Twisted Winter by Catherine Butler

Cerberus pads past me to lie down at his master’s feet. The host does not dance or sing or cry out but they are celebrating their own rituals in their own fashion.
    He is waiting for me. He has waited an eternity, a season, a portion of a year. The winter king, the lordof the deadlands, the third son of the Titans. Hades. My husband.
    His skin is pale as ashes, as dry as bone, as cold as ice. His body is a skeleton in a shroud of flesh – as is all that is mortal – a disguise for a god. He is clothed in shadow and smoke. His hair is raven black, his eyes are winter grey, his mouth is pale and bloodless.
    Death claims all of us eventually. With black wings he stoops from the sky, lifts us from the earth and drags us away from home. Is it a sin to surrender when he will triumph either way? No one asked me my desires when they decided who would own me and how.
    What if they asked me now? What would I say, what would I choose? No one ever does ask.
    I think my mother is afraid to ask my about my life in the dead lands because she doesn’t want to hear about the horror, the terror and the dread. She prefers pretence: a beautiful dream is better than an ugly reality.
    My husband fears nothing, or so he would claim. But he does not ask either. I think he knows no woman would ever choose this desolation over the sunlight world above. Why else did he steal me? Hecould have come as a suitor. He could have asked – but he never asked and so I never said yes or no.
    It is too late for choices. I am at the end of my story. My tale is told. The decisions made for me by distant powers. Still I ask myself the question. I ask it every season. If I could choose, what land would I call home? If love was mine to give, not theirs to take, where would I gift it and to whom?
    I climb the steps to the dais. The host abases itself before us. I take my seat beside the dark lord.
    He turns his skull-like visage towards me; his eyes are dark stars in the hollow sockets, his touch is as cold as the grave.
    And his mouth tastes of pomegranates.

About the Contributors
    Catherine Butler was born in Hampshire, where she grew up in a small market town near the New Forest. As a child, she spent most of her time wandering woods, trying to learn musical instruments, and learning about myths. She also loved reading ghost stories (both fictional and real) and scaring herself silly. Catherine now lives in Bristol, where she teaches English at a local university. As well as writing books for children and young adults, Catherine writes books about children’s books. Some people think her obsessed. Her books (most of them published under the name Charles Butler) are fantasies, but they are fantasies set in our own world – or in worlds set at a slight, disconcerting angle to our own. They include
Calypso Dreaming
,
The Fetch of Mardy Watt
,
Death of a Ghost
and
The Lurkers
.
    Susan Cooper wrote the classic five-book fantasy sequence
The Dark Is Rising
, in which one quiet little scene still scares people. She grew up in England but now lives in America, on an island in a Massachusetts saltmarsh. Besides novels and short stories, she has written screenplays and (just once, as co-author) a Broadway play. Her latest book for young adults is called
Ghost Hawk
, and yes, of course, there’s a ghost in it.
    Frances Hardinge was brought up in a sequence of small, sinister English villages, and spent a number of formative years living in a Gothic-looking, mouse-infested hilltop house in Kent. She studied English Language and Literature at Oxford, fell in love with the city’s crazed, archaic beauty, and never found a good enough reason to leave.
    Whilst working full time as a technical author for a software company she started writing her first children’s novel,
Fly by Night
, and was with difficulty persuaded by a good friend to submit the manuscript to Macmillan.
Fly by Night
went on to win the Branford Boase Award, and was also