McKillip, Patricia A - Winter Rose Read online

  One

  They said later that he rode into the village on a horse the color of buttermilk, but I saw him walk out of the wood.

  I was kneeling at the well; I had just lifted water to my lips. The well was one of the wood's secrets: a deep spring as clear as light, hidden under an overhang of dark stones down which the brier roses fall, white as snow, red as blood, all summer long. The vines hide the water unless you know to look. I found it one hot afternoon when I stopped to smell the roses. Beneath their sweet scent lay something shadowy, mysterious: the smell of earth, water, wet stone. I moved the cascading briers and looked down at my own reflection.

  Corbet, he called himself to the villagers. But I saw him before he had any name at all.

  My name is Rois, and I look nothing like a rose. The water told me that. Water never lies. I look more like a blackbird, with my flighty black hair and eyes more am­ber than the blackbird's sunny yellow. My skin is not fit for fairy tales, since I liked to stand in light, with my eyes closed, my face turned upward toward the sun. That's how I saw him at first: as a fall of light, and then something shaping out of the light. So it seemed. I did not move; I let the water stream silently down my wrist. There was a blur of gold: his hair. And then I blinked, and saw his face more clearly.

  I must have made some noise then. Perhaps I shifted among the wild fern. Perhaps I sighed. He looked toward me, but there was too much light; I must have been a blur of shadow in his eyes.

  Then he walked out of the light.

  Of course I thought about him, at first the way you think about weather or time, something always at the edge of your mind. He didn't seem real to me, just something I dreamed on a hot summer day, as I swal­lowed water scented with roses and stone. I remembered his eyes, odd, heavy-lidded, the color, I thought then, of his hair. When I saw them a day or two later, I was surprised.

  I gathered wild lilies and honeysuckle and bleeding heart, which my sister, Laurel, loved. I stayed in the wood for a long time, watching, but he had gone. The sky turned the color of a mourning dove's breast before I walked out of the trees. I remembered time, then. I was tired and ravenous, and I wished I had ridden to the wood. I wished I had worn shoes. But I had learned where to find wild ginger, and what tree bled a crust of honey out of a split in the wood, and where the 1 berries would ripen. My father despaired of me; my wondered at me. But my despair was greater if I my wonder, like a wild bird. Some days I let it fly and followed it. On those days I found the honey the secret well, and the mandrake root.

  My sister, Laurel, is quite beautiful. She has chesnut hair, and skin like ripened peaches, and great grey eyes that seem to see things that are not quite discernible others. She doesn't really see that well; her world is pie and fully human. Her brows lift and pucker worriedly when she encounters ambiguities, or sometimes on Everyone in the village loves her; she is gentle and : spoken. She was to marry the next spring.

  That twilight, when I came home barefoot, my skirt, full of flowers, her lover, Perrin, was there. Perrin looked at me askance, as always, and shook his head.

  "Barefoot. And with rose petals in your hair. You look like something conceived under a mushroom."

  I stuck a stem of honeysuckle in his hair, and bleeding heart into my father's. It slid forward to in front of his nose, a chain of little hearts. We laughed. He pointed a stubby finger at me.

  "It's time you stopped dancing among the ferns put your shoes on, and learned a thing or two from your sister's practical ways." He drank his beer, the hearts trembling over his nose. I nodded gravely.

  "I know."

  "You say that," he grumbled. "But you don't listen." He pushed the flower stem behind his ear, and drank more beer.

  "Because you don't really mean what you say." I dropped all my flowers in Laurel's lap, and went behind him to put my arms around his neck. "You love me as I am. Besides, when Laurel marries, who will care for you?"

  He snorted, even as he patted my hands. "You can't even remember to close a door at night. What I think is that you should find someone to care for you, before you tumble in a pond and drown, or fall out of a tree."

  "I haven't," I lied with some dignity, "climbed a tree for years."

  Perrin made an outraged noise. "I saw you up a pear tree near the old Lynn ruins only last autumn."

  "I was hungry. That hardly counts." I loosed my fa­ther, and reached for bread, being still hungry. He sighed.

  "At least sit down. Never mind about getting the bracken out of your hair, or washing your hands, or any­thing else remotely civilized. How will you ever find a husband?"

