The Snow Field ⁙ A Short Story

Bundle up, Wanderers — today’s story is a chilly little drop of snow for you. Wonder awaits in the words ahead.

“Mama, will you be ready soon?”

Sorren lingered by the front door, crumbs from breakfast still smeared across his face, scarf trailing behind him, layers of coats unfastened. Anya’s son: ready to brave the dark and cold beyond their door.

Around the table, Anya’s husband and daughter ate their breakfasts with sleep still rumpled on their faces. Tèo and Ebba hummed as they chewed, a little chorus bundled in warmth and firelight. Dread sat icily in Anya’s stomach. But today was Sorren’s day. She would not make him wait any longer.

“Let’s not start your training by freezing to death.” Anya stooped beside Sorren—ten years’ old today. She knew he was getting too big for bundling, but her clumsy fingers cleaned his face. Tightened his scarf. Fastened every button on his coats. Tucked his snow-white hair beneath two hats.

Sorren had been born on the shortest night of the year, beneath a sky riotous with stars and spirits. He had his mother’s hair of snow, and his father’s eyes of earth, his mother’s hands for making, his father’s care for others. Each year, as the days grew longer and then shorter again, her son grew older. Soon, she would not need to stoop beside him. Soon, he would not let her tend his coat.

Only when all she could see of her son were his eyes, did she ask, “Are you ready for the snow fields?”

They opened the door into the dark and cold. Sorren moved like Anya through the well-worn path into the hills, gliding across the crust of snow like a drift of fresh powder blown by the wind.

On his shoulder perched his beloved Lumi, a miniscule ice dragon the size of Anya’s hand. Its blue flame refracted brilliantly through its translucent body. The little dragon kept nuzzling its face beneath Sorren’s hats, searching for his ears to nibble. Ice dragons, Anya learned only after she had created one small enough to fit in her son’s pocket, were very fond of pinching whatever appendage they could find—fingers, toes, ears, the tip of one’s nose—in their pointed little beaks.

“Lumi, stop,” Sorren giggled. His laughter skated across the snow fields. Anya lost her breath whenever her soft-spoken son laughed—there had never been such a beautiful sound. The dragon sighed with a cloud of steam.

Below the crest of the hill sprawled the snow field. Blue light shone through the ice, catching and holding the color of the spirits burning across the sky. Near the front gate were two bushy rows of many-tailed white foxes and a dark patch of talking ravens that would be as black as the night sky. Clusters of low berry bushes wound along the meandering paths: the fruit was white now but would ripen to a sweet purple once Anya and Sorren unearthed them from the frost. Farthest back, toward the widening sky, giant bears and hulking dragons slept beneath vast swaths of ice. Mother and son walked among them all to take inventory of their crop.

“Are you nervous?” Anya struggled to keep her nerves from her own voice even as she asked.

Sorren shook his head. In the gap between his hat and scarf, his brown eyes were serious. A shadow of grief blurred the edges of Anya’s pride. She could delay this moment no longer.

Anya began her lesson the way her own mother had on her tenth birthday.

“There was a woman long ago, and long ago there was a woman. She lived in a place where golden sun shone long on fields so green the air tasted sweet, and the earth spoke to those quiet enough to listen. Those listeners, like us, pulled light from the ground and shaped it to the needs of the earth. But soon, folks began to reap from their lands more than the earth could bear to create. The listeners moved ever north until they’d left the edges of the map behind, until there was no one commanding them to make more than they should.”

Anya often wondered how easy it must have been to coax life from fertile ground: to shape a flower from light and borrow the vivid red of its neighbor, to weed a row of rabbits with their warm pink bellies almost ready to hop away, to lift a griffin’s wing from a tangle of vines and cast the feathers in a soft green hue. Would her ancestors be proud of all she had made with only shades of white, blue, and silver? In her new homeland, the ice and frozen ground did not yield, but Anya had learned to listen to the thrumming of the earth and tend the quiet snow fields until a polar bear sprang forth, or a mountain troll, or new stars to hang upon the sky.

She continued, here the hardest part of the lesson: the rule she needed to teach her son though she had broken it twice over. “The earth is full of light. When we tend the fields, we bring that light close enough to shape. We do not create from nothing, and we only create what the earth needs—no more, no less. Listen, can you hear it? What the earth is asking you to make?”

