When Rose Wakes (10 page)

Desperate for answers, she glides from the thick of the storm into the lovely quiet of the Feywood. Snowflakes drift down through branches still thick with leaves only now turning brown and gold and red. Rose breathes in that silence a moment, glancing around expectantly. They know she is here. They will feel her, as they always have, perhaps not instantly but soon enough. All she can do is wait.

Suddenly discovering her own exhaustion, she moves to a thick oak and kneels in the snow at its foot, leaning against the trunk and exhaling some of the fear and sorrow that she has kept bottled inside. Here, in the moment and this place, she is safe. She cannot say the same for her father or his kingdom or his soldiers, but she will forgive herself a few minutes of selfishness.

The fear is still abated but her sorrow returns in mere moments. She has fought hard against the temptation toward self-pity, but she is losing that battle.

Rose bites her lip to stave off the threat of tears, and it infuriates her. Where is fairness? Where is justice? Where is victory for the righteous and the kindhearted? Or are such things just myths?

A flutter of wings makes her look up, but perhaps she is mistaken, for she sees nothing but the trees and the snow. Heart heavier, knowing she should never have run, old enough at sixteen to realize that there are things you cannot run away from, she wonders if the Ladies of the Wood will even come. Like her father’s soldiers, they have their part to play. The snow is evidence enough that they are otherwise occupied. Mid-September and nearly a foot has fallen, with no sign of subsiding.

“Beautiful flower, are those tears for yourself?”

The voice is small and hushed, yet it reaches her as though spoken just beside her ear. Grateful relief fills Rose and in that moment she feels less alone.

“For myself,” she admits, swiping at her unfallen tears. “For my father. For his kingdom. For my teacher and his wife and sons, for the cook and his aging mother, and for so many I do not know, the ones who died out there beyond the Feywood and the ones still to die—”

“The ones you can save.”

Rose stiffens, the remaining moisture of her tears freezing at the corners of her eyes. The cold seems to have reached deep within her, but she knows this is no magic. This is hard truth.

“Yes,” she agrees. Then she glances around, eyes narrowed. “Don’t talk to me from shadows, Rielle.”

The flutter of wings again, and the spret appears, the tiny
woman no bigger than a hummingbird flitting from side to side three feet in front of her, silver wings a gray blur in the storm-shadowed wood. Rielle has been her friend as long as Rose can recall. The spret remembers the sound of the infant Rose’s laughter, has watched her grow up, has been her tender comfort and her wise counsel all her life, a tiny maternal voice for a girl whose mother had died before ever beholding her daughter’s face.

“You pick a strange night to visit the wood,” Rielle says, her violet eyes accusatory, her pretty, angular features somehow sharpening.

Rose silently implores her, but Rielle has always made her speak her heart.

“Can’t the Ladies of the Wood do something?” Rose asks.

Rielle darts upward, cocking her head and listening with pricked, pointed ears. “Listen, can’t you hear? They are doing something.”

Rose stares at her, confused. The spret flits between snowflakes, those that come too near melting before they can touch her. Rielle gazes back at her, arms crossed, wings buzzing madly.

“I hear nothing,” Rose says.

Rielle sighs, seems to surrender to frustration, and zips closer, alighting on Rose’s thigh. Her wings, at rest, are as delicate as snowflakes themselves.

“Nothing, yes,” Rielle says. “That is their doing.” She throws up her arms. “They have stolen a winter’s day and
unleashed it here. Your father’s enemies shiver in their bedrolls. Their fires will not burn. They have nowhere to shelter themselves. It is midday and yet they cannot see to attack. For this day, and this alone, the war holds its breath while it awaits your father’s decision.”

Rose averts her eyes, wilting beneath Rielle’s gaze.

“That isn’t what I meant,” she whispers.

“You ask more?” the spret replies. “All of the Ladies’ abilities have been put into this spell, to persuade the seasons to exchange a January day for one in September. The very fact that the spell’s influence extends beyond the wood to the plain where the enemy is encamped shows the effort they have put forth. And yet you ask more.”

Rose hears a crackling in the branches, glances up to see a tiny pink eye watching from the crook of a tree. Rielle darts off in an eyeblink. Leaves rustle and Rose hears the crack of a small branch or a thin bone. Something falls from the tree and is swallowed by the soft thickness of the new-fallen snow.

“Rielle?” Rose asks, rising in alarm.

The spret emerges from the shadows, from the crook of the branch, grim-eyed and heavyhearted.

“What was that?” Rose asks.

“The Ladies of the Wood love you, Rose. But there are sometimes others here.”

The words chill her. Rose backs away, thinking to run back to the castle, but then she remembers why she has come and knows that there is no sanctuary to be found there.

“Your father will not force you,” Rielle says, spinning in a gust of wind, a mournful sort of dance. “But you have only until the snow abates to choose. Will you marry this enemy prince, or will you sacrifice the lives of all those who call your father Highness to protect your own heart?”

Rose has been torturing herself with the same question but she does not want to answer it. The enemy has spoken of a truce that will give her father his dignity and freedom, or at least the illusion of such things. If she will marry his son, Luc, the enemy will allow her father to continue to rule his kingdom until his death, at which time the two regions will unite beneath a single banner. It is, her father’s advisors have told her, a civilized conclusion to a barbaric war.

Yet it is also defeat, and Rose does not delude herself otherwise.

“If I marry, I may be forced to leave here,” Rose whispers, her voice almost lost in the snow. “You cannot leave the Feywood. The Ladies… they are bound here.”

Violet eyes soften. “We will love you, near or far,” Rielle says. “We are your family, Rose.”

“Then I should be here with you.”

