I saw the world out of Corbet's eyes.

Our solid walls crumbled, showed stone under broken plaster, and night where stone had fallen. Winds, dark and faceless, flew restlessly in and out of the holes in the roof between the sagging rafters. Beda and my father were shadowy figures, bulky, indistinct, their voices blurred, their gestures ragged and abrupt, like the gestures of scarecrows. The fire fluttered frantically in the darkness, giving little warmth and less light, even when the shadow with the burning pipe rose with a laugh that seemed to ripple across the air, echoing itself, and heaved a log into the flames. Only Laurel seemed unchanged, a glowing figure. Light caught at her and clung, framed her tranquil movements. Her voice came clearly through the errant winds, the constant flow of dry, invisible leaves rushing across flagstones, down all our crooked, meandering passageways.

I didn't see myself out of his eyes. But I saw his face, pale as moonlight, as if the sun had never touched it. Expressions shaped it with every touch of wind. Generations looked out of his eyes. Now he wore his grandfather's dangerous smile, now his father's helpless fury; now his own terror touched his eyes, or his desperate need for the one clear, bright figure in his world. And then he would look at me and his face would change again, beautiful and merciless, luring me and warning me away.

Wind pulled at my skirts as we sat at the table. Like him, I followed Laurel's calm lead and pulled out my chair, though one slat in the seat fell and scraped the flagstones as I sat. A faceless Beda, her cap like a frilly mushroom on her head, brought in something on a silver tray. Leaves, it seemed, or withered petals, flowed out of her ladle into our bowls. I watched Laurel numbly. She picked up her spoon and ate; so did our father, pulling dry, splintering wood apart to dip into his bowl.

"What is this?" I breathed to Corbet. "What is this place? Is this where you live?"

His eyes answered me. A sudden wind sang with an edged, dangerous voice; his face changed, grew taut, haunted.

"You're not eating," Laurel said in another world. "Rois. Corbet."

"Eat," our father urged. "It's Beda's finest: onion and potato soup. Rois, you have hardly touched a morsel in days."

I picked up my spoon; it was tarnished, and so worn the silver parted into strands like a web. "Is this the place where you will answer questions?"

He did not answer. His face changed again, as a figure came to stand behind his chair.

I knew that face, though I had never seen it so clearly before: that moonlight skin, those eyes the elusive burning blue of stars. Her midnight hair mingled with the winds, flowed everywhere, glittering as with stars.

She laid an impossibly pale and delicate hand on his shoulder, and looked across the table at Laurel. Laurel changed under her gaze. Her movements, as she ate her soup, grew slower, stolid. Time mapped its course beneath her eyes, along her mouth, spun a silver web over her chestnut hair. Corbet watched, motionless under the slender hand; I saw the longing for time kindle in his eyes.

Laurel, caught in his gaze, stared back at him out of aging eyes; he made a sound, twisting against the hand on his shoulder, but it did not yield to him.

"This," the woman said, her voice like high, sweet bells. She looked at me then. "And this."

Winds dragged at my hair, petals caught in it. Seams tore along my sleeves; my hands grew creased, dirty, my nails broken and black with earth. A strand of ashen hair blew into my bowl.

"Rois, your hair is in your soup," Laurel said patiently, as to a sick child or a wandering old woman. Her own hair was bone-white now, the skin puffed and sagging on her face. Only her eyes were familiar, still the same wide-set, smoky grey, though the faraway world they saw seemed imminent now, defined.

Still Corbet watched her, hungering for time. She smiled at him. Such a smile on any face is beautiful. His face changed again; a smile came out of him like light. I stared at my wrinkled hands; they closed like bird-claws around nothing.

I felt his eyes then, as if my clawed hands held his heart. "Rois," he said, and nothing more. I did not look at him; I did not know how to change the shape of his heart.

"Rois," Laurel said from the other side of that shadowland. "Are you all right?"

