Free Child of a Dead God by Barb Hendee, J. C. Hendee

cold and clammy.

    “You’re all right,” he whispered.

    “I saw it again . . . ,” she hissed out. “The ice . . . the castle . . . we have to go south.”

    Magiere’s eyes wandered until her gaze locked on the shuttered window across their room. She got up, pulling one blanket around herself, and Leesil didn’t try to stop her. She opened the shutters and leaned out, looking left.

    Leesil knew she was staring at the harbored ship again, as she’d done a dozen times each day.

    “When will we ever get out of here?” Magiere said.

    “Soon,” Leesil answered, desperate to give her ease. “Sgäile said just a few more days.”

    “I . . . we need to go,” she whispered, and hung her head.

    Leesil came up behind her at the window, not knowing what else to say or do. He pressed against her back and slipped his arms around her waist, his hands sliding inside the blanket across the curves of hipbones and stomach.

    Magiere straightened, hands tight on the sill. Then she leaned back, and he buried his face in her hair. He finally lifted his face as she rolled her head to the right, and he found her staring into the dark—but not toward the bay. Her lips parted in one soundless word.

    South .

    Time slipped by like water rippling over stones. Chane woke upon the floor near the entryway’s hearth. Welstiel would soon expect him upstairs to begin his nightly vigil.

    Chane could not bring himself to go just yet. Pushing up on all fours, he listened to hungry cries rolling down the stairway from above. They always grew louder at dusk.

    Longing for a hunt grew inside him at each muffled wail—and false hunger grew as well. He snatched a small twig from the hearth with a clinging bit of flame, climbed to his feet, and stepped through the passage to the back workroom. A lantern rested upon the nearest table beneath hanging branches of drying herbs. He lit it and then snuffed out the smoldering twig.

    Several nights earlier, he’d noticed dark archways in the workroom’s rear, but he’d felt no desire to pass through any of them to explore the monastery further.

    Tonight, he could not bring himself to go upstairs just yet, so he turned toward the workroom’s rear left corner and slipped through the dark opening in the wall.

    Part of him recoiled from going farther and learning what he already feared . . . that this monastery might be more than some forgotten cloister of deluded priests.

    Doorways lined the passage, but before he paused to open even one, his gaze caught on the darkness at the passage’s end where his lantern’s light did not reach. He saw a doorless opening, and a dark space beyond it.

    Chane slowed with each step as his light pierced the portal and illuminated an old corner table. A rack anchored on the wall displayed rows of tiny bottles, vials, and clay containers, all of varied shape and height and sealed with cork stoppers or hinged pot-metal lids. A pile of small leather-bound books sat on the table, along with a scroll on an aged wooden spindle.

    He froze at arm’s length from the opening, staring at these bits of paraphernalia.

    At first, the odor of the place, so faint and overmixed, made it difficult to pick out individual scents. Herbs, floral oils, burned wax, old leather, musty dry paper and parchment . . .

    He did not want to enter, but he could not turn away, and finally he forced himself into the room.

    Other small tables lined the side walls, each covered in a disorder of implements, metal vessels, and varied texts. Chane’s attention fell upon a wide table at the room’s left end with a worn, slat-backed chair behind it.

    He was in a study, perhaps the chamber of whoever headed this place, and he spotted a grayed wooden door just beyond the bookshelf against the right wall. It stood slightly ajar, as if someone in a hurry had forgotten to close it completely. But Chane turned back to the makeshift desk, circling around beside its chair.

    Loose parchments, aged