The Bride of Death by F.M. Aden EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: F.M. Aden
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 4 MB
- Price: Free
THE BLACK WOLF
It was the start of Midwinter and in a small, crooked house in western
Anatolia, a little girl counted her bread.
Zerryn always counted her food before she ate to make sure the spirits
didn’t rob her when she was distracted. Her stomach clenched in hunger,
but still she counted the unleavened dough that made her yufka. The house
of Özdemir was lit with thin, fingerlike candles, and shadows covered her
father’s face where he sat at the head of the table, stroking the ends of his
dark beard.
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On his right sat Derya, Zerryn’s nursemaid, who had looked
after her ever since her mother’s lungs had collapsed from a weeks-long
fever. Her plump form was folded tight on her cushion, and her rough
fingers tore the edges of her bread with a viciousness that was almost
predatory. Her face was as round as an apple with supple cheeks and a nose
as sharp as a blade, as if it didn’t quite fit.
Outside, nesting in the black pine tree, was a crow that watched her with
its beaded eyes protruding like little walnuts. It opened its wide beak and
cawed as if it were speaking to her.
“Do not play with your food, Zerryn,” Derya chided. “You know what
happens to little girls who do not eat.”
“The black wolf will eat them,” she whispered.
At eight years old, Zerryn knew that there was magic in the world. A
soft, silent magic that existed like a film between their world and the
Underworld. And sometimes creatures broke through the curtains and got
lost in the woodlands. It was why Zerryn avoided the woods. Especially the
thick, frost-covered woods that surrounded their home.
They called it the
Dead Woods. There was rarely any whistling of crickets or the howling
sound of a wolf from the Dead Woods. And when her father would dive
into its moss-covered arms to hunt, all he’d find were carcasses.
Hakan Özdemir frowned at the sight of his only child. He turned to
Derya with a sharp gaze.
“You fill the girl with so many tales, she is half afraid of her shadow,”
he said. Zerryn didn’t look at them as they spoke. Her eyes were stuck to
the window as if she saw something they did not. She had been like that
recently, he’d noticed. Her head stuffed full of rubbish and false tales; she
could barely answer to her own name.
“Stories are the food of the mind,” Derya said. “We live so far from the
village that there are no children for her to play with. She enjoys my tales,
and there is no harm in it.”
Sometimes he imagined that Derya had been here all along, that she had
been made with the bones of their home and she had simply revealed
herself to them because she knew that Zerryn needed her.
Eylül, his wife, had passed away a fortnight ago, and he had been
trapped in the despairing hands of grief, drowning his sorrows in ale and
neglecting Zerryn, who dutifully sat by her dead mother day and night.
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