Read an Excerpt from Redwing

HE PUT OFF getting out of bed for as long as he could, unable to face what he knew 
waited for him. The silence had already smothered any hope.

Ettie lay pale but composed, as though she had laid herself out before dying. She 
looked so small, thought Rowan—even smaller than in life. My sister. He touched a 
blond braid, then her cheek. But it wasn’t her, not any more. Ettie’s cheeks had 
been warm, dimpled, never still like this under your hand. And then he was sobbing, 
his head pressed into the edge of her bunk, the enormity of loss crushing his heart.

But his mother waited. She had not gone quietly to the deadlands. Bloodstained and 
livid with bruises, she looked as though her final battle had been against bludgeon 
and knife. 

There was no part of her he could bear to touch. Mumbling out a prayer for her safe 
passage, Rowan untucked her bedsheets and wrapped first one side, then the other 
over his mother’s body. 

By the time he had dragged first his mother’s, then his sister’s, wrapped bodies out 
of the caravan and laid them beside his father on the frozen ground, Rowan was 
near to collapse. Slow and shaky as an old man, he made his way back to his bunk. 
His ragged, helpless weeping seemed like it would never stop, until at last his 
exhausted body took over and merciful sleep carried him away.

***  

The silence stretched out, as Rowan stared into the red innards of the stove, trapped 
in his memories. 

Aydin’s next question pulled him back.

“So. I guess that girl is your sister, then?”

Rowan tried to make sense of the question. He looked around the walls of the 
caravan, looking for a picture he knew did not exist. Aydin sipped his tea and waited 
calmly, his pale eyes unblinking.

Finally Rowan gave up. “What are you talking about? What girl?”

“The girl who hovers about you.” Aydin shrugged, unconcerned. “Perhaps you do not 
see her.” He gave one of his superior smiles. “It would not surprise me.”

Rowan’s reaction was so violent and confused he couldn’t speak. Rage at Aydin’s 
callousness, to toy with him so. Grief like a black ocean for the little girl who had 
tagged at his heels. And beneath it all whispered a superstitious, hair-prickling 
dread, as his traitor mind babbled but what if…

“What’s wrong with you?” The words burst out of him like a curse. “Why would you 
say a thing like that? Can you not even respect the dead?”

Aydin took a sip of tea, as though nothing had been said. The smile—a smile 
Rowan was very close to wiping from his face, dog or no dog—did not falter. And 
when Rowan sputtered into silence, Aydin put his tea down, sat back in his chair, 
and looked him straight in the eye.

“She’s small, about up to your chest. She has fair hair—not as light as mine, but 
blonde—in two long plaits. She has a round face, round cheeks.”

That means nothing, thought Rowan, though shivery chills were crawling up and 
down his spine. Lots of girls have braids. He’s bluffing.

“She wears a purple gemstone at her neck.”

Ettie. Sweet gods of earth and air, it was Ettie. Rowan had won that lump of amethyst 
for her at a fair, and she had loved it so much that their father had paid to have a 
silversmith fix it to a small loop so she could string it around her neck. She had worn 
that stone for the last three years. 

She had died wearing it.