Wintergate Read online

  "Wintergate"

  Copyright © 2020, C.E. Murphy

  All Rights Reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author, [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Artist: Indigo Chick Designs

  For everyone who helped us move unexpectedly in April 2018:

  thank you all

  Contents

  Wintergate

  Wintergate

  They said that when love grew cold, it was because the Snow Queen had sent slivers of ice to settle in the heart, but Emilia knew better. Duty did it: duty to a family whose magic held the Wintergate open, season after season, year after year.

  It had been easier, they said, in her grandmother's time, and in her mother's day. Then, the gate had opened effortlessly, eight times a year, on the four high quarter days and their cross-quarter sistren, so that trade and goods and even love could flow across the border. But that had been before the Border Wars, and before the queen had laid down the magic that closed the Border Kingdom away from her own. Now the gate opened only in the daylight hours of the longest night, and only with considerable effort. Emilia stood unmoving in those hours, hardly blinking, gazing through the stone arch at a world beyond her own.

  There was never any telling what season it would be, in the Border Kingdom. Time flowed differently there, and all that matched from one side to the other was the power of the quarter and cross-quarter days. On Emilia's side, it only opened on the winter solstice, but in the Border Kingdom, she saw flowering spring and golden autumn no less often than she might glimpse heaping snow or the melting rush of spring. Whether it had been six weeks or six years between the opening, only those who came back home again could tell.

  It had been spring in the Border Kingdom when Antoine had gone through the Wintergate, and seventeen winters for Emilia since.

  * * *

  "You have to go."

  The two of them, their heads pressed close together over a letter, and Emilia's voice, shaking with recognition and resignation. Antoine's fair hair smelled of pine, and her own dark hair, of the snow. They had been working for hours, in and out of the house that was meant to be their own come the next marrying-day. It lay near the Wintergate, and had been Emilia's grandmother's, once, when the gate had been a gate of all seasons. Then, her family had not just opened the gate, but guarded it against incursions from those in the Border Kingdom with the strength to force its magic. The village was a fair few fields away, though, and as the gate's use faded, so did the urgency of being within its reach. Being in the village was easier, and if her family were witches, then there was little harm in a village witch when magic had drained from the world.

  But that had been another era. Now it was live with Antoine's mother, or Emilia's five siblings, or take up residence in the remote cottage, and they were young and in love enough to think they would need no other company. Antoine thatched the roof, and Emilia stitched a canopy for the bed that her woodcutter brother built for them. Her second sister wove curtains, and Antoine's mother offered them the cooking-pot that had hung over her own fire for years, well-seasoned with skill and with love. They scrubbed and swept and whitewashed and worked, and left the root cellar for last, knowing all too well it would be a mess of cobwebs and musty air. Emilia would have waited till the spring cross-quarter day or even the midsummer marrying-day to clean it, herself, but Antoine insisted that they do it all before the longest night, so they would be quit of it long before needs must. She could say no to him, but not for something as trivial as this, and so together they went into the root cellar, and together they came out with the letter that changed their lives.

  It wasn't only the letter, of course: it was a cedar chest, beautifully scented even after decades in the dark. It held within it her grandmother's marriage trousseau, mementos from her life, and a few scattered letters, the last of which said Antoine in ink brown and pale with time.

  There had been no Antoine in the village before Emilia's Antoine; the village elders had thought his mother was putting on airs when she'd chosen the name from a beloved book, and gave it to her only son. Emilia and Antoine sat together in the failing winter sunlight outside the cottage, bent over thick, yellowed pages written by a hand neither of them had ever seen before.

  My son, it began. My son, you may well think this letter is madness, if you should ever find it.

  I passed through the Wintergate, as you well know, in hopes of finding Border magic to help your mother. But when it came time to return, I suffered that which those veterans of the Border Wars who have come through the gate to our time have suffered.

  I had not known those twists could take us back in time, as well as bring them forward. I too am now a veteran of the Border Wars, having fought to stay alive so I might return to you and your mother one day. I learned to read and to write, so I could send this letter to you through the years. I have given it to Emilia's great-grandmother, whom I have known as a young woman on this side of time. She has promised to keep it, and to give it to her own daughters to safeguard through the many years between when I am, and when you are.

  She also says I should never risk the Border Kingdom again, but I must. I will enter it once more, but do not dare leave through the gate again without guidance, though. If you should ever receive this letter, my son, and if you have the will and the willingness, I would ask you to come for me.

  Your loving father,

  Pierre

  Antoine, his voice broken, said, "The Border veterans," and Emilia, again, said, "You have to go," in anguish. "I'll hold the gate as long as I can, Antoine. I'll hold it open so you'll be able to come home again."

  "The Border veterans weren't able to."

