Read Online Winterfinding by Daniel Casey - Free Book Online

looking
for anything in particular. She paused in what must have been a
bedroom. On a small cabinet was a blacked book, its cover and spine
seemed to be a kind of metal. Jena gingerly lifted the cover to
discover that the book was hollowed out—a solander.
    Inside were several burnt cards, when Jena
touched them they fell to ash. She dragged her finger though the
ash and pulled up a thin silver chain and a blackened silver cuff
bracelet. Gathering the jewelry up in her other hand she pocketed
it and looked to see if there was anything remaining—a handful of
copper coins, some colored ash, and a brittle piece of folded
vellum.
    She took the vellum and turned back to her
packs; she needed a fire. In the morning, she’d ponder these
objects. In the morning, she’d bury more bodies, but she’d make a
cairn in the Novosar style for Reg.

    Arderra

    It was getting cooler. Jena could smell it
in the air. The warm months had been over for some time and the
cool highlands had lulled Jena into thinking the mild weather would
just keep rolling on. She knew better but she didn’t want to face
it. As she leaned against a broken fence post gazing at her
handiwork, dark mounds even now were losing their color under the
midday sun, she was suddenly aware of her body’s sweat and ache.
Her muscles burned. It had been building for the past few days.
    Jena could smell her tired body; its heat
crept out her collar curling into her nostrils. She stank. Fingers
feeling fat, she tried to stretch them out holding the shovel she
had found in the barn.
    “ These men weren’t
soldiers,” she muttered eying each of the two graves, “but they
weren’t innocents.” Her head rose slightly as she looked beyond the
graves to the stone cairn she had built around Reg’s body. She let
the shovel fall as she walked towards the cairn. Pausing above it,
she knelt, lifted a palm-sized stone in the middle, and placed the
jewelry she had found the night before. She tossed the stone up and
down a couple of times as her other hand rubbed the folded vellum
in her belt. The stone covered the bracelet and chain, Jena stood
and turned back to the burnt husk of the cabin.
    As she strapped on her pack, her eyes gave
one last appraisal to the cabin. There was nothing more she should
bother to salvage. Already she was more weighed down than she would
have liked, but Arderra wasn’t too far away. Jena bounced a couple
of times on the balls of her feet and swung her arms in big loops
to get her pack to settle in a way that felt right. Looking around
she figured she had a two or three hour walk to the outskirts of
the village, less if she was able to find a wagon on the road.
    She pulled the vellum from her belt.
Flicking it open with her thumb, she let the rest of the creases
unfold themselves. The writing was in black ink that seemed to
shimmer; the script was thick but elegant. She read it over again,
the deed granting Reg this land to be added onto his home in
Arderra.
    She tucked the deed back into her belt. If
Reg had a house in the village, then that would be a good place for
Jena to hold up. There were people she needed to talk to,
information to be gathered. Hopefully, Reg didn’t have lodgers.
Still, if he did, Jena thought as she bent to pick up her rucksack,
it shouldn’t be too difficult to deal with them.
    “ Evictions are easier than
folks think,” Jena whispered to herself as she made her way away
from the property. “At least, let’s hope…”
    Arderra wasn’t Anhra. Less people or, at
least, actual villagers for one. There weren’t merchants or sailors
trudging through the streets or wayward soldiers looking for some
sort of sport. Streets were another thing. Everything was dusty,
hard whereas Anhra had always felt muddy and soft. There were no
planks in the street like in Anhra, just the occasional hitching
post rail.
    The buildings of Arderra stood lean with
bluish shake siding and, it seemed to Jena, slanted. Nothing was
uniform but