When All Through the House
Not a creature was stirring, not even a Mouse.
Merry Christmas to you and yours. And to every reader who made this long year a little brighter, thank you.
Ostensibly, Seth had left the warmth of Glenayre to gather juniper cuttings to scent Isobel’s candles. In reality, he welcomed any excuse to escape the confines of a long winter in the Redmist Mountains.
He dismounted and tromped through fresh powder reaching halfway up his boots. Bolt fidgeted on his gauntlet, so he cast her off to hunt. She glided between frosted branches, her bright eyes alert for a meal. The whuh-whuh of her wings sent a dusting of powder falling from a fir bough, and she sailed through the frosty veil before it met a snowdrift below.
Drawn to Blackrock Pond more for its seclusion than its sparse scattering of junipers, Seth drew out a well-honed hunting knife and set to cutting branches. He tossed the cuttings in a haphazard pile on the bank of the frozen pond. His breath disturbed the pristine stillness, and his boots crunched with the shift of his weight. The solitude he craved beckoned him.
So close. So achingly close.
The chime of shattering crystal drew his attention to the icicles hanging from the black rock’s edge. The falling ice had startled a squirrel off a nearby branch. The squirrel dropped before him on the iced-over pond and sat up on its hind legs, as if gathering its wits.
“To me,” he willed.
Seth crouched, and the squirrel clawed its way up his coat sleeve. It stopped when it reached the crook of his arm and looked up at him.
“Easy, now. Just having a look.”
The squirrel was on the smallish side, red with a white blaze down its belly. Pert tufted ears twitched in tandem, and a small brown nose flared as the simple mind tried to sort him out. The expression in its black eyes held more confusion than fear.
“Yes, little fellow. I am an odd one.”
He set the squirrel back down on the ice.
“You see, no harm done. Back to your tree.”
Chapter 37, Solitude, The Witch of Lurago