The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Lauren Groff
- Language: English
- Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at
angles.
In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for
human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.
Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony
and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root
and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark,
she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly
fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast over the frozen ruts of
the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer
already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight.
Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs
moved yet faster.
These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling
half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night
before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather
gloves and the thick cloak the girl had stolen off her own mistress. She
banished the thought of the woman still weeping upon her knees on the
frozen ground in the courtyard inside that hellish place. With each step she
drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl.
Yet there was a strange gleam upon the dark ground of the field ahead,
and as she moved, she saw it was the undershirt of the soldier who a
fortnight earlier had been caught worming his body slow from the horrors
of the fort and toward the different horrors of the forest. He had made it
halfway to the trees when in silence a shadow that had lain upon the ground
grew denser, grew upward, came clear at last as the fearsomest of the men
of this country, the warrior two heads taller than the men of the fort, who
made himself yet more terrible by wearing upon his shoulders outstretched
a broad dark mantle of turkey feathers.
He had lifted with one hand the
creeping fearful soldier by his hair and had with a knife cut a long wet red
mouth into the man’s throat. Then he dropped him to spill his heart’s blood
into the frozen earth and there the dead man lay splayed ignoble. All this
time, he had lain unburied, for the soldiers of the settlement had become too
weak and too cowardly in their hunger to fetch the body back.
She had passed the dead man and his reek had drawn itself out of her
nostrils and she was nearly to the woods when she stumbled again, for the
thought of these two men gave rise to thoughts of other men who lurked
perhaps in the woods, men out there hidden and awaiting her. And now, as
she peered before her into the dark of the forest, she saw a man crouching
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