  I sat. A face turned toward me out of light, and for just a moment I forgot to breathe. Then I swallowed bread, while Laurel, gathering flowers on her lap, said amiably,

  "Perhaps she doesn't want one. Not everyone does." But her brows had twitched into that little, anxious pucker. I was silent, making resolutions, then discarding them all as useless.

  "I want," I said shortly, "to do what I want to do." We lived comfortably in the rambling, thatched farmhouse that had grown askew with age. Centuries of footsteps had worn shallow valleys into the flagstones; the floors had settled haphazardly into the earth; door frames tilted; ceilings sagged. Other things happen to old houses, that only I seemed to notice. Smells had woven into the wood, so that lavender or baking bread scented the air at unexpected moments. The windows at night sometimes reflected other fires, the shadows of other faces. Spiders wove webs in high, shadowed corners that grew more elaborate through the years, as if each generation inher­ited and added to an airy palace. I wondered sometimes if they would die out when we did, or leave their intricate houses if we left ours. But I doubted that I would ever know: My father, with his wheat, and apple orchards, and his barns and stables, only grew more prosperous, and my sister's marriage at least would provide him with heirs for his house and his spiders.

  Perrin was looking at me with that dispassionate, speculative expression he got when he was trying to imag­ine who among the villagers might be enchanted by me.

  I couldn't think of anyone. They were a hardheaded lot, though they were beginning to come to me for the healing oils and teas I made from my gleanings in the wood. Even Perrin, with his easy ways, would have been exasperated by me. And I would never stay where I was not free; I would simply walk out the door and vanish, vows or no.

  That frightened me now and then, filled me with ur­gent, unreasoning despair, as if I lacked something vital -an arm, an eye -but did not know what it was I lacked that other people had to make them fully human. But most of the time I did not care. It would be nice, I thought, to have a Perrin with that wayward jet hair to smooth, or those shoulders to shape beneath my hands.

  But not this Perrin. Nor anyone that I had grown up with, even among those whose own restlessness had led them to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

  Laurel rose to put the flowers into water. I nibbled this and that: a chicken wing, a spoonful of raisins and walnuts in a sweet sticky sauce that our cook, Beda, knew

  I loved. She loved the wild herbs and mushrooms, the ginger and rosehips I brought her. Everyone else had eaten, not waiting for me to come home. My father got out his pipe; Laurel put flowers in niches and corners; Perrin found Laurel's flute and blew softly into it, begin­ning an old ballad of lovers parted on earth and reunited in the grave. He had not gotten through a verse when Laurel said sharply, "Don't play that."

  We all looked at her, astonished. Color fanned across her face; she turned abruptly, shifted a vase an inch. Perrin said quickly, "I'm sorry, love."

  "It's bad luck."

  "It's only an old ballad," I said, still surprised at the tone in her voice. She
was so rarely cross or abrupt. "We've all sung it a hundred times."

  She was silent. Then she shivered slightly and turned to us again, her face softening into an apologetic smile. "I know. It just - I don't want to think of such unhappiness now." Perrin stretched out a hand, wordlessly; she came to him, took his hand in both of hers. "Play only happy songs," she commanded him. Her voice was light, but her smile had gone, until he spoke.

  "I will play," he said gravely, "'The Ballad of Pig's Trough Tavern.' "

  She loosed him then, and rapped him on the head with an empty tankard. "You will not. Play ‘The Mari­ner's Lay for His Lady,' or I will never love you again, and you can take back the ribbons, and the blown glass horse and all your poetry."

  "Poetry!" our father and I exclaimed together, and Perrin turned red as a cock's wattle. But he was laughing, and so was Laurel, and then, that was all that mattered.

  A day or two later, I learned his name.

  I had put my boots on, braided my hair, and ridden to the village with our father and a wagon full of apple brandy, which he had aged in small oaken kegs. While he delivered it to the village inn, I took a pot to the smithy to be mended, and bought ribbons to weave around sacks of dried petals for Laurel to lay among her wedding lin­ens. The village was a scattering of houses, the stolid inn, a sagging tavern, an apothecary, the smithy, a stable, a baker, a weaver, a chandlery, the mill, and a swath of green in the middle of it, where geese and the weaver's sheep and the innkeeper's cow wandered. When I went into the inn to retrieve my father, who above all loved his ale and his company together, I heard the smith's lazy­boned son Crispin say, "My grandfather remembers it all: how his father and grandfather fought, and the son killed his father, and a curse was laid on the family with his grandfather's dying breath."

