Woodhaven

By M.R. Kuhn

Simon Westerby stood on the balcony looking out over the city as he pondered what his next step was going to be. He had been rejected by the council to be governor of the Emali province. He would not accept that. The council overrode his right as ruler and he would not stand for it. He called for several rangers to go out into town and tell the people there would be a town meeting in the city square the day after tomorrow and everyone was expected be there. He dispatched them right away and they left promptly. Simon left the balcony and went back to his study in the city center building. The building is where the governor of Emali stayed and governed the province.
Simon knew he had several things to do. He was mad at the council for overriding his right to be ruler and something needed to be done about it. But what, he thought, what could be done? I need to get most of the people on my side first. The speech in two days will be written for that purpose.
A ranger by the name of Timons came into the room to talk to Simon. “Timons, you are my right hand man correct? I can trust you with anything correct?” Timons nodded and said “Yes, sir!”
“I am going to write a speech and give it at the town meeting in a few days. I want you to find Jorde and have him come here. I want to talk to him about doing a few things. I am going to have him take care of the counsel, and get them to say publicly that I am the governor of Emali. I want you by my side. There could be big rewards in it for you if you stick by me. I trust very few people, but I trust you. Thank you, that will be all.” Simon sat down to write his speech, when he was done, he got up and walked back and forth thinking about the speech making certain modifications to it here and there. Simon sat down. A plan is coming together, I think I can make it work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.R. Kuhn
• Release date: May 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310258862

M.R. Kuhn

Growing up all over the United States, all in the northern states have given me a great knowledge of different climates. I grew up traveling all over the U.S. also Canada and Mexico.Right before I turned nineteen I joined the Navy. I was stationed in Japan and traveled all over the Asia and the Middle East. Once I was discharged from the Navy, I returned home and and had a few odds and end jobs here and there.Five years after returning home from the Navy, I met what was at the time, my greatest challenge ever, Marriage. Turns out now it was really not a challenge, but one of the easiest decisions I made. Little did I know at the time, that my greatest but most rewarding challenge was to come ten years later. Ten years after I was married, our first child was born. I thought being married was a life changing, but having a child is, a hundred times more.A month before my son was born, I quit my job. It was decided I would become a SAHD (Stay at Home Dad). This provided me with many opportunities to do a few things I have wanted to do. Six months after my son was born I enrolled in college. A few years later, I received my degree in Parks and Recreational Management. To this day, I am a stay at home dad to a my two kids.All my life I have been a outdoor person. I love camping, hiking, canoeing and whatever else I can do outdoors. I am big on environmental education and making people aware of the impacts of our decisions on the environment. I am not a Tree Hugger by any means, but I do believe that we do not need to uselessly waste our resources and we need to cut back on what we use.You will see, in my books, my love for the outdoors, different environments, cultures, and many things that I have experienced. I have also incorporated many things I have an interest in, Celtic gods, Dryads, and science.Thank-you for purchasing my book. I am sure there is a character in the books that everyone can relate too, or maybe you can relate to multiple different characters in the books. I encourage you to read the books and tell me what you think.Please visit my website atwww.mrkuhn.net

Book preview

Fire! Fire! Get out! Get out!

One man yelled as he ran around grabbing a bucket from the well. Several people came out of their homes and places of business and grabbed some wooden buckets and started pouring them on the ground around the houses that were burning. They could not provide water fast enough to put out the extremely hot fire, but they could make the ground wet around the homes that were burning to stop the fire from spreading. Everyone did not notice the fire until it was too late. The place that was burning was a blacksmith shop and everyone was used to seeing smoke coming from it. They kept pouring water in a circle around the houses until they could tell that it was not going to spread to more houses.

******

The Evenshaw Basin was flat with tall grass and smaller trees called Dragon Bush. The trees had long thorns on them and the leaves turned bright red in the fall, reaching up seven to eight feet high with about the same width. In certain locations around the Basin, the trees grew more and in other locations the grasses grew more. Around the Basin the mountain ranges extended above the clouds.

Kaylin Borlynn had been to the base of the mountains in all directions, but only to the side that faced into the Evenshaw Basin. Her job was to escort people and merchants to the other side of the Basin and to different locations without being harmed by the raiders and bandits. There were four roads going in and out of the Basin, which led to four different kingdoms on each side. East and west roads lead from the kingdom of Woodhaven to the Kingdom of Oldenberg. The north and south roads go to the Kingdom of Eile and the Kingdom of Phetserath. This was the fastest way to get from kingdom to kingdom. The Basin roads were straight and flat, people and wagons could move fast from one side to the other. It was possible to go around but it would take months longer. The roads are very narrow, winding, and unmaintained. There were always the hazards of wildlife and bandits with little to no protection except whatever weapons travelers carried with them. In the Basin, four wagons could travel side by side on the roads. But Kaylin had been told that in the mountains it was lucky if one wagon got through. She had heard many, many stories about life on the other side of the mountains and in the different kingdoms. Kaylin had grown up hearing stories her dad told her about life in the Kingdom of Woodhaven. About how big the trees are and the wildlife. How people there always lived with nature and how people respected it. Sometimes when she slept, she would dream about going there. She had really never sat down and talked about the other kingdoms with other people. She had heard stories, though. The Kingdom of Eile was where the people who could use magic lived. The magic was strong there for some reason, but she did not know why.

