Month: October 2009

Angry Robot (www.angryrobotbooks.com) has offered up 5 daily sample chapters from Winter Song, by Colin Harvey!

—
Two
Bera
—

Bera wanted to scream her grief at the night, but that would rouse the farmyard dogs. That would in turn wake the sleepers. She already felt so raw that she might as well have been scoured by sandpaper, and a public lecture from Hilda was more than she could face, so she clamped her jaw shut until it ached.
The farmyard was so cold that her breath threatened to freeze solid in the midnight air – not that Isheimur’s midnight-sky was like other worlds, she gathered:. It would be another five weeks until the equinox, when the Mizar quartet would line up together on Isheimur’s far side, with only the twin moons, Stor and Litid, to illuminate the true-dark for a few hours. Until then, though Gamasol and Deltasol had set within a few hours of one another, the further pair was still high in the sky.
That she could see where to put her feet on the rocky slope up to the grave made the act of mourning her dead son easier, and at least Ragnar had allowed her to bury Palli here, rather than in open ground. The graveyard was in a pocket of such boulder-strewn land that it was good for nothing else, unlike the rest of the valley. Its rocky border at least protected the bodies from burrowing marauders. Snolfurs were another matter – only a precious bullet or arrow would deter one of them.
She clambered past a tapped-out steam-vent which no longer gave its energy to the generator, the metre-wide pipe to the water tank down the hill now disconnected. Putting the sprig of lavender on the unmarked cairn was a pathetic little token, but it was all she had. At the thought of Palli’s little face turning blue, the tears started up again, half-blinding her, freezing on her face as they trickled down.
She crouched, offering prayers, to Wotan, Yahweh – any of the old ones who might exist, just in case – to take care of Palli. Assuming that there was an afterlife, rather than just mouldering in the dirt.
Wiping her eyes, she glimpsed something streak above the top of the Reykleif hills in a flat curve, so it couldn’t be a shape-shifter; nor did any troll ever move that fast. It was fiery bright, so it was most likely a meteor, she decided.
Standing again, she winced. Moving sent slivers of pain shooting through her cramped-up feet, numb even through the fur-lined house-shoes. Taking outside boots would have meant stumbling around in the boot-room, perhaps falling over one of the sleeping farmhands. She didn’t want that. Better her feet froze than to admit to the other women that she still grieved for her beloved bastard.
If her body didn’t give her away: ten days after burying him, her breasts were still swollen and sore, her blouses sodden even through the wadding that she’d shoved into her bra. The others must have noticed, but if they had, for once – in a rare show of restraint – they had said nothing.

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