Winter Bewitched

By Sherry D. Ramsey

Traveling scribe Jalia and her cat (who is not a cat) Gemmin stumble into a land where winter seems to have settled in permanently, and the people are suffering. With her penchant for problem-solving, she convinces the local Keliph to employ her to find the answer to the curse, and bring summer back. There's a tangle of secrets and lies to be unraveled here, however, and Jalia will need all of her talents (and Gemmin's, as well), to break a witch's icy hold.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sherry D. Ramsey
• Release date: Feb 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781999575625

Sherry D. Ramsey

Sherry D. Ramsey is a speculative fiction writer, editor, publisher, creativity addict and self-confessed internet geek. When she's not writing, she makes jewelry, gardens, hones her creative procrastination skills on social media, and consumes far more coffee and chocolate than is likely good for her.Her debut novel, One's Aspect to the Sun, was published by Tyche Books in late 2013 and was awarded the Book Publishers of Alberta "Book of the Year" Award for Speculative Fiction. The sequel, Dark Beneath the Moon, is due out from Tyche in 2015. Her other books include To Unimagined Shores—Collected Stories. With her partners at Third Person Press (http://www.thirdpersonpress.com), she has co-edited five anthologies of regional short fiction to date. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies in North America and beyond. Every November she disappears into the strange realm of National Novel Writing Month and emerges gasping at the end, clutching something resembling a novel.A member of the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia Writer’s Council, Sherry is also a past Vice-President and Secretary-Treasurer of SF Canada, Canada's national association for Speculative Fiction Professionals.You can visit Sherry online www.sherrydramsey.com, find her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter @sdramsey.

Book preview

Winter Bewitched

by

Sherry D. Ramsey

Copyright © Sherry D. Ramsey 2008

Cover Design by Sherry D. Ramsey ©2019 (Cover image created in Midjourney by Sherry D. Ramsey; Rune ring brush by Obsidian Dawn)

Cat icon by Freepik from Flaticon.com

All rights reserved. The author retains all copyright in the content of this book.

No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission from the author.

This book contains a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, entities or settings is unintentional, coincidental, or entirely attributable to the whimsy of the multiverse and fluctuations in the space-time continuum.

Winter Bewitched first appeared in Undercurrents: A Cape Breton Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Third Person Press, Canada, 2008

Reprinted in To Unimagined Shores, Sherry D. Ramsey, Canada, 2011

Ramsey, Sherry D., 1963-, author

Winter Bewitched / Sherry D. Ramsey

Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.sherrydramsey.com

Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada

Winter Bewitched

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-9995756-2-5

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We were six days out of Salabad when we crossed the sudden border into winter. One moment the air was warm and dry blowing down from the steppes, and then a frigid breeze sprang up, a rime of frost appeared on the trail ahead, and the sky darkened to the colour of yesterday’s gruel.

I reined in the mare to slip my warm Surcyian cloak over my head, and Gemmin scampered ahead. When his paws hit the frost he turned back, a look of unmistakable dismay on his feline face. Three leaps took him from the ground to my shoulder. He kneaded his long toes into the collar of my cloak as a lock of my hair blew over the crown of his head, giving him a comical auburn topknot.

Enchantments, Jalia, he nuzzled into my ear, in a tongue few mortals would have understood. Gemmin was most comfortable conversing in the words he’d taught me, the language of the strange, inaccessible place of his birth.

I nodded. A witch, a curse, the usual sort of thing, I told him. If you can believe tavern tales told by a half-drunk barkeep.