A Tale of Ghosts and Woodlands

By George Vaughan

The Aurochs... the Tarpan... the great Wolves and Bears... could the great beasts of yore be back from the dead?

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Vaughan
• Release date: Apr 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463036334

George Vaughan

George Vaughan is a lover of all things creative from Tasmania, Australia, who has been writing stories for the last fifteen years. His books will be especially enjoyable for fans of Marcus Sedgewick, Lauren Kate and Laini Taylor.First published in 2013 with Out There On Bruny, a story serialised in a local newspaper, George's first actual book, Through Unseeing Eyes, arrived in 2016 to raise money for the conservation of local birdlife.He loves trying all genres and styles, but especially loves it when people have fun reading the end result!

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A TALE OF GHOSTS AND WOODLANDS

George Vaughan

Copyright 2020 by George Vaughan

Distributed by Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

Thank you for downloading this eBook. This book may not be redistributed for commercial or noncommercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favourite retailer. Thank you for your support.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents either are a product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by George Vaughan using templates and photos from Postermywall.

Cows that weren’t cattle… horses that weren’t steeds… the swards where the waterbirds wheeled away in clattering squalls, and the dogs the size of bears screamed at bears the size of carts…

And the boyish girl with feather-short hair still ached dully from the hooves that’d smashed her forehead.

Wait, what?

Hooves… creatures… monsters, even…

It hadn’t been a dream?

No wonder Katya woke up screaming, bucking, covering her face with her arms to protect her from… like… sheets? Gorgeous, salmon-pink sheets? Were those swans embroidered on them? And what kind of a primeval fairy tale monster had the enormous skull on the wall once belonged to?

Err…

The two very different halves of the girls’ life were squaring off for a pretty epic duel here. On one side, pragmatic in propriety, sharp of tongue and wit, there was Katarina Karouchenko, maid for hire; Head Maid now, actually, which was pretty cool. On the other side stood plain old Katya the daydreamer, a field-wanderer in summer or fire-side barnacle in winter, clutching at least three big old binders of folk tales she’d collected and translated all by herself…

Katya the daydreamer resoundingly won out today, because this was basically a fairy-castle without any fairies… which was probably just as well, seeing how fairies were actually pretty mean, if you knew all the old stories! No monstrous fairies here… that was definitely a plus! She was always urging the Maids along with that one, when their master’s eccentricities were getting a bit too much; like, it could be worse! Shrug. The monstrous fairies could be locking their still-beating hearts in thorn-prisons, so life wasn’t so bad!

Monstrous things like that…

Today, unless she really had been daydreaming, Katya Karouchenko had seen monsters.

The bandage wound tight around her head was proof enough. These memories of stumbling across that sward straight from out of other times, from epochs away… apparently, they’d actually happened! Which would actually be pretty awesome, even very awesome, if not for getting that concussion and so many unanswered questions…

‘What. In the actual. Heck?’

And where was she now, anyway? Like, where in the manor was this room? Even she, as Head Maid, had never seen this place!

She ran her hand across the little embroidery-knobbles of the nearest swan