Drowned Country

By Emily Tesh

From Astounding Award Winner and Crawford Award Finalist Emily Tesh

A Buzzfeed Summer 2020 Must-Read
A Book Riot Must-Read Fantasy of 2020

The conclusion to the World Fantasy Award-winning Greenhollow Duology

Drowned Country is the stunning sequel to Silver in the Wood, Emily Tesh's lush, folkloric debut. This second volume of the Greenhollow duology once again invites readers to lose themselves in the story of Henry and Tobias, and the magic of a myth they’ve always known.

Even the Wild Man of Greenhollow can’t ignore a summons from his mother, when that mother is the indomitable Adela Silver, practical folklorist. Henry Silver does not relish what he’ll find in the grimy seaside town of Rothport, where once the ancient wood extended before it was drowned beneath the sea—a missing girl, a monster on the loose, or, worst of all, Tobias Finch, who loves him.

Praise for Silver in the Wood

"Exquisitely crafted. . . . This fresh, evocative short novel heralds a welcome new voice in fantasy."—Publishers Weekly

"Find a quiet place in a nearby wood, listen to the trees whisper, and thank the old gods and new for this beautiful little book, of which I intend to get lost in again and again."—Book Riot

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Aug 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250756596

Emily Tesh

EMILY TESH, winner of the Astounding Award and a Crawford Award finalist, is the author of the World Fantasy Award-winning Greenhollow Duology, which begins with the novella Silver in the Wood and concludes with Drowned Country. Some Desperate Glory is her first novel.

Book preview

I: The Demon of Rothling Abbey

THORNGROVES SHROUDED GREENHOLLOW HALL. Blackthorn and hawthorn, holly and briar, carpets of stinging nettles in case anyone missed the point. Adders moved in that dark tangle. Crawling, stinging things skittered along branches. Silver had a good line in alarming spiders going.

Thin branches pressed up against the library windows, tapping and tapping as if asking permission to come in. No sunbeam had managed to penetrate in months.

On a Tuesday afternoon in April, a shudder of recognition went through the whole mess. Silver was lying on the dusty floor of the mediaeval great hall, staring at the vaulted ceiling, contemplating making it sprout. Everything sprouted if he wanted it to. There was a healthy crab apple demolishing its way through the ceiling and floor of what had once been a whitewashed ground-floor bedroom in the east wing. Crooked branches laden with white blossom and sour fruit together thrust from broken windowpanes. The tree had been in both blossom and fruit for months and it was not happy. Silver was not happy either. Sometimes he went and sat in there and felt sorry for himself.

Other places Silver felt sorry for himself: his study, which as all the servants had left months ago was a mess; his library, which was hardly better; his bedroom, where mistletoe hung from the bedposts like midwinter baubles; and of course the floor of the great hall, where the cold of the ancient stones seeped into his back and the moss was spreading lusciously along the cracks between them. He sat up when he felt the shuddering demand go through the Wood. His outline remained on the stones where he had lain sketched in yellow-white lichen. There were several similar man-shapes scattered around the empty room.

Behold my ghosts, said Silver out loud. He was in the habit of talking to himself now. He had tried maintaining a dignified silence for a while, and discovered that dignity counted for very little without an audience. These days he chattered, muttered, sang, read aloud when he bothered to read. He read much less than he used to.

The tangle of Greenhollow shuddered again. Silver imagined himself a spider in the web, feeling the threads tremble. What, he said crossly, what is it?

Nothing.

What?

Something moved in the corner of his vision. He turned his head and glared at the shadows. The thorn-dryad Bramble gathered herself out of the nothingness and stepped into the room.

She hadn’t been able to do that until the roof started crumbling. The fact that she could do it now was the one thing that might make Silver consider attempting to repair the roof.

Get out, he said.

