Winter Rose

“You fought for your freedom and won a different kind of prison. I will fight for mine—”

“You can’t fight me,” Tearle reminded him harshly.

“I know.” In the placid light, his face looked chilled and very weary. “But I can die.”

I could not find my way back in dreams, I knew then. They were memory and desire, terror and hope; they told me only what I already knew.

She lies like the moon lies, a different face every night, all but one of them false, and the one true face as barren and hard as stone. Why do you believe her?

I was running from my own thoughts as much as anything. I simply wanted to untangle myself from the web I had touched. A single, sticky, quivering strand of it was all I needed to warn me away. I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.

“Love is what we say it is,” she said fiercely. “That’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows about it. I’m sorry.”

Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart.

“But, Corbet, there were things—between us—”

“You imagined many of them. You wanted them to be true, and so they were. But only to you.”

I didn’t know anymore what love meant, or why we were not all better off without it.

Do you care for me at all? Or do you only need me?

Perhaps there had never been anything at all to see.