Winterkill Read Online Free PDF Page A

Back then, I might’ve told him some things.
    But these days Pa’s got a worry to him and we don’t speak on much. He looks at me nervous-like and real sad, like the older I get, the more Stained I am. This morning it was plain as the scrubby brown beard on his face. I told him nothing about Watch, just ate and made myself scarce. I thought the fresh air would ease my thoughts, but Pa’s worried eyes keep surfacing in my mind. Need to find a way to make that worry disappear . . .
    A soft wind stirs the leaves above me. The Lost People drift through the branches, whispering to me, calling to me. My neck prickles, but I know that what I truly need to worry about is doing something unmindful—spilling my gatherings or such. The Watcher in the tower can see me if I need him to, and the larger beasts—wolves and bears—are far too skittish to venture close. And Takings in the daytime are rare.
    But.
    Mayhap my pa would be relieved if I didn’t come back.
    A stubborn piece of root bursts free in a shower of soil. I dust it off and drop it in my satchel, then sit back on my heels, wrapping my knuckles in the tail of my
ceinture
. I needthree or four chunks of root to warrant my return; we need all the stores we can manage before
La Prise de Glaces
—the big Ice Up—arrives next month.
    Each year, I feel it coming on the air like a poison breath. The birds escape in jagged lines across the sky and the woods get brittle and stark, waiting. When it strikes,
La Prise
sweeps down in ice-cold winds that burn and blistering snow that swirls so thick and fast, you need a rope to guide you from the kitchen to the woodshed. The sun wanes, the dark grows, and—the worst of it—we are all shut inside the fortification until the Thaw. Months of howling winter winds, months of nothing to do but attend pitiful bindings. When we finally stagger out into the springtime air, thinner still and half mad, we thank Almighty we’ve lived to see the trees bud out and the river swell.
    Next Thaw, someone will come
. No one says that out loud, and I suspect it’s because no one believes it anymore. After eight decades of barely scratching out an existence here, the unsaid is louder, truer, than any declaration of hope: either everyone else is cut off, like us, or they’re already dead.
    I lift the cloth from my knuckles to make sure the bleeding has stopped, then scan the dirt for a new spot to dig. I’m not strong enough to get the rest of the root I unearthed. It’s too far down, and besides, there are bound to be others nearer the surface. I rub at my brow absent-like and feel dirt smear across my forehead.
    Oftentimes I wonder what they left behind for
this
. Pa says back years before we came, the
coureurs de bois
were the only ones traveling out this way, chasing after animal pelts. Then the animals those men were hunting got scarcer thefurther west they traveled, so they returned east to work the land.
    But over decades, too many people arrived from the Old World; the colonies got crowded, relations with the First Peoples got tense. A few families—our ancestors—decided to press west. Pa says it was an odd assortment: English speakers looking for a better life, French speakers trying to escape being deported to the Old World, the offspring of French speakers and First Peoples who were tired of persecution for being of mixed blood. No way they all got along; I suspect the idea was to come in the safety of numbers, and spread out once they found suitable land.
    But the emptiness should have warned them. Where were the First Peoples that were said to roam these lands? In the east, the First Peoples shared with the settlers from the Old World, taught them to survive on the new land; they mingled, had families together—became the mélange, whose blood remains in the people of the south quarter.
    Here, just their ghosts remained, traces of people who had up and