Winter's Child (8 page)

“Don’t look back when you turn to go,” my father said. “Set your face to the path and keep on going. Will you do this for me?”

“Only if you’ll do the same,” I said. “Please don’t stand here and watch me walk away from you.”

“On the count of three, then,” my father said.

“No, five,” I said quickly. “Make it five, Papa.”

I saw my father smile for the very last time.

“Five, then,” said my father. “Are you ready?”

“No,” I answered with a shaky laugh. “But you can start counting anyhow.”

“One,” my father said, as his eyes stayed steadily on mine. I gripped the staff of ash wood tightly in my right hand, feeling every groove, every whorl. Trying to ignore the fact that my palm was slick with sweat in spite of the coldness of the day.

“Two,” said my father. “Three.” I heard the soft
shush
as a nearby tree branch let go of its burden of snow and it fell wetly to the ground.

“Four.” My stomach muscles tightened. Just one
count more. One syllable, and I would turn away from my father forever.

“Five,” my father said softly.

At that moment, the wind snuck beneath my cloak and tugged it out behind me. The lacings pulled against my throat.

No!
my heart cried.
Not now. Not yet. Not ever.

But even as my heart protested, my mind accepted the truth. I did not have a choice. Again the wind tugged, and this time, I let it turn me. The pain in my heart was so sharp I thought it would surely split in two.

Through my pain, I heard the scrape of my father’s boot heel. I knew that he had kept his promise. This was what finally gave me the courage to take a step. My first upon my quest as a Winter Child.

Away from the palace made of snow and ice I walked, away from all I knew and loved. The wind was like a guiding hand at the small of my back, as if to make sure I would keep going.

S
EVEN
Story the Fourth

In Which Some Paths Cross and Others Merely Walk Side by Side

How long did I wander? How many hearts did I meet, how many hearts did I mend before I encountered Grace and Kai? Good questions, all. The trouble is, I can’t answer them.

It will help if you remember that I have a somewhat unusual relationship with time.

I was on my journey, fulfilling my quest, performing my duties as a Winter Child. As long as I did this, I would not age. I would stay precisely as I was.

Therefore, keeping track of time served no purpose. Some years felt long, other years felt short. They weren’t what mattered anyway. What mattered were the hearts I found and mended, one by one.

I can tell you that by the time the wind, who was my only companion, brought me the sound of the name “Grace,” I had crossed the world and recrossed it
many times in my journey as a Winter Child. Along with my age, my interest in names remained constant. The longer I journeyed, the more hearts I encountered, and the more I began to see a pattern forming:

Those whose names fit them least on the outside often were the ones who carried a wounded heart on the inside.

Occasionally, though only very rarely, I also came across someone else: a person whose inside and outside were such a perfect match they almost had the power to mend hearts themselves. So is it any wonder that, when the wind brought me the sound of a girl named “Grace,” I hurried to see what she looked like?

Grace.

What a lovely possibility-filled name. Possibility for generosity, for forgiveness. If there was an opposite to Sorrow, it seemed Grace just might be it. So I hurried to see her, following the wind, and discovered that this Grace was not alone. She had a young man with her, and even eyes much less perceptive than mine could have seen that these two were in the midst of a quarrel.

Most people can’t see me. The tales told about me say that this is because I’m not meant to be seen by ordinary eyes. The truth is slightly different, I think: I’m not intended to be seen by ordinary hearts.

Nevertheless, over the years I have learned to be careful, learned it’s best to keep out of sight. Sudden revelations that bedtime stories might actually be
real are unsettling, to say the least. I’m here to mend hearts, not to stop them with fright.

For obvious reasons, it’s easiest for me to conceal myself when the world around me contains a lot of snow or ice, but even on a warm summer’s day I can usually find a pocket of air in which to hide. The trouble with being concealed, of course, is that sometimes you witness events you wish you hadn’t. This is precisely what happened with Grace and Kai.

That was his name, the young man with her. Kai—to rhyme with sigh. And Grace was giving him plenty to sigh about, I soon discovered.

With both hands, Grace was pushing away love.

I don’t get angry very often. There’s just no purpose in it. Getting mad about something usually makes whatever caused your anger in the first place even worse. But the sight, the sound, of what was happening between these two made me angry, angrier than I’d been in a good long while. Angrier than I could ever remember being, in fact.

Grace was doing two things no one ever should: She was denying the possibilities of her name, and she was denying the potential of love.

Gently putting love aside is one thing. None of us can accept all of what we may be offered in this life. Sometimes we must say no, even to love.

But this girl named Grace was pushing love away with both hands, arms straight out in front of her, elbows locked. With all the force of her being, she was pushing away a great gift, and the worst thing of all
was that it seemed to me she was doing it without truly consulting her heart.

Oh, she thought she was. She thought she was doing just what her heart wanted. Her words made that clear enough. But with a name like Sorrow, I can always spot it in another. I have to. It’s part of my job.

