Winter's Child (6 page)

There was a moment’s ringing silence. In it, I stared at Kai and he stared back.

If either of us had taken a step, we could have reached out and been in each other’s arms. Either one of us could have drawn the other in and held on tight
as if we’d never let go. Neither of us moved a muscle. I don’t think we’d ever been farther apart than we were in that moment.

“So you don’t love me enough to marry me,” Kai said.

“I
do
love you enough,” I countered. “Just not yet, not now. I want to see what’s around the corner first. I want to
do
something. If
you
loved
me
, you’d understand. You’d let me go.”

Kai’s mouth twisted. “You’re making an awfully big assumption, aren’t you?”

“What’s that?”

“You assume I’ll be here when you get back. But I might not be. Who knows? Maybe by the time you finally remember me, I’ll have found someone else. I can
do
things too, you know. So don’t start thinking I’ll be sitting around here
doing nothing
while you’re off on your great adventure, because I won’t be! Maybe I’ll even have an adventure of my own!”

Kai spun away and began to walk toward town, his legs pumping with long and angry strides. I stood where I was, arms at my sides, my hands clenched into fists.

“Fine,” I called after Kai’s retreating form. “I hope you
do
do something. I hope you
don’t
sit around staring at the insides of clocks all your life. And I hope you
do
find someone else! Someone whose heart is so different from yours you have to work the rest of your life to figure out how it works.”

As I spoke, I felt the wind come up. A strange
wind. It swirled around my head, lifting my hair as if to tangle it into knots. It traced my face like it wished to commit it to memory. Then, as abruptly as it had come to encircle me, it departed. A moment later, I saw Kai’s shirt push flat against his back.

Kai stopped, as if he’d encountered an invisible brick wall. I watched the way his chin lifted, nose scenting the air, head swiveling from side to side. For just one moment, I thought Kai was going to turn back to me. In the next moment, the wind died down. With a shake of his head as if to dispel some errant notion that had caught him unawares, Kai resumed his brisk pace. He didn’t look back, not even once.

Just like the Winter Child,
I thought suddenly.

And it was only then that I realized what I had done. Like the king in Kai’s favorite tale, I had uttered a wish and a curse combined.

That night, I dreamed of loss.

I was in a strange country, walking through an unfamiliar landscape. My heart pounded in my chest and a fine, cold sweat seemed to cover every inch of my skin. I was searching for something, searching for Kai.

There were times when I could see his outline in the distance, hear his voice drifting back to me on a wind I thought I recognized. The wind from the afternoon—the one that had come up, as if from nowhere, to scuttle between me and Kai.

Wind of change,
I thought.

But no matter how I strained my ears to listen to the sound of Kai’s voice, I could not understand what he was saying. Was he calling for me, asking me to follow him? Or was he trying to drive me away, demanding I turn back and leave him alone?

Did he love me as he always had? Or had my words driven a wedge between us, opening a gap wider than the one that separated our buildings, a space not even I would be brave enough to cross?

“Kai! Kai, wait for me,” I called. I saw his head turn toward me, gazing over his shoulder. Just for an instant, his eyes met mine.

In the next second, he turned away, and I saw for the first time the dark expanse in front of him, reaching out from side to side like a pair of outstretched arms. The chasm was so wide that I could not see across it.

“Kai, wait for me!” I called once more. “Kai, no!”

But I was too late. I watched as Kai raised a leg and stepped out into the open space. Between one of my horrified heartbeats and the next, he was gone.

I sat up in bed, my heart a bright pain inside my chest. My gasping breaths showed white in the air.
Cold,
I thought.
How can it be so cold?
Just that afternoon, it had been spring. Now, as I looked toward the window, I could see a thin etching of frost on the outside of the glass.

I began to shiver.
It’s a late storm,
I thought.
This is nothing more than Winter trying to have the last word, the same as it does every year.
Surely I had experienced
such late storms before. But even as I tried to reassure myself, I knew it wasn’t true. This was not some late-season frost. The cold I felt was something much, much more.

I threw back the covers and got out of bed, hissing between my teeth as my feet hit the icy floor. I dashed to the window, undid the fastening, and pushed it open. Frigid air flowed in to wrap me in its cold embrace. A bright moon floated in the sky overhead. By its light, I could see that Kai’s window was wide open. The street below me sparkled with hoarfrost. In the rime, I could see a single set of footprints leaving Kai’s building and heading down the street.

I don’t remember putting on my stockings and shoes. Don’t remember throwing my winter cloak around my shoulders. What I remember clearly is standing in the street, gazing down that straight line of footsteps. It led to the corner, then turned, vanishing from sight.

Gone.
My heart thundered in my chest.
Gone. Gone. Gone.

It did no good for my mind to assert that Kai was safe in bed, for it to reason with me that the footprints could belong to anyone. My heart knew the truth.

Kai was gone. He had followed the Winter Child.

F
IVE
Story the Third

Enter the Winter Child

I am never cold.

Cold’s absence is my first clear memory, as clear as the stars on a frosty winter’s night. Clear as the way a voice can carry over an expanse of pristine snow in the still, predawn air. And with this memory comes understanding:

I am not like other girls.

Well, of course not.

You were never going to be like other girls anyway,
you’re tempted to say. I am a princess, after all. But there’s not a princess on the planet with my attributes. Many may be called upon to keep the peace and to settle treaties by marrying some prince they’ve never seen. Others may labor under enchantment, twiddling their thumbs in boredom until some fellow on a white horse, or a horse of any color for that matter, rides up to break the spell.

