by A. F. Dery
Winter’s Fallen
A. F. Dery
Copyright © 2015 by A. F. Dery. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Front Cover design by SelfPubBookCovers.com/Shardel
ISBN: 0986258172
ISBN 13: 978-0-9862581-7-6
To Grammy
What a big heart you have!
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ONE
Autumn was nearly over, and it was time for the flock to be thinned.
Grace watched from her lonely place standing in the midst of the open field as one by one, the maidens of Haevor formed rows all around her by the unseen dividing line between the land of their fathers and that of their fathers’ enemy. That enemy was not some nebulous idea, some abstract they would never see; he was a great hulking man with cold dark eyes who came at the end of each autumn to collect his tax from among them.
The land of Haevor produced nothing else of any worth to the warlord, who could find all else he required elsewhere, and it could be argued that she produced nothing of any real worth at all, making this “tax” a mere token display of his rule over them: Grace herself, shivering alongside them and the last of her sisters both older and younger to have to do so, was but one shining example.
In the bitter cold of the last days of autumn, their breath fogging the air, these other young women- some just barely of the age to be called such- looked to her just like her father’s sheep, bland and mild, as they trotted sedately to their expected places, some of the younger ones huddling closer to the older ones for warmth. She knew she looked no different from any of them in any respect save one: their eyes were wide and frightened, like lambs before the shears for the first time, but this was not Grace’s first time and her own eyes were dull and resigned. This was her fifth year joining them in the field, and in five years she had never attracted any notice, not that of the unwed men of her village, and certainly not that of any enemy warlords. Of middling size and pale of skin, hair, and eyes, she was just another nondescript sheep in the flock, distinguishing herself only in that she was not distinguishable at all.
Indeed she attracted no notice even from her own family, among whom she moved like some colorless spirit, industrious and silent. Only her absence would be likely to be of any note, and with the way her life had been going so far, none of them would have expected such an occurrence any time soon, had any of them really thought about it at all.
The wind was howling around the young women now, growing fiercer, the sky dark despite the fact that it was just shy of midday. Grace knew the signs of an impending storm and could taste the snow, yet unfallen, in the bite of the air. She was wrapped in her heaviest cloak, a rather sorry affair of much patched wool, and she wished fervently that the Enemy would appear, make his choice, and have it over with. The thing she feared most was not the warlord, or even the cold; it was watching one of the girls she had grown up with being taken away, never to return. No one spoke of what happened to the girls when the warlord hauled them away, but there wasn’t a maiden in that field who had any doubts about their fate.
But the tax was one maiden at the end of each autumn, and in exchange the warlord left them alone and extended his protection over them from those others who would claim Haevor and her questionable produce out of mere spite. The maidens of Haevor had been taught their duty for two decades now, slowly bleeding into a third. The warlord was beginning to show signs of graying, but no one dared hope he might not show up. If he did, another would just come to take his place, and that one might demand far more and worse than just one virgin a year. It was really a pitiful “tax,” compared to what some of Haevor’s neighbors endured; in many ways, Grace thought as her eyes scanned the tree line, it was good to be invisible and unnoticed. It was certainly safer.
No sooner had the thought come and passed than the warlord came riding into the field on his large white horse, accompanied by a small retinue. It’s a different horse this year, Grace thought irrelevantly as she rubbed her hands together briskly for warmth, eyeing the unusual gray dappling on the beast. She quickly stuffed her hands back under her cloak; she did not dare trust her usual invisibility under the circumstances. Keeping her head down had yet to fail her, and so she kept her eyes fixed on the wind-whipped, browning grass before her feet.
She heard the movement of the horses and the clinking of the warlord’s armor as he dismounted; listened with something akin to boredom to his usual bellowed speech reminding them all of his many benefits and tender mercies to Haevor throughout the preceding year that he deemed (perhaps not inaccurately) as being more than worthy of his required tax; and then he began (at last, Grace sighed interiorly) to walk among them, between the rows. Occasionally he paused to inspect a maiden more closely, to jerk aside a cloak, to look into a mouth, to leer or to paw at a bosom or behind. But it was cold and the wind was picking up: he wasn’t taking as long walking among them as usual. Mere minutes had passed since he’d begun his inspection and already he was walking down Grace’s row, roughly in the middle of the gathered flock. She listened tiredly as his armor clinked closer and closer. He paused not far off from her, something that would have sped her pulse in anxiety in years previous; this year, she just felt numb, the wind biting through her cloak as though it were like her: barely there at all.
