Anashun

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT · READING EXCERPT

Enter the story

Jun Kormun had crossed mountains in winter and fought things he still had no name for. He could not hang a door. Beneath the unfinished lintel, he pushed it closed once more. The upper corner met the frame; the lower corner missed it. He pulled it open and stood with his hand on the latch. A short distance away, Olian lay in the grass, his enormous gray-white head between his forepaws. The Great Vaelic Hound had watched him do this all morning.

“Don’t.”

Olian’s ears rose.

“I know.”

Jun stepped outside and studied the hinges. The frame might be wrong too. Possibly the door. He gripped the bottom of it and lifted. Thick Eldervale oak, cross-braced with ash: he had made a door that would outlast the house, if he could ever fit it. A grunt behind him made him turn. Skorr stood beside the woodpile with half a split log protruding from his mouth.

“Put that down.”

Skorr chewed.

“Skorr.”

The enormous pale urska looked at him. Jun pointed toward the ground, and for several seconds neither moved. Then Skorr opened his jaws and the wood dropped heavily into the grass.

“Thank you.”

Skorr sniffed the log, then lumbered toward the river. Jun looked back at Olian. “You see what I live with?” The hound’s tail struck the grass once.

Jun sighed. The house stood in a clearing not far from where the Ashwen and Rethen rivers drew toward one another, north of the roads leading eventually to Valemoor and Eldmar. Eldervale rose behind it in a wall of deep summer green, enormous trees gathering the morning shadows beneath their branches. He had chosen the place because it was quiet and not too close to a town, though it wasn’t so far away that a journey for flour became an expedition. There were boughhorn in the woods and seyl in the rivers. The house itself was equally modest, with one main room, a stone hearth, and a sleeping loft beneath the roof. A smaller room at the rear had no purpose yet.

Inside, sunlight entered through the empty window opening and stretched across the new floorboards. The scent of freshly cut timber filled the room, mingling with the faint remains of smoke from yesterday’s fire. His table consisted of three broad planks laid across two trestles, and his chair was finished, mostly. It leaned to the left, which Jun had decided gave it character. A wooden cup sat beside a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth. A whetstone, two nails, a length of cord, and one of his knives occupied the other end of the table. His shield rested against the wall, his sword hanging from a peg above it.

Beside the tools lay a roll of heavy hide. He had spent part of the winter dressing the Longstride Dravorn skin until it could be folded without cracking. The mane still ran along it, and his first cut in Elira’s orchard had left a slit near the foreleg. He had kept the whole piece, with a bundle of cleaned bone and dried sinew. The meat had fed them on the southern road. He would find a use for the rest.

His gaze returned to the shield. For most of his life, its circular mark had meant home, his people. Now he could barely look at it without another question forming. He turned back to the hinges. Today he would settle for a door that closed. A voice came from the road.

“You planning to leave it like that?”

Jun closed his eyes. He knew the voice.

“Yes.”

There was a pause.

“That’s a shame. I knew a man in Orra who left a door like that all winter, and the cold came in and took his tolvay. Well. Most of his tolvay.”

Jun turned toward the trees as Tomas Corren emerged onto the path. Age had done little to make Tomas look harmless. His hair and beard were white, his shoulders still broad beneath his old wool coat. His hands were scarred from a lifetime spent solving practical problems with knives, ropes, traps, and, when necessary, other men’s faces. Jun had learned that last part wasn’t entirely a joke. Tomas stepped into the clearing and looked at the house, then the door, then Jun.

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End of excerpt. This site presents a selection from the manuscript.