I wrote this a long time ago, but I'm still fond of it. One of my only two Sleepy Hollow stories, it's the completed one.

Responsible for this edit is the lovely dfg, who politely reminded me that when I wrote this, I obviously hadn't seen the movie in a while or just completely freaking spaced. ((headdesk)) Honestly! 'London'... So thank you very much!

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.'

W.H. Auden

It was to Sleepy Hollow, after Ichabod's death, that Katrina retired.

It was home in its shadowed way, despite the bloodshed and old ghosts. New York, for all its glitter and modern flash, didn't feel so familiar to her bones in this way, like an old bed, covers piled with familiar scent.

She was a young widow, they all said. Such a shame, they'd so clearly been in love. Katrina endured their pity as she endured all things; silently, with Masbath at her side and the silence in her ears.

However when she returned, nights when her bed grew too cold and her thoughts too loud, she took to walking.

She rarely went out on horseback. It took a lot to scare Katrina now, and misty shadows did not live up to the Hessian's terror. Instead she walked winding paths, trailing fingers along wet black bark of barren winter trees.

It was on one of these long winter paths that she found her step-aunt's cave.

Her stepmother had left her sister's body on the ground, and exposure had turned her dress to rags and her corpse to shining white bone. Katrina knelt, her skirts falling around her, and lifted the dirty skull, examining hollow sockets the crows had doubtless picked clean, and felt a shiver penetrate her dull blanket of grief.

It felt like premonition.

The skull cradled in her hands, she rose to her feet and turned to the black silhouette of the trees, struggling to pierce the shadows heavily draping the night. The moon was cold and bare as bone above her.

No one came; no twig snapped, no leaves rustled to foretell the approach of someone not dead enough.

But as she searched with her eyes, blue gleamed suddenly in sharp points through the shadows, and the skull slipped from her fingers.

It bounced as it hit the ground and she looked down sharply, feeling her eyes huge as it rolled to face her. She whirled suddenly, but the skeleton of a woman's body, adorned in scraps of cloth, lay still and unreal.

Katrina left the clearing.

"My lady?" Masbath sounded quiet and subdued. He was a kind young man, and intensely respectful of her grief.

Katrina stood at the window, fingers parting the curtains as she stared out. Snow had begun to fall. "Masbath." She said softly. "Do you think there is any way the Horseman could rise again?"

"You saw him?" He asked, horrified. Something clattered to the floor.

Katrina turned to face him, surprised. "No...I only meant-"

Her eyes fell on what lay upon the ground.

The faded blue book was familiar to her, as was the ragged, black rimmed hole in it. "He saved it." She whispered. Her voice echoed numbly in the room.

Masbath did not speak; he knew her well enough for that. Instead his eyes tracked her movements, solemn and dark.

Katrina left the room with something burning in her throat and went into the icy afternoon, her skirts trailing on the ground like the wings of a brightly colored bird. It was the fashion in London to be colorful like plumage, not like the blending winter colors in Sleepy Hollow.

It meant she burned like a candle flame in the bare branches, the graveyard light of the woods. It meant that when she stopped at the tree of the dead with its twining black branches, her dress blazed like the blood the dead man had spilled.

Katrina's fingers were pulled tightly into fists, her eyes fixed on the tangle of roots. Within them still extended one pale, graceful hand, fingers curled in an unmistakable, unaging invitation.

Warm liquid slid over her fingers. Katrina lifted her hand and found the red of her own life sliding over her palm, punctured marks of restraint.

When she returned home, the sky was low with dusk and she realized for the first time that she must have stayed there, staring at the ghostly doorway to hell for hours.

A woman in town called her a witch in a harsh, audible whisper when she walked into church. Katrina said nothing, merely noticed that the shattered window had, of course, long ago been fixed.

She woke gasping from a dream where a horse's cry split the night in an eerie, unmistakable wail, and she breathed deep and did not cry out herself.

Her vocal chords frozen, she slipped from the thick comfort of her bed feeling like a child at how long it took for her feet to touch chilly floor, and ran to the window, parting filmy curtains.

Only the empty, misty line of houses and muddy street and silence greeted her searching eyes.

When she returned to her bed, she dreamed only of the naked length of blade, poised above her neck, and the merciless curl of his gloved fingers in her long hair.

In the barren winter in the town people will turn to each other; on the cold nights, it was what they needed.

Katrina was left to her fire and her lonely house, Masbath cautiously courting a sweet girl in the midwife's employ. Only her chill, empty world and the woods beckoning.

Her blood left on the Tree of the Dead. Had it been drunk, soaked into the thirsty pitch roots?

Katrina rose, gathered her shawl around her shoulders, and followed her path her memories told her was there, winding through the map of her life.

As stark and real as stone beneath her feet.

The trees caught at her hair and she paused, snow around her ankles, chill biting her face.

She turned and suddenly saw a man dart into the clearing, snow lit with bright sun, the shape of his coal black, absurdly fluffy hair, his bright eyes, the sharp dagger shape of his teeth clearly illuminated. He turned to look at her, the Hessian in the woods, and raised a finger to his lips.

She drew in a deep, astonished breath and close behind her, a horse whuffled.

Spinning, she was faced with an evening dimness rather than the stark day, and only shadows. When she turned back, the clearing was there once more, if dim and lacking any living man or monster.

His grave lay there, gutted, frozen heaps of earth as though nothing had been disturbed since he tore his way free.

Katrina pressed her fingers to her mouth and turned, searching the crowded gray sky with her eyes. Somewhere a bird cried out harshly and she let her eyes follow the trail her mind told her continued into the woods.

She kept walking, if more cautiously.

It wound her between trees, displayed briefly to the side a frozen animal's corpse, picked to the bones by predators, scavengers and nature combined. She diverted her gaze and kept on.

Once again, Katrina was left facing the Tree of the Dead in the empty, chill silence of winter, remembering the warmth of her home, the fire on her skin and chill stone at her heart, names carved like the archer's shape in the grooves of her marrow.

Behind her, someone drew a sword. Katrina whirled, her hair and skirts moving with her, swirling around her body and her legs, hands buried in silk.

His eyes burned like candle flames in the gathering gloom.