Winterkill Read Online Free PDF Page B

I make it worse—getting in my daydreaming way, being punished with Watch. And now, a third offense . . .
    This way.
    I move forward. The grasses get higher, the scrub thicker, so I have to push my way into the tangle of dogwood and wild rose. Branches catch at my tunic and force me to duck under. Deadfall trips me up every other step. I bend and crash through until I have to pull up short.
    The woods have given way to a small, dry ravine. There was a creek here once, that’s plain, but now it’s a rocky bed with slippery shale walls, near impossible to traverse without hurting my foot something fierce. It’s my chance to turn back. I should turn back.
    But I want my foot to hurt today.
    I fumble down the steep bank to the dry creek bed and climb the other side. Every other tuft of grass tears away, so I use my fingernails, skinning my knuckles again as I scramble up the shale.
    There’s a jumble of logs inside this line of trees: four crumbling walls caked with lichen and dirt. A left-behind from the first generation. There are a few messes like this in the woods outside the fortification; soggy ruins after years of the woods creeping mossy fingers around them, pulling them into the soil. Some of the first settlers must’ve lived out here. Before they shored up inside the fort.
    Before they knew about the
malmaci
.
    Heart beating fast, I push into the woods, putting the ghostly jumble to my back and out of mind. I push deep and deeper until the brush gives way once more—this time to a grove. It’s small; looks about thirty strides by twenty. The trees around it reach tall to the sky, and end in a circle of bright blue. The scrubby brush in the middle is scarce ankle-high.
    I pause and listen hard. A white-throated sparrow trills in the bush and its mate answers. The breeze tinkles through the treetops, soft and sure. The woods around me teem with life I can’t see, which is right skittering if I think on it too hard, but this . . .
    This is a little secret haven tucked away from those unknowns.
    My shame and anger drift away. Moving into the center, I close my eyes and breathe the earthy air.
    Nobody has been out here in years—decades. Mayhap I’m the very first person to find this grove.
    I like that. I like that it’s just me out here. No wary eyes, no Pa, no shame.
    A strange kind of peace fills me.
Les trembles
whisper with their tinkling voices, and both my feet feel solid, rooted into the forest floor like I’m a part of this grove, these woods. I breathe deep again. The Lost People are looking on me without judging. I can feel it on my skin.
    The little voice in my head reminds me I’m addled. The Lost People were First Peoples, and they were Taken by the
malmaci
before our ancestors even arrived. The stories tell it that way, and Tom and I find their ancient traces—tools, bones—along the riverbank all the time. Only . . .
    Only, deep down in my secret heart, I’ve always felt their absence as though it were a presence. As though they’re still here, somehow—just . . .
lost
. Tom’s the only one who knows I call them the Lost People, but he doesn’t tease me about it.
    Course, I don’t tell him they call to me.
    This way.
    My eyes snap open.
    A piece of sky is hanging from the brush on the far side. I squint.
    No. A scrap of something.
    I cross the grove to pull it from the tree. The cloth that comes off in my hands is beautiful, the color of an autumn sky. I turn it over, running my fingers along its strange smooth surface. And then my thoughts catch up to my hands.
    Someone has been out here.
    I grip the scrap real tight. Who? When?
    A heady rush washes over me.
    The last Taking happened before I was born. It was an old man from the south quarter; could this be what was left of him? Was he Taken in the night? Or in the day?
    Suddenly the possibility of not returning to the