Keturah and Lord Death

KETURAH AND LORD DEATH

namelos

www.namelos.com

Copyright © 2006 by Martine Leavitt

Published by arrangement with Boyds Mills Press, Inc.

All rights reserved

First namelos edition, 2009

This work is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method is a violation of international copyright law.

This Library of Congress CIP Data refers to the hardcover edition

Leavitt, Martine.

Keturah and Lord Death / Martine Leavitt.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: When sixteen-year-old Keturah follows a legendary hart into

Lord Temsland’s forest she becomes lost, and eventually Lord Death

comes to claim her, but when she is able to charm him with her story,

she gains a reprieve of twenty-four hours, if she can find her one true love.

[1. Death—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.

3. Love—Fiction. 4. Grandmothers—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.L4656Ke2006

[Fic]—dc22

2006000799

For my dear girlfriends,

who have blessed and enriched my life

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

—from ‘“The Chariot” by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Keturah and Lord Death

Table of Contents

Title PageCopyrightDedicationPrologueChapter IChapter IIChapter IIIChapter IVChapter VChapter VIChapter VIIChapter VIIIChapter IXChapter XChapter XIChapter XIIChapter XIIIChapter XIVCodaAcknowledgments

PROLOGUE

“Keturah, tell us a story,” said Naomi, “one of your tales of faërie or magic.”

“Yes, Keturah, do,” said Beatrice, “but I would have a tale of love.”

The boys around the common fire groaned. “A story, yes,” said Tobias, “but a hunting tale, please, one of daring and death.”

The men murmured in agreement. One, whose face I could not see, said, “Tell a tale of the great hart of the lord’s forest.”

Choirmaster sighed. “I would prefer a godly story,” he said, “one to comfort your heart on a gloomy day.”

The fire crackled and leapt for a time, and then I said, “I will tell you a story that is all of those things, a story of magic and love, of daring and death, and one to comfort your heart. It will be the truest story I have ever told. Now listen, and tell me if it is not so.”

I

Of myself, Keturah Reeve, and the personage

I meet, a story scarce credible to one who

has never been lost in the woods.

I was sixteen years old the day I was lost in the forest, sixteen the day I met my death.

I was picking new peas in our garden, which is bordered by the forest, when the famed hart, the hart that had eluded Lord Temsland and his finest hunters many times, the hart about which I had told many a story, came to nibble on our lettuces. I saw that he was a sixth-year hart at least, and I would have run at the sight of his antlers, spread like a young tree, had I not been entranced by his beauty. He raised his head, and for a long moment he looked upon me as if I had stumbled upon him in his own domain, so proud he was, and so royal. At last he slowly turned and walked back into the forest.

I meant only to peek into the trees to see more of him. I thought only to follow the pig path a little way into the forest in hopes that I might have a new story to tell of him at the common fire. I thought I saw him between the trees, and then I did not, and then I did, and after a good long while I turned about and realized I was lost in the wood.

I walked a deer-trod that wove its way for a time along a ridge above a ravine. Far down in the cut I could hear water, a creek, but I could not see it. The way was too steep. Trees grew upward out of the sheer face of the ravine. Some had fallen and lay like blackened bones in the clutches of the upright trees.