Ghostheart by Ananda Braxton-Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

had been going missing, tool by tool. First an old pail and dipper, but after that some good rope and even a few pots and piggins went missing. Later, we lost our biggest, best blade.
    I dug my fingers into the clay harder than I really needed to; the pain felt good somehow, cleaner and simpler than anything else.
    I had one row cleared and was just gathering the seed into my shift, when the hedge-warblers came greedy to the furrows all around me. They were like feathered rats.
    ‘Bloody birds!’ I shouted and waved my arms at them. Foolish in my fury, I threw the seed right at them.
    They looked at me, and ate it.
    ‘Go away!’ I shouted again. I ran at them. ‘Get off!’ I said. ‘Get off!
Off!
’
    They rose in little clouds all the way down the row as I passed and then they just resettled like I was less than a passing gust. I watched our good seed disappearing down their tiny wolfish gullets. They filled the air with contented peeps and my gorge rose into my throat. Even the birds wouldn’t listen to me.
    ‘Stop it!’ I commanded. ‘Stop it!
Stop it! Stop it!
’
    I flailed up and down the rows pelting their thieving bodies and loathing their very beaks and feathers. Then I sat heavily in the dirt and the world span around me somewhat. I scraped together a handful of gravel from the furrows.
    ‘
Stop it
,’ said a voice, somewhere close. I didn’t even look up. I didn’t care who it was. I threw a handful of gravel at the seed-thieves. They were so small but their bellies held so much, while poor Gilpin was eating bugs. I threw the other.
    ‘
Stop it
,’ the voice said again, clearer.
    ‘What?’ Just about ready to have somebody’s face off, I looked up but there was nobody in the greens, nobody behind me, nobody in the alder.
    ‘Hello?’ I said.
    For a moment there was nothing in the plot but humming heat and picking birds and then, ‘
Hello
,’ it said, testing-like. I turned about in the empty yard and slowly I waxed clammy; there was nobody there. Nobody anywhere. Only me. And Mungo lying in the dust under the shadow of the stone-wall.
    ‘
Let the birds be
,’ said the voice. I stepped backward and away.
    ‘All right then,’ I said into the air, respectful, and then slow as sermons I stepped back until I felt the wall hot behind me. Then I turned and looked into the sky like I was thinking about weather.
    Pa had told me you mustn’t let Them know you’re frighted of Them. He said that goosey skin were doors to Them; they just lift the little traps and slip in.
    ‘Come on, Mungo,’ I called and tried to walk careless-like back to the snug, with his warm body pressed to my side. He plainly hadn’t heard anything. He just loped gentle alongside, gazing soft-eyed up at me. As if to ask what we were going to do next. As if to tell me he would go where I went. As if to say I was somebody special.
    I didn’t tell my parents. There didn’t seem to be any point.
    After I shrouded him, we buried my brother in the soft ground up at Redcliff. There was just us four, with Pa hauling the Dead-rick alone. If things had been different there’d have been a line of folk, all black-clad and mournful, winding out from all the crofts and towns to bury him. But things were as they were, and we weren’t to bury Boson in the graveyard but to do with him as most would only do with a dog. Carrick’s graveyard is crammed with a picksome sort of dead folk and Scully Slevin says that if an oddling was buried next to them, they’d most likely climb right out of their graves and stalk away with what was left of their noses stuck up in the air.
    We made a pitiful progress along the Waterward and I could almost see stretched-out behind us the whole blood-line of shamed and sorrowful Quirks. My mother led the way, followed by Pa and the shrouded body knocking about on the rick, and then me carrying Gilpin. Mungo walked last. That was all of my brother’s procession. Pa and Moo were dark shapes against the grey