In 1984 Ottawa’s Charles de Lint received the first annual William L. Crawford Award for Best New Fantasy Author. Since then he has emerged as a prolific and popular storyteller, specializing in and practically inventing the “urban fantasy” tale, combining modern characters and situations with folkloric elements. His work in this tradition includes the novels Moonheart and its sequel Spiritwalk, Mulengro, Yarrow, Greenmantle, The Dreaming Place, and The Little Country. It is an open secret that he also writes horror fiction under the name Samuel M. Key.
Inspired by the work of Canadian landscape artist David Armstrong and a painting by fantasy illustrator Dawn Wilson, “The Soft Whisper of Midnight Snow” has been described as “a widely acclaimed (and envied) masterpiece.” It is dark fantasy with a heart. It is pure Charles de Lint.
Night. The fields lay stark as a charcoal drawing—white drifts, the black clawed talons of the trees, the starlight piercingly bright. A gust of wind-driven snow swirled across the nearest field and he was there again. A shape in the twisting snow. A whisper of moccasins against white grains of ice. One step, another. He was drawing closer, much closer. Then she blinked, the snow swirled with a new flurry of wind, and he was gone. The field lay empty.
Tomilyn Douglas turned from the window and let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. The cabin was warm, the new woodstove throwing off all of its advertised heat, but a chill still scurried down her spine. She walked slowly to where her easel stood by an east window, ready to make use of the morning light. Her hand trembled slightly as she flicked a lamp switch and studied the drawing in its pale glow. It twinned the scene she had just been witness to, complete with the tiny shapeless figure, its details hidden in a swirl of gusting snow.
This morning she’d thought it had been a dream, that she had only dreamed of waking and seeing that figure in the snow, moving towards the cabin. Her fingers smudged with charcoal, she’d stood back and smiled with satisfaction at the rendering she’d done of it, that momentary high of a completed work making her a little dizzy until she’d had to go sit down. A useful dream, she’d thought, for it had left her with the first piece of decent work she’d completed since Alan . . . since Alan had gone. It was an omen of things to come, of a lost talent returned, of an ache finally beginning to heal.
Tomi flicked off the light and the room returned to darkness. It’d been an omen all right, she thought. But she was no longer so sure that she understood just what it was that it promised.
“This is where the dream becomes real,” he’d told her when they bought and fixed up the cabin. It was meant to be only a temporary arrangement. The cabin stood on a hundred acres of bushland south of Calabogie. Alan had the blueprints all drawn up for the house they would build on the hill behind the cabin. It was his dream to build a home for them that would be the perfect design. The house would grow almost organically from its surroundings. A stand of birch grew so close to where her studio would be that she would feel as though she was a part of the forest, separated only by the glass walls of the room. Solar heating, a vegetable garden already planned out, enough forest on the land that they could cut their own wood . . . self-sufficiency was to be the order of the day and she loved him for it. For the house, for the land, for the dream, for . . . for his love.
They could afford to live out of the city. They were both established in their careers—architect and artist. Alan’s clients sought him out now, while her work sold as quickly as she could paint it. They were the perfect match for each other—she loved it when people told them that, because it was true. For eleven years . . . it was true. But the dream had become a nightmare.
Last spring the foundations of their dream house were a scar on the landscape, like the scar on her soul. The forest began to reclaim its own. By the time the snows came this year, the sharp edges of the foundations were rounded with returning undergrowth. The scar she carried had yet to lose its raw edges.
Morning. Tomi bundled up and went out into the field, but if last night’s visitor had left any tracks, if he hadn’t just been some figment of her imagination, the night’s wind had dusted and filled them with snow. She stood, the wind blowing her brown hair into her face, and stared across the white expanse of drifts and dervishing snow-eddies to study the forest beyond the fields. The quiet that she’d loved when she moved here from the city, that she’d slowly come to love again as she dealt with her pain, disturbed her now. Too quiet, she thought, then she spoke the clichéd words aloud. The wind took them from her mouth and scattered them across the field. Shivering, Tomi returned to the cabin.