Anya fell quiet, watching Sorren tilt his well-covered ears toward the wind. Despite her hammering heart and lying tongue, she could still hear the earth whisper: snowdrops, snowdrops, snowdrops.

Sorren looked at Anya with panic in his wide brown eyes. “Flowers?’

“Yes, well done.” But the note in his voice was too like a guess. Anya let Sorren guide her to the best spot for growing the delicate flowers: protected from the harshest winds, but with plenty of space for sunlight once the days grew longer. Lumi nibbled on Sorren’s scarf, but Sorren held back his giggles. His solemnity made Anya’s heart ache.

“Give me a smile?” Anya asked.

“You won’t even be able to see it,” Sorren said through his scarf.

“Haven’t I taught you, my love? Mama’s see everything.”

Sorren grinned and, though Anya couldn’t see his jumble of grown- and milk-teeth, his eyes crinkled with delight.

“That’s my boy. Now, this is the difficult part.” Anya tugged at her gloves. This piece of her craft had not adapted from the time her foremothers sank their fingers into warm, damp earth. No matter how many gloves Tèo made for her—all different materials and weaves—she could not create unless her bare hands were pressed to the ground.

Sorren struggled with his mittens. Within moments of touching the freezing air, his small fingers mottled purple. Lumi glided down from Sorren’s shoulder with his beak wide, ready to nibble on a finger, but Sorren tucked the dragon in his hood.

Anya cradled her son’s hands in hers, warming them with the little heat she still had in her palms. She had feared the cold terribly when she was pregnant with Sorren. She had slept under layers of blankets, her hand cradling her swelling middle. “Don’t let them freeze,” she had pleaded: of her own body, of Tèo, of all the women in town who had carried a child before. “This world may be cold, but it is good. Stay with me, and I will make for you anything you can dream,” she had bargained. The desperate promises of a long-waiting woman.

Now, Anya sank her hands into the snow and held back a hiss of pain as her son did the same. “Feel the ripple of the earth beneath your hands and the waves of light that follow every movement. Do you feel one getting nearer?”

She had spent the last few weeks practicing what she was going to say: testing her instructions with Tèo in the early hours of the morning, thinking through every little movement while she crafted the light. She thought of her mother with her chapped hands pressed against newly thawed ground. She’d known all that Anya was capable of.

But Sorren was made of more than Anya—of broken rules, of desperate want. She knew, down in the aching joints of her well-worked fingers, her son would either have an abundance of light, or none at all.

“Sorren, do you feel that?” she repeated.

He gave a small nod.

“On the count of three, you’re going to make a fist and tug it straight up, like when you’re helping me pull the foxes, okay?”

Another impossibly small nod.

“Okay. Here it comes. One, two, three!”

Sorren pulled his fist free of the snow—turned to her with panic-stricken eyes. “Did I get it?”

“Let’s see!” Anya cradled her son’s wet, freezing fist. She uncurled his fingers.

He held only air.

“That’s okay. Let’s let your hands warm up, and we’ll try again.” Anya dried his hand with her scarf so that she didn’t have to meet his searching gaze. Her chest fissured like cracking ice. Sorren had helped her in the snowfields since he could walk. He had waited for his birthday so patiently to learn how to craft the light that grew such wonderful creatures.

She’d robbed him of his chance before he’d even been born.

***

Sorren tried. He tried, tried, tried, tried until the skin of his knuckles cracked and bled, until his teeth chattered, until Lumi seemed warm against his icy skin.

“That’s enough for today,” Anya said when her heart could take no more.

“Please Mama—”

Anya shook her head and helped him into his soaked mittens. She offered her hand to hold for the snowy walk home, but Sorren buried his deep in his pockets. He didn’t even stop Lumi from nibbling on his ear.

“What was I doing wrong?” Sorren whispered, the sound almost lost to the wind.

“No. No, my love, you did everything right. It’s not your fault.”

It’s my fault, my fault, my fault, her guilt sank with each weary footfall home. She’d not told her children about how she broke the rules for their creation. They never seemed old enough. It never seemed like the right time. She feared they’d feel different from the other children in town, to know that they were made from something more. Now, the secret she kept had Sorren hunched beside her, seeming smaller than he had in months. My fault.

***

Ebba waited at the door for their return. Only two years younger than Sorren, his sister was his opposite: Ebba all motion and noise, Sorren all stillness and quiet.

“What did you make? What did you make? Can I see?” She begged.

