Shadowlands
Part 4: Deathly Debut
by K. Stonham
first released 29th December, 2012

"You don't need to go back to the fields, Thomas," Anne Frost told her husband. Her gaze slid sideways, to their son, sitting at the table looking amused at the discussion. The white hair and blue eyes were unnerving, but the small smirk was one she'd seen on Jackson's face any number of times, and that soothed her.

"If I don't -"

"He can't stay," Anne hissed. "And God only knows how long it will be before we see him again."

That gave her husband pause. "You're... not staying?" he asked Jack.

Jack pushed up from his seat. There was sorrow writ across his face, but he shook his head, resolute. "I can't, Father. I'm a Guardian, in the living world. I protect children. I can't just let that go."

"But you came to us -"

"I came to make sure you were all right," Jack replied, and, oh, he might look like a child, but in that instant Anne saw how much of a man her boy had become. And she felt so very proud. "I came to let you know I was all right. But I did not come to stay."

Thomas swallowed, then bowed his head, accepting. He took a breath. "A day or two amiss shouldn't hurt," he said. "I'll ask Master Rowling to keep an eye on things for me."

Anne beamed up at him.

"So," her husband said, forcing a smile, "shall we go visit your sister, and introduce you to her family? They've only ever heard stories of their uncle Jackson."

A much more delighted smile broke out on Jack's face. "I'd love to," he said, and went to fetch his staff.

"You can leave that here," Anne told him. "It won't be stolen - the village is safe."

Jack shook his head. "This has only left me once in three hundred years." His face darkened; she wondered, but feared to know, what memory was involved. But then he shook the darkness off. "It's a part of me, Mother, like my hand or my heart. I can't, and won't, let it go again."

"Well, then," she said, fetching her summer bonnet off its hook, "shall we go visiting?"

Burgess was definitely bigger than Jack remembered, and livelier. Children ran around laughing, or sat by their doors, or on logs, doing small handwork. A waft of heat and the clanging of metal-on-metal came from the smithy. And everywhere, everywhere, people went about their business.

Most didn't notice him, or paid him the scarcest attention. A few, though, paused. He wondered if his white hair was catching their notice. But then he heard, "Jackson?"

Stopping, he turned. A man, taller than Jack by half a head, with a neatly trimmed black beard, stood looking at him, surprise writ large across his face. "Yes...?" Jack asked, not knowing the other.

That got him a delighted laugh and a great hug that made him stiffen. "By God, it is you! Welcome home!" Drawing back, the stranger grinned at him, and some shift of the light or his features let Jack recognize him.

"Stanley?" he demanded, eyes wide. "You... you grew up!"

"Died in my sixties," the man reported proudly, though he didn't look above thirty. "Look at you! Not a day over eighteen! Where have you been? And why, pray tell, is your hair that color?"

"I've... I've been on Earth," Jack replied. "I got drafted." There was a blank look at that expression. He amended it to, "Someone pulled me out of that pond and turned me into a spirit. I take care of winter." There was no need to go into an explanation of the Man in the Moon. Particularly not with Stanley, who had always been far more Biblically inclined than Jack.

"Winter, you say?" Stanley asked, not seeming to have a problem with the concept. "Well, that would give explanation to your hair and eye colors."

"We're just going to visit Phillipa, Master Pritchard," Jack's father said. "Care to walk with us?"

Stanley looked in the opposite direction, then shrugged and fell in beside Jack. "Of course. I wouldn't miss this story for anything."

"There's not much to tell," Jack said, shrugging himself. "I bring winter, and try to get kids to have fun."

Stanley looked skeptical, and boy was that an expression Jack remembered. He opened his mouth to tease his old friend about his face getting stuck that way, when suddenly there was a woman running into the center square. She dragged a little girl by the hand, and the skirt of her dress was smouldering. "Fire!" she cried.

Jack called for the wind almost before his father and Stanley yelled "Buckets!" and "Water!", their voices overlapping one another.

The burning house, Jack saw from the air, was not at the center of town. But it was close, only the next row over, and as Jack watched, flames licked up out of its mud-daub chimney. They spread onto the roof.

It was summer here, and his powers had never had much effect against fire. But Jack had spent three centuries watching, and learning. Like a man, a fire needed two things to live. Food, and breath.

He couldn't do much to its breath except call the wind, and that would only spread the flames farther. But its food...