She spent the day working at her easel. Sketch after sketch made its mysterious passage from mind through fingers to paper. And they were all good. No, she amended as she looked them over while having a midafternoon soup-and-tea break. They were better than good. They were the best she’d done in over a year, perhaps better than before Alan—
She shut that train of thought off as quickly as it came. She was getting better at it now. But while she thrust aside the ache before it could take hold, she couldn’t shake the uneasiness that had followed her through the day. Night was coming, was almost here. Just at dusk it began to snow. Tiny granular pellets rasped against the door, rattled on the roof. She wanted to turn all the lights on so that she’d be blinded to the night outside, but not seeing made her more nervous. One by one she turned them off, then sat in the darkness and looked out over the fields at the falling snow.
One day he just never came home. She could draw up that day in her memory with a total recall that always struck her as a sure sign that she was still a long way from getting over it. He left in the morning to do some work down the road at Sam Gould’s place—Sam having helped them when they were having the foundation poured. When he still wasn’t back by dinnertime, she gave Sam a call, but he hadn’t seen Alan all day and, no, he hadn’t been expecting him.
That night wasn’t the worst one in her life—those had come after, when she knew—but it was bad. She hadn’t been able to do anything but worry, staring at the phone, waiting for him to call. She tried some friends of theirs in the city. No luck. She thought of calling the police, hospitals, that kind of thing, but knew for all her worry that it was too early for that. Then around eleven o’ clock the phone rang, startling her right out of her seat with its klaxon jangle.
“Alan?” she cried into the mouthpiece. “Alan, is that you?” The words came out in a rush like they were all one word.
“Whoa, Mrs. Douglas. Slow down a bit. This is Tom Moulton.”
Her relief shattered into pieces of icy dread.
“Sorry to be calling you so late, but I was talking to Sam a few minutes ago and heard you were worried about your man. Thing is, I saw your jeep parked out on 511, a couple of miles down from my place. I knew right off it was yours, but I figured you all were out for a little hike or something, you know what I mean?”
She called the police then, and they began a search of the surrounding bush. It wasn’t until a couple of days later when she had to go to the bank that she discovered half the money in their joint account had been withdrawn.
Night. The snow had tapered off, but the wind was still shaping and reshaping the drifts around the trees and fence posts and up against the cabin. Tomi was half-hypnotized by the movement of the snow. Time and again she thought she saw a figure, but it was always just a shadow movement, a tree branch, a fox once. Then just as she was ready to give up her vigil, something drew her face closer to the window and she saw him again.
He was closer still. Not moving now, just standing out there in the field, watching the cabin. Tattered cloth fluttered in the wind, muting his outline against the snow. He was still too far away to make out details, but something about the way he stood, about the way he held himself erect, not hunched into the wind, told her that he wasn’t who she’d feared he’d be. He wasn’t Alan.
“What are you?” she whispered. “What do you want from me?”
She didn’t expect an answer. He was too far away to hear her. There was a thick glass pane and an expanse of white field between them. There was the wind and the gusting snow to steal her words. She wanted to shout at the figure, to run out and grab him. The window frosted up under her breath. She cleared it with a quick wipe of her hand, but in the time it took the figure was gone again.
Hardly realizing what she was doing, she grabbed her coat and a flashlight and ran outside, stumbling through the snow to where he’d stood. When she reached the spot there was no sign of him, no tracks. The field was virgin snow all around her, except for her own ragged trail from the cabin.
She began to shiver. Returning to the warmth of the cabin, she closed and bolted the door. She tossed her coat onto a chair, the flashlight, never used, on top of it, then slowly made her way to her bedroom. She began to undress, then stopped dead as she glanced at the bed. A long raven’s feather lay on the comforter, stark and black against its flowered Laura Ashley design.
“Oh, Jesus.”
