Read Online Raven Speak (9781442402492) by Diane Lee Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t much of a shelter, but it was high enough to be out of the tide’s reach. They could squeeze in there and be partly protected from the wind. They could fend off the cold’s hunger a little longer.
    At her urging, Rune followed her step by halting step beneath the angled walls of the bluff. She had to duck her head to avoid the rough outcroppings, and she could hear the stone scraping his withers. When they’d wedged themselves behind the fallen rock, she turned, tugged on Rune’s forelock, and pointed to the ground. It was a cue she’d taught him years ago, and obediently he folded his knees and dropped with a wheezy groan.
    She dropped onto her own knees. Reaching through the darkness, fingering his coarse mane and fuzzy neck and iron shoulder, she again felt for and found each sticky wound. They’d not reopened, but some of Rune’s spirit seemed to have run out with his blood. He seemed shrunken, bony. Heaving a sigh, he flopped his huge head across her lap and closed his eyes. Out ofhabit she stroked the hollows above them awhile, then buried her fingers in the warmth trapped beneath his thick mane.
    All she could see between the rock in front of them and the bluff above was a horizontal strip of dark sky. Wispy clouds banded the view, but thousands of fiery embers from the gods’ fires burned there too. Was her father staring at these same bits of light? Or had his eyes forever closed to their brilliance? How much longer would her own eyes be open? Judging by the ragged haze clouding her vision, not much longer. What would take her and Rune? Cold? Hunger? A knife? Toughening herself to live with the choice she’d made, and if necessary to die by it, she began rocking, waiting for whatever was coming.

NÍU
    Birds. Huge, rough-voiced birds, calling to her. Loudly. The geese! Drawing summer on their wings.
    Asa struggled to waken, her heart already skipping. She would tell her mother first—nudge her shoulder and whisper the incredibly good news—and then they’d tell the rest of the clan, and together they would breathe in the promise of warmer days and greening grass and new life. They’d made it!
    Except that when she pushed onto her elbow, it dug into damp sand and not her straw mattress. The fingers she lifted to her face rubbed stinging granules of the same stuff into her eyes. She bolted upright, blinking in pain. Where was she? Handicapped by her watery vision and the predawn gloom, she managed to identify a massive rocky wall an arm’s length in front of her and she felt the pressure of its mate at her back: the shore’s bluffs. She was waking near the ocean—and she wasn’t alone. Within that same arm’s length she saw booted feet poking from beneath a dark gray cloak. Her heart left off its skipping to drum an alarm; she craned her stiff neck upward, following the shrouded form. Silhouetted against a horizontal strip of sky that still sparkled with a few starswas the deeply furrowed and well-weathered face of a one-eyed old woman. Scowling. Behind the woman’s shoulder a large black bird—a raven—strutted back and forth on the rock.
    Asa had never given ravens much consideration, but at that moment this one seemed the very embodiment of evil. It was the bird’s demanding, guttural calls that were shattering the morning.
Gronk. Gr-r-o-n-nk
.
    She had to flee. Where was Rune?
    Through the slits of her crusted eyes Asa spotted him beyond the rock, closer to the ocean. Only his uplifted head showed against the strip of sky, but she could tell he was annoyed, and then she saw why: Another raven swooped past his ears, worrying him with beak and claws and that same harsh cry. Rune shook his head as his teeth snapped on air.
    The raven on the rock complained again, loud and insistent, which brought her back to her own tenuous situation. It was shifting anxiously from foot to foot and making hungry stabs with its beak.