After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien

Winter’s King Jane Yolen

He was not born a king but the child of wandering players, slipping out ice-blue in the deepest part of winter, when the wind howled outside the little green caravan. The midwife pronounced him dead, her voice smoothly hiding her satisfaction. She had not wanted to be called to a birth on such a night.

But the father, who sang for pennies and smiles from strangers, grabbed the child from her and plunged him into a basin of lukewarm water, all the while singing a strange, fierce song in a tongue he did not really know.

Slowly the child turned pink in the water, as if breath were lent him by both the water and the song. He coughed once, and spit up a bit of rosy blood, then wailed a note that was a minor third higher than his father’s last surprised tone.

Without taking time to swaddle the child, the father laid him dripping wet and kicking next to his wife on the caravan bed. As she lifted the babe to her breast, the woman smiled at her husband, a look that included both the man and the child but cut the midwife cold.

The old woman muttered something that was part curse, part fear, then more loudly said, “No good will come of this dead cold child. He shall thrive in winter but never in the warm and he shall think little of this world. I have heard of such before. They are called Winter’s Kin.”

The mother sat up in bed, careful not to disturb the child at her side. “Then he shall be a Winter King, more than any of his kin or kind,” she said. “But worry not, old woman, you shall be paid for the live child as well as the dead.” She nodded to her husband who paid the midwife twice over from his meager pocket, six copper coins.

The midwife made the sign of horns over the money, but still she kept it and, wrapping her cloak tightly around her stout body and a scarf around her head, she walked out into the storm. Not twenty steps from the caravan, the wind tore the cloak from her and pulled tight the scarf about her neck. An icy branch broke from a tree and smashed in the side of her head. In the morning when she was found, she was frozen solid. The money she had clutched in her hand was gone.

The player was hanged for the murder and his wife left to mourn even as she nursed the child. Then she married quickly, for the shelter and the food. Her new man never liked the winter babe.

“He is a cold one,” the husband said. “He hears voices in the wind,” though it was he who was cold and who, when filled with drink, heard the dark counsel of unnamed gods who told him to beat his wife and abuse her son. The woman never complained, for she feared for her child. Yet strangely the child did not seem to care. He paid more attention to the sounds of the wind than the shouts of his stepfather, lending his own voice to the cries he alone could hear, though always a minor third above.

As the midwife had prophesied, in winter he was an active child, his eyes bright and quick to laugh. But once spring came, the buds in his cheeks faded even as the ones on the boughs grew big. In the summer and well into the fall, he was animated only when his mother told him tales of Winter’s Kin, and though she made up the tales as only a player can, he knew the stories all to be true.

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.