She fixed her sungold gaze on him. Silver refused to feel embarrassed about the fact that he was wearing the ragged remains of what had been one of his better shirts, and no socks or shoes. He had once prided himself on being well turned out. He wriggled his toes against the flagstones. A man shouldn’t have to wear shoes in his own house if he didn’t want to.

But this is not a house, said the dryad, so he’d said that aloud.

"Get out."

Instead the dryad paced closer. She walked in long springing steps that cracked the stones beneath her feet. Little gasping patches of holly sprang up where her toes pressed down into the dust of the ancient flags, two or three leaves and a spray of berries each time. It looked as though the bodies lined in lichen had started bleeding. Silver did not flinch away from her. She was a powerful and dangerous and strange creature, one of the mysteries of the Hallow Wood, unique even among her tree-sisters, but she did not frighten him. Nothing very much frightened him. Was he not the Lord of the Wood, nearer demigod than mortal man, master of time and seasons, beasts and birds, earth and sky?

Your mother is here, said Bramble.

Silver froze.

After a long silence he managed, Make her go away.

Bramble folded her arms. The human gesture did not suit her stiff shape, yet it struck Silver with a startling, painful familiarity. He knew just where she had learned that pose, and that frown, and that air of patient, half-amused disapproval. She showed no sign whatsoever of being in a rush to remove Adela Silver from the premises.

Silver scowled at her. He reached out to the wood himself, but the threads of its power slipped away from him. Rather than additional curtains of thorns springing up around the boundaries of Greenhollow Hall, the ones that were already there started to recede. The dryad was extraordinarily strong, and her relationship with the wood was peculiar; even a man with more than a couple of years’ half-hearted experience making use of the power of the Hallow Wood might have struggled to match her. Silver gave up quickly. As the wall of thorn bushes gave way before the interloper, he felt a light tread in the soil, the swish of a severe skirt in the dew.

This was embarrassing. Silver was the lord of his own wood. He was the owner of his own house. And he was a grown man of twenty-five years. There was no reason his own mother should strike him with as much terror as if he were a naughty schoolboy caught scrumping.

Oh, very well, he said, trying to pretend it had been his own idea all along. Good of you to let me know, Bramble. Run along now.

The dryad stared at him a moment longer. She tipped her head very slightly to one side.

A wave of rot-scent rolled across the great hall as toadstools erupted through the flagstones and shelves of fungus spread themselves across the walls. The lichen-men vanished under the onslaught. Overhead the vaults of the ceiling erupted into greenery, and shafts of light pierced through as the roof finally, decisively, collapsed.

Silver put his hands over his head. It took a while for the rumbling echoes of falling masonry to die away.

Bramble smirked at him, showing pointed brown teeth, and disappeared.

Silver groaned.

I paid a substantial sum of money for this place, I’ll have you know! he called out. He very much doubted the dryad even knew what money was, and it wasn’t as if he could sell Greenhollow anyway. But still. He looked around in some despair. He was twenty-five years old, he still had some good clothes somewhere, probably, and he was the native demigod of an ancient forest kingdom; but just then he felt altogether defeated by rubble, by toadstools, and by the fact that Mrs Silver was certain to do no more than sniff faintly at the whole.

Moisture dripped from the walls and highlighted the subtle brown striations of the shelf fungus.

Silver contemplated reaching out to the Hallow Wood and attempting to turn his shattered home into a slightly more aesthetically pleasing ruin, or at any rate something he could pretend he had done on purpose, but he had never been able to lie to his mother anyway. Let her sniff. At least this way she could not invite herself to stay.

* * *

Silver met his mother on the steps of the Hall. He had run to his bedroom and thrown on a less horrific shirt, a countryman’s tweed jacket which did not fit him because it was not his, and some socks and shoes.

Mother! he said in his most charming tone of voice as she approached. What a delightful surprise! I . . . He had to stop and swallow hard as he got a good look at her. I hope the journey was not too uncomfortable . . . ? he managed.

Mrs Silver paused. She looked him up and down. Henry, she said.

