I agree with Dip, especially in the first chapter the descriptive language was overkilled. There is a such thing as overdoing it when it comes to describing. Its good writing though. Just a few things, you never really went into much detail of what Kate and Jacob actually look like. I don't know if I forgot or if it wasn't mentioned much beyond, but the only things I remember about appearance is Kate has golden hair and blue eyes. I also think the second chapter was a bit early to kill off Kate, there wasn't really much time to really make the two characters connect. I also don't think there was enough detail into what Jacob was feeling when he was watching Kate be hanged. Also, if you're going for realism, I don't think knocking over a building would be quite so minor in this village, nor could you knock the whole thing down with the kick of a board.
And you said in the story itself their father was poisoned, but the summary in the vanilla post said he had a disease. :o
Its not bad though, not bad at all.
