Twenty Two

Stone walls closed around me. I stood at the hearth in Lynn Hall, in front of my pile of twigs and split kindling, that had only burned in some other world, and left me cold in this one. The silent rooms were smoky wit I, late afternoon shadows. I had to go home, but somewhere beyond the pallid light, within the stones, Corbet had spoken my name, and I couldn't bear to leave the place where I was known. I knelt, folded myself against the cold, made myself small and still, something nameless in the winter watching and being watched.

Don't leave me, he had said: a plea.

You must hold him, she had said: a promise.

She did not know me; I didn't know myself. I was something wild in her wood, as she was in mine, maybe human, maybe not, but even human I recognized her. My mother had called her, Laurel was calling her. She was the death of the heart, and she harvested in the dead of winter. She was transforming my world around me, reaching out to those I loved, changing them to suit her season. She had my mother, she had Corbet; she would take Laurel, she would take me, in the end, because I would follow my heart. But neither of us knew what I could or couldn't do within her wood.

I heard something whisper through the air, and turned. A white owl flew across the room into the tapestry. It gazed at me out of wide, golden eyes before it faded into formless thread. This time it didn't ask its mocking question. It only asked what it already knew. She had said: You must be human to love.

Neither of us knew this Rois.

I got up finally, before the world turned black and my father came for me. Snow mingled with the fading light as I drove home; flakes, catching in my eyelashes, seemed too heavy to bear. The snow never seemed to touch the ground; everything blurred around me. I held the reins, but the horses chose their path, it seemed, carrying me beyond the daylight toward an unfamiliar dark.

But they stopped in a familiar place. My father, hearing the sleigh, came out to take the horses in. "Where have you been?" he kept asking. "Where have you been? In that cold house all this time?"

"Yes," I said. He looked at me closely, but blamed the raw winds for my reddened eyes. I did not know who to blame: him for not seeing enough, my mother for seeing too much in a fall of summer light. Neither, I decided; neither was to blame. Blame lay in another world; that much I could see clearly, even in the gathering night.

"You look terrible," my father said brusquely. "I was just beginning to think you were coming into some sense." He turned the horses toward the barn. "Between the two of you," I heard, and he added a few more things that only the horses heard.

I sat down to supper with him and Laurel, but 1 could barely eat. Something kept pushing into my throat when I tried to swallow. I would see my mother's pale face, her thin, thin fingers, and, haunted, I could not eat for her, so I did not want to eat. I felt Laurel watching me; she had achieved more convincingly than I the art of eating air.

"Rois," she said softly. The barest hint of expression, troubled the dead calm in her face. "What did you find there?"

Ghosts, I thought. I hesitated; she would not believe nothing. Our father answered for me.

"Nothing," he said roundly, "and I don't want to hear any more of it, and that's the end of it."

But she had found something in my eyes more disturbing than nothing.

"Rois," she breathed, and I stood abruptly.

"Nothing," I repeated, and was as startled as they were by the fierceness in my voice. "You were right. So don't ask me again. And he is right. That's the end of it So I wish you would eat something besides nothing."

I crawled into bed then without undressing, burrowed under wool and down. Laurel came up soon after, she paused at the open door, a candle in her hand, guessing from my uneven breathing that I was still awake. She came in, and I pushed back out of the quilts.

"You know something," she said, her own eyes wide, luminous, holding mine. "You saw something in Lynn Hall that I missed. What was it?"

I had seen ghosts and memories, lovers made of air and leaves, nothing. I opened my mouth; nothing came out. She put her hand on my wrist. Her fingers were carved of wax; in the candlelight I could almost see bone. My throat closed in sudden fear; I forced words out. "I saw you," I whispered. "I saw you."

She was silent. Her hold slackened, her fingers slid away from me. "You're making no sense, Rois."

"You're doing exactly what our mother did. You're not eating, you're wasting away, waiting for someone to come to you out of the empty winter."

"She wasn't waiting for anyone. She loved our father."

"She went to the wood - she took me - "

Something flicked into her eyes: almost life, almost a memory. She blinked it away. "It's winter. You don't have enough to do, so you're imagining things. Telling stories to yourself. About our mother, about me, about Corbet." She laid a hand made of bird-bone, thistledown, on my shoulder. "Don't fret so much about me. This has nothing to do with our mother. I'm simply waiting for Corbet to come back."

I woke pushing windblown leaves away from my face, until leaves turned into a hillock of quilts under my hand, and the fierce winds blew out of my dream to rattle against the window. I looked out. A snow-ghost, trailing veils and clouds, engulfed my father on his way to the barn. He disappeared a moment, then reappeared, holding onto his rope. I dressed, ate breakfast alone. Laurel drifted down later, her step so frail I barely heard the stairs creak. She took her place beside the fire, wrapped in a quilt, her hair hanging lankly down her back. I brought her tea and buttered bread. She thanked me, but her eyes didn't move from the wild, snow-streaked winds calling her beyond the window.

Perrin knocked on the door later, startling me. Laurel must have seen him coming; her expression never changed. Or else, I thought in sudden horror, she would have greeted Corbet himself with the same indifference: She waited now for something else entirely.

Perrin gave me a pot of soup that his mother had made for Laurel. I took it to Beda, who set it over the fire and sent me back with a cup of brandy for Perrin.

He looked, making conversation for two, as if he needed it.

"How could you find your way through this?" I asked him.

He cast a grim glance at me, then realized I meant the weather. "It's not snowing, just windy. If snow starts coming down, I might have to live here a while, with the wind this bad." He looked at Laurel, who was a pale profile within her limp hair. He touched an embroidered violet on her quilt lightly. "Will you eat a little of my mother's soup? She'll want to know. She'll feel badly if  you don't. She made it for you."

Laurel dragged her eyes from the window, gazed at him across snowbound fields. "That was nice of her," she said politely. "Please tell her it was good."

They were both silent when I returned with the soup. I handed Laurel a bowl; she took half a spoonful, said something perfunctory, then sat holding it awkwardly, letting it grow cold. Her eyes went to the window. I heard Perrin take an unsteady breath. But he kept his voice steady, speaking to me when Laurel didn't answer. When words finally failed us both, he remembered the flute on the shelf behind Laurel.

He picked it up and began to play softly. Laurel's face turned quickly from the window at the first sweet notes. She stared at Perrin as if she had not known he was there. Then she felt the bowl in her hands. She set it down, and leaned back, pulling the quilt closely around her. Firelight brushed across her face, melting its stiffness, as she watched Perrin; a forgotten expression surfaced. I left them there, to sit on the stairs and listen, and remember how we all once were such an endless time ago, when Laurel loved Perrin and I loved no one, and only the season would change.

Perrin spoke to Laurel and played, and spoke again; I heard her murmur once or twice. He left her finally, came to the door looking pale and tired. He said softly, tying his cloak, "She listened, but she barely spoke and she didn't eat at all. When I stopped playing, she'd hear the wind, and her attention would drift again. It's as if she's under a spell."

"Yes," I said hollowly. "Will you come back soon?"

"Tomorrow. Even if I have to walk blind through a blizzard. I'll go to the village first, see if Blane can come up with anything to help her."

"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 t, 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.