook her head. “I don’t think he was your friend, Jennifer.”

  Fer cupped her hands around the mug of tea. Rook. She’d left him next to the moon-pool, pinned to the ground under Phouka’s hoof. What had happened after that?

  She had one more question. “Grand-Jane, did you ever meet my mother?”

  Her grandma bowed her head over her sewing, but she didn’t take a stitch. “I saw her once. I followed Owen to the crossing place. He was going to meet her, and I tried to stop him, because I knew he was putting himself in danger. He was more a boy than a man then. We argued.” She sighed. “Then I saw her, and I knew that I’d lost him forever.”

  “What was she like?” Fer asked. She thought she knew, from her dream, but she had to be sure.

  “Beautiful, of course,” Grand-Jane answered. She took a stitch. “But she wasn’t what I expected.”

  “What was she?”

  “I saw her take off the glamour, the magic that made her beautiful, and I saw that she was just a girl, not so much older than you are.”

  “She really did love my father,” Fer said. Not a question. She knew it to be true.

  “I think she did,” Grand-Jane answered softly.

  Fer nodded. That was the story she’d been trying to find. But she still didn’t know its ending.

  After a silent while, Grand-Jane folded Fer’s mended jacket. “Well, my girl,” she said, getting to her feet. “There is nothing more you can do. We will go first thing tomorrow and you will close the Way, and that will be an end to it. You’d better drink up your tea and have some dinner, and then it’s back to bed with you.”

  In the morning, Fer found herself stiff and sore and standing with Grand-Jane on the gravel road by the culvert, the roar and rush of the stream loud in her ears. The storm had stopped, but the sky was gray and the wind was cold, and a slick of ice covered the flooded fields. In a puddle near her feet she saw three sodden balls of matted fur, half-covered with muddy water. When she squatted down to see what they were, she found three baby raccoons, drowned and dead. Everything was dying—the land, the animals, everything. Shivering, Fer stood and pulled the sleeves of her patch-jacket over her hands. While she’d been gone, the school year had ended. It was supposed to be summertime.

  On the walk over, her grandma had told Fer more about the terrible weather. With all the rain, the basement of the public library had flooded and the entire collection of books was lost to mold. Farmers had tried planting their corn and soybeans, and the seeds had rotted in the ground. Grand-Jane had turned over the mud in her herb gardens, but her seeds and cuttings didn’t come up either. Outside in the trees, birds’ eggs were rotting in their nests.

  And Grand-Jane’s bees were still asleep in their hives. They would die soon without sun and fields of flowers.

  All of those bad things were happening because the Way was open.

  “Go quickly,” Grand-Jane said. “And be careful. Close the Way and come back here. I’ll wait for you.”

  Fer nodded to Grand-Jane and slipped down the bank. The rushing stream had overflowed its banks and ran right next to the path, which was muddy and slick. Fer went along the path, clinging to branches on the other side when she slipped. After pushing through a clump of bushes, she came to the pool, which was brown and swollen with rainwater and had flooded its mossy banks, but it wasn’t the roiling torrent it’d been the night before, when she’d come through.

  When she’d opened the Way, she’d touched the surface of the water and felt a tingle, almost like a shock, as it had opened. Crouching, she held her fingers just over the water. Wavelets rippled across the pool, which reflected the gloomy gray sky overhead. Fer felt the same tingling tightness in her chest that she had before, a power inside her. With a touch she could make it go away, and the Way would be closed and all its wrongness would stop troubling her world. She brought her fingers closer to the rippling surface of the water.

  Time was passing in the other place. What was happening there? The more Fer thought about it, the more certain she was that Rook had gotten into trouble. To the Lady, arriving at the moon-pool just as Fer had jumped, it would look like Rook had let Fer get away. And poor, brave Phouka. Just thinking about him made Fer shiver. The Lady would use a whip on a horse she thought was disobedient.

  If Fer closed the Way, it would mean Rook, and Phouka, and Twig and Burr, and the wolf-guards—all of them would be lost to the Lady and the evil she’d loosed upon her land. Nothing would
have been set right.

  She took a deep breath, then stood up and shoved her chilled hands into her patch-jacket pockets. Then she looked around at the bedraggled clearing, the flooded pool. As long as the Way was open, the wrongness would keep spilling over into her world.

  “I have to go back,” she whispered to herself. Then she nodded, feeling more certain. She had to leave the Way open, to be sure she could get back there and right the wrongness, and she had to do it fast, before things here got any worse.