On watery legs she walked over to the bed, stared at the intrusion, unwilling to touch it. He’d been inside. Somehow, while she’d been out looking for him, in those few moments, he’d come inside. Slowly she backed out of the bedroom. It didn’t take long to search the cabin.
There was the main room that included her studio and the kitchen area, a bathroom, and her bedroom. She was alone in the cabin. In a trancelike state, she investigated every possible hiding place until she was positive of that. She was alone inside, but he was out there. What did he want? What in God’s name was this game he was playing?
She was a long time getting to sleep that night, starting at every familiar creak and groan in her cabin. When she finally did sleep, restless dreams plagued her, dreams of shapeless figures and clouds of raven’s feathers that fell like black snow all around her while she ran and ran, trying to catch an answer that was always out of reach. Underpinning her dreams, the wind moaned outside the cabin, whispering the snow against its log walls.
The deed to the cabin and its land was in her name and, once the initial shock was over, she was quick to remove what money remained in their joint account into one under her own name. She kept thinking there was some mistake, that this wasn’t happening to them, to her. But as the days drifted into weeks, she had no choice but to accept it. To believe it, even if she couldn’t understand it.
At first she was confused and hurt. Anger was there too, but it came and went as if of its own will. Mostly she felt worthless. If they’d been having fights, if there’d been another woman, if there’d been some hint of what was coming, maybe she could have accepted it more easily. But it had come out of the blue.
“It’s him,” her friends tried to convince her. “He’s just an asshole, Tomi. Christ, he never had it so good.”
Neither had she, she’d want to say, but the words never got beyond her thinking them. He’d left her and she knew why. Because she was worthless. As she tried to lose herself in her work during the following weeks, she saw that her art was worthless too. God, no wonder he’d left her. The real wonder was that he hadn’t left her sooner.
And even later as she, at least intellectually, came to realize that it was him and not her worthlessness that had made him leave, emotionally it wasn’t that easy to accept. Emotionally, she retained the feelings of her own inadequacy. She’d stare into a mirror and see her face drawn and pale with her anxiety, the brown hair that framed it hanging listless, the body that could have been exercised but instead had been left to sag.
“Who’d want me?” she’d ask that reflection and then would retire deeper into the shell she was building around herself. Who’d want her? She didn’t even want herself.
Morning. Tomi had the jeep on the road and was halfway to Ottawa by the time the nine o’clock CBC news came on the radio. She turned it off. Her own troubles were enough to bear without having to listen to the world’s. But once she was in Ottawa, she didn’t know why she’d come.
She’d had to get away from the cabin, from the figure that haunted the fields outside it, from the black feather that was lying on the floor of her bedroom, but being here didn’t help. There was too much going on, too many cars, too many people. She almost had a couple of accidents in the heavy traffic on the Queensway, another on Bank Street.
She’d been planning to visit friends, but no longer knew what to say to them. Running from the cabin wasn’t the answer, she realized. Just as withdrawing from the world after Alan had left hadn’t been an answer. She had to go back.
That first spring alone had been the worst. She hadn’t been able to look at the foundations without wanting to cry. Unable to paint, or even sketch, she’d thrown herself into working around the cabin, fixing it up, removing every trace of Alan from it, putting in a garden, buying a new woodstove, discovering talents she’d never known she’d had. She might not be able to keep a husband or express herself with her art any more, but she could handle a hammer and saw, she could chop firewood, she could do a lot of things now—do them without ever worrying about whether or not she was capable of them.
The first night that she made a vegetable stew with all the ingredients coming out of her own garden, she celebrated with a bottle of wine, got very drunk and never once wanted to cry. She stood out in the clear night air and looked up the hill at the foundations and was surprised at what she found in herself.
The ache was still there, but it was different now. Still immediate, but not quite so piercing. She might not be able to paint yet, but the next day she took out her sketchbook and began to draw again. She wasn’t happy with anything she did, but she wasn’t discouraged about it anymore either. Not in the same way as she’d been when Alan first had deserted her.
