The Almanac

by E L Stricker

  Contents

  Copyright

  Free Comic!

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Author’s Note. For inquiring minds, please know that The Old Farmer’s Almanac...

  Copyright © 2019

  E. L. Stricker

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 978-1-7343654-0-5

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7343654-0-5

  Free Comic!

  To be notified of new releases, visit www.elstricker.com.

  Subscribe and receive exclusive access

  to my comic: Russell Bagley and the Winds of Fate.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ILLYA OSLOV FLICKED an ice-coated strand of dark hair out of his eyes and tried to swallow the lump of panic that was rising in his throat.

  There was nothing here.

  With his heart hammering a frantic drumbeat in his ears, he crouched back to the earth, ignoring the sinking sun and the lengthening shadows. This cattail stand was the last one they had left. The stalks had all been harvested earlier in the year, but there should still be roots left to eat. He refused to believe they could be gone. Illya scraped deeper into the mud. Frigid river water swirled in to fill the hole, soaking his shirt. His nose dripped, and his back ached, but still he dug. Weakness seemed to spread from his shrunken stomach through his whole body, making his vision blur and his muscles tremble. He couldn't remember when he had last had a real meal.

  Darkness began to filter through the sky above him. He felt the shift without looking up. He clenched his teeth together. Soon, the gates in the walls around his village would be closing. Night brought the Terrors. No one stayed out after dark and lived to tell about it. He knew this as well as anything; as well as he knew which plants to eat and which held the malice that could kill; as well as he knew his own ma's face, but his ma and little sister back in the village were every bit as hungry as he was. He could not go back empty-handed again.

  It was near the end of his seventeenth winter, and it was the worst he could remember. The game was gone, the foraging nearly so, and still the snow had not broken. He scraped through another layer of mud, and his nails caught on something. Quickly, he cleared away more, feeling an odd slippery texture through the grit.

  Plastic.

  His heart began to beat faster. Plastic was rare, left behind by the Olders from the time before the Calamity. It was something he had only seen a handful of times. He could feel regular, straight edges in the mud.

  Night advanced, its claws reached over the mountaintop behind him. Not far away, in the darkness that had just covered the foothills, the first yipping of the Terrors began. Illya jerked his head up and stared into the dark with wide eyes. A jolt of fear shot through him and stole his breath. He was out of time.

  Still, the box could have anything inside it. Ignoring the mud that caked his palm and stuck under his fingernails, he scraped and pulled with all of his strength until it came loose with a sucking pop. It was smaller than he had expected. The color was strange, and something he didn't have a name for; between leaves and sky, blue and green at once.

  He pushed himself up. He clutched the box to his chest and ran.

  ***

  The light was gone, and an eerie yip yip yee rang out in the dark. His feet pounded on the frozen earth. His chest heaved like a set of bellows, and he pushed his legs faster and faster.

  He could see the safety of the fires of his village ahead. They looked tiny in the distance, seeming to be too small to be the center of all his hopes.

  Faster.

  The yipping was getting louder, sounding closer. Illya thought he could hear the sound of the Terrors' gravelly breaths in the air behind him. He strained his eyes forward, willing the ground ahead to be smooth with no tree branches or roots to trip him.

  There was a rustling and cracking sound in the brush nearby. He faltered but didn’t turn to see what it was, pressing for new speed as horrible thoughts boiled up in his mind: images of snapping teeth, gleaming eyes, and furious claws.

  His neck prickled. He clutched the box closer and tried to focus on counting his steps to drive away the surge of panic. One, two, three— he lost count after ten when he forgot some of the words.

  Then he was there. The gates were shut. A palisade of sharply cut pine trunks loomed high above him, cutting him off from sanctuary. He dropped the box and pounded on the gates, yelling with the last of his breath.

  There was no answer.

  Illya threw himself against the wall, hammering until his fists throbbed. How could this be happening? When he hadn't come home at evening time, his mother would have worried. She would be looking for him. Surely, she would have thought to check the gates.

  But that was the problem. They wouldn’t think to look for him out here because no one but a madman would have imagined staying out this late themselves. His cousin's hut, the Healer's, the central fires; there would be many places inside the walls they would look before they checked here.

  He wiped his face. His hand was coated in river grit, and it scraped across his cheeks as the mud mingled with a few tears that had escaped from the corners of his eyes.

  A growl came from the darkness behind him.

  Illya slipped in the snow as he turned to face the sound, barely staying on his feet. Light from the fires on the hill behind the wall glinted off dozens of eyes. The Terrors had surrounded him, and there was no direction left to run.

  He glanced around for a branch or rock, anything to use to defend himself. There was nothing he could reach without getting far too close to the gleaming ring of eyes.

  He worked his hand into a gap between the stakes behind him, where ropes woven from reed fiber lashed them to cross braces. His fingers, slippery with mud, fumbled on the knot. They were numb and felt disconnected from him, like lumps of clay.