“Ebba, let’s give Sorren some space, please. Training is very difficult.”

Ebba looked up at her big brother in awe. Tèo appeared, his shirt flour-speckled, to help Sorren out of his snow gear. He draped a blanket around Sorren’s shoulders and kissed him on the top of the head. “Go warm up by the fire. There will be cookies for you soon.”

Even the promise of cookies did little to lift Sorren’s spirits as he trudged toward the hearth.

In the kitchen, the heat of the stone oven warmed Anya down to her bones. The scent of butter and cream sweetened the air. She rested her forehead against Tèo’s flour-covered chest.

“What happened?” He stroked her hair.

“What if he can’t do it?” Anya whispered. “I don’t think he could feel the light at all. But he wouldn’t tell me, he just kept insisting on trying again.”

“Don’t worry. He’s young. He has plenty of time to learn.”

“But what if he can’t? What if he—what if I—we have rules for this craft, Tèo, and I... The earth did not ask for our children, but I wanted them so desperately…”

Ten years and many months ago, Anya had wandered the snow fields in grief, red-eyed from crying over blood when there shouldn’t have been. She’d wanted to create something that night—anything. It had been a whim to sink her hands deep into the snow, still heavy despite the promise of spring. Her skin burned. Her knuckles popped. But she could feel it, down beneath the snow and the ice: a scorching light. The earth demanded a new constellation; stars shaped like a winged horse to adorn the sky above their village. With all that power, it would have leapt from the ground, galloped across the sky in a rain of sparks, and settled itself like a beacon in the firmament. But Anya did not want more stars.

She wanted a pair of little hands she could hold between her and Tèo.

She had sunk her fingers down until she clutched that blaze of creation in her numb grasp. Anya had created life and breath from this light, the frozen earth, her long-honed craft, her sheer force of will. She would do so again.

When she swallowed the light, it had fizzed on her tongue. She’d returned to her bed to create with her husband.

She finally choked out the words, “What if he can’t create, because he is a creation?”

“Anya,” Tèo pulled her close. She was shaking, and he rubbed her arms like fear was something that could be banished as easily as cold. “Perhaps the earth did not ask for Sorren and Ebba, but it is better with them in it. There are many ways to create. He will find one that speaks to him.”

***

Feeling returned to Anya’s numb hands when it was time to tuck her children into bed. No matter how old they grew, she would always remember how physically she had yearned for them, how when she pulled the light from the earth, she promised the frozen land that she would never ask for anything again once she had her children.

That, of course, had been a promise she couldn’t keep. When Sorren was sick for the first time, his fever so high he hadn’t the strength to cry, Anya had offered thousands of constellations if only Sorren would get better. When Ebba wouldn’t sleep for months on end, screaming every hour, unable to be comforted by Anya’s breast or Tèo’s songs, Anya had begged and bargained, offering up the bubbling spring she had denied the earth when she took its light to bear her daughter.

Love made Anya greedy. She would ask the earth anything for her children.

She did so now, her forehead resting against the children’s bedroom doorframe, painted by Tèo’s steady hand with a pattern of snowy owls.

“Let him create.” Anya whispered almost soundlessly. “Let him feel happy. Whole. Inspired. Let him shape the world for the better.”

As if in response to her plea, a little voice rose up on the other side of the door.

“It’s okay, Sorren,” Ebba said easily. “Mama said you could try again tomorrow.”

“But I wanted it to work today.”

“Why?” Ebba’s favorite question.

“Because,” Sorren huffed. The owww that followed suggested that Ebba wasn’t satisfied with that answer.

“Because—I wanted to show Mama that I was ready. I’ve been thinking about making something for so long, but when Mama told me to feel the earth, I couldn’t feel anything.”

“Maybe you were too busy looking for what you thought it would feel like that you couldn’t feel what was really there. It’s like music. Papa says listening is just as important as singing.”

Lumi chirped in agreement.

Tèo was right. The earth was a far better place with these children in it.

Anya knocked on the door. Behind it, she could hear the soft scamper of her children tumbling into their beds. She tucked them in—quilts nestled beneath their chins and a scoop of fresh snow for Lumi—and asked as she did each night, “what was good today?”

Ebba had a list as big as the sky: singing with Papa, eating her favorite cookies, playing with the neighbor’s cat. Sorren took longer to respond, thinking as Lumi steamed beside him in the candlelight.

