When the winter child was ten, his mother died of her brutal estate and the boy left into the howl of a storm, without either cloak or hat between him and the cold. Drunk, his ten-year father did not see him go. The boy did not go to escape the man’s beatings; he went to his kin who called him from the wind. Bare-footed and bare-headed, he crossed the snows trying to catch up with the riders in the storm. He saw them clearly. They were clad in great white capes, the hoods lined with ermine; and when they turned to look at him, their eyes were wind-blue and the bones of their faces were thin and fine.
Long, long he trailed behind them, his tears turned to ice. He wept not for his dead mother, for it was she who had tied him to the world. He wept for himself and his feet, which were too small to follow after the fast-riding Winter’s Kin.
A woodcutter found him that night and dragged him home, plunging him into a bath of lukewarm water and speaking in a strange tongue that even he, in all his wanderings, had never heard.
The boy turned pink in the water, as if life were returned to him by both the bathing and the prayer, but he did not thank the old man when he woke. Instead he turned his face to the window and wept, this time like any child, the tears falling like soft rain down his cheeks.
“Why do you weep?” the old man asked.
“For my mother and for the wind,” the boy said. “And for what I cannot have.”
The winter child stayed five years with the old woodcutter, going out each day with him to haul the kindling home. They always went into the woods to the south, a scraggly, ungraceful copse of second-growth trees, but never to the woods to the north.
“That is the great Ban Forest,” the old man said. “All that lies therein belongs to the king.”
“The king,” the boy said, remembering his mother’s tales. “And so I am.”
“And so are we all in God’s heaven,” the old man said. “But here on earth I am a woodcutter and you are a foundling boy. The wood to the south be ours.”
Though the boy paid attention to what the old man said in the spring and summer and fall, once winter arrived, he heard only the voices in the wind. Often the old man would find him standing nearly naked by the door and have to lead him back to the fire where the boy would sink down into a stupor and say nothing at all.
The old man tried to make light of such times, and would tell the boy tales while he warmed at the hearth. He told him of Mother Holle and her feather bed, of Godfather Death, and of the Singing Bone. He told him of the Flail of Heaven and the priest whose rod sprouted flowers because the Water Nix had a soul. But the boy had ears only for the voices in the wind, and what stories he heard there, he did not tell.
The old man died at the tag-end of their fifth winter and the boy left, without even folding the hands of the corpse. He walked into the southern copse for that was the way his feet knew. But the Winter Kin were not about.
The winds were gentle here, and spring had already softened the bitter brown branches to a muted rose. A yellow-green haze haloed the air and underfoot the muddy soil smelled moist and green and new.
The boy slumped to the ground and wept, not for the death of the woodcutter nor for his mother’s death, but for the loss once more of his kin. He knew it would be a long time till winter came again.
And then, from far away, he heard a final wild burst of music. A stray strand of cold wind snapped under his nose as strong as a smelling bottle. His eyes opened wide and, without thinking, he stood.
Following the trail of song, as clear to him as cobbles on a city street, he moved towards the great Ban Forest where the heavy trees still shadowed over winter storms. Crossing the fresh new furze between the woods, he entered the old dark forest and wound around the tall, black trees, in and out of shadows, going as true north as a needle in a water-filled bowl. The path grew cold and the once-muddy ground gave way to frost.
At first all he saw was a mist, as white as if the hooves of horses had struck up dust from sheer ice. But when he blinked once and then twice, he saw coming toward him a great company of fair folk, some on steeds the color of clouds and some on steeds the color of snow. And he realized all at once that it was no mist he had seen but the breath of those great white stallions.
“My people,” he cried at last. “My kin. My kind.” And he tore off first his boots, then his trousers, and at last his shirt until he was free of the world and its possessions and could run toward the Winter Kin naked and unafraid.
On the first horse was a woman of unearthly beauty. Her hair was plaited in a hundred white braids and on her head was a crown of diamonds and moonstones. Her eyes were wind-blue and there was frost in her breath. Slowly she dismounted and commanded the stallion to be still. Then she took an ermine cape from across the saddle, holding it open to receive the boy.
“My king,” she sang, “my own true love,” and swaddled him in the cloud-white cloak.
He answered her, his voice a minor third lower than hers. “My queen, my own true love. I am come home.”
When the king’s foresters caught up to him, the feathered arrow was fast in his breast, but there was, surprisingly, no blood. He was lying, arms outstretched, like an angel in the show.
“He was just a wild boy, just that lackwit, the one who brought home kindling with the old man,” said one.
“Nevertheless, he was in the king’s forest,” said the other. “He knew better than that.”
“Naked as a newborn,” said the first. “But look!”
In the boy’s left hand were three copper coins, three more in his right.
“Twice the number needed for the birthing of a babe,” said the first forester.
“Just enough,” said his companion, “to buy a wooden casket and a man to dig the grave.”
And they carried the cold body out of the wood, heeding neither the music nor the voices singing wild and strange hosannas in the wind.
Götterdämmerung
Barry N. Malzberg
We are talking, essentially, about the need to preserve a sense of magic, of mystery. Explicitness is the enemy of reason, not its assistant. Wizardry is an honorable trade but it demands, no less than some of the metal trades, hard work and a sense of discipline. I have been at the profession long enough to contemplate this without irony, but with a certain disdain. None of this functions as a prologue to these confidences, it is simply a form of meditation.
I am talking of sitting on a high, bare yellow hill, smoke rising from my small quarters in the distance, the sun casting its fetching rays against this landscape, yellow on yellow. A dry time in a late season. The two elves, the dwarf and the giantess straggled up the elevation toward me, holding out their hands in homage. No gifts—I am known to be both jealous and capricious; the burnt offering trade is certainly not mine—but clearly an anxiety to please. They hovered before me at some respectful distance, then the older of the elves stepped forward.
—Greetings, he said. We come in peace and humility. Is that the proper formula?
—I don’t know, I said. Where did the formulaic enter into this? Are you the spokesperson?
—We would prefer that, the dwarf said. He was pleasant-looking enough, not strikingly misshapen, generic features, the same description applying to all of them although there was a certain aggressiveness to the stance of the giantess which might have been threatening in other circumstances. Of course no wizard encounters “other circumstances.” We live in a regulated way, surrounded by obeisance if not outright fawning.