Winter's Child (9 page)

“I always knew there was more to the tale than just being a bedtime story. I knew that you were just as real as I was.”

“And so I am,” I said.

He smiled then, and I felt my own lips curve up in answer. “Yes,” he said. “I see that you are.”

My heart had become a rushing river.
So this is
what it feels like to hope,
I thought.
It makes you light-headed, and sets all your limbs to trembling with strength and weakness combined.

“And my heart?” I asked, amazed to hear my voice come out just as steady as his. “Do you want to try and heal it?”

“I think I must,” Kai answered slowly, as if the admission were welling up from someplace deep inside him. His eyes slid from mine to fix on something just over my right shoulder. At first I thought it must be Grace’s window, but when he spoke again, I realized I’d been wrong.

“I used to ask about your heart,” he went on softly, “when Grace’s oma would tell us your story. It always seemed so unfair to me, to give you the power to heal so many hearts but not enough to heal your own.”

The past. He is looking at the past,
I thought. T
he past that has made him what he is now.
A past that would give me a chance for a future. We stood in silence for several minutes. I gazed at Kai. He gazed at his former self. With an effort I could almost feel inside my own body, Kai shifted his eyes back to me.

“Where must we go?”

I pulled in a breath before I spoke. “Just like that?”

He made a sound that reached toward laughter. “Well, hardly. I
have
been hearing your story my whole life.”

“Don’t you dare ask me how old I really am.” This time, Kai did laugh. “I wouldn’t dream of it,”
he promised. “Besides, I already know. Grace’s oma used to say that you would stay the same age until your quest was done. You’re sixteen, just like Grace and I are.”

“Very cleverly answered,” I replied. “So what makes you think we have to go anywhere? Why can’t we settle things right here and now? Perhaps all you need to do is kiss me and be done with it.”

“I’m not a prince,” Kai said. “I think that only works for them. Besides ...”

He drew the second syllable out, as if he were formulating his answer even as he spoke. “Having an answer as simple as a kiss wouldn’t make sense. It wouldn’t fit with the rest of the tale. You’re on a journey, a quest, in search of all those other wounded hearts. So I think a journey must be the way to heal your heart as well.

“In which case I’ll repeat the question. Where must we go?”

That was the moment when I realized how very much I wished to be in love.

Certainly it was the moment that I felt the future begin to open up before me, as my heart had opened itself to hope just a few minutes before. Perhaps love and hope are one and the same. I don’t know. I do know this was the moment when the future ceased to be a desolate place, a place where I would always walk alone. By the use of a single pronoun, one simple “we,” Kai had created a path where two might walk side by side.

If I was very lucky, the two might even hold hands. I extended mine.

“Home,” I said. “We’re going home.”

I hadn’t known what the answer was until I spoke. But now that I had, I knew it was right.
Home.
Back to the place where my strange journey had begun.

“I’ll come with you,” Kai said. “But I’m not going out through the window, if you don’t mind. I don’t think I’m ready to fly through the air. I’m just a mortal who likes to keep his feet on the ground.”

“Suit yourself,” I said. “Though you don’t know what you’re missing. I warn you—someday I hope to change your mind.”

He turned from the window.

“Kai.”

He turned back. “What?”

“Will you tell her good-bye?”

If Kai was surprised by my question, he didn’t show it. Nor did he ask whom I was talking about.

“No,” he said after a moment. He gazed past my shoulder, as he had done earlier. I knew he was thinking of Grace this time.

“I don’t think so. There isn’t any point. I used to think we’d always understand each other, that we would always walk the same path. I don’t think that anymore.”

His eyes shifted. Now they looked straight into mine. “I’m going to walk a new path,” he said, “and see where it takes me.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“So am I.”

And that is how it came to pass that Kai left
his warm bed and all he had once held dear, and he embarked upon a journey with no milestones to guide him. A single line of footprints in an unseasonably late frost was all that remained to mark his departure.

Kai did not look back. So, just as he turned the corner at the end of the street, when he could not see me do it, I looked back for him. My gaze went straight to the rooftop of Grace’s building, with her darkened windows just beneath.

What will you do when you discover Kai is gone?
I wondered.
Will you find a way to follow? Or will you give in to pride and let him go?

I found the courage to venture my heart, Grace. Now let’s see if you have the courage to venture yours.

N
INE
Story the Fifth

In Which Grace Makes a Choice

He was gone. Kai was gone. He had followed the Winter Child.

I stood in the street, staring down the trail his footprints had left in the frost until I could no longer feel my feet and the hem of my nightgown was soaked. Until I could hear Oma’s voice in my mind, clear as a bell:

For heaven’s sake, Grace, get back inside this minute before you catch your death of cold.

Though I never catch cold.

It’s the strangest thing. Not even Oma could account for it, which meant the familiar scolding was also something of a joke. But suddenly, catching cold was precisely what I feared. I feared my luck might run out just when I needed it most.

Kai had asked me to marry him, and I had turned him away. I had turned him away and now he was gone.

Oh, Grace,
I thought as I finally began to shiver.
What have you done?

