A Shiver of Snow and Sky

  For Dad

  Though my soul may set in darkness, it

  will rise in perfect light;

  I have loved the stars too fondly to be

  fearful of the night.

  SARAH WILLIAMS

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Skane was built on superstition. Always enter your home right foot first. When you sneeze, someone who bears you ill will has just spoken your name. Don’t whistle while looking towards the sun or you might bring on rain.

  But mostly, the superstitions were about the lights. Bright, colourful lights that danced for us in the clear night sky.

  Green was common. It meant the Goddess was happy, and everything was as it should be.

  Blue meant snow, and lots of it. Best round up your sheep and haul in some firewood before those first few flurries started to fly.

  And then there was red. Red was different, rarer.

  Red was a warning.

  The lights danced. The lós, most called it, a word given to us by the old rune singers who translated it from symbols and pictures etched into cave walls. They waved and morphed and rippled like the sky was a lake into which someone had dropped a pebble.

  “What are they?” I would ask my father every night as a child.

  Every night he would answer differently. “They are the last remnants of the setting sun dancing for the moon.” “They’re the light of the stars reflecting off the sea.” “They just … are.” Eventually, I realized he didn’t know. No one knew. The Goddess could change their colour; that was the only certainty. What they were, why they were there – those were still mysteries to us. Perhaps they always would be.

  Between those of us who were staring up at them now, the air grew still, charged, as if we were on a mountaintop and the breeze had stopped.

  I’d joined a few other villagers who were seated on the large rocks that fell away into the sea. On nights like this one, when the lights shone so vibrantly that they lit up the snow in vivid greens and blues, groups of us would gather to gaze at them. When the sky demanded our attention, we obeyed.

  “They’re changing,” Ivar said beside me, but his words were a fading echo, distant and hollow. My eyes were fixed on the sky, and I didn’t miss the subtle shifts here and there as the bright blues became pinks and purples. They were deep too, reminiscent of a sunset.

  My skin prickled, hairs standing on end, but not from the cold. This hue was dreadfully close to another, drawing ever nearer to a shade none of us in Skane wanted to see again.

  It had happened seventeen years ago, the sky glowing crimson only days before a fever outbreak had ravaged our villages. Once it set in, nearly two hundred people died in a matter of days. I was born, and lived. My mother birthed me, and died. They said I was lucky. One quarter of those who perished were children.

  Lucky. I’d never know her. Lucky. I’d had to be passed around other mothers who’d recently given birth – mothers whose children would know them, know what they looked like. How they sounded. Have memories of them to cherish. I was nursed to health by strangers.

  Lucky.

  Seventeen years was a long time, but no one had forgotten. Whenever the lights in the sky shifted away from green, even for just a few seconds, the villagers held their breath.

  “Ivar,” I whispered, but his name felt strange on my tongue. Meaningless, foreign, as my throat began to constrict. His presence usually grounded me, was my guiding point of comfort when life tried to smother me, but tonight, it did nothing. I may as well have been alone on a boat in the middle of the sea.

  He drew in a long breath, one mitten-clad hand just barely touching mine.

  The edges of the tendrils were changing. Shifting. Deepening. One particular whorl high overhead, waving like a scrap of cloth in the wind, was almost wholly crimson. It seemed to bleed out from there, infecting all the nearby branches with its blood-red disease. My body went cold, as if the colour had been stolen directly from my veins. Mist from the crashing waves stung my eyes, but I couldn’t close them. I raced to find parts of the lights that hadn’t changed, that were still uncorrupted, like I could singlehandedly prevent it from progressing.

  It took mere minutes. Minutes for the entire sky to stain red. It bore down on us, a presage, a desperate but wordless warning we had no way to translate. It’s coming, it screamed. The plague is coming. It was always the devastating plague, haunting us every few decades since we’d first arrived in Skane. But why it was coming was as knowable as how many snowflakes would make up the next storm, or how many raindrops it took to fill the sea.

  I clutched at the icy rock beneath me, my fingers long since numb through my mittens. I suddenly felt keenly conscious of the scale of the lós, and of my own fragility in comparison. What does one tiny, useless form matter in a world where such dark things can happen? How many of these poor souls around me would be dead within days? Weeks? A wave of confusion and sickness came over me, and I couldn’t tell the sky from the land. Doubling over, my head spinning as though I were falling through the dark places between the stars, I closed my eyes and forced cold, crisp air into my lungs.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  I recovered my orientation slowly, gripping the rock and setting my eyes on the stars that managed to shine through the cursed red lights. I expected fear to take hold of my heart and mind, paralysing me after all the stories I’d heard about the blood red sky, but it wasn’t fear that gripped me. Instead, anger surged to life like a springtime river, refilling my frozen veins. Anger, because I didn’t know why it was happening. Anger, because I knew the sky didn’t portend that a handful of fishermen would drown at sea or a child would get lost in the woods and be found days later, buried under the snow. Anger, because when the lights glowed red, it meant the lives of everyone I knew and loved were at stake, and I had a greater chance of thawing Lake Hornstrăsk in midwinter than stopping it.