But I defy you to find another princess who can do what I can, what I must: right a wrong she did not commit. Mend hearts too numerous to count with a single icy touch.

“Why me?” I used to ask my father over and over, and with such regularity that I’m sure he could have set his watch by the question. “Why did the North Wind choose me and not someone else? Why must
I
be a Winter Child?”

The answer, which my father never failed to give despite the way it must have pained him, was as plain as the nose on my face. A face that was much like the face of another—one whom Papa never spoke of if he could help it.

“Because of your mother,” he always replied.

I knew the story, of course, though not from Papa. Not from any one person at all, in fact, but rather from everyone—and everything—around me.

There wasn’t a person in my father’s kingdom who didn’t know the tale of what had happened, the details of how I had become a Winter Child. Nor did the knowledge end there. Every tree, every rock, every flower that bloomed and every frost that killed it knew the tale as well. The story was so much a part of the fabric of my father’s kingdom that it was in the water we drank, the air we breathed, the first flush of green that came in spring, the last winter snowfall.

Speaking the details was simply unnecessary. Each time I was laced into a dress for some fancy
court occasion, I felt it in the way my ladies in waiting worked hard not to let their fingertips touch my skin.

So cold, and she can’t feel a thing. It’s unnatural, but what can you expect? She is a Winter Child.

I felt it in the way the castle servants turned their backs each time I snuck out of the castle dressed in a set of the head cook’s youngest son’s outgrown clothes.

Another princess would never be allowed to get away with such a thing, but then we must make allowances for her, mustn’t we? Her time for fun and games will end soon enough—and then just think of what comes next.

Poor little Deirdre. Poor little Winter Child.

It isn’t easy being different, let me tell you. But it’s even more challenging to be different in a way that’s so obvious nobody ever feels the need to acknowledge it. An obvious that is so well-established you can almost fool yourself into believing it’s going overlooked.

Almost.

“Then why didn’t the North Wind just take my mother instead?” I would ask my father.

One particular interrogation occurred when I was eight years old. Halfway to the milestone of sixteen, the year in which I would be called to fulfill the destiny
she
had mapped out for me.

She. Her. My mother.
I’d never called her by her given name. I couldn’t. I didn’t know what it was. Though I’d pestered my father with a million other questions, this was one I’d never dared to ask.

“If the North Wind wanted her attention so much, why didn’t it just snatch
her
up in its arms?”

“You know I don’t have an answer to that question, Deirdre,” my father said. “It was the North Wind’s choice, not mine.”

“But I
want
you to have the answer, Papa!” I said, restraining the desire to stamp my foot with momentous effort. Such behavior might be acceptable at six, but never in an eight-year-old. “You’re a king. You should have an answer for everything.”

A strange expression came over my father’s face, as if two factions were battling for possession of it. On the one hand, he looked sad and weary. On the other, it seemed that he wanted to smile. Before the matter could be settled, my father held out his arms. I crawled into them, settling into his lap with my head against his shoulder. He rested his chin on the top of my head. I couldn’t see him do it, but I was pretty sure my father closed his eyes.

“I want you to listen to me, my daughter,” he said. “What I am going to say may not make much sense to you now, but you will understand as you grow older.”

I squirmed a little, in spite of the comfort of my father’s embrace. Nobody likes to be told they’re not old enough to grasp something important.

“I’m eight,” I remarked. Halfway to the sixteen years I would need to possess in order to set out on what I was already sarcastically referring to as “my great quest.”

“I know how old you are, Deirdre,” my father replied, and I thought I caught a hint of laughter in
his tone. This was enough to stop my squirming in an instant. My father didn’t laugh very often. He hardly even smiled.

“I was there the moment you were born, when you had all the possibilities of the world before you. That person is still there, inside you. The North Wind’s embrace has not changed that. It has not changed who you truly are.”

“But you gave me a Winter Child’s name,” I said. “You called me ‘Sorrow.’”

“Only to prepare you for what would lie ahead,” replied my father. “You must learn patience, Little One.”

“Maybe you should have named me that instead,” I interrupted, and this time, I felt a tremor of what I was sure was laughter shimmy through my father’s body.

“Perhaps you’re right about that,” he said, giving me a quick squeeze. “But listen to me now. When your task is complete, you may choose a name for yourself, the one you desire above all others. On that day, your life will begin anew. It will be as if you have been reborn.”

I twisted in my father’s lap so that I could look into his eyes.

If my first memory is of being cold, my second is of my father’s eyes. They were a deep and piercing green, like the needles of the evergreens that grow in the woods that mark the boundary between our kingdom and the lands beyond my father’s realm.

Always, it seems to me that I feel my father’s gaze, even now that death has closed his eyes. Watching over me with love and concern, promising that, in the
end, I will find the way to solve the puzzle of my own existence, to right all the wrongs not of my own creation and, at the last, even find the means to mend my own wounded heart.

“I can choose my own name?”

“Absolutely,” my father vowed. “You were not born to be called Sorrow.”

His eyes kindled now with a bright green flame. “Just think, Deirdre,” he went on. “You have a chance almost no one else is granted. The opportunity to choose your own name, one to match who you truly are inside.”

“But how will I know what to choose?” I asked.