WINTER'S NIGHT
Edited by Siri Paulson
Icy stories and poems by
Kit Campbell
Siri Paulson
KD Sarge
Erin Zarro
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed within are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Individual stories © 2011 by their individual authors.
Smashwords Edition
Distributed under Turtleduck Press
http://www.turtleduckpress.com
Cover art © 2011 by KD Sarge.
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
Introduction
by Siri Paulson (Editor)
Winter is a time for warm drinks, family gatherings, presents, and glitter. It's also a time for hunkering down in thick clothing, for putting up lights to ward off the darkness, for waiting for the return of the sun. Bare trees and snow can be stark, but also beautiful. Some people struggle with losses of loved ones at a time when such importance is placed on family, or simply have trouble functioning with so little direct sunlight. Others come alive when the weather cools—they love the crisp, clear air, the sparkle of fresh snow, the quietness of a snowfall.
Our anthology authors explore both sides of winter, each in her own way.
Kit Campbell shows us, in "Frozen", a village where summer has been banished and the inhabitants are struggling to find enough food to survive...unless they can solve the mystery of why they are trapped in eternal winter.
Erin Zarro's three poetry offerings explore love, loss, and heartbreak through the imagery of winter.
KD Sarge takes us to another planet along with a cynical space Marine who has never experienced Christmas before. For those who have read Sarge's previous novels, Knight Errant and His Faithful Squire, "Santa Hat" is a sneak peek into the early life of Eve "Cori" Marcori, Taro's adopted older sister.
Siri Paulson gives us, in "The Long Night", another take on the motifs of winter, hunger, and magic, this time from the perspective of Inuit (tundra dweller) mythology.
We've also included a preview chapter from Turtleduck Press's next publication, a novel by KD Sarge set in the same world as her previous two novels from Turtleduck. For one girl, Joss Ravid will change the world—even though he doesn't like girls. Queen's Man will be available from Amazon and Smashwords in April 2012.
So wrap yourself up in a big sweater, make yourself a cup of tea, curl up before a crackling fire, and enjoy Winter's Night!
Frozen
by Kit Campbell
The snow drifted slowly through the bare branches of the trees, turning to mist as it floated through Astrid's breath. She glanced back for just a moment, just to make sure it was not filling in her footsteps, before continuing forward. Snow lay thick on the ground, but there seemed to be some equilibrium to it; it had been the same depth as long as Astrid could remember, falling just below her knees. She trudged on, pulling her coat tighter about her shoulders. Hopefully today there would be something in the traps, something to take home to her mother to feed to her siblings, but she held out no hope. There was as little food for the animals as there was for the rest of them.
Astrid paused, peering up at the white sky. She'd heard that once it had occasionally been blue, once the snow had melted and the trees had bloomed. That was before her time.
The traps were empty except for a small quail. Astrid broke its neck quickly and began the return trip home before the snow absorbed her path. Not that she worried about getting lost particularly; there was only so far she could go, and, come nightfall, the village would be the only source of light within the forest. There were always people trying to go, trying to reach different lands, perhaps to see if things were different elsewhere, if the snow was not ubiquitous, but they always returned to the village. There seemed to be nowhere else to go.
Her footprints had disappeared by the time that she returned. To her surprise, there was a large crowd gathered in the center of town, surrounding the fountain. Once, her mother had said, water had flowed there, but it was so iced over that one could no longer see the original sculpture. Astrid joined them, curious. It was rare to see everyone together; she was aware of no births or weddings, and no one had been sicker than usual lately, but perhaps there'd been an accident. Rumor told of a giant bear, as white as the snow, that roamed the forest.
"What has happened?" she asked the woman next to her, an elderly neighbor that Astrid had not seen outside her house in some time.
At the center of the group was Erik, a boy a few years older than she. They'd gone to school together, back when there'd been school, back before the elders had given it up as folly, back when there had still been the hope to try left. He looked up as Astrid joined the circle and smiled widely. "Astrid! The most incredible luck - I've found a hoard of mushrooms. It should feed us for some time."
Astrid blinked. That was good news indeed. A new food source was desperately needed. "Where did you find it?"
"In a cave, two days' walk from here. Deeper in the forest than I've ever been." The group began to break down into smaller ones, whispering amongst themselves, as if speaking any louder would make the mushrooms evaporate into thin air. Erik came to Astrid's side. "And something else," he said, lowering his voice, "You told me how to get there."
"What?"
"It was the strangest thing," continued Erik. "You came to me in my dream and told me where to go."
"And you believed this dream?" asked Astrid, taken aback.
Erik shrugged. "There didn't seem to be any reason not to. Even if it was only a dream, I had to take the chance. My grandfather has not been well. He often sits by the window, staring off into the forest. I am afraid he begins to consider letting the snow take him."
