Patricia A. McKillip - Winter Rose 01 by Winter Rose

Author:Winter Rose [Rose, Winter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-05-28T10:41:09+00:00

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Fifteen

I thought I knew what cold was, before cold stripped me bare of thought, then blinded me and froze my heart. I could not feel such cold and live; cold forced me into something other, something not quite human, who held a dream with bones of ice, and did not remember names, only what we once had been: a flower on a vine, a fall of light.

When I began to see again, as wind sees, or the moon, I had drawn cold as close to me as death. I did not feel it now, any more than ice feels the falling snow. Again I saw the elusive faces of wind and shadow, the wild riders of the night. An enchanted wood flowed past us. Trees, embraced by ice, spangled the night with whorls of crystal branches. The odd leaf that still hung on them flashed silver or gold like some strange jewel that only grew on trees, and only in the coldest night. Streams forged paths of wind-scoured silver through the snow, that grew harder, brighter, as we passed. Snow hares froze in our wake; the fox and weasel in their winter coats grew even whiter. We left no path for human eyes to follow beyond swirling, misty ribbons of snow. No one human watched us ride. Only the white owls saw us; only they followed.

Then we rode out of the heart of winter into light. Light fashioned me into something more nearly human, and gave me back my memory. I had hair again, and skin; I had a name. But it could not reach my heart, still frozen by that cold, cold journey. I saw meadows and trees burning a young, fiery green, as if leaves had just opened, as if green itself had never existed before. I breathed heavy, golden air that might have pooled all summer over roses blooming in every color on a hundred trees. But I saw winter just beneath that scent, that green; I felt it just beneath my skin, and I didn’t know anymore what I was, or if I was alive.

We had gone everywhere and nowhere; we had ridden from Lynn Hall to Lynn Hall. But in this unfamiliar country, the house was as I had only seen it in a dream. The buttermilk mare, following a single hooded rider on a horse as black as nothing, brought us back to the door we had left. Other riders flowed away from us, making little more noise than leaves; they went elsewhere, into the wood, maybe, or back into the wind. The hooded rider dismounted at the door; so did Corbet, slipping suddenly out of my hands. I felt something tear at my heart then, as if it had broken from the cold.

“Corbet,” I whispered, as he turned toward the stranger. “Where are we?”

He looked up at me, his eyes empty of all expression; he seemed as far from me as he could go without leaving me. “This is the place where I was born.

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