No one used Silver’s given name. He tried to stand up straighter in the shapeless tweed jacket, and to give her the same treatment in return. She was wearing her second-best dark grey dress, which she often wore for travelling. She had retrimmed the wrists with a new lavender ribbon. Her black-caped lady’s coat was adorned at her shoulder with a heavy silver brooch. Her hat was dove-grey with lavender trim. The effect was sombre in the extreme. Silver had never dared to ask her if she was really still mourning his father or if she just found the sober attire of the widow convenient for her purposes. Hunting monsters could be a messy business. Bloodstains hardly showed on black.

Her left hand rested on a cane. Silver had watched her walk up the well-paved drive with it, the strong stride he remembered replaced with a firm step, a halt, a decisive tap, and a second, more careful step. The cane itself was dark, elegant wood—not native, Silver noticed automatically, as he often did now—and tipped with silver. Silver wrenched his gaze away from it and back to Mrs Silver’s

Reviews for Drowned Country

[brittaniethekid · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book starts a few years after the first one, and after some crucial developments that the reader isn't privy to until the latter part of the book. I found this frustrating because Silver constantly worried about this unknown event without just stating what happened throughout the story and the two main characters (Silver and Tobias) are at odds because of it. It turned out something pretty insignificant and petty imo so the build up didn't make it less frustrating. Also, half of the book is on a linear timeline but then suddenly we're jumping from two years before and back to the present. When I saw the "2 Years Ago" header I was like FINALLY we'll find out what happened between them... but nope, still not for another couple chapters.
I do like this world Tesh has imagined and we see a lot more of it, though the rules she seemed to have set out for the Greenman in the first book are completely broken/remade for it so it.
Overall, an interesting sequel with a lot more action and detail but I would like a more linear plot.

[fiverivers_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Emily Tesh's World Fantasy Award-winning Greenhollow Duology, which begins with Silver in the Wood, is a gorgeously told novella which digs deep into legends of the fae. Her writing is reminiscent of both Guy Gavriel Kay and Robert Holdstock, and I very much found myself hearing echoes of Holdstock's Mythago Wood series.This is a beautifully told tale of transformation and love, of good and evil, of the commonplace colliding with the fantastic, all set in the myth-inspiring landscape of England's small villages and the manors which oversee them.My only criticism, which in fact is a testament to Tesh's ability to create an absorbing tale, is that I wanted more. The world she builds, the characters with which she populates that world, and the emotional adventure which ensues are all highly addictive and utterly absorbing.While this is not high literature, and hence the reason for three rather than four or five stars, this is most definitely great escapist literature of the highest calibre. Go read it.

[sandyamcpherson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lacked the vibrancy and mythological atmosphere of Silver in the Wood. The prose seemed to drag out every detail and the cohesion between all the players was superficial; perhaps I just didn't like how Tobias was portrayed in this sequel.

[krau0098 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Series Info/Source: This is the second book in the Greenhollow Duology. I bought a copy of this book for my Kindle.Story (5/5): I loved this story. It is just so magical and does an amazing job of blending what feels like traditional quiet woods magic with the more modern day paranormal aspect of monsters and strange creatures. This story follows Henry most of the book but also focuses on a young woman that Henry, his mother, and Tobias are tasked with finding. There are a lot of fae elements this time around, along with vampires, and tree magic. I absolutely loved how Henry’s tree magic spans ancient forests that have been and could be.Characters (5/5): There are not a ton of characters in this book but the ones that are here are amazing and really help make the story. While Tobias was a solid and calming presence in the last book, this book focuses on Henry. Henry is much more conflicted and selfish and does a lot of growing throughout this book. We also spend a lot more time with Henry’s mother, who is having to accept the limitation of her age and the fact that she is starting to need more help during her monster hunting missions. A new addition to the story, the girl our monster hunters are tasked with saving, was just as amazing.Setting (5/5): I loved so many aspects of the setting here. The quiet, yet wild, woods are beautiful and absolutely come alive for the reader. Then we journey to a quant seaside town that is just as amazing. From there we venture into fairyland and a sad landscape of desolation. All the while the woods underlay these lands because in the beginning they were much bigger than they are now. It was magical and enchanting and absolutely engrossing.Writing Style (5/5): Tesh is an amazing writer and I absolutely love her writing style. It is lyrical and engaging and pulls me completely into another world. So many story elements are blended together in such a seamless way. This is a story that is hard to put down and engaging, but also leaves you feeling strangely peaceful and happy at the conclusion. This is pretty much the art of excellent storytelling at its best.My Summary (5/5): Overall I loved this book and this duology as a whole. I cannot wait to see what Tesh writes next. I am so excited to have found these books and this author. Tesh does fantasy in a way that seamlessly blends old and new story tropes and does it in a beautiful and engaging way. Every aspect of this story is perfect and I can’t wait to read more!

