Children of the Rune – Winterer - Chapter 59

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 59.
The Island of the Survivors (1)
Autumn came swiftly to Trabaches.
The brilliant blue sky turned cool and overcast from mid-August onward. On a dawn when the pale blue night—still touched by lingering summer—began to brighten, a child was born in a manor within the Capital of Ron.
The child’s father was not home that day. He had departed to another land a month prior, summoned by orders from someone of high station.
He had promised to return by the day the child was born, yet the infant arrived two months ahead of expectation. Thus, the father’s homecoming was delayed by two months as well.
Yet the child received abundant love and blessings from those who remained in the manor.
She was the first child, the one everyone had awaited. Those who served the manor’s master harbored hope that this daughter might thaw, even slightly, the frozen heart of her father.
If only she would be a girl. Even the child’s mother, who had yet to lower her own walls, believed that the power of a beloved daughter would be sufficient to bridge that distance.
Born according to everyone’s wishes, the child was a daughter with gentle eyes.
Her golden hair, not yet fully grown, and eyes of the same luminous hue possessed a depth that seemed almost mature.
Yet born before her time was complete, the child’s body was frail. During the month that physicians and healers—sent personally by the one her father served—remained at her side, she crossed several perilous thresholds. There were many days when all feared she would not survive.
But the child lived. As though answering the prayers of those around her.
Neither the mother’s endless tears nor the father’s hopeful letters promising his swift return went unanswered. One morning, as if by miracle, she grew robust, eating well and sleeping soundly.
From that day forward, the child grew into a girl who could not disappoint those who wished for her. She performed miracles multiple times over, answering the tearful prayers of many, unable to reject the desperate hands that held her, unable to leave this world.
On the day she first saw sunlight beyond the manor walls, the soft, bird-like infant rested in her mother’s arms as they sat in the courtyard.
She was so docile that she did not even know how to whimper. Before the child’s mother, who wore a smile of perfect peace, a man approached—the Silent Steward whom the manor’s master had brought from a distant place.
Though he had never truly integrated with the manor’s household even after a full year, he was trusted enough by the master to oversee the manor in his absence.
The child’s mother felt somewhat afraid of him. While he handled every matter flawlessly, he was far too somber to speak with openly.
The child was not asleep. As if she could perceive this peace, she gazed quietly toward the garden, where autumn light filtered through.
After observing the child for a moment, the Silent Steward spoke to the mother with an unusually gentle expression.
“The child resembles her deceased aunt.”
When the child’s father returned, the girl who had yet to have a name became Yenichka.
December in Lemme was brutal.
Two figures walked across a meadow where frost crunched beneath their feet. Though dressed in similar robes, the shorter one wore something closer to a hooded cloak.
At first glance they resembled father and son, yet they seemed more like friends—though the age difference was too great to call them peers. Either way, their pace was light. They seemed scarcely to feel the cold of this day.
Isildor San glanced down at Boris with a low murmur.
“Let’s see how long you last.”
Boris answered immediately.
“Same to you.”
His lips were numb from the cold, making his speech indistinct. The two exchanged glances mingled with stubbornness and playfulness, then resumed their stride with renewed vigor.
As the sun descended, the sky turned sallow as if snow might fall at any moment. Their faces were cast in yellow light. Soon, fine snow began to drift.
Both their cheeks had frozen solid as stone. Yet their pace only quickened. The frost-covered meadow seemed endless, and daylight faded rapidly.
Before long, even they—who had been accelerating as if in a race—were forced to stop.
“A river.”
Neither wishing to be the first to halt, they deliberately slowed their steps. They arrived at the Frozen River nearly simultaneously.
Isildor San spoke.
“Shall we cross?”
Boris attempted to smile, but his face was too frozen to manage it.
“If you go, I will.”
“Hmph, stubborn as always.”
I climbed onto the ice. Neither of us hesitated. The river was perhaps twenty paces across—not particularly wide, but its depth remained unknown. Nor could I gauge how solid the ice truly was.
Yet considering the brutal cold that had ravaged us for days, I thought the ice unlikely to crack easily.
But that was a miscalculation. Whether from the swift current flowing beneath the ice or the sun’s rays beating down all morning—
“Boris!”
Isildor San noticed first. The moment Boris, who had been walking ahead, stepped into the central section, thin fractures spiderwebbed across the ice, and with a sharp crack, the surface began to split apart.
Boris was fortunate enough to land on a large ice floe. But the resulting collapse shattered the surrounding ice, and now the one who had called out found himself in peril.
A jagged fissure crept toward my feet.
“Master!”
I had told him not to call me that, but in the urgency of the moment, the word escaped unbidden.
Isildor San, who had been moving toward Boris, stepped back abruptly, then launched himself upward, using a fractured piece of ice as a springboard to reach the floe where the boy stood.
But before he could grasp my hand, the impact of his landing split the ice in two. The swift current relentlessly pushed the fragments downstream.
The moment Isildor San’s ice collided with another floe, I lost my footing and slipped.
As the weight shifted, the ice tilted into the water, dragging me down with it.
The instant I plunged in, my startled heart leaped into my throat. I had thought I was already sufficiently cold, but the water was a different dimension of freezing.
“This won’t do!”
Boris had already vanished beneath the surface. If he drifted under the ice, he would suffocate before the cold could claim him.