  It was a moment before anyone sorted this out. My father said, "Wait-"

  "His grandson," Crispin nodded, "it would be." He had a beautiful smile, and a smooth easy voice that made you forget the time it wasted. He sipped his beer, then enlightened my father. "Corbet, his name is. Corbet Lynn. His father died, and he has come to claim his inheritance."

  "That old wreck?" The innkeeper, Travers, shook his head, mopping a ring my father's beer had left. "The land must be worth a fortune, but where's he going to live? The hall is in ruins. Nothing but a broken husk of stone overgrown with vines. The wood is taking it back. Will he sell the land?"

  "He told my father no. He intends to stay. He's out there now." His eyes found a skirt and long hair in the doorway, and he smiled; he didn't need to see a face, just the suggestion of shape caught him that way. "Rois."

  My father turned vaguely toward me. But his atten­tion lay elsewhere. "Corbet."

  Crispin nodded. "Riding through the village on a horse as white as milk," he said liltingly. "Or buttermilk, at least. Pretty. She threw a shoe at the crossroads. So we got his story first."

  "His father wasn't hanged?" the innkeeper asked. "No. He vanished. No one searched very hard for him. My grandfather said Nial Lynn had it coming. Any­way, no one saw anything."

  "Then how-"

  "No one admitted to seeing or hearing anything. But somehow everyone knew who spilled the blood in Lynn t 1a11, and how the family was cursed."

  "What was the curse?" I asked, as entranced as any­one by such passions in our quiet world, and equally as skeptical.

  "'May yours do to you what you have done to me.' That's what my grandfather remembers."

  My father's brows were up; he was thanking himself, I could see, for his wisdom in having only daughters. "And did he?"

  Crispin shrugged. "Kill his father? He didn't mention it. He has his grandfather's face. So mine said. But others may remember differently. He seemed cheerful enough, if he did."

  My feet had begun to want out of their boots. "Fa­ther," I said, and he rose. Crispin smiled at me again, raised his beer.

  I turned, walked into the hot noon light, and saw him, with his pale gold hair and light-filled eyes, riding his horse the color of buttermilk across the green grass, as if he were human as the rest of us, not something that had stepped out of light into time. I could not move; I could not breathe. And then, as if he read my thoughts, his eyes met mine. Pale green seemed to melt through me, and I thought: How could they be any other color?

  "Rois," my father said, and his eyes loosed me, and I could move again.

  Two

  Summer nearly passed before I spoke to him. I heard his name, now and then, on a wayward breeze. He had hired several villagers, including the indolent Crispin, to help him pull the fallen roof and the weeds out of the shell of the old hall. Crispin, I thought, worked out of curiosity about the man cursed to murder and be mur­dered. As the foundations began to appear, he hired other villagers to mortar stone walls back together, and to begin to clear the overgrown fields. Sometimes I drifted through the trees in the deep wood behind the hall. I caught a glimpse of him high on the stone walls, guiding a roof beam dangling from ropes, or in a room with three walls, studying a fireplace that stood attached to nothing. I never saw him closely. The loose angles of his body, the rolled sleeves and open neck of his shirt, the way he wiped carelessly at the sweat on his face and shouted for water, did not suggest either a man under a curse or something that had made itself in the summer wood and walked into the human world.

  But I had seen him before he had a face.

  The curse, among those whose memories had out­lived their teeth, became the subject of long and rambling argument on hot afternoons. Each variation, born in blood and fraught with danger, riveted our interest on the man putting his house back together, as if the inevitable hung over his head while he bent to his work, and we could only guess if he would be struck by lightning before he fell off his roof, or before Crispin dropped a hammer on his head.

  "My mother met Shave Turl's old aunt outside the weaver's today," Perrin said, at the end of a breathless day when the air seemed so heavy and full of molten light, everyone sweated drops of gold instead of brine. Perrin had been harvesting his fields; he had straw in his hair and stubble on his chin. We sat outside, watching the twilight birds wheel in the trembling air, watching for lightning. Laurel, as usual those evenings, worked at something dainty, sewing lace on a pillow slip, or em­broidering a handkerchief with Perrin's initials.

