Winter Song Read Free Page A

afterlife, rather than just mouldering in the dirt.
        Wiping her eyes, she glimpsed something streak above the top of the Reykleif hills in a flat curve, so it couldn't be a shapeshifter; nor did any troll ever move that fast. It was fiery bright, so it was most likely a meteor, she decided.
        Standing again, she winced. Moving sent slivers of pain shooting through her cramped-up feet, numb even through the fur-lined house-shoes. Taking outside boots would have meant stumbling around in the bootroom, perhaps falling over one of the sleeping farmhands. She didn't want that. Better her feet froze than to admit to the other women that she still grieved for her beloved bastard.
        If her body didn't give her away: ten days after burying him, her breasts were still swollen and sore, her blouses sodden even through the wadding that she'd shoved into her bra. The others must have noticed, but if they had, for once – in a rare show of restraint – they had said nothing.
        Bera turned back, looking down the slope to face Skorradalur. Farmhouses crouching into the hillside formed three sides of a square round a courtyard, with the lake Skorravatn beyond the barn the fourth side. On the far side of the lake, antique wind-turbines hunched in the lee of the valley slope, their blades turning slowly in the incessant wind, the open grassland between them peppered with sheep, grazing on the last of the late-summer long grass.
        She descended the stony, treacherous slope to Ragnarholt, the biggest farmhouse, passing the watertank which took the excess steam from the newer geo-thermal vent; what wasn't needed to heat the house was allowed to condense inside its bulk to provide fresh water, so that the settlers didn't need to venture down to Skorravatn in winter and risk ambush from lurking creatures. It wasn't the halcyon days of when the farm had fusion power, but it was better than nothing.
        Even in the thickening twilight she had to be careful not to turn an ankle on the stony ground. But if its aid in finding her way was a blessing, when the deep boom echoed from the west, waking the farm-dogs into a barrage of barking, it was a curse. Any onlooker could see her picking her way back. She speeded up, and twice nearly fell in hidden dips in the grass. Looking up, the shadowy bulk of Thorir perched in the watch-tower atop the farmhouse hadn't moved. Hopefully, he was asleep. Thorir was good at that, even though, if he were caught, it would mean a flogging.
        The breeze strengthened, the wind-turbines' blades speeding up.
        Brynja caught Bera's scent and yapped.
        "Hush!" Bera hissed.
        But instead the puppy redoubled her efforts to slip the leash, where she was tied to the courtyard water tap. Droplets from the tap had frozen so that Brynja's feet slipped and skidded on them.
        Reluctantly, Bera fondled the little dog's ears. She was as white and fluffy as the rest of the litter, but they'd all found homes. No one wanted the little runt, though, so Ragnar had banished her to the courtyard, saying, "We can't afford to throw away what resources we have on animals that aren't viable, however cute they look now." If Brynja survived on the scraps that she could scavenge, she would live, but she was already skin and bone.
        Desperately, shivering, Brynja tried to climb inside Bera's coat and nuzzled her blouse.
        Still thinking of Palli, and of Ragnar's ruthlessness, Bera undid the leash, her jaw clamped. Freed, the puppy scrambled inside her coat in a flurry of paws. Brynja nuzzled and nuzzled at her blouse, until Bera sighed. She reached in and undid her bra.
        Teeth like needles clamped onto her nipple. The pain made Bera draw her lips back from her teeth in a silent scream, but in a perverse way she welcomed it. However bad it was, it was real, and for a few too-short moments it obliterated memories of a tiny face turning blue and