  But she had some things to figure out first.

  When they got home, Grand-Jane went to sit at the kitchen table with the account books for her herb and honey business spread out on the table. As Fer came in with an armful of books, she set down her pencil. “What are you up to, my girl?”

  Fer set the books down on the table with a thump. “Studying.” She lifted Hildegard’s Causae et Curae and showed her grandma the cover.

  Grand-Jane looked at Fer over the rims of her reading glasses. “All right,” she said mildly. “Would you like tea?”

  Fer shook her head, set the herbology book aside, and opened the leather-bound journal she’d found beside it on the bookshelf. The handwriting was old-fashioned, the ink fading, the pages yellowed. It contained notes on herbs and spells, but also on the others, as the writer called them. Some of the things Fer knew already, things her grandma had told her about oaths and the power of asking questions three times, and she found a few sentences about how turning your clothes inside out made a person invisible to the others. That explained why her patch-jacket’s brown lining had hidden her from the Lady’s people on the night she’d snuck into the Lady’s tent. But that wasn’t what she was looking for. She felt the Way tugging at her, reminding her to hurry. Grand-Jane placed a hot cup of tea at her elbow, but it grew cool as she read on.

  At last she came to a section labeled “Rites and Rituals.” There she found what she’d been looking for. She read the spidery script once, then again to be sure she understood it.

  The Green Man: The Year for the others begins with spring, and the wheel of the seasons is set turning by the Green Man, who is sometimes a Woman. It is the Green Man’s power and purpose to bring the spring to all the Lands through a life-giving ritual that is followed by celebrations as the darkness of winter is banished and Green returns to the Land.

  Fer nodded. Life-giving ritual. Not bloodshed and death.

  She knew what she had to do.

  Chapter Twenty

  Fer stood ankle-deep in water at the edge of the flooded moon-pool, her heart pounding with excitement and fright. Her arm ached a little where the wolf had bitten her. The day was gray and gloomy, the sun hidden behind a blanket of clouds. Fer could feel the wrongness in the air, spilling through the open Way.

  Over one shoulder she had her quiver full of arrows and her bow. On the other she had a heavy backpack. It was stuffed with bags of herbs and vials of tincture she’d stolen from the stillroom, and also with extra socks, a blanket, matches and a candle, a canteen full of water, and food. In each of her patch-jacket pockets, she had a cloth bag of spelled herbs for protection. She felt as if needles were prickling all over her skin. At every ripple of water that passed over the moon-pool she felt another prickle.

  Early in the morning, before Grand-Jane was awake, she’d gotten the backpack and the bow and quiver of arrows ready, and she’d snuck out. She hadn’t left a note—Grand-Jane would guess where she’d gone. Then she’d headed down the roads to the culvert and along the ravine, which was awash in rushing water. Fer had been forced to pick her way along the edges of the flooded stream, and still her sneakers were soaking, and her jeans were wet up to her knees.

  At the edge of the clearing around the moon-pool, the leafless branches rustled in the breeze. Fer stared down at the surface of the water. She was doing the right thing, running away. She was. Wavelets rippled across the pool, and then the water stilled. Fer felt her breath come short and her heart beat faster.

  Time to go. She jumped.

  Fer landed on mossy ground beside the pool.

  It looked exactly the same, though not as wet. Moss, bare branches, bushes covered with rustling brown leaves. The Lady had used her hunt of the stag to bring the spring here before, but the power was fading because it was a false ritual done by a false Lady. The spring was slipping back into winter.

  Hearing a low growl, Fer sat up. Across the pool from her, standing stiff-legged, was a shaggy black dog with yellow eyes. One of his ears stuck up; the other was lopped over.

  Fer scrambled to her feet. “Rook?” she asked.

  He lowered his head and growled again.

  It sounded like Rook, anyway. Fer edged around the pool, ready to run if she had to. “Did the Lady leave you here to catch me if I came back?”

  The dog just looked at her.

  Fer stepped closer. His yellow eyes looked like they had little flames dancing in them. She blinked and for a second she saw Rook as he would look to anybody else, a huge, fierce dog with sharp teeth, fiery eyes, and shaggy fur. But she wasn’t afraid of him. “Well, change back into a boy, Rook, so you can talk to me.”

  He didn’t move.

  Oh. Fer’s heart gave a little jolt. “You’re stuck as a dog, aren’t you,” she said. “Just like Phouka is stuck as a horse?”