Astrid's breath hitched. Her own grandmother had done the same, and then, one morning, she had been gone and had never returned. "Yes, I understand."
"It was like no dream I have ever had before, Astrid. Everything was so clear, and I remembered everything upon waking. So thank you." Erik took her hand and gave it a squeeze before moving through the crowd.
Astrid watched him go, watched him share a laugh - and how rare, that laugh - and smiles with others as he went. "But I have not done anything," she murmured to no one but the snow.
With a shake of her head, she left the crowd and headed towards her family's home with her own prize.
An expedition left the next day to gather some of the mushrooms, and Astrid returned to her usual routine of checking the traps and helping her mother with her siblings. The youngest was four and had been unexpected; though no one really talked about it, no one in the village tried for more than two children. Three was unheard of, these days, though apparently before the eternal snow it had been quite common. Astrid's father had set out soon after her sister had been born, convinced he could find a way out of the forest. He'd never returned. At first, they'd hoped that he'd found a way out and would return for them, but now they assumed the worst.
Three days passed without note before Astrid returned to find everyone gathered around the fountain again. This time, a man who had been a friend of her father had discovered a way to break the ice on the creek and had returned bearing a catch of fish.
Afterwards, he had pulled her aside and thanked her for telling him how to get through the ice. "Best dream I've had in awhile," he'd said before leaving to get home.
Once was weird enough, but twice? Astrid had lain awake a long time that night. What was happening? She certainly hadn't known where there were mushrooms or how to get into the creek. Were these people merely remembering something they knew and their thoughts were taking her form in their sleep? Was something helping these people and assigning their advice a familiar form?
She had no answers, however, and sleep was long to come.
The next day the mushroom expedition returned and the village celebrated in a way Astrid could not recall it ever doing before. So many smiles, so many laughs. People even pulled out instruments, long forgotten, and played music while people danced, though there was a stiffness to the whole thing. It was as if the movements were foreign to them, their limbs unused to the motion.
Astrid sat on the outskirts, watching. There was a light in people's faces that she'd never seen before, or at least could not remember. These dreams people had - they lifted the village's spirits.
She vowed then and there to continue them.
If it was truly she that was sending the dreams, surely she could have some control over them. Surely, if she thought hard enough, she could do it on purpose.
Still, she would have to wait until nighttime to try, so when Erik offered her his hand for a dance, she accepted and delighted in the way the snow seemed to melt out of the way of their feet. By the time it grew dark and people began to wander home, the snow in the square had been stomped down to a few inches. Astrid had never seen it so low, with hints of red stone peeking out in between drifts. No doubt by tomorrow the snow would return, but for now, she could almost imagine the spring her mother had talked about when she'd been young.
She dressed for bed and lay awake, waiting until the house fell into silence. How best to go about this? Did she have to be asleep? Perhaps she could stand next to one of her siblings' beds, whisper in their ear, and it would affect their dreams. But by that, she wouldn't be able to affect anyone outside of her family. Best to try it from inside her own dream. Astrid closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and willed herself to sleep.
She had never thought much of her dreams in the past. She remembered them or she did not, and it was of little concern.
Now she found herself standing in a dream version of the village, the edges fuzzy and unclear. Astrid rubbed her arm; she was not dressed for being outside, but she was not cold. What should she do now that she found herself here? She had no knowledge of new food sources for the village, no wisdom to share. But somehow she - or someone masquerading as she - had raised the spirits of her fellow villagers in a way that had not been accomplished in years.
Astrid wandered through the village, running her hand over the ice as she had never done when awake. It was slick but not wet as she had always assumed. Looking up, she found herself standing outside of Erik's family's house. She paused, remembering how he had worried about his grandfather's well-being. She had not seen him at the celebration during the day. Well, she might not have any new tricks to share, but perhaps she could at least try to help out the old man. She had often worried about what it would have been like for her grandmother, and she hated to think someone else would choose that fate.
As she approached the house, the walls seemed to fade away before her. She could make out the entire inside of the house, see the location of each family member. Erik's father sat up in the kitchen, leaning his head on his hands. He must still be awake. Astrid hesitated, then stepped over the threshold. The old man slept near the back of the house, his covers tucked up under his chin.
The walls posed no resistance; Astrid stepped through them as if they did not exist.
She reached the edge of the old man's bed and sank onto the chair next to it, taking his hand in hers. After a moment, he stirred, blinking his eyes open to meet hers.
"Hello," she said, suddenly unsure of her course of action.
He seemed unsurprised to see her. "Come to give me hope, child?"
"Yes," she answered. "Erik worries about you. We have had good news lately, so there is no reason to be sad."
He laughed, a cheerless noise. "Oh, child, there is more ill in this village than you could possibly know. We deserve our punishment, and I cannot help but remember my own part in it."
