The Garden Of A Thousand Nightingales

By Katherine Wyvern

In the whispering wilderness of the Sandoval forest, Dusk, an elusive wood-elf, is intent on preserving the fragile life of her hidden trees from the ravages of men, but once her natural green magic finds its match in the powerful wizardry of Juan Francisco Deva de la Torre Espinosa, Royal Astrologer and right hand of the Queen, her whole life changes course.
When their sensuous, starlit romance in the forest turns into a frightful quest in the bleak heart of the city, only the power of her wizard can save Dusk from the cruelty of men, and make a place where their love may blossom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Wyvern
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301553358

Katherine Wyvern

Katherine is a gipsy soul who lived in Italy, Norway, Germany, France and Spain but mostly in some private universe of her own. She is now settled, for a while at least, in SW France, where she lives in a yurt in the woods, with her boots and a horse as only means of transport. She's worked as a printer, a welder, and a gardener, and she has been writing since she can remember, mostly poetry, fantasy and erotica, sometimes mixed together in weird ways. Nowadays, when not busy with walking, horse-whispering or dream-weaving, she is usually painting, embroidering, or working her backbone off in the garden.

Book preview

The Garden of a Thousand Nightingales

A fairy-tale

By Katherine Wyvern

Copyright Katherine Wyvern 2012

Smashwords Edition

Images by Katia V. Michelet

Mailto: [e-mail]

Editor: Karyn White

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Prologue

The Forest

The City

The Garden

About the Author

About the Editor

Prologue

Once upon the time, in an age of the world quite unlike our own, a little wood-elf met a great wizard.

That they met is already a wonder, because their lives were very different, as was their magic. A wood-elf cannot thrive in the stone towers of the walled cities of men, and the wizard did not care much for the whispering wilderness of the forest.

And yet, there was inside the elf's green soul an empty place of the exact same shape as the wizard's wry smile.

There was a long-lost song in the spiral of her ear that sang only for him, like the bramble rose, that deep in the tangled thorns of a forgotten garden, blooms only for the gold-ringed eyes of the blackbird.

In truth, he was her love and her destiny, and she had always ached for him, although she did not know it until the day she met him.

And this is the story of how they came to love each other.

The Forest

It was a green and gold afternoon in the heart of the Sandoval forest, just after mid-summer, in the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Eliza, the Maiden Queen, when Dusk, walking softly and silent as a marten in the woodland shadows, picked up the trail of a party of men travelling light and fast on horseback.

Dusk was, like all of her rare kind, averse to human company as a rule, but she always made sure to watch closely the men who happened to pass through her woods. She had the knack of perching quite unseen on branches that overhung the paths of the forest, or standing, perfectly invisible, against the moss-grown, shady side of gnarled old trees just beside the road. Mostly, she watched that they didn’t do too much damage. Men are the bane of any wild creature, whether it be plant, bird, or four-legged beast.

But also she watched because, for all her dislike of men’s noisiness and clumsiness, she was curious of their ways. Men had horses, which she loved, although they could not live in the heart of the forest. They belonged in the grassy plains, where she did not go. Men had fire, which she feared, although it was pretty to look at, especially on cold winter nights, when the red glow shone through the barren branches of the sleeping forest like a flickering red star. She was glad to spy it from afar when they burnt dead wood, but if they dared cutting any living tree of hers, she was sure to send the pungent smoke in their faces, even if they sat upwind of the campfire. Elves can do that without difficulty, because they can govern the forest breezes as easily as you can stop a draft in your living room by closing a window or a door.

Some men were more beautiful than others, of course, and some seemed gentle enough, so that Dusk wished they could be friends sometimes, but in her experience all men were shuffling, awkward, blind, heavy, slow, dull creatures on the whole, and she could lead them round the woods in circles until they lost all sense of time and direction, if she wished. Elves will do that for sport sometimes, but Dusk was not a cruel creature, and if ever she led a man astray it was for protecting the secret heart of the forest.

And the forest needed protecting. The croplands of men ate a bit of it every winter, and the Royal Dockyards, of which Dusk knew nothing, were insatiable. Oak and pine, ash and locust, elm and fir, they all fell one by one to the heavy axes of men, and were dragged away towards the plains, never to be seen again.

Very few elves lived in this part of the world anymore. Men came and went all the time almost undisturbed, following their own roads and paths. But she didn’t like when they strayed among the hills, where the older oaks were, and that was exactly what this company of men was doing. So after following them until darkness fell, she overtook them along the trail, quick and quiet as only a light-footed elf could be, and as the men searched for a way under the whispering trees, she placed herself square