  Then, through the gap in the slats, he saw movement. Outlined by the glow of the fires beyond were two figures, walking away from him on the path inside the walls. A bubble of hope swelled in his chest and he yelled, but the sound came out broken and thin. His voice was hoarse from the cold, and he could not push it out more than a few feet.

  The figures were getting farther away by the moment.

  Illya snatched the plastic box up from the ground and heaved it as hard as he could, high over the fence. Desperation gave him strength, and it flew through the air a long way before falling directly between them. They stopped, looked down at it, and then turned back in the direction it had come from. Illya yelled again with every ounce of breath he had, finally getting more than a croak out of his lungs. The taller figure hesitated, but the other sprinted towards the gate.

  More snarls came out of the darkness around him. He could hear the creaking of wood against wood and heavy breathing. Finall
y, the gates swung open.

  As Illya fell through the opening, something brushed against his ankles, and a red line of pain seared across his calf. He scrambled inside and collapsed on the ground, gasping. The gates closed with a groan; the figure of his rescuer leaned against them, struggling with the latch as a chorus of angry howls rose into the night beyond the wall. Illya pulled himself up and stumbled over. Together, they jammed the crossbar into place.

  “It’s full dark! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  It was a girl, slight and red-haired. She turned and glared up at him, chest heaving, shaking with fury.

  Sabelle Eder. Of all the people to find him. He gasped, still trying to catch his breath, and found himself staring at the firelight skipping through her tangled waves of hair. His head spun, and prickling heat spread up his neck to his ears.

  “Uh . . .” he managed.

  Sabelle was the prettiest girl in the village, and her father was the village Leader. Illya clenched his fists, trying to keep them from shaking. A shiver went through his entire body, reaching his bones. In his flight, he had forgotten the cold, but now he felt it. His damp clothes clung to him.

  “What's this?”

  Sabelle's mother, Impiri, had reached them and was gripping the plastic box with white-knuckled fingers. It was open, and the lid lay on the ground at her feet. Illya's heart thudded harder. He strained his neck to peer inside.

  “An Olders' thing,” Impiri said, pursing her lips. She looked up from it and met his eyes. Standing, he was taller than her, but the force behind her gaze made her tower in his imagination. He looked at his feet.

  “You know better than to bring something like this here,” she said.

  “It could have been food,” he muttered then snuck another covetous glance at the box. His stomach was aching, but he ignored it. He caught a glimpse of more plastic inside. Impiri snorted, and his cheeks flared hot.

  “Ma,” Sabelle murmured.

  “It’s a wonder you haven't brought the Calamity in before now. All that junk. That … bicycle. Devil’s work,” Impiri said. She scowled down at the box as if it held a particularly offensive insect.

  “Illya!” His ma was sprinting toward them down the path. His aunt, Ada, followed close behind her.

  “Your boy was outside the gates Grenya. Brought in another Olders’ thing,” Impiri said, her lips and nose wrinkling up as if she had smelled a skunk.

  “In the dark?” His ma’s eyes were wide and bright with worry. She gripped him by the shoulders, looking him over.

  “Illya, you're bleeding!” There was a rip in his pants, and through it a deep scratch was visible, cutting across his calf. A line of blood was trickling down his ankle and soaking into his boot.

  “It’s nothing, Ma, I caught it on a branch,” he said. She knelt and ripped a piece of cloth from her skirt to bind it. He winced. Their clothes were a patchwork of animal skins and salvaged remnants of the finer cloth of the Olders. There was less and less Olders’ cloth around these days, and he knew that skirt was one of his mother’s favorites.

  Ada came up behind him and flung a fur over his shoulders, cutting off the sharp chill of the wind.

  “He's alright now,” Ada said. Grenya stood. Her eyebrows gathered together in a reproachful cluster. She licked her fingers and began to wipe some of the mud off his cheek.

  “Ma!” Illya squirmed away, horrified that Sabelle had just seen his mother clean his face as if he was a kid. He shrugged her off and edged closer to the box. Impiri was picking at the plastic inside it.

  “What is this?” she muttered, tearing through the top of the wrapping. Gingerly, as if she was holding something that could burn, she lifted a floppy object out and let the plastic drop to the ground.

  It was not food.

  “It's paper!” Illya blurted, shaking again, this time not with cold but with excitement.

  He had seen a few pieces of paper before but never so much at once. It was bound together along one side.

  “A book,” Impiri said. She narrowed her eyes at it and ran her finger down its smooth edge.

  Illya wanted to grab it right out of her hands to get a closer look but held himself back.

  “I found paper one time. Turned to dust when I touched it,” Grenya said.

  “When we were girls, our pa had some he used to start the fire,” Ada said to her. “Worked pretty good.”

  Impiri looked up at her. “Pa had the right idea about this sort of thing,” she said.

