Free Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey

this was the moment when the future ceased to be a desolate place, a place where I would always walk alone. By the use of a single pronoun, one simple “we,” Kai had created a path where two might walk side by side.
    If I was very lucky, the two might even hold hands. I extended mine.

    “Home,” I said. “We’re going home.”
    I hadn’t known what the answer was until I spoke. But now that I had, I knew it was right. Home. Back to the place where my strange journey had begun.
    “I’ll come with you,” Kai said. “But I’m not going out through the window, if you don’t mind. I don’t think I’m ready to fly through the air. I’m just a mortal who likes to keep his feet on the ground.”
    “Suit yourself,” I said. “Though you don’t know what you’re missing. I warn you—someday I hope to change your mind.”
    He turned from the window.
    “Kai.”
    He turned back. “What?”
    “Will you tell her good-bye?”
    If Kai was surprised by my question, he didn’t show it. Nor did he ask whom I was talking about.
    “No,” he said after a moment. He gazed past my shoulder, as he had done earlier. I knew he was thinking of Grace this time.
    “I don’t think so. There isn’t any point. I used to think we’d always understand each other, that we would always walk the same path. I don’t think that anymore.”
    His eyes shifted. Now they looked straight into mine. “I’m going to walk a new path,” he said, “and see where it takes me.”
    “I’m glad,” I said.
    “So am I.”
    And that is how it came to pass that Kai lefthis warm bed and all he had once held dear, and he embarked upon a journey with no milestones to guide him. A single line of footprints in an unseasonably late frost was all that remained to mark his departure.
    Kai did not look back. So, just as he turned the corner at the end of the street, when he could not see me do it, I looked back for him. My gaze went straight to the rooftop of Grace’s building, with her darkened windows just beneath.
    What will you do when you discover Kai is gone? I wondered. Will you find a way to follow? Or will you give in to pride and let him go?
    I found the courage to venture my heart, Grace. Now let’s see if you have the courage to venture yours.

N INE
Story the Fifth
    In Which Grace Makes a Choice
    He was gone. Kai was gone. He had followed the Winter Child.
    I stood in the street, staring down the trail his footprints had left in the frost until I could no longer feel my feet and the hem of my nightgown was soaked. Until I could hear Oma’s voice in my mind, clear as a bell:
    For heaven’s sake, Grace, get back inside this minute before you catch your death of cold.
    Though I never catch cold.
    It’s the strangest thing. Not even Oma could account for it, which meant the familiar scolding was also something of a joke. But suddenly, catching cold was precisely what I feared. I feared my luck might run out just when I needed it most.
    Kai had asked me to marry him, and I had turned him away. I had turned him away and now he was gone.

    Oh, Grace, I thought as I finally began to shiver. What have you done?
    It took all day to sort out my affairs. Unlike Kai, I didn’t simply walk out and leave everything behind me. There was the landlord to speak to, completed work to send to my patrons, and incomplete work for which I needed to make arrangements for others to finish.
    “I’d feel better about all this if I knew when you were coming back, Grace,” the flower vendor, Herre Johannes, said late that afternoon.
    He and I were standing together on the rooftop, my rooftop, among Oma’s pots and planters. It was still too cold to sow seeds, but I had turned the soil over on the first clear day in preparation for when it would grow warm enough.
    I had given Herre Johannes all of the notes that Oma and I had made about what should be planted where, and I was sure the old flower vendor would have some thoughts of his own. He was moving into