“I liked your story.”

“I’m glad.” Anya kissed the tops of her children’s heads: Sorren’s snow-white and straight like hers, Ebba’s sand-colored and curly like Tèo’s. Her most miraculous creations.

She would break the rules for these children all over again to keep them healthy and smiling. And it was time they knew.

***

The next morning, Sorren emerged for breakfast along with bleary-eyed Ebba. He put on his scarf, coats, and hats methodically. He hardly noticed when Lumi bit his ear, the little ice dragon dangling like an earring. On their path to the snowfield, Sorren crunched through the crust of snow. Anya couldn’t bear to see him like this any longer.

“Would you like another story?” she asked.

He nodded.

Anya knew that Sorren would grow up with the telling—that her earnest son would take the truth as a responsibility he had not asked for. But Sorren was growing up every day, and all Anya could do was help him along the best she could. She would help him carry the burden.

She began, as all good stories do. “There was a woman long ago, and long ago there was a woman. She lived in a place that danced between the blade of day and night, where the air cut sharp and cold, and every night the sky burned with spirits heading for elsewhere. This woman had a husband whom she loved very much. In town, he created music, food, and art that filled their neighbors with warmth and light. In the snow fields, she created creatures that took their first breath of ice-crisp air and strode off into the darkness. But for all their creating, they struggled to have a child. Until she swallowed light that let them make life.” Her breath hitched, “My love, you were born from the same light that makes everything in the snow field.”

Sorren shuffled beside her, quiet for so long that she feared she’d broken him in some irreparable way, that the Sorren he was before could not be reconciled to the Sorren he was after.

But at last, her son spoke. “Mama, I’d like to thank the earth. I’ll make whatever it needs.”

Sorren took Anya’s hand as they stepped through the gates. She’d hold it as long as he’d let her. One day, he’d think holding hands was too childish. One day, he’d be a whole head taller than her. One day, he’d grow a thick beard to keep his face warm on the snow field and Tèo would teach him how to groom it.

His future danced in front of her, but for now, Sorren was still her little boy, clutching her hand, leading her through the snowfields.

They wandered: through the neat patches of cottontails where rabbits grew beneath the snow, waiting for spring; through the seething plot of eight-legged horses, ready to gallop from the ground as the midwinter festivities flickered through town; through the frozen paths where, beneath icy mounds, seals slept dreaming of becoming selkies.

Sorren didn’t say anything, but his eyes began to water. Lumi licked the tears from his lashes before they could freeze. Anya squatted beside him.

“If this is too much, we can go home. We can make cocoa, and read, and eat all of Papa’s cookies.”

But Sorren took a deep breath, steadied his quivering chin long enough to ask a question.

“I’m really made of the same light as all this?”

“Yes. The light of the earth, and me, and Papa.”

Sorren’s wide eyes swept over the fields that Anya had carefully tended all these years, all of the life she had coaxed from the earth and shaped in the snow.

“Everything is part of me,” Sorren whispered.

“Yes, my love. And you are part of everything.”

When he turned to her again, his tears were gone. A light burned in his deep brown gaze, and Anya gasped. That was the spark her ancestors saw then they tended fields in their old homeland with warm, damp soil. She looked back at the distance traveled, all to culminate here in the infinite possibility of her child.

They returned to the place where they’d meant to grow snowdrops, the snow pocked with the memory of their hands and knees. Sorren took off his mittens. Anya was going to offer advice again, but stopped herself—it wasn’t her that he needed to listen to. She sank her hands beside his. Beneath her snow-bitten fingers, the earth hummed with light.

Sorren waited. Light emanated from his palms, pulsed beneath his hands, called to kindred power. The earth spoke, and Sorren could speak back in a way that Anya could only dream of.

When Sorren pulled his hands from the snow, he cradled three perfect seeds of light, their spark exactly the right size for making snowdrops.

Anya was so awed, she startled to find Sorren looking at her expectantly.

“Now what, Mama?”

“Now, you create.”

Erin Keating is a U.S.-based writer, who at any given time is writing either cozy fantasy or body horror—she has given up trying to figure out what that says about her psyche. Her cozy fantasy stories have previously appeared in Hearth Stories, Tales and Feathers, and Wyngraf. When she's not reading or writing, she's dabbling in whichever hobby has most recently caught her attention. Find her online at erinkeatingwrites.com.

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