The Liar's Tales: Five Stories from the Lore of the Neverwoods Saga: Neverwoods

By K.D. Ritchie

What if you dared to seek everything you ever wanted?

Five stories intertwine in a land thick with perilous secrets, hidden magic, and mysteries that shall be unraveled.

Travelers must cross the forbidden woods but step into a world even more forbidden. A clever orphan faces death unless she uses her wits and dodges fate. Lazy Tomlin either obeys a witch's demands or receives a horrid curse.  One sister can risk her life on the deadly sea or lose a coveted treasure. And a child vows to catch a swift-footed man who if found in time, will change his life forever.

Some will succeed. Others will fail. But none of them will return to the world they once knew.

The Liar's Tales is a fantasy short-story collection. Read it today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: K.D. Ritchie
• Release date: Mar 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386562504

Book preview

Table of Contents

The Liar’s Tales

Copyright

From K.D. Ritchie

Foreward

Map of Amberjack

K.D. Ritchie’s Mailing List

Picky the Orphan and the Deadly Raven

The Unlucky Traveler’s Luck

The Swift Story of Swiftfoot

Lazy Tomlin and the Hut with Three Legs

The Hidden Treasure of the Lonely Sea

K.D. Ritchie’s Mailing List

About the Author

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Picky the Orphan and the Deadly Raven

When times were tougher and orphans ordinary as porridge, a young girl stumbled into the furthest town north in Amberjack, like a tumble weed. Between the flues of last winter and lost ships on the Lonely Sea, the once prosperous townsfolk clung onto the familiar: sons, daughters, grandparents, uncles, cousins, and even strangers with distant blood-ties all surfaced in need of beds, meals, and work. The once welcoming dispositions of Porttown went dry as day-old bread, and it was the worst time in history to ever be a nameless orphan of nobody-knows-who.

But stumbling out of the Neverwoods, which thankfully no one witnessed, a young girl set about rummaging every skill she’d learned to survive. One got her a name: Picky. But not from an unwillingness to eat certain foods, because within hours on the streets she’d taken to diving in garbage cans and tugging dress hems for scraps. But the day people remembered her name was a morning, gloomy as ever and ordinary as rain.

Picky’s luck waned like a bad moon when she woke from the first winter night in the alleyway. Not any alley, but one between two tall buildings that kept out most of the cold, some of the wind, and none of the rain. It faced a library she’d never dared step into, but whose chimney warmth she swore went every direction, including her own. Yet for the first time, it hadn’t budged away enough of the coldness in her fingertips. Had she owned a pair of gloves to warm her hands, maybe her grip wouldn’t have slipped on the bread loaf.

And the Baker wouldn’t have caught her.

At least, that’s what Picky went on to think ensnared like a hare with a wire around its limb. But unbeknownst to Picky, even rising from a Queen’s four-post bed that day wouldn’t have done a scrap of good. Because the Baker had noticed something arwy for a long time. So, when the Baker lurched his wrist out like a frog catching a fly, they both locked eyes the way every prey does when caught by something much larger.

Some passerby’s gasped at the scene, and one woman with a baby at her hip veered away at the roughness of it all. But none of them knew that the Baker had begun to question himself in ways that made him very uncomfortable. Questions that if left unanswered might have driven him to a dark place, like the back of a cupboard where you find rotten potatoes.

For twenty years or so, the Baker sold two dozen loaves is what he sold each day, along with the five baguettes, dozen rolls, ten pretzels, and usually a pastry or two depending on the sweet tooth of the Mayor. But for one month, a loaf of bread was always missing. The man had a way with numbers, so when the bread went missing every week at the market it bothered the Baker worse than a splinter in your thumb.

You’re the one that’s been taking it! the Baker said, and his eyes bulged.

I’m sorry, Picky yelped and found a dozen faces all staring in her direction.

The Baker let go of her wrist with a fleck of his meaty fingers, go on, take it. But steal from me again, girl, and you’ll be sailed out to who knows where on the Lonely Sea.

Regretfully, had Picky asked for bread or inquired about an apprenticeship the baker was scouting for, only good things would have risen for Picky. But in that spectacle in the middle of the market under the watchful eyes of the Porttown locals, Picky went from an unfortunate to an urchin. Thieves got a level of empathy drier than a desert well. Thankfully, she did not know of the Baker’s ties to his pirate father or she might have dropped the bread rushing back towards her hovel in the alleyway. Once there, she held onto her food until all its dry, warmth seeped out amid the sogginess of everything else, and Picky wondered if it would be the last thing she’d ever eat.

But a flapping noise cut the stillness. A caw murmured out, long and rattling. Goosebumps crept up along her arms. Her gaze went towards the corner from where the sound came, over near the brick wall where nothing but a weathered poster hung limp. Yet there amid the scraps of wood and streaks of chimney soot was a figure. Blue-black and feathered, a raven watched with a pair of beady eyes, its head cocked as