Astrid squeezed his hand. "Do not talk like that."
"I will not, if it bothers you," the old man answered, "but nonetheless, it is true."
Curiosity got the better of her. "What do you mean?"
"I ache for you, child, you and those that will come after you. You had no place in that evil, yet you will suffer for it."
"Then you cannot give up." Astrid had no idea what the man alluded to, but she saw a way to accomplish her goal of her nightly visit. "You must work to set it right. How selfish it would be to leave us here on our own with no idea of the truth and no idea how to fix things."
The old man stared at her openly. "But...we do not speak of it. It is our great shame." He looked away from her, drawing back into his own thoughts. "Yet...have we ever tried to fix it? I cannot recall..." His eyes closed and he fell silent, and Astrid knew he had returned to his own mind and would not respond to her again that night.
Astrid stood and made her way back into the empty streets of the dream village. The old man's strange words cut her deep. She'd never considered the village anything but home, a lone light in the darkness of the winter, but now strange shadows seemed to loom out of the corners of her eyes. What dark secrets could the village hold? She knew every person in it and could not imagine any great evil, yet the haunted look in his eyes...she had not imagined it.
Without a clear sense of purpose, Astrid visited many others that night, mostly elders, and the result was much the same. Though she tried to bring them hope and relief, they were filled with a deep sadness that Astrid yearned to absolve. In the end, she returned to her own bed, unsure she had accomplished anything of note.
There was a cheerful atmosphere in the house the next morning, though Astrid felt oddly detached from it. As she helped her mother mix their share of mushrooms into a thick stew, she could not help but remember the sadness and fear that so many of the villagers had expressed to her in the dream village. It was not something they expressed in waking, but some distant, personal reaction that they kept locked inside. They had lost hope, and worse, felt they deserved none. But surely they did; everyone deserved hope.
"Mother," she asked, once her siblings had been sent outside to play, as they were too young to help out with most of the chores as of yet, "did something happen, long ago, to make winter stay?"
Her mother shrugged. "I'm sure something must have," she said, "though I could not tell you what." She paused, looking at the window, though the vacant look in her eyes told Astrid she was seeing something other than the drifting snow. "Just, one day, there was a feeling - a feeling of such betrayal and pain - I think everyone must have felt it, though no one would talk about it. And from then on, nothing changed."
"What was it like, before?" Astrid had never asked, had never cared. Before was before and was lost to them. The winter was their present and their future. But now, thinking about the old man had said...perhaps there was something that could be done.
"How can I describe it?" Her mother sighed, brows knit. "How will you picture it, when all you are familiar with is ice and snow? If I told you the sun shone, you will not understand. To not have seen it, to not have felt it...oh, Astrid, how I wish your father and I could have taken you children away from this place, how I wish we could have had a normal life."
Astrid backed off, afraid she had ruined the joy of the mushrooms with her questioning. "Do not worry about it, Mother. Things are fine. I do not wish for anything else in life." She slipped on her coats and her gloves, gathering her hat in her hands. "I will go and check the traps."
She stepped outside, breathing the cold air deeply into her lungs, and tried not to think of the look in her mother's eyes, the look she she'd seen so often the night before in her dream wanderings. Then she headed towards the forest. As she passed Erik's family's house, she glanced toward it and met the eyes of the old man, sitting at the window. He did not smile, and neither did she.
It was late when she returned from the traps, bearing one rabbit, hardly into adulthood. There was no gathering waiting by the fountain. For a horrible moment, Astrid wondered if she had destroyed the prophetic dreams by attempting to take them into her own hands, and then, even worse, she wondered if she had nothing to tell anyone because there was nothing left to tell. She forced such pessimistic thoughts away and hurried home.
The lights shone brightly from the windows as she approached. She pushed inside, gave the rabbit to her mother, and put her things near her siblings' at the fire to let them dry. They had dinner, a joyous affair—it had been awhile since they'd had any change in diet—and then Astrid attempted to darn some socks while her siblings recounted their adventures of the day. Astrid smiled; she could recall how exciting the snow had seemed when she was little, when she and her friends would imagine grand tales to live out.
Night crept on and her mother put her siblings to bed before joining Astrid by the fire. She carried a small package with her. "I was going through Mother's things today and found this," she said, "and thought of our conversation earlier." She held out the package to Astrid.
Astrid took it gingerly, peeling off the aging fabric that clung to its contents. Inside was a small book, ancient and cracking.
"I hadn't seen it in years," her mother said. "Mother was…strange, before she disappeared. I think she hid everything that reminded her of before, like she couldn't stand to look at it."