Night. Tomi had forgotten how quickly it got dark. She decided to return to the cabin, but since she was in town anyway, she thought she might as well make a day of it. It went by all too quickly. From grocery shopping to haunting used bookstores and antique shops, it was going on four o’clock before she knew it. By the time she was fighting the heavy traffic on her way home, it began to snow again, big heavy flakes that were whisked away by the jeep’s wipers but were building up rapidly on the road and fields. When she reached old Highway 1 going north from Lanark, she was reduced to a slow crawl, even with the jeep’s four-wheel-drive. The build-up of snow and ice made for treacherous driving, especially on roads like this without as much traffic.
After Highway 1 turned into 511 and crossed the Clyde River, the driving grew worse. Here the road was narrow and twisted its way through the wooded hills that were barely visible through the storm. The wind drove the snow in sheets across her windshield. The jeep plowed through drifts that had already thrust hallway across the road in places.
Not far now, she told herself, and that much was true, but a half mile from the laneway leading in to her cabin, the road took a sudden dip and a sharp turn at the same time. She was going too fast when she topped the hill and hit an icy patch. Already nervous, she did the worst thing possible and instead of riding the fishtail and easing out of it, she slammed her foot on the brake.
The jeep skidded, came sideways down the hill, and missed the turn. Its momentum took it through and then over the snow embankment until it thudded to a stop against a tall pine. The shock of the impact brought all the snow down from its branches in a sudden avalanche.
Panicked and shaken, Tomi snapped loose her seatbelt and lunged from the jeep. The snow came up to her hips as she floundered through it back to the road. She was breathing heavily by the time she reached it, the cold air hurting her lungs. When she looked back, she saw the jeep was half covered with the snow that it had dislodged from the pine.
She was never going to get it out of that mess. Not without a tow truck or tractor. But she couldn’t face seeing to that now. She wasn’t far from home. She could walk the half mile easily. Trying to ignore the chill that was seeping in through her clothes, cold enough to make even her bones feel cold, she forced her way back to the jeep, fetched her purse and groceries, and started the short trek home.
The snow was coming down in a fury now, the wind slapping it against her exposed skin with enough force to hurt. Neck hunched into her coat, head bowed, she trudged up the road, fighting the steadily growing drifts. The half mile had never seemed so long. Her boots—fine for town, but a joke out here—were wet and cold against her feet. The stylish three-quarter-length coat that was only meant for the quick dashes from warm vehicle to warm store couldn’t contend with the bone-piercing chill of the wind.
She got a scare when she stumbled and fell in a sprawl on the highway, her grocery bag splitting open to spew its contents all around her. But she was more scared when she found she just couldn’t get up to go on. The shock of the accident and the numbing cold had drained all her strength.
She could lie here and, with the poor visibility, the snowplough would come by and bury her in the embankment, never knowing that its blades had scooped her up and shunted her aside. Or a pickup could come by and run her down before its driver even realized what it was that he was about to hit.
Right, bright eyes, she thought. So get the hell out of here.
She managed to sit up and tried to scrape together her scattered groceries, but her fingers were too numb in their thin gloves to work properly. What a time to play clothes horse, she thought hazily. But then again she hadn’t been planning on playing the arctic explorer when she’d set out this morning. What a dramatic picture this would make, she decided. The woman fallen in the snow, her groceries scattered around her, the wind howling around her like a dervish . . .
She blinked her eyes open suddenly to find that she’d laid her head down on the road again as she’d been thinking. This. Wouldn’t. Do. She forced herself back up into a sitting position. Screw the groceries. If she didn’t get out of here quickly, she wasn’t going to get up at all.
But the cold was in her bones now. Her teeth chattered and her jaws ached from trying to keep them from doing so. Her hands and feet just felt like lumps on the ends of her arms and legs. She realized with a shock that she was almost completely covered with snow. Only her upper torso was relatively free, the snow covering it having fallen off when she sat up.