It took all day to sort out my affairs. Unlike Kai, I didn’t simply walk out and leave everything behind me. There was the landlord to speak to, completed work to send to my patrons, and incomplete work for which I needed to make arrangements for others to finish.

“I’d feel better about all this if I knew when you were coming back, Grace,” the flower vendor, Herre Johannes, said late that afternoon.

He and I were standing together on the rooftop,
my
rooftop, among Oma’s pots and planters. It was still too cold to sow seeds, but I had turned the soil over on the first clear day in preparation for when it would grow warm enough.

I had given Herre Johannes all of the notes that Oma and I had made about what should be planted where, and I was sure the old flower vendor would have some thoughts of his own. He was moving into my old rooms and would care for the rooftop garden in my absence. This suited both Herre Johannes and my landlord well.

Oma’s garden had made our building famous. My landlord never lacked for tenants, even when times were hard. Standing on the rooftop now, I felt my first pang of regret. The rooftop garden was the one thing I would be sorry to leave behind.

“I’d be happier if I knew where you were going,” Herre Johannes continued.

“That makes two of us,” I said. I caught the worried expression on Herre Johannes’s kind and wrinkled face and bit down on the tip of my tongue.

I am going to miss him, too,
I thought. Strangely, it made me feel better to know that I would miss not simply a place, which could not miss me back, but a living, beating heart of flesh and blood.

I placed what I hoped was a comforting hand on Herre Johannes’s arm.

“I spoke without thinking, Herre Johannes,” I said. “I’m sorry. I have thought about what I’m doing, honestly.”

But I hadn’t been truthful with Herre Johannes, not entirely. I’d let him believe the obvious, that Kai had gone off in a huff following a sweethearts’ quarrel. I kept to myself the knowledge that he’d actually chosen to do something much more dangerous and difficult than that: He was walking the path of the Winter Child.

Herre Johannes reached to give my hand a pat, and I dropped my arm. He rubbed one set of knuckles against the stubble on his chin. It made a rough and scratchy sound.

“You’ve been dreaming of striking out into the world for a good long while, I think,” he said.

It was all I could do to keep my mouth from dropping open. Something of my struggle must have shown in my face, for Herre Johannes gave a chuckle. I laughed too, as I shook my head.

“Was it so obvious?”

“To someone who sees only the outside of you,
no,” he answered promptly. “But for anyone able to catch a glimpse of the inside of you ...”

He broke off for a moment, gazing over my shoulder. It came to me suddenly that Herre Johannes was doing what I always had done when I came to the rooftop: He was gazing into the distance, his eyes seeking out the horizon.

“I have known you for a long time, Grace,” he said. “I have watched you grow up, and your grandmother and I were good friends. I think, sometimes, that you are like the plants in her garden, always turning your face toward the sun.

“But I want you to remember something,” Herre Johannes said, his eyes on my face now. “A plant needs to do more than stretch its leaves toward the sun. It also needs to send down roots deep into the ground. They hold on tightly in the dark, out of sight where it is easy to forget about them. But it is the fact that a plant can do these two things at once, anchoring itself to the earth even as it reaches for the sky, that makes it strong.

“If the roots fail, the plant will die every time. Do you understand what I am trying to say?”

“I think so.” I nodded. “You are trying to remind me not to get so consumed in what lies ahead that I forget about where I came from. You want me to remember to look both forward and back.”

“There now,” Herre Johannes said, and he pressed a kiss to my forehead. “Your grandmother was right. She always said you were a smart one.”

Not smart enough to keep Kai from leaving,
I thought.
Not smart enough to truly see him even though he’s spent his whole life standing at my side. Not so smart that I stopped myself from driving him away, straight into the arms of the Winter Child.

But I did not say these things aloud. “I will never be as smart as you are,” I said as I put my arms around Herre Johannes and held on tight.

Herre Johannes made a rumbling sound deep in his chest. “Yes, well,” he said. “It helps if you remember that I am very old.”

“And your roots are strong,” I said as I let him go. I stepped back, the better to see his face in the fading light.

“As are yours,” Herre Johannes replied. “Remember that, when your journey seems difficult. Remember that I will be thinking of you as I tend the garden.”

“I will,” I promised.

We left the rooftop just as the sun went down.

T
EN
Story the Sixth

In Which Kai Finally Finds His Voice

I suppose you’re wondering why I haven’t said anything until now.

If Grace were here she’d tell you I don’t talk all that much, not unless I really have something to say, anyhow. Which makes me sound like some strong and silent type. Totally untrue, of course. And Grace isn’t here. That’s part of the point. If the two of us hadn’t quarreled, if we’d stayed together, neither of us would have much of a story to tell. Or at the very least, they would be different from the one—ones—you’re now holding in your hands.

You may also feel as if I owe an explanation. Why did I do it? Why did I follow the Winter Child? This would be difficult to put into words even if I were a big talker. The closest I can come is to say that the moment I beheld Deirdre, I felt ... affirmed. For as long as I can remember, my heart has harbored a
belief in spite of my logical mind: the belief that the Winter Child truly exists, that she is much more than a character in a bedtime story.