[fred_mouse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is probably as strong a book as the first, but I did not like it as much. Partly this is because some of the artistic decisions made by the author about how to string the non-linear narrative together threw me straight back out of the story, but also because the protagonist is much less interesting in this book, being persistently mopey in a way that strained my credulity. The books starts with strong suggestions that the romance that ends the first book has ended badly, some time ago. It isn't clear what has gone wrong, and I felt a lot like I'd forgotten/misunderstood the ending of the previous book (this is part of my issues with the non-linearity). There is one new main character introduced, and she is a fascinating individual. Concerning, and her story arc very much veers towards the fae-as-horror side of things, but she is oh, so practical, and I love her. I was very impressed that at the end of the book all the threads had been gathered together and tidied up in a satisfying (if potentially open-ended) manner. And that some of my remaining questions from book 1 had been answered as well.

[macha_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

still good, but this wasn't as good as Silver in the Wood. problems with the narrator, who for most of the book was being a little shit at length. also, the background detail wasn't as strong nor was the writing as lyrical.

[quondame · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Silver doesn't seem to have done well as replacement for Tobias, and he is pulled from his downward spiral to join his mother and Tobias in rescuing a young woman from and old vampire - only to find himself on a rather different tack. A bit too handy to be nearly as mythic as the previous book.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this sequel to the first novella, Silver and Tobias have split up; Tobias is with Silver’s mother, until she comes to get him to investigate what they think is a vampire who’s taken a young woman. It turns out to be a bit more complicated, and they have to deal with the attractions of Fairyland while figuring out how to navigate Silver’s new immortality and Tobias’s new mortality. It’s nicely done.

[villemezbrown · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Having made a decent enough book the first time around, why not just reset and basically do the same thing again, this time from the perspective of the least interesting character from the first book? Oh, and let's sideline the most dynamic character from the first book but replace her with what is basically a younger clone?Between books, Tobias Finch and Henry Silver have become estranged, but must come together again when a young person goes missing, possibly because of a vampire. Silver is an even mopier narrator than Finch was in the first book as he struggles with the burden of being the servant of the forest and smitten with someone who seems unreachable.The prose is irritating and slow, the plot is predictable, and the whole thing is much to much lacking in Adela Silver.

[verkruissen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Drowned Country is the sequel to Silver In the Wood, a beautiful folklorist story about a man in love with the lore of fairy tales and how they are more real than he imagined. Drowned Country was a good follow up to the first book, which I did enjoy more. In this story, Silver joins his mother and Tobias on a mission to save a young girl from a 900 year old vampire. Silver begins to see the girl like a sister who has similar thoughts and ideas about the world around them and tells them that she is going to Fairyland. Silver immediately sees this as the next adventure in his supposedly immortal life he will be leading. This book was good, I felt it jumped around a bit more so it wasn't quite as cohesive as Silver in the Wood but it was still enjoyable.