Kaylin was content living the life she did even though she did long to get out and explore other areas outside the Basin. The first place she would like to go was Woodhaven because of all the stories she had heard from her father. She had never seen the huge trees he told stories about or the forests. She loved being with her dad and hearing the stories he told. But the years of working as a blacksmith had taken a toll on her father's body and he did not work as fast as he used to. The quality of his work was the best in the Basin and better than many of the kingdoms according to what people have said to him. With working a little slower Kaylin had to help to provide some of the income. Which was why Kaylin took a job as an escort for people across the Basin. They were not rich, but between the two of them they made a pretty good living. She charged based on the value of the goods being carried from one kingdom to the other. Working in the escort business was fairly competitive, but word got around quickly if an escort was not good or a lot better than others. Kaylin tried to get the highest priced cargo she could to get the biggest payout from the people being escorted. Food and weapons pay out much less than escorting high-ranking officials. Kaylin did not get too many of them, mainly because people felt that since she was woman she was not as good as a man. This really pissed her off. So, for the most part, she took the highest paying jobs she could, mainly escorting weapons, precious metals, and when there was none of that whatever was left she would escort.

I was born here and grew up here. I see people of all different kinds coming through here. This is the main hub for all traffic between kingdoms. Right now I live with my father and support him for the most part. My father is a blacksmith, and I grew up learning how to do that also. At first, my father mainly fixed horseshoes and wagon wheels, but after a few years and people started asking him to fix their weapons and to be able to make swords, shields and other weapons that may have broken after a trip through the mountains to get to the basin. Being the daughter of a blacksmith, and learning the ways of the blacksmith, provided me with a lot of strength and flexibility in my body. At a very early age I learned to use the sword, and various other weapons. I practice with them and use them on a daily basis with the job I do. I do not necessarily like the job I do, but I also do not hate it either. I do what has to be done to support my family. I do long to get out of the Basin and explore, though. I picture myself sitting under a huge oak or aspen tree with the squirrels running around picking up nuts or some other kind of ground forage. Then scampering back up the tree. I look around and see a deer with its baby run away when it heard me move.

OK Kaylin, time to snap out of it. It was evening, the sun was starting to settle in the west. It always got dark early living in the Basin because the sun would go down behind the mountains. Kaylin was starting to doze off as her horse, Tieri, slowly moved along the road leading back to the village. She opened her drooping eyelids and in the orange and red sunset and saw a cloud of smoke on the horizon. She was only an hour from home, and pushing Tieri hard during the day, so she would not arrive home in the middle of the night. Kaylin saw that the smoke was coming from the direction of the village. She kicked the side of her horse and brought him up to a fast trot. She was about a half hour away when she started to smell the smoke and as she got closer, it was getting harder and harder to breathe. She started to cough a little and her eyes were starting to burn. As she approached her house, she saw that it was her house on fire along with a few neighboring buildings. She pulled her tunic over her mouth and ran into the burning building. Fortunately, the house and the blacksmith shop were made of large trees so it took a long time to burn through and weaken. She ran in and found her father laying on the ground on the edge of consciousness. She grabbed under his arms and started to drag him out of the house. He yelled in pain as she was dragging him, as he was yelling he was coughing badly because of the smoke, making it even harder for Kaylin to drag him out. She managed to drag him to an area of the house that the fire had not spread to yet and put him down on the ground. Then she went and knelt down next to him and put her hand on both sides of his face.

Father, Father, I am here, listen to my voice!

Her father was fading in and out of consciousness and Kaylin lightly slapped the sides of his face to wake him up. Finally he started to wake up, recognizing the voice.

Kaylin, is that you? You are here?

Yes, yes I am here

Listen to me closely, my time has come and it is time for me to go, but you must listen to me. I just lived a part of my life in Woodhaven. The Rangers took me in when I was twelve years old. I ran away from where I was originally born and spent the first twelve-- Kaylin's father started coughing frantically from all the smoke he breathed in. --years, they are bad people with big plans. I did not agree with them that is why I left-- He coughed a little more.

Hang on Father, I am going to get you out of here.

No, leave me, I am done for. You must find them, stop their plans. Everyone who lives in Exalon is in trouble if they succeed.

Where do I find them? What kingdom are they in?

They are not in a Kingdom, they live--

Her father's eyes started to roll back in his head, he started to half gag and half cough and then his head tilted to the side.

