A Storm of Ice and Stars by Lisa Lueddecke

Author:Lisa Lueddecke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic UK
Published: 2018-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

I awoke the next morning bursting with a sense of urgency to be underway. Voices in my dreams pressed at me to hurry, and even though they abated some when I opened my eyes, the urge to get away remained. The storm had dropped another foot or so of snow, just enough to slow our progress but not enough to stop it. With very little idea as to precisely where we were going, we struck out to the north and moved at a steady, determined pace, Siiva walking at the front so we could keep an eye on him should anything else be moving about in the woods.

It was a strange sort of day. Walking through the trees felt as though we could be anywhere – back near the village, collecting firewood, or taking a walk after the storm. Everything could be so normal in these moments, like it hadn’t all been irrevocably changed. I let my fingertips brush against the trunk of a tree as we moved further away from the places I knew, a sort of silent goodbye that was both saddening and exhilarating. I tried to focus on other things for a time, more immediate things, like the sight of morning frost dying in the light of a waking sun, but my mind kept wandering back. Adventure is different in thought than in practice, when those imagined dangers grow teeth and become real.

This was what I’d always wanted, though: to be free. Free of village life. Free of the rules and superstitions that anchored us to our homes, forbidding us from seeing or learning too much. I had wanted this chance to travel, to discover, just perhaps not under these circumstances.

After the first couple of hours, we had reached a point in the forest that I no longer recognized, the trees strange and new. They also seemed to grow closer together, away from the villages and the people who had cut so many down to build houses and use for firewood. Here, the forest had endless reign to grow and thrive and watch over the island of which they’d been a part for centuries. What sort of things had they seen? I wondered as we trudged along, eyeing one giant of a tree, and then another. What did Skane look like when they were little more than saplings, struggling to survive in the winter?

That was how I thought of us sometimes, like saplings trying to survive in a world that wanted us dead. Between the Ør, the red lós, and the winters in Skane, it was a wonder that so many of my people had survived at all. We should be nothing more than an old story that nobody would tell; a memory for nothing but the trees and the snow.

“I heard the trees never end,” Enja said, after what felt like hours of silence. I wasn’t complaining; I enjoyed the silence, the chance for reflection. I was used to spending time alone, used to the safety of my own thoughts, and allowing myself to wander in them for hours on end.

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