Winter always slinks into our valley, like a wounded fox, hesitant, angry, and hellish. It begins with a snarl, a waspish glare of frost on the ground, it huddles and scurries and slinks down the alleys and streets. It frightens old women into chants of long forgotten prayer in languages lost. The old men glare up at the sky and whisper amongst themselves about the feelings in their bones, the patterns of the birds, and the signs in the frost wreathing their doorways. The youths stand huddled about half worried, half excited, for winter means the end of fields and sweat. It means warm food and warmer hearths. They don’t remember the cold of years before, the way that the wood runs out and the blankets grow threadbare. But this is the way of life in the valley.

I had grown up here in the shadows of the Renvar Mountains, bathed in and nurtured by the fickle weather of Alistair Valley. Perhaps I am jaded, because I am a youth, but I remember and dread the cold. Even now I can hear it as it howls through the chimney and dampens the light of the candles. In the corner my mother sleeps in the rocking chair and, cradled in her arms, my little brother, Carus. Our house is small, settled in the outskirts of the town where the forest rises up to kiss the overturned brown earth of the fields. Father pulled together the rough logs of our cabin in a late summer long ago. He promised us a house of clay brick and fine wood once his fortune was made. He said that eight years ago when he walked out of our musty log house and our lives with a backpack and head full of dreams.
A month had passed before we received a letter, not from him but from a general at a distant fort at the edges of the border of the kingdom. The words were nearly illegible but the intent so clear. My mother died that day, not in body but in spirit. I watched silent, as her heart was burned and blackened by the flames of her pain. Their love had been strong enough to be fated in the stars, or so my father had said.

Outside the window, I can see those stars winking down at me, taunting my pain. Eight years has not lessened the pain. Time does not matter with death; each day I breathe is just a reminder of who does not.

I crush my hand to my beating heart and go to the door. For a moment I stand there waiting as if the closed door means that at any moment my father could be behind it listening to the quiet sound of my quaking breath. But it is wrong. I place my hand on the wood latch and open the door before slipping out into the star studded frosty night.


When I return the logs have burned down to embers in the hearth and mother’s tired eyes are following me as I hang my coat and scarf, as I pull off finger by finger my wool gloves and tug off my cap, and as I smooth the now messy braid of my hair.

“Where do you go, Mariah?” Mother’s voice was weak, barely heard above the oppressing weight of the smoky darkness. I do not answer, I never do. How could she understand my desire to feel the cold and let it hurt me?

Instead, I turn to the chimney and stack new wood inside. When I glance at her she has already faded back into the chair and forgotten me, forgotten life. In her arms Carus still sleeps unaware.

“I’m sorry.” I whisper the words softly and they blend with the smoky air and all the other things left unsaid, unheard. Sparks fly when I hit the flint, the brief light reflects the sudden burn of anger in my chest, but unlike the light my pain does not burn out. It chokes my chest and makes me want to cry. I want to tell her that I want someone to confide in, to pour out the truth to. And as sudden as the pain, I’m wheeling up and staggering to the door, the pain in my chest too large for the tiny breaking house.
The house shudders with the force of the slamming door, but I’m too angry, too broken myself to care if I break something. The weight in my chest demands an audience, but I have none. I must speak to the stars, the valley, the moon and the trees. And so with burning in my chest and eyes, I scream. The frost in the air shatters and the stillness craters to the brown dead ground. I curse the stars that gave my father dreams, the dreams that lured my father away, and the general that could not send him back to us and to the earth that he toiled for so long in. The weight of my screams sends me to the ground.

In the twilight, I kneel amidst the shattered glass of my own broken hopes. From the sky the snow begins its descent, the first snow of the season. It coats me like a blanket and for once I let myself forget the cold. I let myself remember the first winter we spent in the valley. We had opened the door and breathed in the smell of the wind and the frost. Father laughed and jumped into it. Mother grinned hidden behind her hand, but he saw and he pulled her out with them. And in the winking light of the love fated stars they danced and danced and danced to music only they could hear.

Tonight though, I can hear their music playing softly and sweetly, hovering in the once heavy night. I stand up. I cannot see past the heat of my tears, but I begin to twirl. Then, slowly ever so slowly, I begin to dance. And not once do I feel the cold.