"No"
"You don't know him," I insisted. "He could hurt you."
She was silent again, her eyes wide, dark. "I know," she whispered, surprising me again. "He is such a mystery. He could pick my heart like a rose and watch it wither in his hand. Sometimes I think he is like that. At other times I think he is as simple and golden and generous as our father's fields. And then I see things in his eyes - things that I have never looked at, and I know that I have walked a short and easy road out of my past, while he has walked a thousand roads to meet me. I know Perrin's past; the same road runs into his future. I don't know Corbet. But I feel his hand upon my heart, and I wake wanting to say his name. I don't know, Rois, how much longer I can wait."
The hard winds sang their way into my dreams again that night. Long, white, insistent fingers of snow brushed against the window glass until I saw the storm out of memory, snow falling endlessly, hiding the moon, the earth, and any footprints in the frozen ground. Come to us, the winds called. Come. And I rose and saw the light from Lynn Hall flickering like a star among the wind harrowed trees.
So I went there, walking through that wild storm, scarcely feeling it, finding my way by the light I watched, the lodestar in the screaming night. Winds shook me apart piecemeal, flung a bone here, a bone there. My eyes became snow, my hair turned to ice; I heard it chime against my shoulders like wind-blown glass. If I spoke, words would fall from me like snow, pour out of me like black wind.
As I drew close to the light in the wood, I began to hear the words they spoke. Fear sharper than the cold shook through me, but I had to see, I had to know the path that Corbet Lynn had taken out of the world.
Winds shaped their voices - one desperate, wild, passionate, the other silken and biting, a blade of ice. Winds swirled into words; I did not want to hear them, but there was no place to hide, no haven but one from the storm they made between them.
You will never leave me, said the silken wind. I am leaving you. Now. Watch me.
You will die out there.
You are colder than any winter night. You are more cruel than any wind.
I will not let you leave. The door will not open for you. The window will not break. There I'd no way out of here.
My mother found a way.
Wind roared through the dark; I caught a straining tree and clung to it. Birch, its smooth, papery bark told my cheek. I closed my eyes, felt the sting of snow against them, and heard a sound like ice shattering.
Then the winds died. Trees stood in a silence like the silence on the face of the moon. I turned, bewildered at first, then desperate; as I stumbled through the snow, the light seemed to move to meet me. And then the wind struck again, with terrible, icy force; I felt its bitterness in the hollows of my bones.
You will never find your way out of my heart.
The door opened; firelight fluttered across the threshold into the snow - streaked winds. I watched, trembling like the frail wings of light. A figure leaned against the doorway. I heard his uneven breathing, saw him racked with winds. He did not notice me as I crept out of the night into his shadow. His eyes clung to all the pale, beautiful riders in the wind. Corm, they said.
A horse as white as buttermilk came out of the dark, stood before him, looking at him out of still, onyx eyes. He mounted it. Then he bent down low, his hand outstretched to me.
"Rois," he said. I saw the color of his hair.
I drew myself up behind him, held him as tightly as any brier rose.
We rode into the winter wood.