Crown and Concubine

The wind howling through the jagged crags of Dead Man’s Pass did not merely blow; it bit straight through wool and hide, settling deep into sixteen-year-old Raymond Silverstein’s bones.

He stumbled across the treacherous stone incline, his breath coming in ragged, white plumes. The blizzard had rolled down from the northern peaks without warning, engulfing the high trails in a blind wall of ice and driving snow. Up here, miles above the muddy lanes of Oakhaven, the frost was an absolute predator.

Raymond dragged his frostbitten fingers across his frozen face, numbly adjusting the heavy leather strap of his timber haul. Down in the valley, the local bailiffs cared nothing for autumn storms. They demanded their wood and their stock, indifferent to whether a peasant boy froze to death in the mud to deliver it.

"Just three more strays..." he rasped to himself, his voice lost instantly to the gale.

A sudden blast of wind shoved him sideways, his iron-nailed boots slipping on the black ice beneath the powder. Raymond dropped to one knee, a sharp gasp escaping his lips as his knuckles struck the frozen rock. He forced himself to look up into the roaring white abyss, his mind flashing against his will to the small, miserable hearth back in Oakhaven.

He thought of the village. He thought of young Farzana, Maha, and little Maggie—the quiet, wide-eyed girls who looked to him like an elder brother to keep the bitter chill away from their dilapidated doors. He had promised to bring back firewood for them before the pass closed.

And then, like a cruel ember in the freezing dark, the face of Vasanthi burned in his memory.

The agony in his chest had nothing to do with the winter air. Just days before the snows came, his teenage world had been shattered at the woodline. He had carried a quiet, pure affection for her, believing the subtle smiles she offered him by the well were meant for him alone. But the sight of her wrapped in another man’s arms under the trees had torn his romantic innocence to shreds, leaving him with a hollow, aching void.

I won't die in the mud, he swore through gritted teeth, pushing up from the ice. I won't die a nameless peasant.

A sharp bleat echoed from the lip of the gorge ahead. One of the stray goats was pinned against a narrow ledge, half-buried in a drift. Raymond took a determined step forward, reaching out a stiff arm toward the animal's horn.

Then the shelf beneath his boots gave way.

The thunder of collapsing rock and ice drowned out his cry. The world inverted in a whirl of white and gray as Raymond plunged over the edge, tumbling down into the blinding abyss of Dead Man’s Pass.

sixteen-year-old boy remained. The bailiffs shrugged, the townsfolk muttered a brief prayer for his soul, and Oakhaven wrote him off as another casualty of the frozen wilderness.

They did not know that deep beneath the ice of the pass, broken but breathing, Raymond Silverstein had survived.