Jack dropped into a crouch on the far end of the house's roof. He took a breath, concentrating, then stood. Holding his staff in both hands, he slammed it to the shingles.

Ice crackled out, shooting across the roof, down the chimney, inside and out, encasing everything in a quarter-inch-thick ice sheet.

The fire hesitated, guttered, then died.

Jack couldn't help the icicles now dangling from the building's eaves, or whatever water damage the melting ice might cause. But the house itself was intact, and eventually only a few scorch marks would indicate its near-burning.

There was silence below him. Suddenly remembering his audience, Jack whirled, looking down. The adults could see him, how could he forget and be so obvious, they could see him -

His mother's face was a study in pride. As was his father's. Stanley was staring wide-eyed, but then he broke into a broad grin. "Jackson Frost indeed!" he called, laughing. "More like Jackson Ice!"

And then, like the villagers suddenly all realized who Jack was, they were all clapping and cheering Jack's name.

It was a disconcerting feeling, and even more discomforting when Jack realized that he wanted to hide. For all that he had spent centuries wanting anyone to look at him, he didn't want everyone looking at him. But he couldn't hide, not here, and he couldn't fly away without seeing Pippa, he just couldn't. So he steeled himself, and let the wind carry him back down to the ground, where the crowd of people were waiting for him.

Phillipa Austen sat at her loom, humming contentedly as she passed her shuttle through the weft threads, battened the fill, then passed the shuttle back through to her right hand. The wool cloth taking shape under her hands was warm and soft and the loveliest shade of cream. Properly dyed and fulled, it would make a winter dress.

Behind her, sitting at her spinning, Elizabeth, her eldest daughter, took up the thread of Phillipa's notes and wove them into a nonsense song. It was a fun little ditty, full of clever rhymes and an increasingly silly storyline, when it suddenly broke off into "Grandmother! Grandfather!" and the sound of the spinning wheel stopped.

Battening down the cloth one last time, Phillipa set down her shuttle and turned.

And stopped.

A young man stood in the doorway with her parents and daughter. He was staring at Phillipa like she was the last breath of hope he had before -

Her breath quickened.

Before falling through ice, she made herself finish the thought, and it couldn't be him, it absolutely couldn't, he was in the living world -

"Pippa?" her brother asked, and something old and half-healed inside Phillipa Frost Austen broke. Shattered. Like pond ice.

"Jack?" she whispered, and she was ten again, running into his arms, crying. His arms wrapped around her, and he was crying too. And if his tears were cold, instead of hot, where they fell on her and soaked through her dress, she didn't notice.

Phillipa Frost had her brother back, and that was all that mattered.

"It's okay," Jack murmured to his sister. "It's okay, Pippa."

She looked up at him, brown eyes teary, and how weird was it that she was ten again when just a minute ago she'd been in her thirties? Time was apparently malleable in this place, and Mort really ought to put a warning label about that on it.

"You fell in -" his sister snuffled, and for the moment, Jack ignored their parents, and Stanley, and that girl who had to be Pippa's own daughter.

He knelt, making her taller than him. "I fell in," he agreed, his hands on her upper arms. "And that wasn't your fault. It wasn't anyone's fault. It just happened." Pippa sniffed again, and he dredged up a smile for her. "I'm not going to deny that it hurt, Pips. Drowning's not the best way to go. But you know what? I got a second chance, a new life, from what happened that day."

"What happened?"

Jack smiled at her, glanced a smile up to his parents as well. "There's a Man in the Moon, did you know that? And he really likes people who protect children. So he pulled me up out of that ice and gave me all the powers of winter, so that I could keep doing for other kids what I did for you." Jack held his hand open before his sister.

A snowflake, delicate and ethereal, formed on his palm. He solidified it, hardened it, and with that little twist of magic he'd learned from North, changed it so it would never melt. Wide brown eyes stared at Jack as he took Pippa's hand, turned it palm side up as well, and gave her the snowflake.

"It's... cold."

"Winter usually is. But it can be beautiful, too, and a lot of fun. You remember that, don't you?"

There was growing maturity in her eyes now, and Jack stood as his sister changed again, back to the woman she'd been when he entered the room. Her face was different, looking very like their mother's, and she was just a little taller than Jack himself. But her eyes were the same. Jack would have known her anywhere.

Pippa held the snowflake to her heart. "I remember," she said.