"She's eaten nothing," our father grumbled, and raised his voice. "Beda! Bring her some roast fowl." He poured more wine into my cup. The wine was blood-red now, and the cup fashioned of bone that had lain season after season in the wood, scoured clean by water and light. I drank it and heard Corbet say again,

"Rois."

I looked at him, finally. The woman had disappeared. Or perhaps she had changed into the rustling ivy sliding over his chair, until he was enthroned in green and bound to it, leaves circling his wrists and hair and throat. I stared, my heart aching at all that green shining in such a dreary season.

A shadowy Beda put something down in front of me; I started. Birds flew from my plate, leaving bone behind. Corbet made a soft sound. His eyes closed; he leaned back into the wood's embrace, all but vanishing into leaves.

"Rois," he whispered. And then, so faint I might only have heard him with my heart, "Please."

I felt the red rose bloom in my heart then; thorns

scored it, thorns pricked behind my eyes. I could no longer see him, only a blurred, fiery green. "All right," I said, to whatever he was asking, though I did not know why he wanted time and Laurel when he could have the timeless wood in all its mystery. "But I don't understand.'

"I will show you," his heart's voice said, a promise or a warning. "If you will come with me."

"Rois," Laurel pleaded, "where are you? Are you wandering through the summer wood in winter? Corbet, call her back. She'll hear you. She must eat."

He said my name. I saw the candlelight glide along the silver in Laurel's hands; her hands were young again; so was her voice. I raised my head, saw our father', plump, anxious face, and Beda watching me, her fingers twisting the cloth of her apron. I looked at Corbet, for the green that had embraced him and bound him; green was a memory, a longing, nothing real in this dead world.

I picked up my fork, blinked at what lay on my plate. A chicken wing, my eyes told me finally, sprinkled with tarragon, a roast onion, braised carrots. I speared a piece of carrot grimly, as if I could pin the world into place on the end of my fork. "I'm all right," I said. "The wine made me dream."

"It'll take you like that," our father said, relieved, "on an empty stomach."

"Yes." It took as much effort to lift that carrot to my mouth as it would have to chop down a tree. It took more not to sit mutely staring at Corbet, waiting to be shown the tangled paths that lay behind his eyes.

I ate what I could, silently, keeping my eyes on my plate, while Corbet spoke to Laurel and our father, inviting, in his light way, tales of the past, of Laurel's childhood on the farm, memories of our mother, who was only a vague word or two, a touch, an indistinct face, in my own past.

"Laurel raised Rois," my father said, "though she was so young. She took to her responsibilities early. Beda did all she could, of course." He frowned at his plate; I wondered how much of her face he remembered by then, how much of his youth he had buried. "I was no help," he added, and sighed. "No help at all. I would look at Rois and see her mother's face, and that would be the last I could do. I let her run wild; I never checked her. She's been in and out of the wood in all seasons since she could walk. "

As if he could have stopped me. I asked, to remind him I was still there, "Did she love the wood, too? Our mother?"

There was a little, odd silence, as if an answer hung between us in the candlelight, but no one would say it. Then Laurel and our father spoke at once.

"She took us walking in it-" "No. She never went into it."

They stopped. I raised my eyes, found them looking perplexedly at one another. "But I remembered," Laurel said. "She would carry Rois - "

"While I was in the fields," our father interrupted a little abruptly. "It must have been. She seldom mentioned it." He studied his plate, jabbed without interest at a slice of onion. "Anyway, she never foraged, like Rois does. She never ran barefoot."

Laurel opened her mouth, closed it. Her eyes sought Corbet's. Something passed between them, and the little, puckered frown appeared between her brows. She glanced at me, then at her plate; she changed the angle of her knife a degree or two, and finally spoke. "No," she said. "She wore shoes and only picked the wildflowers."

I wished I could remember. Corbet sat silently, his eyes on Laurel, then on our father, as if he could see what they did not say. I gave up trying to guess why our father took comfort in her shod feet.