Rielle flits nearer, poking her nose with a finger. “The rest of us are limited, foolish girl. You are your mother’s daughter, but your father’s as well, and you are free to travel far and wide. You could be our eyes in this world, until the magic of the wood has faded and either freed us or killed us. Your aunts gave you such gifts at birth—charm and wit, beauty and song—
but merely by virtue of his humanity, your father has given you the gift of freedom.”

“Freedom I must now surrender to this prince, this stranger!” Rose cries.

Something cries out in the wood. Rielle darts upward, spinning to and fro, searching for any sign of threat, and then slowly, suspiciously, descends.

“You must choose, Rose,” the spret says. “No one can do it for you. All your life the Ladies have watched over you. When the Black Heart visited her curse upon you, when all the castle and village were made to sleep while she put her mark on your heart, they wove their protections into that curse, diminishing it, they wept that they could not undo it entire. They will watch over you, Rose, until the great tapestry of the world itself is unwoven, but they cannot make this decision for you, and neither can I.”

Rose shakes, forcing herself not to weep.

Rielle comes nearer, studies her eyes. “There is more to your fear than this prince.”

Snow whispers, but perhaps it is more than snow, out there in the gray shadows of the midday storm. Rielle frowns and glances that way, but then focuses again on Rose.

“I’m going to die,” Rose says.

“Not for a long time, as your father’s kind mark it,” Rielle replies. “Not with your mother’s blood in you.”

“Sooner,” Rose tells her, gazing at the snow between her feet. “Soon enough.”

“Why would you—”

“She came to me. The Black Heart.”

“What? When?” Rielle snaps, flitting toward her and grabbing hold of the cuff of her jacket. “In the flesh?”

Rose shakes her head. “Worse than flesh.”

The spret releases her cuff and lets herself eddy on the wind, deep in thought. But then a branch snaps, startling them both. Rose whips around, trying to see through the snow, and there is something there, some dark figure whose presence fills her with a dread so much colder than the storm.

“Run!” Rielle pipes in her ear.

Rose bolts, fleeing through the trees, ducking branches and leaping fallen trees, cutting away from the natural path, seeking the shortest distance to the edge of the wood. Her face burns with fear, heart drumming, and her jacket drags at her so she sheds it and runs on. Rielle flies ahead, wings a blur, turns to peer back into the snowy woods with those violet eyes, flies ahead again, turns again, her sharp features unaccustomed to expressing fear, though Rose sees it in her.

The spret drops down beside her, flying just beside her ear, wingbeats strangely loud.

“The Black Heart will not kill you, though she wishes you dead,” Rielle says.

“Then what is this?” Rose gasps.

“Something for you to fear. Something to hurt you. For she would love to see you hurt.”

Rose runs wide-eyed, no longer caring about branches that claw at her as she passes.
Dead is dead,
she thinks,
but pain
can be an eternity. Stop that. Just run.
Her breath comes in ragged gasps and darkness fills the corners of her vision and disorientation begins to shift the world out from under her. She staggers, nearly falling.

“You’re nearly there, Rose,” Rielle urges. “Keep running and you will be safe. But listen to me now as you’ve never listened to me before. When you marry this Luc, as you must, you cannot lie with him, Rose. You mustn’t let him inside you. If he pricks you, all is lost.”

Shocked, Rose turns to look at Rielle, and her boot catches on a root hidden beneath the snow. Crying out, she tumbles forward, spilling to the white-blanketed ground in a flailing tangle of arms and legs and the billowing cape of her jacket. As she struggles to rise, snow slips down her collar and clings to her face, but she finds herself just at the edge of the wood, trees around her but open, snow-cloaked ground spread out ahead and the village and castle beyond.

Her father stands in the snow, torch in hand. Other searchers, dim figures in the storm, call her name not far off. Many are near the edge of the Feywood but she did not hear them calling her, not while she herself was amongst the trees. Her father, though, does not seem to have been calling her name. He seems only to have been waiting, there with his torch, and now he crouches beside her and offers his hand.

She studies his eyes, so full of regret and worry. His beard has become grayer of late, not quite winter but deep into autumn, and she fears that his life has also been foreshortened by the strain of this war and now his concern for her.

“Darling Rose,” he says. “Come home. There are decisions to be made.”

“Yes, Father,” she says, taking his hand and rising. She will tell him soon enough that decisions have already been made, that no matter what her fate, she will not allow the war to continue if it is within her power to stop it. The killing. The dying. She will tell him, but not just now.

“Bid your aunts farewell,” the king says.

Confused, Rose turns back toward the wood. At first there are only shapes amongst the trees, but then those forms resolve and she sees them. Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay, cloaked in snow and shadow. In the branches above them, ravens track her with cruel eyes. Something flutters in the branches, something with violet eyes.

And she hears the words again.

All is lost.

•

And Rose wakes.

She opened her eyes to the solidity, the firm reality, of her bedroom on Acorn Street, and exhaled.

“We need to talk.”

Twisted up in her bedsheets, Rose jerked back, startled by the sight of Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay standing just inside her bedroom door. She looked past them into the gloom of the hall, fearful of what might accompany them.

“Rose, darling, what is it?” Aunt Suzette asked, starting toward her.

Rose, darling.
Just the way her father said it.

“Another dream; what do you think?” Aunt Fay said, curt with her sister.

Rose exploded from the bed.

“It’s not a dream!” she screamed, pursuing her startled aunts as they retreated in shock. All of her fear and frustration, both sleeping and waking, boiled over. “Goddamn you both, it’s not a dream!”

They backed into the hallway, staring at her wide-eyed, trying to stammer some sort of reply.

Rose slammed the door. After a moment, heaving to catch her breath, heart like a hummingbird—or something else, something with violet eyes—she turned her back to the door and slid down it, burying her face in her hands.

And she whispered to herself, “Please, let it be a dream.”