Saviours of Oestend Oestend 2 Read Online Free Page B

up some jars of carrots, which they’d eaten cold. But more often than not, it was baked beans and salt pork. The thought of eating anything that wasn’t baked beans and salt pork was a relief.
    “I’m still taking stock of what’s here,” she told him, “and there wasn’t much I could do on such short notice. I guess I could have stayed up all night—”
“No need for that.”
She smiled at him. “Glad we can agree on that. Anyway, there wasn’t time for bread to rise, but I made some biscuits, and I found some jam in the cellar.”
“The boys will love you for it. Assuming I leave them any.” At that moment, he thought he could eat everything she put in front of him, and to the wraiths with those other men.
She’d changed her clothes. She still wore her dark sweater over her blouse, but the skirt she had on was different. It was some kind of heavy dark fabric that looked thick and warm. “Looks like the clothes will work.”
She was in the process of pulling a cast iron pot from the fire, but she smiled sideways at him. “I’ll have to alter most of them but these fit.” She laughed. “Well enough, at any rate.” She nodded downwards towards her feet, and Dante followed her pointed glance. The skirt stopped a bit short of where it should have. At least four inches of ankle showed below her hem, revealing a pair of heavy boots she’d found somewhere.
“Can you fix it?” he asked. Seemed like she probably could, but Dante sure as hell didn’t know the first thing about sewing.
“I could, but honestly, this way seems better. I don’t have to worry about the hem dragging in the mud. The sleeves are a different story.” He couldn’t see the sleeves of her blouse because of the sweater, but he could imagine that they ended a bit short of her wrists. She shrugged. “I’ll fix them once I have a few minutes. I’ll either pull them off and start over, or add cuffs to the cuffs.” She said this in a lighthearted way that told him it was a joke, although he wasn’t sure he understood why it should be funny.
He didn’t have time to ask, though, before the door burst open, and eight men came crowding through it, hurrying in from the cold. Frances was at the front of the bunch, and the eagerness on his face as he tried to see what they were having for breakfast was enough to make Dante laugh out loud.
Then it was time for the day to really begin.
It hadn’t actually snowed in the night. It seemed more as though water had poured from the sky and frozen on everything it touched, blanketing Oestend in ice. It covered each and every tree branch. Green leaves were held captive, still and fragile in its grip. Evergreen branches drooped against their trunks. The barbed wire fences sagged under the weight. The sky was low and grey, and it was still bone-chillingly cold. Dante treaded carefully on his way to the barn, at least an inch of solid ice under his feet. On the bright side, the wind wasn’t blowing, which was a rare blessing on the Oestend prairie.
“Can you believe this?” Frances asked as he came across the compound towards him. He slapped his hands against his arms for warmth, smiling like a kid. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”
Dante had seen it before, but not often and never quite to this extreme. He shook his head, but the movement caused him to lose his footing on the ice and he had to flail his arms to keep from landing on his ass, which made Frances laugh. “It’s something, all right,” Dante agreed once he’d regained his composure.
“I had ice skates back in Lanstead. Kind of wish I had them with me.”
“Ice skates?”
“Yeah. You know…”
No, Dante didn’t know, and Frances must have seen the confusion on his face.
“They’re like boots, only with blades on the bottom, like a sleigh.”
“Sleigh boots?” Dante tried to picture such a thing. He couldn’t imagine why anybody would want them. Sure, sleighs were useful things for hauling hay or coal, but on your