Wildwood

By Thea Hayworth

All the wild places--forest and sea, mountain and plain--each have their own guardian to look after their lands and keep their humans safe. Among the greatest of these is the guardian of the vast Oakensea, but unlike his fellows, the forest lord hasn't been seen in generations, leaving his shrines deserted at the changing of the seasons. He's a ghost, and his villagers wait for the day he abandons them entirely, whether by falling to dark magic or dark creatures or by growing twisted, turning the immense forest into a sprawling, deadly tangletrack.

Sent by the king to replace a fallen ranger, Koster knows the forest's reputation. He's been inside a tangletrack when it turned, and he knows the dangers. But a chance meeting with a reveler at a Quarter Night's dance may change everything, for everyone in the Oakensea and for the Oakensea itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thea Hayworth
• Release date: Mar 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311206206

Thea Hayworth

Thea Hayworth lives surrounded by snakes, gadgetry and reference materials. She is also incurably addicted to pen names.

Book preview

Wildwood

Copyright 2013 by Thea Hayworth

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.

Wildwood was first published in slightly altered form in All Wrapped Up (Storm Moon Press) August 2013

*****

It was a long ride from the king’s seat in Eskermere to the wood-locked town of Orm. The wide trade roads through the lowlands and their far-flung net of lakes and rivers narrowed over mounting hills and were squeezed down to mere paths by the ocean of trees that lapped the edges of distant mountains. To the south and west of the king’s city, the woods were younger: islands of ash and maple, pine and fir, and to the east the lakes gave way to marshland and the endless plains beyond. In those provinces a man could travel a week in any direction and stop to pay his respects at a different kith-shrine every night. To the north lay only the Oakensea, vast and ancient, a great sprawling tract of oak and aspen and birch that an unwary traveler might lose himself in forever.

That the entire great forest had only a single kith-shrine should have made strangers a common sight at the Quarter dances, or so Koster would have thought. Instead he caused a minor sensation as he stepped from the shadows of the path through the wood, having followed the torches of the celebrants and Senn Arvidson’s laughing directions to the clearing at the shrine.

It wasn’t a large turnout for a Quarter dance, even taking into account the chill of a spring balance-day. All the same, Orm wasn’t a large town, far smaller than might be expected from the age and power of its guardian. Without visitors from the Oakensea’s other towns or travelers from beyond its wide bounds, perhaps the sparseness of the crowd wasn’t so surprising. He’d had a few of the dancers pointed out to him earlier that afternoon, but he’d been introduced to none; he’d ridden in late, had been collared almost immediately by his new captain and several other rangers, and had only escaped a more thorough rehashing of several weeks’ news by the arrival of dusk. He didn’t doubt that there’d be plenty of private celebrations that evening, but the gathering at the shrine should have been the best-attended, the dancers not nearly so predictable in their reasons for coming.

Welcome stranger, said the biggest man there―Rig the blacksmith, Senn had named him in passing―though he didn’t sound at all certain of the welcome he offered. Have you come to join the dancing?

Not to join them as kith. Interesting.

Koster smiled. Senn Arvidson showed me the way, he replied, neither agreeing nor denying. I’m just in from Eskermere to take Brenna’s place.

You’re the new ranger, then, Rig said, and suddenly there were smiles all around, the tense silence lifting all at once. Must’ve ridden like there were wights on your tail; we weren’t expecting you for another week.

I have a good horse, he explained with a shrug, pretending not to notice when one of the young men brightened instantly. That one had the look of a horseman dressed up in his holiday finest, but the girl on his arm gave him a quick poke in the ribs to rope his attention back, and with a sheepish smile, the boy closed his mouth on the questions lighting up his eyes.

He’d heard music as he threaded his way up the moonlit path, pipes enthusiastically but inexpertly played, a fiddle wielded with a thankfully more practiced hand. Someone else brought out a little drum as he approached the kith-shrine, and together the players struck up a lively tune, but Koster noticed the stares that followed him, covert but not unfriendly.

He didn’t blame them for their curiosity or their wariness; if they expected trouble, Koster certainly looked the part. He was a big man, tall and long of limb, with a face that was all angles and bird-black eyes to match the disordered thatch of his hair. Armed, unshaven, still in his dusty traveling leathers, he looked like a bandit chief intruding on a wedding in the midst of this festive crowd, of whom he was one of the oldest, though none of them were old.

That surprised him too, or it should have: that they were all young, unattached if he could judge by their bare left wrists, and afraid.

He’d been warned and he knew what to expect even as he approached the shrine, a moss-encrusted stump with a wide, wooden bowl cupped in its hollow, filled almost to the brim with golden liqueur. Honeysuckle wine, he decided as he sipped a palmful for politeness’ sake, straightening with an easy smile. No wonder they were nervous, why they couldn’t welcome him as kith. Not that he was a great frequenter of the Quarter dances, but he knew kith-mead, the gift of the guardians, when he tasted it...or when he didn’t.

So everything he’d been told was true. The forest lord of the Oakensea, one of the oldest guardians of them all, had abandoned his shrine―and his people.

He begged off the few shy offers of a dance from lad and lass alike, warned them off when they came at him with pipe and drum, and took the good-natured ribbing for each in stride. It was decidedly odd to see what should have been a renewal of kinship between village and forest turned into a simple country dance, but he tried not to let it show. A hundred years, his old captain had warned him while passing on his new orders; twice that, if he believed the rangers of Orm. Two hundred years without a strengthening of the bond between man and guardian, all the old ties withering and dying with nothing to replace them. The entire Oakensea should be one vast tangletrack overrun with wights and dark magic, its blight spreading outward like wildfire. How, by all the good spirits, was this village even still standing?

He slipped away from the shrine as the dancers began to disappear, some for only a little while, some gone long enough they might not be coming back at all. He could hear them under the fiddler’s unceasing song, but he didn’t think it was the weak mortal wine they’d drunk themselves to giddiness on that robbed their voices of some measure of joy. With no guardian to bless their dance or safeguard their pleasures, they were alone in the dark, easy prey. It was concern for them that first gave him the notion to stay.

It was the tall, shrouded figure he found watching from the darkness of the trees that absolutely decided him.

Good evening, he greeted the other man—and surely it was no a woman with that height, that breadth of shoulder, though Koster could see nothing under the shadows of the stranger’s hooded cloak. What kept his hands

Reviews for Wildwood

[Ariam · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It was incredible, fantastic worldbuilding once again - it seems that is to be expected from this author - and the story was lovely