Up. That was the ticket. She had to get up, put one foot in front of the other, and get herself home. She tried to rise, but the cold had just sapped something in her. There’d been a lot of times over the past spring and summer when she’d simply wanted to die, but now that it was a very real possibility, she wanted to live with a fierceness that actually got her to her feet.
She tottered and took a couple of steps, then fell into another drift, frustrated tears freezing on her cheeks. Which was weird, she thought, because the snow actually felt warm now. It was cozy. Just like her bed in the cabin. Or the big easy chair in front of the woodstove . . .
As she began to drift off, the last thing she saw was a dark shape moving towards her through the billowing snow. Incongruously, for all the howling of the wind, she heard a rasp of bead and quill against leather, a whisper of moccasins against the crust of snow, smelled a pungent scent like a freshly snapped cedar bough, and then she knew no more.
She blinked awake. The air was thickly warm around her. She was lying on something soft, cozily wrapped in a coverage of furs. Dim lighting spun in her gaze as she sat up. When her head stopped spinning, she stared groggily about herself.
There was a fire crackling in front of her, its smoke escaping upward through a hole in the roof. Roof. Where was she? The walls looked like they were made of woven branches. She could hear the wind howling outside them.
Movement caught her eye and she looked across the fire. He’d been sitting so still that she hadn’t noticed him at first, but now he leaped out at her with a thousand details, each one so clear that she wondered how she could have taken so long to see him there.
He sat cross-legged on a deerskin, the firelight playing on his pale skin, waking sharp highlights in his narrow features. His clothing was a motley collection of tatters. A black shirt, decorated with bone. A grey vest, inlaid with beadwork, quills, and feathers. A raven’s skull hung like a pendant from his neck in the middle of a cluster of feathers and shells. He wore a headdress, again decorated with feathers and bones, that lifted high above his head in the shape of a pair of horns. She thought of the wicked queen in Disney’ s Sleeping Beauty, looking at those horns, or of Tolkien’s highborn elves, taking in his pale features. But there was more of the Native American about him. And more than that, a feeling of great sorrow.
“Who . . . who are you?” she asked. She spoke softly, the way one might speak to a wild animal, poised for flight. “Why were you watching my cabin? What do you want with me?” She knew it had to have been him.
He made no reply. His eyes seemed all white in the deceptive light cast by the fire, all except for their pale grey pupils. His gaze never left Tomi’s face. She was suddenly sure that she was dead. The plow had come by and scraped her frozen body up from the road, burying it under a mountain of snow.
He was here to take her to . . . to wherever you went when you died.
“Please,” she said, fingers tightening their grip on the fur covering. “What . . . what do you want with me?”
The silence stretched until Tomi thought she would scream. She plucked nervously at the furs, wanting to look away, but her gaze seemed to be trapped by his unblinking eyes.
“Please,” she began again. “Why have you been spying on me?’”
He nodded suddenly. Movement made the bones and quills click against each other. “Life,” he said. His voice was husky and rough. He spoke with a heavy accent so that Tomi knew that whatever his native language was, it wasn’t English.
She swallowed thickly. Fear made her throat dry and tight. “L-life?” she managed. She looked for the door of the lodge, trying not to be too obvious about it. She didn’t know if she’d have the strength to take off, but she couldn’t just stay here with . . . with whatever he was.
He pulled a strip of birchbark from under his tunic and took a charred twig from beside the fire. With quick deft movements, he began to sketch on the birchbark. Curiosity warred with fear inside Tomi and she leaned forward. When he suddenly thrust the finished drawing at her, she floundered to get out of the way, then chided herself. So far the stranger hadn’t hurt her. He’d brought her in from the cold and snow, bundled her up in his furs, saved her life . . . And the drawing . . . it was good. Better than good.