  Anger, because when the red lós shone, it meant that somewhere in Skane the plague was brewing once more and it was hungry for bodies.

  Somewhere nearby, but just far enough away to be distorted by the breeze, someone began to chant the words. I’d heard them innumerable times before. Knew every word and nuance by heart, forward and backwards. Without looking away from the sky, I let my voice join in.

  “Green, green, the lights glow green

  Happy is our gracious queen

  Blue, blue, the lights glow blue

  A vicious storm nearby does brew

  Red, red, the lights glow red

  Beware the dangers up ahead.”

  Chapter 2

  Fear hung like shards of frozen mist in the air. Not just the quiet, inward fear that left one wide-eyed and anxious, but the kind that brought tears to pale faces and cries to the
lips of those who could no longer hold it in. Families huddled together in tightly-woven embraces, savouring these precious moments of peace and calm before the plague came back with a bloodied vengeance. Children, young enough to not have been alive last time but old enough to know the stories, wept into their hands. Grown men tried to stay stony-faced and silent, but their eyes glistened with secret tears that would fall when no one was looking.

  Despite the crying and embracing and whispering that passed around the people like rustling leaves, we all made our way towards the centre of the village. We acted on instinct. The red lights show. Then comes the bonfire. A large circle of stones had long ago been formed in the village, and it was our gathering point, our place of congregating at various times throughout the year: midsummer, the new year, and it was where we gathered to talk about the red lós. This would be my first time doing so, and the heaviness of that fact made every step a struggle.

  On other days, the gatherings were a happy event, causing excitement amongst the children as it meant food and games and stories told by anyone who had one to tell. On the warmest day of the year, we’d sit around in nothing but our thinnest wraps and sip cool drinks, all thoughts of winter fading away into nothingness. This time, though, that excitement was nowhere to be found. This time, I ignored the knot in my stomach as I watched the wan faces of the villagers gathering together to discuss the unspeakable.

  Log upon log had been piled within the stones, dripped here and there with oil and stuffed with bits of smaller sticks and twigs for kindling. It was just as I was arriving, rolling with me the round stump of a tree to use as a seat, that a sombre-faced woman sent sparks flying on to the pile, and flames kindled to life.

  I stared into the growing blaze, red lights dancing before my eyes. I watched a few sticks catch fire and burn away, and couldn’t help but wish that we could be that way. Not the sticks, the fire. Catch on and consume our doubts, our worries. Overcome whatever lay before us with a power that could not be quenched. If that sort of will could catch on, if we could all add fuel to the fire, then perhaps we’d fare better than the last time. Perhaps a few more lives could be saved.

  A stump thudded to the ground beside me. Ivar. “All alone?” he said, seating himself and extending his hands towards the warmth. He wasn’t wearing mittens and his hands bore callouses where he’d spent so much time writing, and blisters from shovelling snow. Ivar was from a long line of rune singers, men and women trained in the art of translating the ancient language and the corresponding images into Agric, the language we spoke today. It had made me jealous as a child, the way he could scratch out letters quicker than I could read them. I did everything slower than him, reading and writing in particular. But those were his life blood, his meaning. I could fish and shear sheep, if I cared enough to try, but it was my desire to do something, to know something others might not, that encouraged me to learn the stars.

  “Early comers get the best seats,” I replied, watching a small stick go up in flames.

  More and more villagers gathered, some bringing wooden chairs from their homes, others bringing boxes, and still others bringing stumps like our own. The oldest man in our village, Ymir, was helped to the fire by his wife and grandson. They placed him in a large wooden chair, and tucked blankets around his shoulders and legs. I’d heard Ymir was nearly one hundred years old, but by the lines on his face, the weight he carried in his eyes, I sometimes felt as though he’d watched the island of Skane itself be born from the waves. He’d taught me about the stars so many years ago, taking me on as a pupil after finding me on a rooftop staring up at the sky. I’d been tracing out their shapes in the snow, learning where to spot them and at what times of year they showed. He told me the stories of the constellations, of the maps they painted and how to use them to find my way when lost.

  Móri, Ivar’s little cousin, came to sit at our feet, some sticks in his hands. Whittling was a favourite pastime of Ivar’s, when he wasn’t reading runes, and he’d passed it down to some of the children. I tugged at a blond wisp of his Móri’s and he swatted me away like a fly without bothering to look up.

  Across the fire, Father sat with my sister, Anneka. Her face was deathly white, shiny patches on her cheeks where tears were drying in the heat of the fire. Her eyes caught mine for a heartbeat before she looked away. I watched, through the licking flames, the light dance in my father’s eyes. When compared with Ymir, he could be a child, but on his own, lines formed from years of worry, from fighting the wild sea, crossed his face. Anneka said that some used to call him handsome. Maybe he had been, once upon a time. To me, he was just my father. A symbol of strength, of respect, and sometimes of fear.