"How did she die?" Corbet asked, with an unusual lack of grace, I thought. But our father seemed to want to talk about it. Perhaps he felt that Corbet should know these things about our family, our blameless, unmysterious past, but there his reasoning fell apart. He refused to consider that Corbet might be in love with Laurel, but that left me, his fey daughter who drank roses, an even more unlikely choice for the heir of Lynn Hall. He dreamed a double wedding in spring; he would be lucky, I thought starkly, to have one, and in this world.

"She died," he said heavily, "of some strange wasting illness. She could not eat. She fell sick during the autumn rains and died on the longest night of the year." He looked at me reproachfully; I stirred myself and ate another piece of carrot. "She had me shift her bed to the window so that she could look out. But there was nothing to see, just bleak winter fields and starless nights. I thought she watched for spring. But she died long before the crocus bloomed." He stared at his cup a moment. "Maybe it was not spring she watched for. Maybe she saw, finally, what she wanted; maybe she didn't. I'll never know."

"I'm sorry," Corbet breathed.

"At least I had my daughters to comfort me." He drank wine; the shadow eased out of his face. "My sweet Laurel and my wild rose." He smiled a little. "Rois kept bringing me things to cheer me up-some of them walked, I recall. A caterpillar, once, and a beetle with bright wings. A hummingbird's egg." He took a bite of chicken. "That was long ago."

"Your mother died young, too," I said abruptly to Corbet. "Do you remember her?"

He nodded. "Oh, yes. Very clearly." He touched his cup as if to lift it, but paused. His eyes, meeting mine, held a warning; I could almost hear the rustle of the ivy that held him in thrall. "She was tall, with very white skin. Her voice was gentle; she sang old ballads to me." "How did - "

"I was never sure," he said, and drank before he continued, frowning a little, his eyes on the candle between him and Laurel. "For a long time, my father only said that she had gone away. He grieved terribly; he spoke very little, and I could not bear the look in his eyes when I asked about her. So I stopped asking. Years later, I asked; he only said that she had died, as his own mother had, of being too delicate to live in the world."

I swallowed dryly, pulling the husk loose from his answer to find the truth: She had been too human to live in the wood. Or too fey to live in the world.

Or was it all chaff? Had his true mother stood behind him with her skin as pale as moonlight, her hand on his shoulder, fingers flowing into the ivy that bound him to her world?

I watched him then, searching for her in his face, forgetting to eat while he watched Laurel, sometimes forgetting to eat, himself, at the way she spoke a word, or the way her face, under the shifting candlelight, changed every time she met his eyes. Our father, oblivious, and cheerful now, spoke of Perrin and his good nature, his hardworking ways, and of the grandchildren who were to overrun his old age.

"Eat," he urged me now and then. "Eat." But I could barely do more than watch the rich tapestry they wove of their glances and slow smiles, the words they spoke that said one thing to our father, and another to me, while the ivy, growing secretly all around us, whispered its warnings.

I bequeath all to the wood.

I drank more wine from my silver cup. It was pale sunlight now, and tasted of roses and blood. Snow whirled outside the window when we finished eating; Corbet, glancing out, said to Laurel,

"I should leave now. While I can."

"Yes," she said softly, and went to stand beside him, so closely they might as well have touched. "Later, it may not be possible."

"Perhaps it is no longer possible."

"Or course it is," our father said, lighting the iron lantern. "Only an inch or two on the ground yet. Follow the field wall when you leave the road-that will take you to the edge of the wood."

Corbet drew his eyes away from Laurel to look at me. "We Lynns walk on snow," he said, smiling; his eyes held no smile. I smiled back, learning from him and Laurel how to say secrets in idle commonplaces.

"What winter path will you take from place to place through the wood?"

"I'll dream one up," he said, and swung his dark cloak over his shoulders. He turned again to Laurel, his face set, withholding expression. "Thank you for asking me." He touched me lightly before he left. His fingers burned like the touch of the briers; I looked for the rose they must have left, but saw nothing. "Finish the wine," he suggested. "There are dreams and more in that."

And so I did. And so I dreamed his dream.