DELETED SCENE – Beneath the Haunting Sea
Echo North had a prologue up until just before copyedits! I worked the first few lines into another chapter, but it was still tough to cut the prologue—even though I agree it was the right call!
Now you can see it in all its glory:
PROLOGUE
I lost him to the snow and the ice and the wolves. I lost him to the wind and the dark. I lost him to a flare of lamplight and a spot of oil.
I lost him, and it was all my fault.
Now every time I close my eyes I see him, standing in the snow in nothing but his shirtsleeves, his face creased with sleep and wracked with betrayal.
So I try not to close my eyes.
Smoke curls up from my campfire, a wisp of spider silk in the bitter night, and I pull my ragged cloak tighter around my shoulders.
A log shifts in the fire and the reindeer grunts in her sleep. She’s hobbled safely in the shelter of a rock jutting out from the mountain we’re going to climb tomorrow. Weariness presses behind my eyelids.
But I don’t want to sleep, because he’s always waiting for me in my dreams, in the places I can never reach. Always he stands there, shivering in the snow, his eyes accusing me, the burn on his cheek raw and red.
I did this to him, damned him to a fate I don’t even understand.
Why hadn’t I waited?
The question haunts me with the memory of his eyes.
Just another hour, and everything could have been so different.
I stare into the fire and rebuke sleep, listening to the wind moan across the ice on the mountain. The night spins on and I watch and I wait, clinging to the hope of tomorrow.
My last hope.
Exhaustion claims me hours later against my will, and when I open my eyes it’s morning. Thin bits of ice cling to my cheeks where I’ve been crying in my sleep. It’s snowing again.
I jerk myself upright, ignoring my stiff muscles, and scatter the ashes of my fire with one booted foot. There’s no breakfast to eat, for me or the reindeer, so I unhobble the beast quickly, and shoulder my pack.
The snow falls thick and wet, sticking to my coat and my eyelashes. I swing up onto the reindeer and guide her to the path that leads up the mountain. Up to a quaint, old-fashioned village, if my information is correct—up to a storyteller who might know something about a Wolf Queen, about a place where the mountain meets the sky and the trees are hung with stars.
The place she took him.
I nudge the reindeer forward with my knees, and begin the long climb.
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