The rains began.
Hard, constant, they battered the fields, turned the roads to mud, crushed the gold leaves into the ground and turned them black. In the wood, the sodden trees and brambles bowed beneath the torrents. Leaves fell, clung limply to vines and wildflowers, slowly buried them beneath their sodden weight. Work in the fields, on Lynn Hall, stopped, though I heard him hammering inside, the time or two I ventured into the wood. I went to the well once; the rain-kissed water gave me nothing, not even my reflection. Another time, near evening, when the rains had grown gentle, drops flecking the air like tiny fireflies, I went to gather the last of the crab apples for Beda. So I told myself: I had to pass the ruined hall to reach the tree. Smoke came out of a chimney, smelling sweetly of birch and maple. Crispin had brought him a wagonload of seasoned wood. I did not see him.
Most of the time, I stayed in the house, sewing beside Laurel, or watching the rain. I had frightened myself in the wood: I did not know, anymore, what was true. If I had invented a world that none of us lived in, then the true world was Laurel’s, predictable, dependable, with no secrets and no stray midnight gold that turned to leaf by morning. Corbet Lynn had not walked out of light, but had ridden a horse into the village; Laurel loved Perrin as always, and I had seen wild horses in the night winds only because I wanted them there. I made myself teas of camomile and vervain to soothe my thoughts, and watched Laurel move calmly through her world. She never paced, or pulled a window open to feel the rain, the wind; she never moved without grace or purpose. She never went barefoot.
So I wore shoes and braided my hair, and made lace for her wedding dress, as if I sewed time and promises into each airy loop and every inch of it bound Laurel more securely to her future. And then I began to notice how softly my father spoke around me, and how he walked as if I were recovering, as he and Perrin sometimes did, from a keg of apple brandy. The little, anxious frown seemed always in Laurel’s eyes when she looked at me. I had thought she still fretted over my stormy ramblings, but gradually I realized that my shod feet bothered her more.
“What is it?” she asked one afternoon, when we both sat sewing in the grey light from the window. “You’ve grown so quiet.”
“I’m trying to be like you,” I said.
She stared at me, amazed. “Why?” she asked finally. But I could not tell her why without telling her all the ways we differed, without painting pictures out of wind. She added, when I did not answer, “Usually by now you’ve paced a path across the ceiling, and it takes you the rest of autumn to settle muttering into winter. Or else you just go out in any weather, and come back wet as a fish, with your hands full of whatever isn’t dead. You used to love the rain.”
“You used to worry about that,” I said shortly. There seemed no pleasing anyone.
“Rois —”
“I’m just trying to be civilized.”
“But I miss the way you were.” I huffed a sigh, and she said quickly, “I mean, I miss you being happy. You are never happy, housebound. Why are you forcing yourself so?”
“I can’t be wild all my life.” I missed a loop with my hook, aimed for it, missed again. I let lace and hook fall into my lap finally, and leaned back. Across the room, the window framed white birch, a muddy field, distant trees, looking ragged with the last of their leaves. I saw smoke rising above the trees, and I looked down quickly. Laurel, watching the same smoke, did not.
She said slowly, “I wonder what he cooks, in there. Probably half-raw meat and burned bread.”
“He might eat at the inn.”
“He might eat here.” She stood up suddenly, briskly. “Tonight. You go and invite him. I’ll tell Beda.”
“Tonight?”
She threw a quizzical glance at me. “He must eat. And our father and Perrin like his company. Maybe hell tell us more about his past. Go on.”
“But it’s raining.”
She laughed at me incredulously. So I put my lace aside and contemplated my shoes. I hesitated; Laurel looked away discreetly.
I decided to ride to the hall. It suited my state of mind, which, like my feet, seemed both agitated and constrained. What expression would be in his eyes when he looked at me? I wondered in terror as I sorted through them in memory: his polite lack of expression, his remote smile, the way he looked at me without seeing me, or worse, saw far too much. But riding my calm dark mare, I was armed and in disguise: shod, braided, cloaked and hooded in green wool against the rain. His first expression would be surprise.
I rode around the ruins and found a door near the smoking chimney. I heard no noise inside. I dismounted and knocked: still nothing. I stood listening, wondering if he slept, or had ridden to the village. Then he said behind me, “Rois.”
I whirled, my heart hammering. He walked among the old rose trees, his hair wet, leaves clinging like hands to his grey cloak. His shoulders and boots and the hem of his cloak were dark with rain; it did not seem to bother him.