Astrid opened the book and fought down a gasp. There were very few words, but she did not even bother with them, for the illustrations showed a world completely unlike the one with which she was familiar. The trees were brilliant greens, the sky a deep blue, shades she'd never seen before, as the village always seemed so muted. Astrid turned page after page, lost in this new world. There were flowers of every color imaginable, birds with bright plumage, and above all, a warm, gentle glow that she assumed must be the sun.
No wonder there was such sadness. To have all this, and then to be trapped in the monotony of winter…
Astrid had never thought the forest was ugly, but it was all she knew. It was home. For someone who had known the world before, it would seem like a punishment.
She closed the book and held it to her chest. "May I have this, for a while?" she asked her mother.
"As long as you like," was the answer.
Astrid took the book with her to bed. In the low light of her candle, she flipped back through it, committing each image to memory. Then she lay down and bade sleep to come.
Once again, she found herself in the dream village. It was unchanged from the night before, though shadows still seemed to lurk. Ignoring them, Astrid walked to the fountain, pondering her actions for the night.
As she stared around at the quiet houses, Astrid remembered her elderly neighbor, the one that she'd seen at the mushroom gathering after so much time spent inside. She returned the way she'd come, bypassing her own house and entering the neighbor's.
Inside, the house was a mess. Even in the dream, she could feel the wind leaking through the windows. Astrid resolved to come by in the day and see what she could do to help, but for now, she walked silently through the house until she came to the neighbor's bedside.
As before, the sleeper seemed to realize Astrid's presence and opened her eyes. "Ah, the dreamwalker," she murmured. "Do not come to me with knowledge, child, I am too old to make use of it."
"I do not come for such a purpose," Astrid answered. "I bring sunlight instead." She offered her hand to the old woman.
The old woman seemed surprised, but took the offered hand. Astrid helped her out of the bedroom and down the hallway, opening the front door. Instead of the usual shadow village beyond, the door opened upon a green meadow, wildflowers bobbing slightly in a warm breeze. The sun shone high overhead while clouds drifted lazily by.
"Oh!" said the woman. She released Astrid's hand and took a few steps outside, staring up at the sky. "Oh, I had almost forgotten what it was like." She clasped her hands together, tears trailing down her cheeks.
Astrid let her go on her own. The place, while beautiful, held no special appeal for her.
After some time, the woman returned. "Let me stay here," she begged Astrid. "I cannot go back to that eternal snow after this."
"That is not possible," Astrid replied, surprised at the request. "You deserve to live your life to the fullest. This place will await you in your dreams, but there is beauty to be found in all paths of life. Remember that, and remember that you bring something to others' lives as well. Do not wall yourself away when there are still things to do."
She again offered the woman her hand. The woman hesitated a moment before taking it. Once she was back in her bed, she gave Astrid's hand a squeeze. "Thank you," she whispered as her eyes closed once more.
As Astrid made her own way back to bed, she noticed the shadows seemed lessened.
Every night over the next several days, she repeated her nocturnal journey, taking others to see the sun. At last, she felt she was accomplishing something. She might not be revealing hidden food stashes, but the general air inside the village was more cheerful. Neighbors who had disappeared inside their homes began to come out again, and those who met them were greeted with smiles and words of hope. It warmed Astrid's heart to see it.
She had not yet been to see Erik's grandfather. She was still a bit chilled at his words, but as time went on, the shadows in the dream village disappeared, and the clouds even cleared out overhead, revealing small pinpricks of light. There was now a restful calm that lay over the village as she wandered among its darkened buildings.
She worried about the old man. He still sat inside at the window. She had hoped, whatever his guilty mutterings had meant, that he would do something about them, but it had not come to pass. She could not delay another nighttime visit with him.
Astrid turned towards his house, but in an instant everything changed. A sharp, cold wind blew up, driving the snow against Astrid's face. She threw up a hand to protect her eyes and, when she lowered it again, found her path blocked by an enormous white bear. Rigid with fear, all she could do was stare.
"How dare you," growled the bear low in its throat. "How dare you give these people hope!"
Astrid tried to move, tried to say something, but nothing happened.
"They deserve to suffer for what they've done. I will not have you meddling."
She finally found her voice. "Everyone deserves hope," she whispered.
The bear's eyes narrowed. "What was that?"
"Everyone deserves hope," Astrid repeated, stronger this time. "Whatever these people have done, they have repented of it."
"Lies!" The bear reared onto its hind legs, roaring into the night. Astrid stumbled back a few steps. This must be the rumored great bear of the forest, but how had it come to be here? "If you insist on your path, child, I will have no choice but to banish you back into the world of the waking."
Astrid pulled herself up, straightening her shoulders. "I will do what I must to help them."
"So be it," growled the bear, thudding back to all fours.
A sharp pain bloomed in Astrid's chest. She bent over, gasping, but the pain only intensified. Her vision began to black out, the world began to fade.