Beneath the pale sunlight, only the dark water glimmered. Unable to devise an alternative, Isildor San threw caution aside and prepared to dive in.
“Gasp… haah…”
Boris’s head broke the surface momentarily. Could the boy even swim?
Without time to deliberate, Isildor San threw himself prone across the ice and seized the boy’s shoulders, pulling with all his strength.
“…”
In mere moments, Boris’s body had become rigid as a frozen fish.
With remarkable force, he managed to haul the upper half of the boy’s body above water so he could breathe, but from that position, he could not pull him further up. One wrong movement and the ice supporting them would shatter.
“I’m… fine… really…”
Yet the legs that had frozen in an instant refused to obey.
Before my eyes was the anguished gaze of the man holding me. No matter how I tried to grip the ice, my body no longer responded to my will.
Am I dying…?
The thought flickered like a dying ember.
Then I heard a strange voice from somewhere. Was it a dream? A delusion?
But the voice grew clearer, reaching both the man outside the water and the boy within it. It carried the strong accent of the Lemme dialect.
“What’re ye doin’ over there? Tryin’ to catch yer death in this cold, are ye?”
Isildor San, still prone on the ice, managed to turn his head. On the far bank stood three men who looked like farmers and a young woman.
And they were laughing and snickering at this dire moment?
Isildor San shouted in fury.
“A man is dying, and you stand there laughing!”
“Dyin’? Who’s dyin’? Ye think a body can drown in shallow water like that?”
It felt as though I had been struck on the head. I curled my feet downward and felt along the riverbed.
Though numbness prevented me from sensing it clearly at first, as the water rose to my chest, it became unmistakable—my feet would descend no further. The bottom was solid ground.
“…”
The woman shot a glance at the men who were laughing.
“Is it fun to mock people who don’t know any better? At this rate, the boy will get ice in his feet!”
The woman wore a thick long skirt woven from wool and leaned on a pole that towered over her height. Without a moment’s hesitation, she stepped onto the ice.
She plunged the pole into the water and used the recoil to propel herself forward, reaching us in mere moments. Her footsteps on the ice were so light they bore no comparison to what Isildor San had done earlier.
The woman extended her hand to Boris while supporting herself with the pole.
“Grip it tight, and push hard against the bottom with both feet.”
It happened in an instant. The woman counted to three and in one fluid motion pulled the boy out and set him down on the ice.
The ice cracked beneath them, but she lifted him again moments later. With nothing but a single pole, she brought Boris to the riverbank as easily as if she were clinging to a tree with roots firmly planted in the earth.
“Ha… hah…”
My body trembled and I could barely speak. The woman stripped off Boris’s wet robe and swiftly snatched the cloak from a man beside her, wrapping it around him. The man whose cloak was taken offered no protest, merely laughing awkwardly.
The woman then swung the pole, flicking the water off with sharp taps, and having finished her work, suddenly glanced toward the river as if remembering something.
Upon spotting Isildor San still lying prone on the ice with a vacant expression, she shrugged her shoulders.
“The adult can come out on his own.”

The farmers welcomed the two of us gladly.
It seemed that our foolish display had actually endeared us to them. The people of Lemme were exclusive toward outsiders, but when they took a liking to someone, they became infinitely warm.
That evening, the villagers displayed remarkable kindness—providing not only supper and lodging, but even heating bathwater by the fire for the boy who had fallen into the water.
However, the next morning, Isildor San and Boris Jineman learned that it had not been free.
After a late breakfast, we stepped outside only to encounter people turning their heads and snickering at us repeatedly. If anything, it was payment for the spectacle we had provided.
Of course, considering we had acted as gravely as if we stood at death’s door over a river barely taller than a child, neither of us felt particularly good about it. Isildor scratched his head vigorously and sighed.
“Ever since I met you, it seems I’ve been acting the fool right along with you.”
Boris merely laughed silently. It was Isildor’s habit and charm to speak thoughtlessly in ways unbefitting an adult.
Over the past two days, the two of us had engaged in a wager to walk continuously through the cold.
Looking back, I couldn’t fathom how such a thing had started, but without that wager, we would never have attempted to cross the Frozen River so recklessly without proper inspection.
The first night we went without sleep, and the second day we walked the entire time without lighting a single fire. Even if falling into the water was a mistake, it was a blessing from heaven that our ears and extremities had not succumbed to frostbite.
Had word spread that we had attempted such a feat in December on the Nim Peninsula, no less on the eastern side of the Drakenz Mountain Range, the people of Lemme would have every right to treat us as fools forevermore.
“In any case, I lost.”
Isildor suddenly bristled.
“You brat! The place where I grew up has snow that never melts year-round, even on the hills behind the village! I rolled around in that snow as a child. Ordinary cold is no match for me. You should have proposed a fair wager.”
Boris lifted his head and smiled wryly.
“Still, at least we came through safely, didn’t we?”
“…”
Isildor’s agitation was mingled with self-reproach for having participated in such a perilous wager in an attempt to break the boy’s stubbornness.
Though it had ended as a laughingstock, in the moment Boris fell into the water, he had genuinely cursed his own recklessness.
But Isildor remained an innocent man for his years. Soon enough, he began scheming how to punish this troublesome little creature who had caused such a mess.
“So, how did it feel to swim in ice water?”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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