  After a silent moment, the dog tipped his head down. Like a nod.

  “She did this? As punishment?” Fer asked.

  Again the tip of the head.

  “For breaking your thrice-sworn oath?”

  The dog bared his teeth and growled.

  Fer almost felt like laughing. Rook was a dog, but he was still Rook. “Okay, I know you didn’t break your oath,” she said. Still, it wasn’t fair. The Lady had to be punishing Rook for letting Fer escape through the Way, even though he’d tried to stop her. “Do you still serve her?”

  The dog gave her a long, yellow-eyed stare.

  He did, then. But somehow he’d gotten away from the Lady, and maybe he would help. Fer continued around the edge of the pool. As she got close to him, he backed up a few steps, his fur bristling. She crouched down in front of him and reached out her hand. “It’s okay, Rook,” she whispered.

  He stayed back, watching her warily.

  “Is Phouka all right?” Fer asked.

  No head tip, just the yellow-eyed stare. He wasn’t, then. Fer gulped down a knot of worry and got to her feet.

  The dog cocked his head, listening to something Fer couldn’t hear. Suddenly he lunged forward and, before Fer could dodge out of the way, seized the hem of her jacket in his teeth and started pulling her toward the forest.

  In the distance, Fer heard the howl of a wolf. She whirled, jerking her jacket out of Rook’s jaws, and looked down the path leading into the forest.

  Rook gave a low bark and ran to the edge of the forest where another, narrower path led away; he paused and looked back at her, waiting.

  “Let’s go.” Fer followed Rook out of the moon-pool clearing and into the end-of-winter forest. Rook broke into a loping run. Her backpack, bow, and quiver heavy on her shoulders, Fer ran to keep up. “Slow . . . down, Rook,” Fer gasped. “You have four legs and I only have two.”

  They ran for what seemed to Fer like hours, until the straps of the heavy backpack were digging into her shoulders, her breath came in gasps, and her legs felt like sacks filled with wet cement. The trail grew narrower and the light grew dim as the sun set. A twig slashed Fer across the face. A clump of brambles spilled out onto the path and tripped her feet. She stumbled to a stop and bent over, panting.

  Rook loped back. In the growing darkness he seemed to float over the ground like a shadow.

  Fer straightened and tried to still her breath so she could listen for the wolf-guards. “I don’t . . . hear them,” she said. “Let’s camp here.”

  As an answer, the dog padded off the path to a murky clearing in the woods where a dead tree had fallen. Fer followed. Panting, Rook flopped down
on the wiry brown grass, and Fer slung her backpack, bow, and quiver on the ground. Then she crouched down so she’d be closer to eye level with Rook. “I guess we can’t risk having a fire if those wolves are hunting for us.” She dug in her backpack until she found matches and the wax candle she’d stolen from the stillroom. After lighting the candle, which Grand-Jane had scented with rowan and rosemary for protection, she brought out the packets of food. “Hungry?” she asked.

  Rook jumped to his paws and leaped into the circle of wavering candlelight.

  Fer tossed him a piece of cheese, and he snapped it down before it even hit the ground. She laid out the rest of the dinner on her blanket. Rook took exactly half, leaving the rest for Fer to eat more slowly.

  When she’d finished, she wrapped herself in her blanket and blew out the candle. The clearing was completely dark. Fer heard the rustle of a breeze in the naked tree branches overhead. An arm’s length away, Rook lay down, his eyes gleaming in the darkness. She’d be safe, she knew, as long as he was watching.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Rook kept watch all night. His nose sifted information from the breeze. A deer had passed through the clearing a few hours ago. Mice were building a nest in a rotting log. Wolves were . . . He stood and paced to the path, sniffing. Wolves were not nearby.

  He padded back to the clearing to check on Fer, who lay sound asleep wrapped in her blanket. She smelled like the lavender and magical herbs in her jacket pockets, and her honey-colored hair smelled like she’d washed it with some other herbs.

  The sky overhead was tinged with gray, very early morning. Dew covered the wiry grass. A tendril of scent drifted under his nose. Following it, he came to a den made of dried grass, inhabited by two sleeping rabbits. Breakfast! He killed them both with a quick snap of his jaws, then devoured one. His stomach had been hollow for such a long time, since the Mór had forced him to shift to dog form, and with the dinner Fer had given him the night before and now this good rabbit breakfast, he felt better. Not quite so snappish.