And so I knew that this girl, this Grace, had sorrow and pain and fear in her heart, and I also knew she was denying they were there just as fiercely as she was refusing love. In spite of all her words about freedom, her heart was bound.

You are just like my mother, Grace,
I thought. A name and a heart so at odds that one could not find the other.

And with this realization, I felt my anger fade. I watched as the argument reached its conclusion and the young man spun on one heel and set off for home. The wind hurried after, barely taking the time to swirl around Grace before dashing against Kai, plastering the shirt he wore against his back.

He stopped, and my heart began to beat so hard and fast the sound of it rang in my ears. I watched as Kai’s head turned quickly from side to side, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of something he was sure was there but could not quite see.

And suddenly, I was dizzy. Possible paths opened before me only to splinter and then re-form like the colorful pieces of a kaleidoscope. That was the moment I understood, even as Kai was hunching his
shoulders against the wind and continuing to walk. As Grace was standing alone, her expression stricken and desolate as she watched him.

The three of us were not finished with one another. Not by a long shot. We all had a very long way to go.

E
IGHT

I waited until the middle of the night. When the world grows still and the hearts of dreamers lie wide open. This is when I do most of my work.

Most people never even know I’ve touched their hearts. They simply wake up the next morning feeling better than they had when they closed their eyes the previous night. Usually, it’s only after many such mornings have come and gone that those whose hearts I’ve mended recognize there’s anything different about themselves. Even then, they might not be able to tell you what it is.

It isn’t happiness, not quite yet. Instead, it’s a lessening of that for which I am named, a lessening of sorrow. It is the creation of a space so that something else can come and take sorrow’s place, the thing for which my mother was named but which she could not find within herself. I create a space for joy.

Every once in a while, though, I encounter someone who can truly see me. Not just the traces that I leave behind, like the frost on the windowpane that children are taught denotes my presence. I mean my actual form. There’s a reason for this, I think: These are the hearts that have been willing to believe I exist, against all logical odds.

I’ve only met a handful of them during my journey, but each and every one holds a special place in my heart. For it is these hearts that have schooled my own to hope. They remind me to hold fast to the belief that there is a heart that can help me mend my own.

Standing in the narrow street that divided Grace’s tall building from Kai’s, I gazed at her dark windows high above. The full moon that had been playing hide-and-seek among the buildings abruptly gave up the game and leaped over the rooftops to hang like a great white plate in the sky. The street around me was flooded with its pale light.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained,
I thought.

I turned and directed my upward gaze toward Kai’s windows. Like Grace’s, his were dark. Sensible people were asleep, even if what they dreamed wasn’t sensible at all.

What do you dream, Kai?
I wondered. He’d come so close to seeing me that afternoon. Dared I hope his dreams were of the Winter Child?

I spread my arms. Instantly, the wind appeared, filling my cloak. Up, up, up into the air the wind carried me, until I could place my hands against Kai’s windows.
Beneath my palms, the panes of glass grew cold. I knew this because I could see a thin film of ice begin to form, spreading out, then cracking like sweet sugar glaze.

Wake up, Kai,
I thought.
Wake up!
And then the window opened and I was looking straight into Kai’s eyes. They were blue. I could see this by the light of the moon. Not a pale blue such as mine, but the deep blue of an alpine lake after the sun has gone down behind the mountains. They gazed out steadily, though the expression in them was startled. I could hardly blame him for that. It’s not every day you literally come face-to-face with someone straight out of a fairy tale.

When I spoke, his eyes widened. “Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he replied. His voice was quiet and steady, the kind of voice made for making promises. Then, just like that, Kai’s eyes narrowed, as if the light of the moon had grown too strong for him.

“How do you do that?” he blurted out. And I discovered that even a girl named Sorrow can still smile. It was a reasonable question. He did live on the top floor. It just wasn’t the question I’d been expecting.

“I can do anything,” I boasted. “I’m a Winter Child.”

He shook his head in a quick, determined motion of contradiction. “No,” he said. “That isn’t right.”

I lifted my chin, as if in defiance, though, as it had that afternoon, I could feel my heart begin to pound. “What can’t I do?” I asked.

“You know the answer to that as well as I do,” Kai replied without hesitation. “You cannot heal your own heart.”

I felt a sharp pain as my heart contracted, then expanded, opening wider than it had known how to until this moment.

“Can you do it?” I asked. “Are you the one who can heal my heart?”

Kai looked at me for several moments, his eyes still narrowed in a slightly unsettling way. It was as if he thought he could figure out the way I was put together, how I worked, if only he could stare at me long enough. Again, my heart felt a painful, hopeful pang. If someone can see the way something works, they can see how to fix it when it breaks, can’t they? Wasn’t this precisely what I did myself?

“I don’t know,” Kai finally said. His voice was troubled. “Is that why I can see you, because you want me to try?”

“You can see me because you believe in me,” I answered.

He gave another quick shake of his head.

“No,” he said. “There’s something more. It’s because
you
believe in
me
that I can see you, isn’t it? And because
I
want to try. I always have, I think, from the time I first heard your story when I was just a boy.