  Once as a child, I’d heard Anneka ask him if he couldn’t perhaps be a bit softer. Why he insisted on that harsh exterior that sometimes frightened us to the point of tears. His response had been unyielding, yet even so young, I’d understood it.

  “Our ancestors didn’t come here, didn’t sail an unfamiliar sea to start a life for us that would be easy. They knew it would be hard, and hard it is. It’s the weak ones who fall, Anneka. It’s the frail who succumb. I won’t let you be weak. I won’t watch you fall. It’s not in my blood and I won’t let it be in yours.”

  A new understanding of him had dawned then, and while there were still times when he frightened me, still times when anger at him burned so hot I feared it would come out in some unforgivable action, that understanding remained.

  “Tonight,” Ymir began, “we saw the red lós.”

  All our eyes turned obediently to him, a chill settling into the air despite the fire. Ymir’s age and presence demanded respect from everyone around him. When he spoke, people listened.

  “Many of you younger folk” – he looked to me and Ivar, who sat near him – “won’t remember the last time they shone in the sky. They were the same, back then, starting out so simple and … unthreatening, but transforming. I was younger, perhaps not too much younger” – a faint smile – “but young enough that the lights made me angry.”

  I looked to the ground, recalling the fire that had run through my veins when the red lights bled in the sky.

  “But the one thing we all, every single one of us since the first of our boots landed here, have had to accept is that we cannot understand it. The Goddess sees fit to warn us, to put us on our guard, but not to give us an explanation. That’d be meddling. Meddling in the affairs of mere mortals, and that’s crossing a boundary that’s been in place since the dawn of time.”

  A few whispers passed around the group and the fire crackled. People leaned in, eyes glistening with curiosity and reflections from the flames. Móri carried on whittling, as though he wasn’t listening, but I could sense the straining of his ears, the way his hands paused in their work every few seconds to hear better.

  “Seventeen years ago was the first time I saw the red lights,” Ymir continued softly. “It still seems like yesterday. Before that, I’d only heard stories from my father. When he was a young boy, they’d glowed once. It was ten days before they knew why. Days before a villager followed a trail of blood through the trees to where a body lay in the snow, raging with fever and bleeding from their eyes and nose. It caught on like kindling, sweeping through the village and taking one life after another. By the end, only half of them remained. The oldest was a mere forty, the youngest was ten.”

  The youngest was ten. Maybe I was lucky. Lucky to have survived as a baby when so many before me had perished.

  Not a noise could be heard in the cold night air. Mouths hung open, but we had all forgotten how to breathe. An unexplainable urge gripped me. I wanted to reach over and take Ivar’s hand, to squeeze it until my own hand shook. Not out of fright, but a desire to know I wasn’t alone.

  “And again, seventeen years ago,” Ymir continued, softer. “Again, it happened, and again it took so many of our lives. Again, husbands were torn from their wives, and children were separated from their mothers by the unforgiving boundary of lif
e and death.”

  I could have sworn he glanced at me.

  “It should be different this time,” someone shouted from the group, a middle-aged man I barely knew. His eyes blazed as he spoke, fuelled by a passion born from fear. “Anyone who shows signs of illness, anyone at all, should be quarantined. We know what will happen if we don’t.”

  A few nodded, and a few shook their heads. I did nothing, only stared at the man, turning his words over in my mind. I’d seen the fever caves before. Crept in the early morning hours to the caves north of the village, where horrors had been etched into the very air around them. It was where some of the ill had been herded, left to die alone, away from their families, cold and feverish. Some died quickly from the plague, others froze to death. Some families, like mine, wouldn’t let their ill be taken. My father wouldn’t part with my mother until she’d passed, and her body was moved to one of the fever caves to be burned. The ash had long since disappeared, but some bones remained, those that had defied the fire out of will or sheer luck, refusing to be taken from Skane. That was all that remained: the charred shards of bones that even the animals wouldn’t touch.

  No one was meant to go there, but tell a child not to do something and it creates a burning desire so intense that nothing else can quench it.

  I wished I hadn’t.

  The moment I saw the bones, I had emptied my stomach into the snow. They could have been my mother’s.

  Such a blanket of darkness had been cast over the group that, noticing it, Ymir turned to me.

  “Ósa. Perhaps you could tell us a story about the stars.” He smiled weakly and I couldn’t say no. We were all a part of this, but the children didn’t deserve such evils.

  For a long moment, I gazed into the fire, sorting through my roaring thoughts. There were so many stories, but they’d fallen from my mind and vanished at Ymir’s words. All I could remember were vague hints, unclear shapes.

  A long breath of cold air and my thoughts returned to me. It couldn’t be a dark tale, not after what we’d just heard. The red lights brought with them shadows and darkness enough, yet so many of the stories were tragedies or horrors; finding a happy one was next to impossible. Blocking out the fire with a hand, I craned my neck to look up and the story stared back at me.