  “He just liked it for kindling,” Ada said and shrugged.

  “You don't know everything,” Impiri said, sniffing.

  “What’s it for?” Sabelle asked.

  There was silence for a moment, filled with nothing but the crackling of the distant fires and the wind howling through the slats of the palisade.

  “It has stories marked down on it, and they say you can hear them in your mind when you look at it,” Ada said.

  Impiri shuddered. “It's the worst kind of Olders' magic,” she said.

  Sabelle frowned and glanced at Illya, meeting his eyes for a brief moment. He wasn't sure in the dim firelight, but he thought that she blushed. His heart skipped, and she looked away.

  “Oh, leave off that talk, Impiri,” Ada said, sighing.

  “What good have Olders' leavings ever done us? You know Pa always said—”

  “He just liked to hear himself talk.” Ada cut her off.

  “Did you find any roots, Illya?” Grenya asked.

  Illya's heart dropped. He tore his eyes from the book and shook his head. Grenya smiled, a little sadly.

  “Tomorrow then,” she said.

  Illya took a deep breath. “No,” he said. He swallowed then went on. “Won't be anything tomorrow either. I went farther downstream than we have ever dug before, and there was nothing. The roots are gone.”

  The women’s chattering dropped off abruptly. They stared at him.

  Impiri broke the silence, “They can't be.”

  “It's true. There’s nothing out there,” Illya said, looking up to meet the challenge in her eyes. His legs shook as the realization of it hit him in waves. There was no food tonight and none to come soon, likely nothing before spring. His head spun. How many of the villagers would starve before the snow melted?

  Impiri's eyes flared hot. She gripped the book as if she would rip it apart.

  “You bring this thing into the village, and now you tell us the roots are gone,” she said. “I think it's no coincidence.” Her grip tightened on the book as if she could strangle the life out of it.

  “Impiri—” Ada started to speak, but Impiri turned and stormed down the path toward the fires, clutching the book to her chest.

  In moments, she had reached the roaring fires beside the stone farmhouse in the center of the village. Illya ran to catch up, passing rows of mud and thatch huts that were ringed around the stone house like a legion of devoted worshipers around a god.

  It was growing late, but there were still people at the fires. In better times, the villagers would gather here in the evenings to tell stories, dance, and even share in feasts when food was plentiful. Now, knots of waif-like people huddled together, trying to forget their hunger in the warmth of the fires. The air was thick with desperation. Lately, it had not been unusual for bitter fights to break out over the little food that they found.

  Impiri headed directly for the largest fire. Illya caught up to her and grabbed her arm, pulling her back.

  “You can't burn it,” he said.

  “Let go of me.” Impiri jerked out of his grasp. By now, they had attracted the attention of the other gathered villagers. People started drifting over to see what the commotion was.

  “That boy of Grenya's,” he heard someone whisper nearby. Illya's face burned.

  “Don't interfere with things you don't understand,” Impiri said, sniffing. She turned back to the fire but stopped when another hand descended onto her shoulder. Illya looked up and saw the wri
nkled face of the village Healer, Samuel.

  “What is this?” Samuel asked. Impiri tensed against his hand then relaxed, letting her breath out long and slow. Samuel was one of the oldest people in the village. He taught the smallest children about edible plants, and he was old enough that nearly everyone could remember learning from him as a little themselves. Because of this, the entire village carried an awe of him and a peculiar fear that he would catch them out in their mischief, even if childhood was long past. They may not even be engaged in wrongdoing at all, but it still seemed to be necessary to stop and check.

  “It's nothing.” Impiri tucked the book inside her patchwork jacket.

  “Nothing?” Samuel raised his eyebrows. His stern face relaxed into a smile, and he lifted his hand from Impiri's shoulder.

  “You won't mind if I have a look then,” he said, shrugging. “Humor an old man.”

  Impiri pursed her lips then glanced around at the growing crowd of people. Finally, she pulled the book out from her jacket and held it out to him.

  Samuel took the book from her gently. He cradled it in both of his hands, and Illya finally got a good look at it. The paper was brown, like dry leaves. It seemed fragile, as if it could crumble away in the Healer's fingers.

  “You are wrong, I think,” Samuel said, smiling at her. “This is something special.”

  Impiri snorted with laughter.

  “Whatever you say, old man,” she said and stood up taller before turning and pushing her way past the crowd.

  When she was beyond the ring of onlookers, Impiri looked back.

  “It's of the Olders. You know that no good can come of it,” she said and strode off toward the stone house. Sabelle followed her. She glanced back over her shoulder at Illya, catching his eye for a moment before climbing the stairs and going inside.

  Illya looked at Samuel. The Healer's eyes were shining. He brushed his fingertips across the book's smooth cover.

  “A book,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “How long has it been since I've seen one?”

  “I found it,” Illya said, almost to himself.

  Samuel looked up at him, frowning.