Silver Thaw Excerpt

I dove into the indie author waters today when I published my novella “Silver Thaw.” The novella is fantasy with a horror twist, heavy on the character development and light on the fantasy elements. The first portion is below. You can download a longer excerpt at Smashwords, PubIt!, or the Kindle store. I look forward to hearing from you!

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Winter

When the girl came through the door of the Seven Horseshoes, Cad at first thought the sun was casting an enormous shadow behind her. Have I been here so long it’s morning already? As he blinked away the haze of ale, the shadow materialized into the biggest man Cad had ever seen. Gods be good. I hope Darrick sent him up here.

The man didn’t duck to enter the tavern so much as crawled through the door; he had to hunch his shoulders in close to his sides to fit. His legs strained against tight woolen breeches like a haunch of roast boar still in its skin, and his arms put Cad in mind of a black bear newly out of its den. A long tangle of hair fell to the center of his back.

Snow swirled in on a gust of mountain wind, and men in the tavern shouted for the stranger to close the door. The man didn’t seem bothered by their voices. He surveyed the room, eased the door closed, and seated the girl at a table with a rough hand on her elbow. She shrugged away from him and examined the room with the look of a woman who hadn’t eaten in days. Her hair splayed across her shoulders the way a midwinter night fell across the mountains—so dark it was almost blue, it shimmered flat against the green of her silk tunic. She was as dark as the man who guarded her, but there was something unobtrusive about her. Cad could have easily looked right past her on another night. If they weren’t strangers.

“Girl come to sing.” The giant bore down on the barman, thick eyebrows over thick beard over thick accent giving rise to the odd notion that the recently awakened bear had suddenly learned Northern, although not well. He pointed. “Girl sing for men. Men give coin for song.”

The barman, Shep, narrowed his weasel-brown eyes. “Sing, eh? Let me hear her first. In the back.”

Cad swallowed the last of his ale. “Shep, keep your grimy pecker tucked up.” He stood and approached the bar.

Shep’s mouth tightened. “Constable. Din’t know you were still here.”

“I’m always here.” The giant looked down at Cad and their eyes met. “You say she can sing?” Cad asked.

“She sing. Good. Men listen, give coins.” He gestured to the girl. “You hear, you give coins, too.”

The girl turned her eyes to Cad’s. He couldn’t put a color to them. Gray, green, blue, golden—all would have suited equally well. She had a face he expected to see but wouldn’t have looked for, average and common. She stood, her silk tunic swirling loose around narrow hips and thin thighs clad in silk breeches. Around her neck she wore a silver torc carved with intricate runes. He heard a metal clink and looked down to see her wrists joined by silver cuffs that bore the same runes. He frowned. Cuffs on a girl this size? She couldn’t be a threat. And how is she not freezing in those clothes?

Cad scratched his brown beard and crossed his arms, assessing his chances in a fight against a man twice his size. He’d thrown some rough drunken miners out of the taverns in the town when he hadn’t had too much ale, and tonight was a good night. He still had a pocketful of tokens. Still, that fist would go through my head before I could draw a blade, and not a man here tonight would help me. Better to avoid a challenge. “Let the girl sing, Shep.”

Shep grunted. “She opens her mouth someone’ll want to put something in it that don’t belong to me.”

“You shame yourself, Shep.” Cad turned to the girl. “Good lady, forgive the barman’s behavior. We see few true ladies in this part of the world. It’s all silver and ice. He forgets how to speak to one of your gentle birth.”

She blinked twice, but then a smile spread across her face, and Cad forgot to breathe. The smile held promises, secrets, and pleasures. It was sweet and forbidden, happy and tragic all at once. When the smile touched her eyes, Cad’s groin did something it hadn’t done in years—not since before he’d come to this place of forsaken men. How can this girl go unmolested in this territory? How can even this giant protect her? Even giants have to sleep.

Cad swallowed hard and gathered his thoughts. He turned back to Shep. “There are whores aplenty down the street. The men know where to go. It’s been too long since I heard a lady sing. Let her sing.”

“Yer the law, I guess.” He gestured. “Sing, then, and gods be good that yeh don’t get yerself killed or worse.”

The girl went to the giant and lifted her hands. He lifted a leather strip with a silver key from his neck and unlocked the cuffs and collar. The girl turned to the room and opened her mouth, and the world dissolved into song.

Cad couldn’t find the words to describe the voice. There were singers who came through on occasion—Lord Darrick sometimes sent one up to Sweet Shayla’s for entertainment in the good months, when silver flowed freely down the mountain and everyone had tokens and high spirits and all of Shayla’s girls ran warm. And long ago, in his childhood, there had been other singers—singers in white, lifting voices to gods he didn’t remember in a place he could only envision sometimes late at night when he hadn’t had enough ale. And her voice—always her voice, their voices. There wasn’t enough ale in the nine seas to drown out those voices.

But now—the nameless girl sang, her voice cascading over notes and words as a brook tumbling over smooth river-rock. Cad closed his eyes as the song washed over him. He couldn’t hear the words—only her voice, the sweet rise and fall of it that pulled him into forgetfulness, into the bliss that always felt just beyond his reach when the ale or the tokens ran out. He could reach it, he thought—if he tried, he could touch it—

A sharp crack jolted him out of his reverie. Cries echoed where bliss had been. Cad drew a long dagger. A miner lay on the floor, clutching his arm and howling.

“You don’t touch girl,” the giant said. The girl was unharmed, and the giant was refastening her collar and cuffs. “Girl sing only.”

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Thanks for reading!