Winter War Awakening

Austria, late September 1848
 
 
These mountains gave nothing back. You might offer your secrets to them, and they would be kept safe in the folded rock and jagged crevices.
 
You might tally your fears against them, and they would be swallowed by the immensity of stone.
 
You might throw yourself at them and never return.
 
We were too few, the five of us against these mountains, against the praetheria who might be holding my cousin Noémi in a cave buried somewhere in that imposing stretch of rock--a handful of dust against the weight of the mountains.
 
Night fell swiftly as we set up camp, a sweep of ink blotting out the Austrian Alps rising all around us. The walls of a military fortress, clamped on high rocks behind me, disappeared as though someone had dropped a curtain over them. But I could feel the mountains even so: craggy stone sentinels piercing the sky overhead, monoliths that would crush me as soon as shelter me. Though the September evening was mild, I shivered in the too-large secondhand dolman I wore over a boy s shirt and trousers. I wished that Gábor were here, to share his warmth--or that Mátyás would let us start a fire. But my cousin was being uncharacteristically cautious.
 
I squinted into the night. The mountains facing us were no longer visible, except as a wash of black at the base of a star-strewn sky. Somewhere in that darkness, Noémi waited.
 
Assuming, of course, that the information we had pieced together in Vienna was correct.
 
Two months earlier, Noémi had disappeared from Vienna while I was crusading unsuccessfully on behalf of the praetheria, the creatures I d released from the Binding spell. Before I could do anything to recover her trail, my own life had imploded, and I d been hunted from Vienna, running until I d stumbled across Mátyás and Gábor on the puszta.
 
Together, along with some outlaws Mátyás had befriended, we searched for Noémi

Rosalyn Eves is a college professor living in southern Utah and involved in the YA community there and across the country. The Blood Rose Rebellion series is her first. Find out more at RosalynEves.com and @RosalynEves.