Prologue

A husband and his wife fought their way through the snow-covered landscape of Southern Arberyth County. Their destination was the home of their landowner’s recently widowed wife and friend. The husband was tall and thin, to the point where one would consider him more the kin of a scarecrow than a man. He wore a cabbie’s hat and a pair of glasses, both completely mismatched with his faded-red scarf and high collared brown cloak. The woman seemed younger and healthier, fighting through the snow with more vigour than her husband. She had a stockier, some might say homely, build; full red cheeks that nearly matched the scarf that she was wearing. Curls of long brown hair peeked out from a thick winter shawl, and her dress and boots peppered with a mix of frozen mud and snow.

“I say,” Benfinkle yelled in the howling winds, his voice hoarse with age and cold, “are you certain this is necessary?”

“Of course,” Edna answered, squinting against the blizzard, “we shouldn’t have left to begin with!”

Benfinkle pulled up his collar to block the wind, “We couldn’t have known the winter storms would come early!” he said, spectacles fogging up, “And even if we did, someone had to have left to get more food anyways! Poor woman couldn’t have been asked to walk all the way to Horsetalley and back; she carries enough as it is!”

“I hope she still carries,” Edna answered, stopping for a brief moment before renewing her march with increased fervour, “it would have been even crueller of us to have left her to birth alone!”.

“You’re right,” he huffed, “but pace yourself! You’ll collapse long before you reach the cabin!”

“I say you hurry it up,” Edna puffed, “those lanky legs of yours shouldn’t have any trouble keeping up with me! Besides, it’s not that much further. I can keep it up!”

Clicking his tongue and snorting a glob of wayward snot back up his nose, Benfinkle knew better than to argue. They kept up the pace for another forty-five minutes before seeing the faint outline of the cabin, both freezing and tired from their hurried journey from Horsetalley Village. Edna was the first to notice that the seemingly quaint, though large and well-carved cabin had no candlelight in its windows; no smoke in its chimney. Rather, as she came close enough, one of the second-storey windows seemed open.

A sense of dread filled Edna, though Benfinkle was none the wiser; his glasses so fogged from his breath, there might as well have been a dense fog accompanying the blizzard. When Edna took off running, he didn’t even notice.

Edna walked up to the front door only to find it barred and the windows shuttered. After five minutes of frantic knocking, Benfinkle finally caught up; his chest was heaving for air, and his skin was red with exertion.

From behind frosted spectacles, he spoke, “She is probably resting, what, with that heavy belly, I expect that she must get exhausted just from standing.” He continued after catching another breath, “What I fail to understand is where you get the energy to run around like that from! Why just last night you were ‘tired’, yet all you’d done that day was eat my cherished ‘Pommes de la Villes’.”

“Please,” Edna snorted, “You would have eaten one, then fed the rest to the horses.” Turning to look at her husband, she continued, “Besides, they were not true Villean apples. They came from Hamfield orchard.”

Benfinkle looked at his wife quizzically, “And how would you know that?”

Straining against the door, Edna spoke in between grunts, “Villean. Apples. Are. Deep. Green.”

Frowning, Benfinkle watched his wife struggle as he said, “No, I have heard they are red like the trader said.”

Edna stopped trying to force the door open, “The trader,” she enunciated carefully, “was tricking you”. Sighing deeply, she looked at her husband, “Look, there was an opened window on the second floor,” she took a few steps away from the door, “there, see?” she pointed.

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Benfinkle cleared his spectacles of ice and fog before looking. “And?” he spoke, puzzled.

“No one,” Edna growled, “keeps an open window in the middle of a blizzard, you dolt.” Moving towards a snow-covered barrel that stood on the porch, “There is no light anywhere, no smoke in the chimney.” She grabbed hold of the barrel, taking a deep breath before she pulled. “Help me move this, would you?”

Seeing some sense in his wife’s words, he didn’t argue. However, as he reached the other side of the barrel and they started to heave, he spoke, “You do not suppose to break in through the window, are you?”

“No,” Edna smirked, “I’m not.”

“Oh, then what are we…” He stopped before looking at his wife, mouth agape, “You want me to crawl through that window?”

Edna looked her husband in the eyes and nodded, her smirk disappearing, “I think it is necessary, Ben.” Setting down the barrel beneath the window and climbing on top of it, she continued, “I have this terrible feeling that something is not right.”

With a look of dismay, Benfinkle looked at his wife, “So because you feel weird, I have to act like a burglar? What if she’s just forgotten to close the window and she’s sleeping somewhere else in the house? Do you truly want to force these old bones up there?”

“Please, Ben,” Edna said, sitting down on the barrel and cupping her hands in front of her, looking at her husband with serious eyes.

Grumbling, Benfinkle plodded towards his wife, taking off his coat and scarf. Shivering, he took the first step, placing his foot in her cupped hands. Failing at maintaining his balance, he took a few attempts before managing to get his other foot up on her thigh. After that, he leaned over her, steadying himself along the snowy walls of the log cabin. Then, in one swift, if shaky motion, he managed to get a hold of the windowsill of the second-story window. Using her shoulder and head as the final steps, he managed to pull himself through the window.

Seeing her husband safely entering the cabin, Edna let out a sigh of relief. She waited for him to poke his head out, or come and open the door, but he didn’t. After waiting for a few minutes, Edna lost her patience and yelled out, “BEN! ARE YOU DOING FINE UP THERE?”

After another couple of minutes with no answer, Edna grew anxious. She began trying to climb the barrel and reach the window, but she was much too short. Then, just as she was about to try again, she heard the faint thumping of someone walking inside. She walked back over to the front door just in time for Benfinkle to crack it open it.

“What took you so long?” Edna scolded.

She was about to continue when she took a good look at her husband’s face. Gaunt by nature, the shock in his eyes and paler-than-normal face made his visage a bit frightening. He said nothing but used his foot to open the door further.

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Four hours before.

Writhing with the pain that childbirth brings, a red-haired and pale woman laid soaked in her bed. The crackling of the fire burning within the stove grew less and less frequent as the wood turned to charcoal. She fought harder than she ever had before, blood and all manners of bodily expulsions were leaving her, but the child had not yet come. She prayed, then, asking each god that they grant her deliverance from the pain. No answers were given.

An hour passed, eternity to the woman. She could cry no more tears, for the intensity of her struggle lasted for so long that she had no more fluids to eke out. She saw her husband, the brave man, had come back from his duty just in time to deliver the child. However, he did not help her; however, he instead walked over to the window, and with a violent bang, he opened the windows, letting the winter air carry snow and cold with it into the room.

Another hour passed, though she didn’t know it. Falling in and out of consciousness, she looked around the room for her husband. The thronging pain was still there, but he was not. She struggled to get out of her bed, only to find that the bedcovers were frozen to her body. With her last moment of clarity, she began the exhausting process of hauling herself over to the stove at the foot of the bed. Amongst a sea of embers, there was only one burning coal left.

Another hour passed, and the shrill sound of a screaming infant reverberated through the snow-covered log cabin as it struggled in its mother’s last embrace. As wind and snow blew through an open window, a woman’s body slowly lost its heat; turning ever so pale. The orphaned child cried until it could cry no more, its pleas going unheard as the heat slowly died, snow fell, and the remnant embers in the bedroom stove turned cold.

And then a man came through the window.