Tomi taught art from time to time, week-long courses at the Haliburton School during the summer, a few at Algonquin College in Ottawa. Not one piece of the students’ work could hold a candle to the lifelike sketch of a snow hare that her curious host had thrust at her. His quick deft rendering of it was what she always tried to instill in her students. To go for feeling first. She smiled to show she appreciated it.
“It’s very good,” she began.
“Life!” he repeated. Taking back the drawing, he blew on it, then laid it on the ground beside the fire.
Fear clawed up Tomi’s spine again as the lines of the drawing began to move, to lift three-dimensionally from the birchbark. A hazily shaped hare sat there, its outline smoky and indistinct. Nose twitching nervously, it regarded her with warm eyes. Her fear died, replaced with wonder. She reached out a hand to touch the little apparition, but it drifted apart like smoke and was gone. All that remained was the birchbark that it had been sitting on. Its surface was clear, unmarked. “You,” her host said. “Your breath.”
“I . . . I can’t breathe like . . . like . . .”
“You must.”
“I can’t breathe—” Suddenly the lodge was spinning again. The fire turned into a whirlpool of glittering sparks that twisted and danced like snow-driven wind. Tomi’s words froze in her throat. Gone. It was going. It was—
—gone.
“—can’t breathe . . .”
Something was shaking her. She blinked rapidly, trying to slow down the spinning.
“Miz Douglas? Miz Douglas?”
The world came into focus with a sharp snap. A face was leaning into hers. For one moment she was back in the storm, or the storm had torn apart the strange man’s lodge, blowing everything away, then she recognized the face. Sam Gould’s strong features were looking down into hers. Worry creased his face. He looked at a loss.
“Sam . . . ?”
“It’s me, Miz Douglas. Found you lying on the highway. You’re damned lucky I didn’t run over you with the plow, I’ll tell you that.”
“You . . . found me . . . ?” Then the lodge, the man—that had been a dream?
“Sure did. Funny thing—thought I saw someone standing beside you, just when my high beams picked you out, but that must’ve been you standing for a moment, just before you fell. Hell of a storm, though, and that’s fact. Had a look at your jeep, but it’s in too deep for me to do much about it till the morning. I’ll come round with the tractor then, if you can wait.”
“I . . . can wait.”
“Not much damage, considering. Headlight’s gone on the driver’s side. You might want Bill Cassidy to have a look at that fender. I figure he could straighten her out for you, no problem.”
“There was . . . someone standing . . . ?” Tomi managed.
“Well, I thought there was, I’ll tell you that. But it was just a trick of the lights, I’d say. Storm can fool you into thinking you’re seeing just about anything sometimes.”
“Yes,” Tomi said slowly. Like what she’d thought she’d seen. A dream. Just . . .
“Anyway, I brought you up to your cabin,” Sam continued. “Thought you mighta had a touch of frostbite on your wrist there, but I wrapped it up tight and kept it warm. The skin wasn’t broken, so it’ll be all right. You were lucky, and that’s a fact. I coulda plowed you right up into the bank and no one would’ve known to go looking for you till your jeep was spotted in the morning. I put you to bed, but ’cepting your boots and coat, I didn’t . . . you know . . .” he blushed. “I just covered you up, Miz Douglas.”
“Thank you, Sam.” Tomi sat up slowly. “You saved my life.” A dream?
Sam shuffled his feet. “Guess I did at that. I woulda called up an ambulance, but by the time it would’ve got here, well . . . I did what I could, I’ll tell you that. You want I should call up the doc now, Miz Douglas? Or maybe get someone to stay with you for the night?”
Tomi shook her head. “I’ll be all right, Sam. But thank you.” Just a dream?
“My pleasure. I’d best be going now. Weather’s not getting any better and I’ve got a load of plowing still to do. Keep me busy most of the night, I’ll tell you that.”
Tomi started to get up, but Sam laid a hand on her shoulder and gently pressed her down. “I can see myself out, Miz Douglas. You just lie there and take her easy. I’ll lock up and be back in the morning with the tractor. You just get some sleep now. You’ve been through a rough time, and that’s a fact. Sleep’s the best thing for you now.”