Kaylin looked at her father, his head on her lap, as she held him. He was gone. Her eyes started tear up and she put her forehead against his and cried. After a few minutes, she started to smell the smoke coming into the area. She grabbed her father under the arms again and started to pull him out again. She made it outside as the roof over the blacksmith shop fell in, pulling with it other parts of the roof of the house. This just fed the fire a little more. There was nothing they could do about the fire. It was burning big and hot, there was nowhere to get water from besides a small well nearby. That would not be enough to make any difference. Kaylin lay down on the bedroll, thought about how exhausted her mind and body felt, she also thought about what to do. She had just buried her father, who was the world to her, next to her mother who died six years ago of a severe illness. Now she had no family and a burnt out shell of a home. These were her last thoughts as she drifted off to sleep.

Kaylin woke up coughing. She had this same dream the last four nights since returning home. Everything she had built up over her last twenty-two years of life had gone up in smoke, except what she carried on her horse. Tears started to form in Kaylin's eyes as she sat on her bedroll inside the tent. Confused as to what she was going to do, angry because everything she had ever known was gone.

Kaylin slowly got up, tucked her wavy brown hair behind her ears, rolled up her bedroll, and took down her tent that was set up next to her burnt out house. She packed up the few things and put them onto the horse. She went back into the house one last time to check for anything that might have survived before she would leave the home she grew up in for good. She stood in the center of the house and looked around. The house was half stone and half wood. Her father spent several years building this house himself, bringing stones from different locations around the Basin to build the four-foot high stone walls at the bottom of the house. He traveled to the Kingdom of Woodhaven to get the logs to build the upper portion of the house and roof. All that stood now was the stones at the bottom of the house. The tears formed in her eyes again as she looked around. As she leaned against one of the walls, the energy drained out of Kaylin. She sat on the ground in a ball, with her knees up and her forehead resting on her knees trying to recompose herself.

Kaylin, you need to get yourself together, she said to herself. Using some of the rocks in the wall she pulled herself up. As she stood up, a larger piece of rock fell out of the wall. She quickly jumped back a little bit to prevent the rock from landing on her foot then looked at the rock. The rock looked like it had been expertly cut in half, and one half had fallen out. She looked back to the hole in the wall and there was a little dust drifting in the air. Through the dust she could see that there was a hollow space in the wall. She moved her head over to look into the hollow space. In the morning sun, Kaylin could see that there was something in the bottom of the space in the wall. She reached in to grab it and pulled it out and laid it on the ground. It felt oily, was about three feet long and made a clanging sound. She slowly unwrapped it. Inside was a scabbard with a sword, and two daggers that had a double sheath with holes in it. The holes were from the moisture in the wall and the age, mold had eaten through. As she grabbed the handle of the sword to take it out, her hand instantly burned like she just stuck it into a fire. Her arm started to warm up and get hot also. She could not let go, it would not let her. After a minute or so she was able to let it go. Kaylin dropped the sword and looked at her hand. She was shocked by what she saw. Her right palm had been branded with three different characters she did not recognize. Kaylin bent down to inspect the sword again, and noticed that a few of the crystals in the hilt of the sword had changed colors. She gently put the back of her hand on the hilt of the sword to see if it was going to burn again, it did not. She very slowly started to pick up the sword there was no burn, it felt perfect. As if it was custom made for her. This sword was perfectly balanced, there were crystals across the cross piece of the sword. It was the most gorgeous sword she had ever seen. The steel was three inches wide with a blood groove down the middle on both sides. Inside the blood grove were characters she did not recognize. These were the same as the ones on her hand and the hilt of the sword. She had no idea what the characters were or what they were supposed to mean. The only thing she knew was that this was the most perfect sword she had ever seen in her life. Both of the knives matched the sword but were much smaller. They did not burn her hand when she picked them up. Since the sheath for both of the knives was gone, she used a sheath she had on her belt to hold one. The other knife she put in the saddle bag. Her old sword was put on the side of the horse and put the new at her side. She figured since she was leaving, she may as well take as much as she could. She mounted her horse and she set off to the west heading to the Kingdom of Woodhaven. Her father knew people there, so maybe she would be able to reestablish some connections.