  She raised her eyes at Perrin's voice. Our father grunted and drew on his pipe. "He's even got Shave working," he commented. "Shave hasn't worked three days in the year. His bones are too delicate. Some days they can't even lift him out of bed."

  "His aunt said that Crispin's grandfather remembers the curse all wrong, and his head is full of sheep shearings."

  My father grunted again, this time with more inter­est. "What does she remember, then? I suppose she was there in Lynn Hall, rocking beside the great hearth while the boy killed his father."

  Perrin shrugged. "Who knows?" "Everyone seems to."

  "Go on," I said impatiently, my arms tightening around my knees. I sat on the grass with my skirt trailing over my knees, my bare feet. I could smell the sweet crushed grass around me. "What curse does she remem­ber?"

  "She says Nial Lynn said to his son with his dying breath, `Sorrow and trouble and bitterness will hound you and yours and the children of yours until Lynn falls and rises again.' "

  My father raised a brow. "He said all that in one breath?"

  "What did he mean?" Laurel asked curiously. "Lynn falls and rises again. The house? The family?"

  "Shave's aunt couldn't be precise about that."

  "It's a convenient curse, with the house beginning to rise already." My father tapped his pipe against stone. I looked out over the darkening wood, and wished I were something wild that prowled at night. I would run through moonlight until I reached the hall, where the wild roses grew among the tame in the old rose garden. And then, from some secret place, I would see what he became when moonlight touched him.

  I shifted restlessly. Laurel dropped a hand on my shoul
der, said gently, "Can you find me lavender, or roses-something sweet to scent my wedding cloth until

  I work on it?" She had sensed my impulses; I had already brought her so much lavender to dry that the whole house smelled of it.

  I nodded wordlessly. Perrin sniffed at the air. "No rain, yet." He fretted to be done with the harvest. Then the world could drown around him. Such stillness seemed charged, dangerous: There should be snakes' tongues flickering dryly above the trees at least, and the low, dis­tant mutterings of thunder.

  Laurel leaned back. "It's too hot to sew. My needle sticks in my fingers, and I can't remember what I'm do­ing. I can barely remember your name, Pernel. Or is it Perekin?"

  "Don't," Perrin breathed, his face averted in the dark. She laughed and put her hand on his arm. They were both growing odd, prone to uncertainties and su­perstitions about their love. I supposed they would be unbearable by the time they married. And then they would forget their doubts as easily as you forget rain that falls at midnight.

  She took her hand away again, her laughter fading. "It's too hot . . ." Her voice sounded unfamiliar; if I were an animal, I would have pricked an ear. I couldn't see her; all our faces had grown dark. If I had been her flute, I would have played a minor tune. If I had been her, I would have made a restless movement in the hot, sweet night; I would have wanted to touch and not touch; I would have misplaced my name.

  The next week unburied another curse.

  Perrin had got his grain into the barn; he helped our father finish his hay-making before the rains came. Each evening the clouds on the horizon turned the color of bruises, or overripe plums; the air seemed to listen, as we did, for rain. But the rains did not come. Work in the fields, work at Lynn Hall, continued.

  Laurel, who had not yet seen Corbet Lynn, brought home the next curse. She had gone into the village to buy dyed thread and bone buttons and more linen, of which she seemed to require extraordinary quantities. She came to supper laden with gossip.

  "Leta Gett broke another bone and is bedridden again. I asked Beda to make her some soup." She passed me cold beef and salad; it was still too hot to eat hot food. Perrin and our father, drinking ale, both looked as if they had, some time that day, dunked their heads in it. Their eyes were red with weariness; their hair stuck up stiffly; they wore threadbare beards, which they rasped absently and often but would not shave off until the hay was in. We ate outside again, fat candles smoking around us to drive away the insects. "I thought you or I could take it to her tomorrow, Rois. You could bring her some wildflowers." I made a noncommittal noise, my mouth full of radish. Laurel touched my arm, and lowered her voice, which caught the men's attention. "And here's a bit of scandal -Crispin must get married."