This post is an excerpt from the fantasy novel The Snow Witch by Jaclyn Wilmoth. You can find The Snow Witch at all major retailers in both ebook and paperback by clicking here.
To Lumi, Arctic Town was just too creepy. The birds were always watching and she stuck out like a sore thumb.
From the air, the domed city looked like a blister on the land. A blemish where the pus of the place boiled out of its skin. They had arrived in spring as the snow melted down the dome, creating honeycombs of ice around the lower walls.
“This,” Cole swept his arm out in front of him as they came in to dock, “is Arctic.”
As they stepped out of the dirigible terminal, the world of Arctic Town sprawled before her. The brightness of the place smacked her. The sun at this angle seemed to be magnified by the dome in which the city was built.
It was more than just a town. It was an entire manufactured experience, like stepping back in time. The streets were bustling with people. The buildings had facades that looked like a frontier town.
From inside, you could hardly see the outside world at this time of year. A thin veil of water ran between the dome and the ice-comb, making the forest outside shift and change in unnatural ways, its reflection distorted for those inside. It gave Lumi an uncomfortable feeling, as if nothing was what it seemed, as if she couldn’t trust her own eyes.
Cole moved into the crowd and Lumi weaved her way through people to follow.
Lumi felt herself drifting away on the stream of people as Cole wrapped his hand around her waist.
“You can always spot the tourists.” He gave her a knowing smile.
“How?” she asked, looking around. There was something off about it. The people swarming the roads all looked so similar. The same pale eyes, the same fine hair, the same set chins.
“The newness of their clothes.”
Lumi looked closer. The clothes looked old to her. Old-fashioned, like each person had just stepped in from a hundred years ago, as if they’d been riding horses, but there were no horses to be seen. Frontier clothes, horse hands in pristine condition. Everyone almost seemed to be in costume, as if they were wearing clothes that didn’t quite fit them. Denim and leather that hadn’t been worn before. The jeans were bright blue, the leather stiff and uncomfortable looking.
Cole fit in here, in his denim shirt and tan moleskin pants. Lumi felt garish in her bright blue dress, out of place in her tattered but contemporary clothes. Here everyone else wore stuff that was old-fashioned but new. She wondered if they were even in uniform, the sameness was so exact.
“But how can you tell? Everyone’s got new clothes,” she called ahead to Cole.
He smirked back at her. “Everyone’s a tourist.”
Lumi wondered what this said about a place, that everyone was a visitor. The trees even seemed transplanted. Even they looked uncomfortable, as if they too wore costumes that didn’t quite fit.
There were birds everywhere, but no other animals. Each tree lining the street had several birds of different species looking down into the street, heads whirring from one side to another.
Lumi looked to the ground, wondering if there should be birdshit everywhere. There was none.
The light shone bright in Arctic Town. She had to squint against it. Then claws clamped down on her shoulder. She shouted, swatting and trying to get away.
It was a magpie, perched on her shoulder even as she tried to run from it. As it moved next to her ear, she could hear the machinations beneath the feathers. This was no biological bird.
The movement on the street around her had frozen. Lumi looked around. Everyone was staring at her.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Cole said. He leaned his mouth toward the bird, as if he were talking into it. “Just her first time here.”
He nudged the magpie up onto his finger and flicked it into the sky, on its way.
The crowd murmured and slowly returned to the bustle it had been.
“Turning heads everywhere you go,” Cole said. “Good thing we’re here.” And he guided her through a wooden door as he opened it.
“I feel like I’m being followed,” Lumi told him.
“It’s the birds,” he said. “You get used to it.”
They were only passing through, so she didn’t get used to it.
Just as she had stepped back into the stream of vintage-clad, starched bodies, she felt a brush of fur and a firm grip on her arm. Some soul so old that Lumi couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman, so wrinkled as to be unrecognizable and covered in so many furs that the person seemed not to have a body at all. Just a wrinkled face and wrinkled hands in a ball of dead animals.
The hands held Lumi’s wrists, and she looked toward the elder.
“Whatever you do,” the voice seemed to be garbled, as if it came from beneath the pelts. “Do not come here with child.”
Lumi pulled her hand away.
“You will disappear,” the elder said, releasing Lumi’s hand. “They are watching.”
The aged soul looked up to the birds in the trees. Lumi followed the gaze and when she looked down, the ball of furs was gone.
She was on edge for the rest of the time they were in the dome. Each time she looked outside, each time they went out, she saw fur rushing to hide.
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