The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister

Author:Greer Macallister [Macallister, Greer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Virginia

Sierra Nevada Mountains

1846

Virginia looked out on a bright white landscape that seared her eyes. Everything had been wiped away. Trees, rocks, the path that brought them here, any path that might have led them out. Invisible, impassible.

They’d been told it was a shortcut. They’d wanted to get through the mountains as fast as possible to beat the advance of winter. They’d failed. And now they would be here only God knew how long, trapped by the unforgiving, merciless snow.

At home, she had never seen anything like this. Never seen snow this deep, never felt cold all the way to the bone. California was supposed to be the promised land, but from here, it looked like hell.

Were they even in California? She had lost track. She wasn’t a leader of this expedition by any stretch anyway. She wasn’t yet twenty years old, unmarried, still part of her mother’s household. She could only do what she was told, go where she was bid. Sneaking out to give her stepfather enough supplies to survive on after his exile, that had been her only act of rebellion. And look where being good had gotten her. Stuck here, and look at the people stuck with her—Keseberg certainly wasn’t a good man, nor Foster, and she had serious doubts about Spitzer and Reinhardt. If one’s actions made such a difference, she should be in a different place than they were, not the same.

She’d prayed with the Breens a few times already, and she was considering, if the weather warmed enough, dragging herself through the drifts toward their cabin again. The times when she knelt to pray with them, grasping John’s hand on one side and Edward’s on the other, were the only times she felt warm. The only times she forgot her hunger. Perhaps their god warmed them. Perhaps when God spoke to you, it wasn’t in words you could understand, only feelings. If she got out alive, she would thank God for it and ask Him to tell her how she could serve Him best.

And if she didn’t get out alive, she wouldn’t have to worry about keeping that promise or any other.

The snow was beautiful, in its way. Blue from within, like the color of the veins under a pretty girl’s pale skin. Virginia herself had never had skin translucent enough to see through, but her cousin Mary Catherine had, and she could hear her relatives’ compliments ringing out over this cold snow. How lovely. How delicate. The fact that she’d left Mary Catherine behind when her family had joined this wagon party—and the much more worrisome fact that the women she could hear speaking these words were clearly nonexistent—oh, those facts were simply not relevant right now, in the face of life-changing uncertainty. If her mind was developing ways to come to terms with it, that was to be expected.

Was she going insane? And if so, what could she do about it? Perhaps the smartest thing, given how bad it had already

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