Chapter 2

Halvaron

She traveled west for about four days. The Dragon Bush started to get a little thicker and turn orange, which meant that the peak of the summer was over and the weather would start getting colder. When the leaves were bright red, snow was about a month off. When the leaves were gone, travelers could be trapped and freeze to death. However, the Dragon Bush turning red or freezing to death here was a ways away yet. It rarely rained or snowed in the western side of the basin. Because of the mountains, most of the rain or snow was dropped on the other side before it got over the mountains. However, it did get very cold during the winter and was fairly cool during the summer because the basin was at a pretty high elevation. The eastern side of the basin received more rain and snow, and the plant life was larger and had larger diversity of plant and trees. There was also more wildlife than in the western part. Kaylin traveled until the sun started to go down and she stopped for the night. She did not bother setting up the tent since she would just be leaving first thing in the morning. Kaylin unrolled the bedroll under a large Dragon Bush, and took the horse down to a stream and filled her water skin for the next day. The horse ate some of the grasses in the area and Kaylin ate some dried chicken and a few carrots she packed. She did not want to start a fire, the grass was dry after the brunt of summer was over and the rains had not started yet. The dry grass and the dry Dragon Bush would be nothing but a giant tinderbox. She lay down on her bedroll and fell asleep for the night.

I was looking down on myself where I currently slept under the Dragon Bush, my horse to the left of me tied to a branch. The detail was amazing. I could see all the items I brought with me sitting next to my left side. The sky was just starting to light up in the east, meaning that the sun was just starting to rise. I looked back down at the ground, not by choice, it just happened. The ground was going by at an amazing speed.

A large squawk woke Kaylin from her sleep. The other dream of riding home and seeing the village on fire had not haunted her since she left. This dream was amazing. Her adrenaline was pumping. She rose from her bed roll to see a large falcon flying over head looking as if it was preparing to hunt. That was strange. Is it just an accident that I was seeing everything from above? Then I wake up to see a big falcon flying overhead, in the same direction I was going and also looking down on the same spot I was viewing it from? Kaylin thought to herself. She rolled up her bed and put it on the horse. She walked her horse to the stream for a drink, hopped on and started down the road.

Kaylin rode for two more days, until she was on the outskirts of the town of Halvaron. She passed by some farms, some with crops, some with livestock, some with a little of both. Halvaron was a smaller community but was fairly well off. It made a majority of its money selling food and wares to travelers passing through and looking to restock their food and supplies when they came into the Basin. The houses and inns were nice and well maintained.

As she rode into town, a few people waved and greeted her. Kaylin also saw a few people look at her and then look down at the sword she carried on her right hip. She had no idea what they might be thinking. She hoped they did not think she was some great warrior or something like that. She felt far from it. She could hold her own, but was not a great warrior. As she crossed through town, she saw many different merchants along the way. A baker waved to her and offered her some samples, a jeweler, a weapon smith, apothecary, and a blacksmith. Most of the other merchants were farmers selling their produce or meats on the street. She crossed through town mentally noting where the merchants were and proceeded to the inn. She gave her horse to the stable boy for the night, and walked into the inn. Upon entering, she noticed several people sitting at various shaped tables. Some were square, some were rectangle to accommodate the larger group of people, and some were round, placed in the corners of the room. A few of the tables were empty, but the ones that had people at them every person had a mug of mead. Off in the corner was a man sitting close to the door by himself looking Kaylin up and down and fixing his eyes on her sword. He wore a green and brown mottled cloak with his face was covered by a hood attached to the cloak. After he looked at her face, he noticed that she saw him staring at her. He turned away and proceeded to drink his mead and eat his food. Kaylin walked up to the counter and saw a woman who appeared to be the owner of the establishment. She was instructing staff where to go and what to do. The innkeeper was a little shorter than Kaylin and definitely a little more round. She had straight, darker brown hair with streaks of gray in it. It fell a little past the middle of her back and was tied with string every four to five inches. The innkeeper walked behind the counter to get another glass of mead for a customer. As she walked, the upper part of her body moved to the right with each step she took. Kaylin noticed she had a limp. One other thing she noticed is that even though she had a limp and was a little round, she could tell she could hold her own and would probably throw anyone out of the inn that tried to cause trouble. When she was done serving the mead to the customer, she went back telling her staff what needed to be done.

Hi, my name is Kaylin Borlynn. I am looking for a room for two nights with meals and a bath.

The owner did not look at Kaylin right away, as she was still instructing some staff on what needed to be done. Then she turned to Kaylin and said in a very pleasant tone, I am very sorry. I did not mean to ignore you, sometimes I can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

Kaylin just started laughing and said, It's no problem at all, I am the same way. My name is Kaylin Borlynn, I am looking for a room for two nights with meals and a bath.

The innkeeper looked at Kaylin in surprise, and asked if she was the daughter of Andahal Borlynn. Kaylin's head dropped and it was taking everything she had to hold back the tears.

Yes, she replied.

Why are you so sad, child, and why are you so far from home?

Nothing could come out of Kaylin's mouth. She could not get her mouth to work without completely going into a breakdown.

The innkeeper watched Kaylin for a moment, then said to a nearby girl, "Ceria, take

Reviews for Woodhaven

[Robert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. You can really feel what the charecters are feeling. The plot is well thought out and take a lot of twists and turns you would never expect. You just get sucked into this book. I could not put it down. I hope book two come out soon!!! I can't wait!!