  "But they do," Emilia whispered. In the decades since the Wars, the lost still sometimes found their way home. Those who came through the gate that she held open on the winter solstice were displaced by time, two generations or three removed from the families they knew and remembered. But they did come home, finally finding the last place in the Border Kingdom from whence Irindala's country could be reached. "And they always have stories of others whose lost feet are still guiding them slowly home, Ant. Stories about veterans who are still trying to make their way to the Wintergate. And now your father is one of them."

  "Em, it's only open for eight hours. Unless he's right there waiting on the other side of the gate, how can I find him and bring him back before it closes? And if I can't it could be—"

  "Forever." A shudder ran through Emilia, chilling her skin far more than the cooling winter evening did. "I know. But…can you leave him, Antoine?"

  Antoine's slender shoulders slumped, and she slipped her arm around them, drawing him closer to hide her tears. "I'll hold it. You'll find your way back again. I believe in you. I believe in us."

  "So did my father," Antoine whispered. "I won't be back for at least a year of your time, Em. You know that. We can't get married in the summer, if I go."

  "I'd go for you," she said helplessly. "I'd go for you, but…"

  "No. If you go, no one ever comes home again. I'll ask Maman," he said, but his tone told Emilia what she had known from the start. He had to go, and five weeks later, under the low solstice dawn, he did. He went with a thousand promises to return when the gate next opened on the Border side, with crushing hugs for his weeping mother and a trembling, desperate kiss for Emilia herself, and a glance over his shoulder that shattered her heart with the memo
ry of it, until time took its clarity away.

  His mother lived with Emilia in the gate cottage for five years, until the fever took her, and then Emilia carried on alone, the witch at the edge of the wood, waiting for her lost love.

  In time it became known that the price of traveling through the Wintergate was to carry any hint of information about Antoine or his father; those who went from Irindala's country into the Border Kingdom knew it going in, and those who exited—rarely the same—learned it upon egress. Emilia grew cold with the years, and knew it, and did not care. Youthful hope died with Antoine's mother, turning to bitter anger that he had broken his promise. The wiser part of her knew he couldn't be blamed; the Border Kingdom took what it wanted and gave little back, and that, not in a timely way. What season is it there, she asked travelers, how long have you been gone? The scant few she knew who went and came back again could name the number of seasons or years, and yet unless they went in pairs and never parted from one another, there was no method to that, either: some had been gone weeks, some only days, some months, and one, an old man, many years.

  He stopped just on Emilia's side of the Wintergate, that one, and said, "Emilia?" in uncertain tones.

  Her stomach clenched with her fists and she took two strides forward. "Antoine?"

  "No. I knew him, though. He called himself Travere, in the Border Kingdom." The old man swayed, a tightness coming into the lines around his mouth. "It's not wise to use your given name, beyond the gate. I'm sorry, Emilia. Travere died in the Border Kingdom."

  * * *

  Perhaps the Snow Queen had sent ice into her heart after all.

  The villagers thought so, for the way she hadn't wailed or sobbed at the old man's tidings, but what could she expect, after so many years? She hadn't grown old, because they had both been so young when he left, but neither was she a child anymore, and she had long since put away dreams of eternal love. He had gone away, son and husband to duty, and she had known it was right and righteous. That he had not returned was neither; that he had died was worse: but life was neither fair nor unfair, and that was not the Snow Queen's doing. Emilia stayed in her isolated cottage, speaking to almost no one year in and year out. The villagers saw her when she emerged to open the gate the next winter, and the winter after that, but she never graced the village any more. What trading she did for meat or milk happened at the end of her cottage lane, one bucket of her goods left in exchange for those that were dropped off.

  It was not what she wanted; none of it was. She wanted Antoine; she wanted the years to unwind, for her duties to be a pleasure instead of a burden, for things to be different. She wanted what children wanted, but she was no longer a child, and so instead of lingering on what she wanted, she let herself grow cold. Some said she reveled in it, but Emilia didn't think she did. It was only easier, because she had no choice in keeping the gate. Without Antoine, she had no desire for children; without children, there was no one to pass the gate's duties on to. And there were people on the other side, Border Wars veterans, travelers from her own time, who still wanted to come home. What Emilia wanted mattered less than those lost souls on their hopeful quests.

  What she wanted had mattered less than doing the right thing, ever since Pierre's letter had been found in the old cedar chest. She would have gone herself if she could have, gone in the hopes that she could awaken the gate from the other side and return home with greater certainty. But the gatekeepers were forbidden the use of the gate itself: it was known that to do so would end the magic for good. Not known from some lorebook, or from history handed down from one keeper to another, but from within the power itself. Emilia had no other way to describe it. She had often asked her mother why they never went through the gate. Her mother only said that they couldn't, which struck young Emilia as preposterous. The gate was there, it opened, it closed again; there was no doubt her skipping feet could carry her through.

  And even now, there was no doubt they could. But she knew now, in her bones, the way she knew the sun would rise and set, that to cross through the threshold would break the power she held over the gate, and any mortal left in the Border Kingdom would be caught there for good. Perhaps, once upon a time, she might have gone to fetch Antoine, and perhaps she might even have been able to cross back home with him. But no one else would ever leave the Border Kingdom again, not through the Wintergate, and all the stories that travelers told said it was the only passage still linking Irindala's country and the Border King's.