The noise resumed, and moments later, shining silver had planted itself in Grace’s line of vision, and it did not move on. Startled by the incongruity from her usual experience, she looked up before she could stop herself, meeting the cold dark eyes. This close- he was standing so close she could have touched him without fully extending her arms- his eyes, though just as dark, did not look so cold and menacing as they had from a distance. They looked weary, even bored; she saw her own expression of moments before twinned in them and almost gasped at the recognition. The warlord stared back at her, unblinking, his graying brow furrowing slightly, and she felt her chest tighten and her throat close, the fear of five autumns flooding back into her all at once. Though he made no move to touch her or open her cloak, she felt naked and small under his unblinking gaze, utterly exposed as though she were the only one in the field rather than one of many. She felt frozen to the spot, unable to even blink her own eyes, her mind completely blank. After a long moment of this, he made a motion with his right hand, still not looking away from her, and her gaze flickered involuntarily to his hand, staring at it without comprehension.
“This one,” was all he said.
And then he reached for her. She was shocked beyond speech when his gauntleted hand closed around her upper arm, paralyzed as she mutely shook her head, her eyes returning to his, but he had already looked back to his horse, and was already hauling her away. Her eyes fell on the wide-eyed gaze of one of the other maidens, a girl Grace had grown up with as neighbors; the girl, standing motionless with her hands covering her mouth, looked as shocked and horrified as Grace felt.
The warlord pulled her along in her stu
por as though she were indeed made of nothing; she scarcely knew if her feet were actually even touching the ground. A hundred thoughts suddenly filled the blank that her mind had become and each seemed to be competing loudly for attention in her head, at least half of them lurid images of what was about to happen to her, and the other half cries of denial and disbelief. She couldn’t draw breath even to scream or cry; spots swam before her eyes.
An eternity could have passed in those moments it took to march her to his horse, and then she was half standing there, held up most of the way by her captor. He pushed her towards one of his men, who had dismounted unnoticed by Grace at some point in the proceedings, no doubt so he could take her up on his horse. In that brief moment of liberation, Grace had only one thought, one instinct, breaking like a clarion call through the fog of panic that had enveloped her: run.
She hardly knew what she was doing before she had made it to the tree line. Her behavior had no doubt shocked the man who had been supposed to grab her and shocked the warlord who was unaccustomed to any kind of resistance from the sheep in the field. All she knew was that she was running, running: fat flakes of white had begun to fall from the sky, stinging her eyes and skin. Blindly she ran, barely evading the trees as they grew together more densely, sometimes not evading them entirely. She thought she imagined footfalls behind her, but she couldn’t be sure over the roaring of blood in her ears. Bare branches slapped at her face like a reprisal, tearing her skin; her blood felt hot against the numbness, streaking across her skin, and still she ran.
As the ground began to slope upward, her legs began to burn as much as her lungs. If it had been hard to breathe before, she could barely catch her breath at all now. She slumped behind one of the trees, gasping and panting, her heart pounding, feeling absolutely certain a hand would descend and grab her at any moment. She shut her eyes as tightly as she could against the falling snow and the vicious wind, aware for the first time of the salt in her eyes, the tears leaking down her numb face and mingling with the blood from her cuts, freezing against her skin. All at once the reality of what she had just done struck her: it was stupid, ridiculous, insane, shameful. She would never be able to outrun them. She was failing her duty, her family, her village. She was the worst of cowards, the lowest of the lowly; who knew what the consequences would be to the very people who had accepted and raised her and known her all of her life. She was selfish, foolish; in just the time she had been running, all manner of evil could have occurred because of her moment of insanity.
Grace forced herself to open her eyes, to look tentatively around, but to her surprise, she saw no one. Her pursuers must not have caught up with her yet, or perhaps the warlord had chosen to let her go rather than pursue her at all and punish her village somehow instead. Again her breath hitched in her throat; a fresh wave of tears and remorse came over her. She forced herself to her feet on shaking legs and swiped an arm over her face; the snow was falling thicker and faster, and she was suddenly aware that she had no idea where she was. It was also much darker than it had been when she had begun; she started at that realization, wondering just how long she had been running. Surely it could not have been long.
She looked around, desperately trying to regain her bearings, but nothing was familiar, and she wasn’t even certain just where it was that she had entered the tree line. It was entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that she was not even on the Haevor side of the forest any longer.
I have to get back, I have to get back and give myself over, I can’t have been gone long, perhaps just killing me will appease him, Grace thought desperately. She made her way back through the falling snow and trees, clutching her cloak more tightly around her, trying to retrace her steps, but her flight had truly been blind, and the snow had already covered her footprints; she had no idea where she was or if she was even returning the same way she had come, or if she was wandering in aimless circles. Soon the snow was falling so hard she could not see farther than her hand in front of her face, and she was so cold she could not feel her face or hands or feet. She could not even hear the clicking of her teeth as they chattered against each other over the howling of the wind. It whipped in her hair, which had come unbound at some point when she had been running, and lashed at her clothing with greedy, ice cold claws.