“How could you recognize me like this?” I demanded. He would only have seen the back of a hooded cloak, and a pair of boots, and he did not know my horse.
He shrugged slightly, his eyes saying little, neither surprised nor unsurprised. “How could I not?” he asked simply.
I did not pursue that. I didn’t want to be even more confused. I gave him Laurel’s message tonelessly, adding dourly, “She thinks you eat raw meat.”
He smiled at that. He walked to the door then, and unlatched it. “Come in and see.”
Surprised, I followed him.
He had roofed two rooms and had hung a tapestry between them, a glittering fall of gold and silver thread, so ancient the threads had worn through in places, making the design dreamlike, imprecise. Roses framed it, deeply red, like old blood. The marble flagstones had been cleaned of moss and weed and half a century of grass. Some stones had broken, but he had mortared and smoothed the cracks, and scrubbed the stones to the color of old ivory. A velvet couch and a needlework chair stood beside the marble fireplace. Both trailed threads, but the dark wood had been polished until light caught in all its graceful scrolls and turns. Great raw beams spanned the ceiling above our heads; the roof, I realized, would become the underpinnings of another floor, next spring. Now rain tapped on it, soft at first, then harder, with insistent fingers, the wood wanting its own back.
“I had those brought from where I used to live; they belonged to my mother.” He lifted the tapestry and let me see: a bed of the same dark wood, the cloths and canopy so precisely spread and hung that they seemed frozen into place, as if no one really slept there.
I saw no dust or spiders anywhere, nor anything he might have picked up in the wood: no nuts, or bowl of apples, or bright spray of leaves. “You don’t eat raw meat,” I said. “You don’t eat anything.”
“I eat at the inn,” he said absently.
“And tonight?”
He smiled again, pleased. “Yes. Of course. It was kind of you to come.”
“Laurel asked me to.”
I watched him pull the tapestry straight on its wooden loops. His hair was the exact gold of those pale gold threads; he seemed, for an instant, his head and arm uplifted, his shirt blending into the flickering threads, a part of the tapestry, just stepping free. I felt my throat close on words, on wonder. Have you seen the winds hunt? I wanted to ask him. Have you ever seen something as bright and heavy as gold turn into leaf by daylight? His face turned toward me then, as if he heard my thoughts; his eyes held mine.
Again I felt their green drain through me, as if that color had become my heart’s blood. He said softly, before I could turn away, “What did you see when you ran in the wood that night?”
I had seen his face, pale and alien and beautiful as the moon. The winds rode over me again, dark, wild, their cloaks of golden leaves, their harness forged of moonlight. I swallowed; my voice barely sounded.
“Wind.”
“What else?”
“Water.”
“What else?”
“A leaf.”
His eyes loosed me then; I turned away, feeling dazed. Then I cried sharply, “Nothing! I saw nothing! Why do you think I’m dressed like this?”
“All in green,” he said softly, “on a black horse, to bid me come and eat with you.” It sounded like an old song. He added lightly, “Tell your sister I will bring wine from the inn. What do you like?”
“Anything. Apple or blackberry. Laurel likes blackberry.”
“Then I will bring both.” He opened the door for me. It was still raining hard, but I forgot, passing him closely, so closely I heard his drawn breath, to pull my hood up. I rode across the muddy fields blinded by water, my braids sliding loose in the wet, so that when I came into our house, dripping water and tracking mud, my hair in my eyes, Laurel finally looked familiar again.
He came at twilight, riding his buttermilk horse. The rains fell everywhere from an iron-grey sky, silvery ribbons in the lamplight, a constant hollow sound beyond that, as if the world were slowly emptying in the dark. He brought sweet wines, one dark, one pale. We drank them with stew and salad and black bread, and then we drank more around the fire, my father’s brandy passing with the wines, while Perrin talked about his harvest, and Laurel’s lace inched down from her hook, and I sat in the shadows, watching how the shifting light in Corbet’s hair flickered silver and gold like the threads in his tapestry.
Perrin stopped talking after a while, and began to play softly on Laurel’s flute. Laurel’s hands stilled; she raised her eyes to Corbet’s face.
“Where did you live,” she asked, “before you came here?”
He seemed inclined to answer; there was little, in that winey warmth, worth hiding. “In the city. In other places. My mother could afford to live where she chose. Sometimes near the sea. She loved water; moving or still, it didn’t matter.”
