Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales (68 page)
She follows the uphill winding of the beck, the misty Lyke Road to its spring. It rises on the nightfell, high amid the stones.
By the Owlstone, drifted deep in leaves, the grey thorn crouches, capped with haws. Her lap is full of snow. But see now, see the old witch hiding in the tree? Leaves puzzle into ragged skirts, gnarled branches into hands; rucked snow is ragged apron. There she sits and knits the summer. At her foot, her winterspring wells up, a twirl of silver spilling endlessly away. With every stitch in time, she's younger, water-sleek and ruddy-fingered, wickening; she's braided now with birds. Her petticoats are green. Glancing up with her spectacles, she sets the early sun a-dance.
She lifts her chin to Annis, beckons.
Sister.
Sister.
They embrace, the blackthorn and the white; the sisters mingle, intertwine, as close as moon and dark of moon. They weave one garland of themselves, of green: a hey of light.
Above all, with thanks to my first readers: Deborah Manning, the goddess of fractally evolving fiction; Sonya Taaffe, who enticed me to the underworld; and in the later rounds, Lila Garrott, of the archipelago of index cards.
The Nine, as Margaret found, are many. With thanks to those many others who have worked with me, the co-creators of my Cloudish mythos: to Nick Lowe, Tibs, and Geraldine Harris of Jomsborg, where it all began; to my silly sister Faye Ringel, to whom I first told the stars; to Delia Sherman, Mary Hopkins, Caroline Stevermer, in the early days; to Paula Tatarunis, Sue Thomason, Chris Bell; to Sherwood Smith; to Farah Mendlesohn; to Rachel Elizabeth Dillon; to Elizabeth Willey, for the glorious eleventh-hour gallop; to Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link of Small Beer Press for asking, and for their bookish attentiveness to everything, from text to typography.
With thanks to my dear twin Barbara Breasted Whitesides; to Sylvia Adamson for the art of reading; to Lucy de Gozzaldi for the leaves and marbles; to Betsy Hanes Perry for Lady Fettiplace's jam; to Annie Lenox for the hats; to Joan Corr; to my community of friends on GEnie and LiveJournal; to the Readercon gang; to Sue Thomason and Rory Newman for taking me to Cloudish landscapes; to Chris Bell for the bluebell wood; and to all those great and generous writers who encouraged me, not least to Diana Wynne Jones, Michael Swanwick, John Crowley.
With thanks to Anon, for all the ballads; to the singers who revived them, green leaves from old roots; to June Tabor and Maddy Prior, to the Watersons and Carthys; above all, to the late miraculous Lal Waterson for “The Scarecrow."
With loving thanks to my mother, who first gave me books.
Greer Gilman (nineweaving.livejournal.com) is the author of the novel
Moonwise
(which won the Crawford Award and was shortlisted for the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Awards), and of the World Fantasy Award-winning novella “A Crowd of Bone."
Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines and anthologies such as
Century, Trampoline, Salon Fantastique, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror
, and
Women of Other Worlds
, and she has contributed to
Modern Fantasy Literature
(Cambridge University Press) and the
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
.
A librarian, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