Then she saw something, moving by one of the trees. Her relief nearly matched her previous panic: it was surely one of the warlord’s retinue, hunting her. She tried to call out to him, but she could barely even hear herself over the howling wind. She tried to make her way towards it, and it was only when she was within arm’s reach that she realized the shape she saw was no man at all.
It was a wolf, large and gray, barely visible even up close amid the snow, and it was not the wind that was howling. It ceased its noise and lowered its head, staring at her with fathomless dark eyes.
She screamed, or whatever thin sound could pass for it as she staggered backward, falling over an exposed tree root onto her back. She scrabbled away backwards, staring at what she could see of the wolf as she tried wildly to get to her feet, but she could feel nothing, and it was impossible to get her feet back under her. The spots returned before her eyes, but this time, they were crowding out everything else; she tried to push herself upwards with her hands, but they were numb and quickly lost purchase with the slick, snow covered ground, sending her falling backward again. Her head hit the ground hard, and all went dark as new howling filled her ears.
Hadrian hated the snow. He had always hated it. Even as a child he had abhorred the cold, wet stuff, the way it permeated his clothing, the way the cold seeped down into his very bones. He hated being cold. There was something in his body that just could not support it, making his joints ache at the very threat of it. Winter was one endless stretch of misery, as far as he was concerned.
If his joints had given him cause for his first suspicions, he knew beyond doubt it was snowing now because he could hear its unholy pattering against the pane of glass in the window in his bedroom, high up in the tower that had been his domicile for nearly five years. There was the faint but unmistakable ping of ice mingling with it, and he suppressed a shudder: it must be mixed with hail. The wind was relentless, which surely worsened matters, throwing the vile stuff harder still against the glass.
What a foul combination for the first day of winter. It couldn’t even hold off a blasted week, he complained to himself, but his complaints lacked their usual fervor. Like the rest of him, they were cold and hollow. It didn’t really matter anymore, not the cold, the snow, the ice, his joints, his bones, not anything.
He sat at what was supposed to be his dressing table and ran his fingers over the smooth curves of the little glass bottle he had been holding for the last hour. He liked to shift the bottle back and forth and listen to the little splish the liquid inside made against the glass. Unlike the pattering and pinging against his window, it soothed him somehow. It reassured him. The bottle had been as cold as the glass in the window likely was right now when he had first picked it up, but it was now only cool, warming in his hands. He doubted it would get much warmer. He had not bothered with a fire since sometime the day before, and his fingers were cold.
I hate the cold, he reminded himself listlessly, again shifting the bottle and listening to the little splish.
He wanted to believe that if he could just lie down and sleep forever, he would be warm again. That the cold place inside his chest that had not thawed since he had come to the tower would again be filled with the heat and light that he thought must be his soul. Ironically he had not been convinced of such an idea as souls before he had come here. It wasn’t until his had gone cold that either its dormancy or its absence had caused him to believe in its existence. He still was not sure which it was. If it was merely dormant, he had long since lost hope of awakening it; if it was gone entirely, he would not be surprised.
I deserve this, he thought, and his eyes stung unexpectedly. Warmth dripped down his face. I deserve whate
ver lies beyond, even if it is just…cold.
His heart was suddenly beating much faster, and he realized it was because, without really thinking of it, he had slid the cork from the little bottle, holding it very still now. The pattering at the window was growing louder. The snow must be falling very hard. Ordinarily this thought would have inspired all manner of invective from him, but now he was unable to distract himself for long from the little bottle.
But what if it’s just unending cold? What if that is all there is to death? His heart beat a little faster still with fresh anxiety. To his mind came unbidden the memory of graves, rows of graves, whole fields full of graves, the freshly turned earth riddled with holes, bodies being planted rather than seeds and flowering into nothing but bones beneath the dirt.
He thought it must be very cold in graves.
Don’t I deserve that, even if endless cold is all there is?
He had just raised the bottle to his lips when a loud thump came from somewhere down below. He startled, then cursed, checking carefully with his free hand that none of the bottle had spilled. He didn’t think it had. Again he heard a thump. It sounded like something large and heavy, and it had to be thumping against the door, for the walls were made of stone and would not have made such a loud noise, whereas the door was made of wood. It was surprising with the wind and snow and ice that he could hear it at all, but then, maybe not that surprising. His hearing only seemed to improve over time. He gave a slight shrug, thinking it was perhaps a wild animal or some criminal seeking shelter. Soon it wouldn’t matter. He didn’t need much time. Again he raised the bottle to his lips, and again the persistent thump.
“Good god above,” he muttered. He could go lonely months without a single wanderer disturbing the peace, but the moment he actually craved solitude…thump thump. It was growing more insistent still.