Tomi nodded and lay back, knowing that he wouldn’t go until she did. She listened to him clomp across the hardwood floors in his workboots, heard him tug on his parka, the sound of the zipper, the door opening. “I’ll see you in the morning!” he called, then the door slammed shut. The door handle made a click-click noise as he checked to make sure it was locked. Silence then for a time. Except for the wind. The snow being pushed against the cabin, the windows. The big snowplow starting up. Gears grinding as they changed. The truck backing out of her lane. Silence again as the sound of the engine was swallowed by the wind.
Tomi stared at her ceiling. Just a dream?
She listened to the wind and the whisper of the snow against the windowpanes and logs outside. She might have drifted off, she wasn’t sure, just dozed there, until suddenly she had to get up, had to see, had to. She padded out of her bedroom into the main room of the cabin. Sam had left the lights on and she turned them off, one by one, then went to stand by the window.
The snow was still falling, the wind blowing it in great sweeps across the field. She stared out at the field, willing her stranger to be there again, for it not to have been a dream. She wasn’t sure what she wanted, what she expected. She had been frightened in the lodge, but remembering it now, there had been no reason for fear. Just the strange man with his totemic clothing, and the drawing that came to life with a breath, with just a whisper of air drawn up from his lungs . . .
She moved to her easel and turned on a light, aiming it so that it pooled over the easel, leaving the rest of the room in shadows. From the closet she took out a virgin canvas, a sketching pencil, her acrylics. The sketching went easily. Background first, light, hazy as though seen through a gossamer curtain of falling snow. Then the figure. But close now.
She knew his features and quickly sketched them in. Left their look of sorrow, but imbued them with a certain air of nobility as well. She made the clothing not so ragged, not so tattered. The totemic raven skulls, feathers, beads, and quills came readily, leaping the gap from memory to canvas with an exhilarating ease.
Oh, lord. This was what it felt like. This was what she’d missed, what Alan had stolen from her, what the stranger had given her back.
She didn’t know who or what he was, realized that it didn’t matter. Dream or real, it didn’t matter. Some spirit of winter, of the snow and wind, or of the forest . . . or a creation of her own blocked creativity. It didn’t matter.
When the sketching was filled in as much as she needed, she moved straight to the acrylics, mixing the paints and applying them, scarcely paying any attention to what she was doing. Her subconscious remembered, her fingers remembered. She only had to give them free rein. She only had to breathe life into what took shape on her canvas. God. To have forgotten this . . . to have lost it . . .
She leaned close as she worked, mixing colours on the seat of the stool, too enrapt in her work to search for her palette. The shades came easily. The painting grew from the rough black and white sketch into a being almost composed of flesh and blood, almost as though she were back in his lodge, seeing him across the fire, the light playing on his features, his steady gaze never wavering from hers. She listened to the wind, to the hiss and spit of the snow against the windows, and smiled as she worked.
It was long after midnight, but still far from dawn, when the main figure was completed and she only had the background to fill in. Her gaze locked to the gaze of the figure in the painting as she brushed in the pines and cedars behind him, the swirl of the snow as it gusted through the trees, across the field. But for all the movement in the background, the figure in the foreground was still. Only his eyes spoke to her.
Her fingers were cramping when she heard, under the moan of the wind and the whisper of the snow, the sound of her locked door opening. A draft of cold air touched the back of her neck as the wind entered, the wind and something more, something she had no name for, but she knew she owed it a debt.
It didn’t matter what he was—her imagination running wild, or something out of the wild night sparking her imagination. She was repaying what he had recovered for her from that first moment she’d seen him in the field, just a dark shape in the blurring snow, repaying what had been lost and now regained with life.
The door closed, but she didn’t turn around. The painting in front of her was like a mirror and she continued to breathe on it as she finished the last cedar.