  Duty and righteousness were unforgiving mistresses, and without Antoine, they were the only ones Emilia knew, or cared to know. So she held the gate, and a child came through, skipping, with her mother; a child who had been dying, when the mother carried her through the winter before. She had the glow of health about her now, the strength of youth and release from illness, and that was a gift no one on this side of the Wintergate could offer. Emilia found a smile, and if it was cold and wintry, it was still a smile.

  The mother, relief flushing her cheeks and her eyes bright with hope in a way Emilia remembered from her own youth, stopped a moment to whisper, "Thank you," to Emilia.

  She nodded and said, "What news?" before remembering herself.

  A guilty blush burned the relief from the mother's eyes as she remembered that she had gone forth and come back again in a timely fashion, and with the object of her desire safe in her arms. "No news," she said, then, hesitating, added, "Save for the Border King's Chosen."

  "The Chosen." Emilia meant it for a question, and the mother smiled uncertainly.

  "They say it's someone who came through the gate a long time ago, or was a soldier lost in the Border Wars. She caught his eye, they say, and he's made her the Border Queen."

  "There hasn't been a Chosen since…" Emilia turned her cool gaze toward her cottage, forgetting the woman, forgetting even the Wintergate, for a moment. The healthy little girl danced through her line of vision, playing with freshly-falling snow, then ran to make a snow star near the wall the gate was set into. The cedar chest had contained some mention of the Border King's Chosen, that to Choose a mortal was a mockery of Irindala's sacrifice. Emilia couldn't remember, quite, but the sun was setting and she could look through the journals by the light of the fire.

  "They say it's the first Choosing in a hundred years," the mother offered eagerly. "The first since the Border Wars."

  "Has it been a hundred years?" Emilia looked back to the mother, forgetting about the Chosen and her grandmother's journals. "How long were you there?"

  The mother's face faltered. "A season. It was summer there when we arrived, and the passage opened again on the autumn quarter day. Thank you," she added more softly.

  "It was my duty. Take her home before she catches her death of the cold. You wouldn't want to have wasted the journey. Don't touch, child," she said more sharply, as the little girl reached a hand toward the Wintergate.

  "I only wanted a leaf!" There were leaves, gold and red lying on still-green grass, just beyond the portal, a contrast to the blowing whiteness on their side.

  "You shouldn't carry anything not fairly traded back through the Wintergate," Emilia admonished. "The Border Kingdom always extracts a price."

  A tightness came into the mother's face and she captured the girl in her arms, hurrying her away from the cold stone arch. Emilia watched them go, watched until they were dark silhouettes on the snow, until they were shadows swallowed by the nearby forest, until all that was left of them were their prints.

  In all that time, no one came to the Wintergate, not from her side, nor from the other, where autumn shades rioted against each other for dominance, and the blue sky beyond the trees leaned into the last rich blue depths of the season.

  For the first time that she could remember, for the first time in all the history of her family keeping the gate, Emilia let the power that opened it falter before sunset, and went into her cottage to get her grandmother's journal.

  * * *

  When she opened
the gate again, minutes before sunset, it was winter in the Border Kingdom. The sky there now matched her own, slate blue with encroaching night, wind tearing snow from the earth and tossing it against the darkening clouds. Trees that had, minutes before, been warm with color, now reached black bare branches upward, scraping at the clouds. Emilia drew her worn cloak around her, feeling its tattered hem drag against icy snow, and with one hand twisted the length of her hair away from her face. The wind caught it again and made a tangle of it, as if offended at her efforts, and she did not bother to try again.

  Her grandmother had written of the Border King's Chosen, and the fate that befell her. She was honored, yes. She was beloved, yes. She was all things to the Border King, for the space of a single year.

  And then, filled with the love and honor and ire of a faery nation, she was bound to the Border, an assault of human blood, human breath, human soul, against the boundary built by Irindala, the immortal human queen. The Chosen would live a hundred years, bleeding out her humanity in slow, painful drops, awake and aware to regret her year of glory as the Border King's favorite.

  Emilia's grandmother had believed it was the Chosen's sacrifice that allowed the Wintergate to remain open at all. That the Border King himself had forced the single weakness in the Border into being, using humanity's own blood against it. The journals spoke of her uncertainty at continuing to open the gate on the shortest days, but duty called her more strongly than worry, for there were those who still struggled to return home from the Border Kingdom, and without the Wintergate, they never could.

  Someone, now, would die a lingering cold death, to keep the Wintergate open another hundred years. Someone would lose a girl they loved, and never know what happened to her. Ice would settle into someone else's heart, cold shards that grew and grew and would never entirely stop, perhaps not as long as the life dripped out of the innocent who had been bound to the Border.