“‘I loved my love by water,’” Perrin said, breaking off a note. He was getting drunk. “‘I loved my love by land. I loved my love by the green, green sea, and left her on the silver sand.’” Our father gave a ghostly snore. Perrin raised his flute again to play.
“Go on,” Laurel said to Corbet. “Where did you live just before you came here? In the city?” He nodded, sipping brandy. “Is that where your father died?”
“No,” he said, and nothing more. But his eyes, cool, still, waited for another question. Laurel asked it, leaning back, her face framed by her dark hair, by darker wood, her eyes holding his.
“How did he die?”
“No,” he said smoothly. “You should ask, ‘Then where did he die?’”
“Did you love him?” I asked abruptly, and his eyes flicked to me, surprised.
“Now that,” he said, “is a very good question. It would lay to rest any number of curses. But it will cost you an answer.”
“To what?”
“Any question I ask.”
Perrin, grunting a laugh, blew a sharp note. Our father straightened, blinking. “What was the question?” he demanded sleepily. “I misheard.”
“Nothing,” Perrin said. “Laurel and Rois are playing a game.”
“I wasn’t,” Laurel protested. “I’m being seriously rude. Corbet is changing it into a game.”
Corbet smiled at her over his glass. “Truth is a simple place reached by many different roads. I will tell you, but you won’t believe me. My father is still living, but for understandable reasons he never wants to return to Lynn Hall. He married late in life; my mother died young. I inherited her fortune, and with my father’s blessing I came to repair the hall and the land. With his blessing. Not his curse.”
We were silent. I glanced at Laurel; she didn’t believe him, either. “You told Crispin your father was dead,” I said.
“I did not. Crispin assumed he was dead, since I returned to claim Lynn Hall.”
“You let us all assume,” Laurel protested.
“I didn’t intend to,” he answered gently. “It’s just that no one asked me. And I was too busy to listen to gossip.”
“It’s a truth,” I said after a moment. “Are there different truths, the way there are different curses?” I could feel the dark sweet wine pulsing through me; I had drunk too much, and it made me reckless. His eyes changed as he looked from Laurel to me; they withheld answers, emotions, held only secrets. “Or,” I continued, “is each curse a different truth?”
Laurel laughed. “Rois, you’re making no sense! Ask something he can answer, so we can understand.”
“Yes,” he said to her, and my breath stopped; he had answered me. I drank more wine.
“You ask,” I said to Laurel, dazed by too much truth, and suddenly afraid. I wanted to hide myself in shadows the way I had hidden myself in leaves that night. But he saw through the shadows into fear: A smile, distant and cold as a star, surfaced in his eyes.
Laurel saw the smile differently; an answering smile touched her lips. He was a challenge to her, a teasing puzzle, something to unravel in the winter evenings, as long as he spun his riddles out. She contemplated him a moment, while Perrin played softly beside her, then asked, “Did your grandfather really curse your father?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, and I saw his fingers tighten a little on his glass.
“And you?” she persisted. “Are you cursed?”
He looked at her without answering, until her eyes widened slightly and dropped. Perrin had stopped playing; he waited, curious, for an answer.
“I am cursed,” Corbet said, “with a leaky fireplace, mutton four times a week at the inn, a horse stabled in my woodshed, weeds to the horizon everywhere I look, autumn falling into all the roofless rooms of my house, and winter waiting to take up lodging after it.”
“You could leave,” Laurel said softly, her brows crooked. “Come back in spring. Why don’t you?”
Our father stirred from his nap again, probably listening for the silent flute. “Good,” he exclaimed, having caught a word here and there in his dreams. “Mutton, four times a week, that’s terrible. You must come and eat with us, as often as you like. Come for the company.” His affable smile, fat and warm as our beeswax candles, flashed at me a moment, then back to Corbet. “For the company,” he repeated. “The winter nights grow old and thin and threadbare very fast, when you’re alone.”
Corbet rose. “Thank you.”
“I mean it — you tell him, Laurel. See to it he comes.”
“I will,” she said, laughing. “If only to plague him with more questions, until he tells us the simple truth.”
“I have told you,” he protested. But she did not listen to him. I listened, but I had heard nothing simple at all.
He bade us good night. I left Laurel and Perrin talking, and went to bed. Sometime in the night he stood in my dreams, watching me out of his secret eyes, and I woke, shaken, still feeling his gaze in the dark.