Burningwood and Devilsbane

By Leanna Renee Hieber

An executioner and a healer are an unlikely alliance in a world newly waking to restored ancient magic, but their leadership in freeing enslaved children from magic-repressing mines in the land of Allforth is as inspiring as it is dangerous. Blackthorn’s executioner’s past comes back to haunt him as he is abducted by three Amethyne witches from the last of the three Allforth courts. Roseleigh the healer, still reeling from the passionate night with her executioner suitor, is startled when her new friend Will, a dream-world visitor to their realm, explains he was eyewitness to Blackthorn’s abduction. A playwright, Will knows that while these three ‘weird sisters’ will inspire his upcoming drama, he needs to help his new friends and volunteers his spectral presence as an emissary, to seek out Blackthorn’s whereabouts. Roseleigh and a party of colleagues set out to track Blackthorn down and along the way, the two are dreamstitched and psychically continue their passionate exchanges.

Blackthorn learns he’s being held captive by the Amethyne Court’s powerful but traumatized sorceress, who has been prophesied to rule over not just her own court, but all of Allforth as rot and decay spreads from years of unholy necromancy powering the mines full of imprisoned children alongside the working dead. She needs Blackthorn’s death-dealing spell to finally eliminate the royal family she’s been prohibited from harming by magical restraint. Blackthorn is well-aware that if he unleashes his death-magic in a land full of precarious countermeasures, the entire realm could be obliterated.

At the center of the moldering Amethyne citadel stands a tree, the last vestige of the ancient magics of the land. Blackthorn begins to concoct a plan utilizing some of Roseleigh’s healing light, magic transferred to him in their unfolding love affair. Roseleigh and her coterie draw near, advised on their path by Will the dreamer, pausing to help heal plague victims that have been sent to slow Roseleigh down and perhaps consume her light and energy with their own need.

An immense confrontation in the Amethyne citadel sees both Roseleigh and Blackthorn willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the land, knowing they’ve both been unwitting pawns in royal evils, but the great and ancient tree provides a way forward and offers the last of the elder faerie magics of the land to live anew in the duality of death and life; making Roseleigh and Blackthorn the faerie royals Will had prophesied. With a return to Blackthorn’s Silvervale court, they gently but firmly depose the sitting king and offer a new, egalitarian way forward to a more just world where magic should never have been taken from them in the first place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Publishing
• Release date: Sep 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781094416878

Leanna Renee Hieber

Leanna Renee Hieber is an actress, playwright, tour guide and the award-winning, bestselling author of Gothic, Gaslamp Fantasy novels such as the Strangely Beautiful, Magic Most Foul, Eterna Files and The Spectral City series as well as the Dark Nest universe of Space Opera novellas. A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America's Ghosts, co-authored by Andrea Janes, marks Leanna’s first foray into non-fiction, focusing on narratives where women are centered in haunted house and ghost stories. Her Dark Nest and Strangely Beautiful series have won 4 Prism awards and her work has been included in numerous notable anthologies. Her books have been selected for national book club editions as well as translated into many languages. She crafts whimsical accessories for Torch and Arrow http://etsy.com/torchandarrow and works as a ghost tour guide for Manhattan’s Boroughs of the Dead. Hieber has been featured in film and television on shows like Mysteries at the Museum and Beyond the Unknown. For writers’ resources, free reads and more visit: http://leannareneehieber.com

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Aressa paced the floor of her Devilsbane quarters, cold rooms in an abandoned citadel of the Amethyne Court, and examined a scrying glass—part and parcel of her dramatic inheritance from her guardian. She would rule the Amethyne Court and then the whole continent of Allforth. She would take it by force. It had been foretold.

Are the signs in place? the sorceress asked the wide glass bowl.

Yesss . . . It’s already begun, the scrying glass replied in the sibilant manner of her guardian, the woman to whom Aressa owed her life, whose voice had imprinted on the mercurial waters of fortune.

The silvery liquid within solidified into a smooth surface and began to showcase flickering images of children being rescued from a harrowing mine in which they’d been imprisoned. Clenching her jaw, she growled rather than give over to the pain of her own memories. She watched as, deep inside one of the caverns, a handsome man in silver court robes cast a very distinct spell. Execution.

My deathdealer. There you are, Aressa said to the glass image. What a striking one, too. Thanks to you, my ascension will be complete. She placed a sharp-nailed finger on the scrying glass so that it stilled on his face. Uncorking a potion from a black bottle beside the glass bowl, she poured it over the image. She dipped another finger into a vial of dreamsweet powder, the only herb she’d known to accompany a death spell. She sprinkled the powder into the oily substance now covering the deathdealer’s face. The oil swirled around of its own accord, taking an imprint of the image and the properties of the dreamsweet powder as a tracking mechanism. The oil rolled into a ball, lifting into the air as if it were a feather, and hovered before her.

Aressa moved to the center of her stone chamber, a suite that surely once had been beautiful, painted and inlaid richly, but the rooms had begun to rot like everything in Amethyne, covered in a fine black mold that turned even the brightest spaces dim.

When she rang a large bell, a patter of feet could be heard in the stone hall outside and three wan faces peered in from the archway threshold. Dressed in gowns of grayscale with purple detailing, they looked like dolls that had once been kept immaculate by a princess who, in a fit of pique, thoughtlessly cast them into a dustbin.

Hello, Sisters, here is your charge. With a wave of her hand, the sorceress created a breeze and the tracking orb floated before them, reflecting their nervous faces in its slick surface. "A deathdealer in Silvervale colors, though I doubt he’s welcome at his own court anymore, not after what I witnessed in the scrying glass; that certainly wasn’t a court-ordered execution. Look for him as a refugee, an outlaw, somewhere between Silvervale and Amberfire. The tracking sphere will guide you. He shouldn’t be well guarded, his only supporters are sickly children who’ve been underground for years. Convince him to come with your magic or bring him here by force."

Yes, Sorceress, the three replied in unison and hurried on to their task, following the small black sphere that guided them down the hall and away from view.

Aressa turned back to her scrying glass once more, dragging her long fingernail around the glass rim, making a high-pitched vibration that evoked a grimace.

Is there an opposing force who would stand in the way of my work with the deathdealer?

The scrying glass flickered again.

There are always obstacles, child, you know this . . . the glass replied and began to show images of the same dreadful mine. But here, in the dim cavern, there was a distinct magic being deployed by a lovely woman whose dark reddish waves of hair were streaked with gilded swaths. The golden-skinned young woman placed her hand on the sternum of a coughing, struggling child. Her hand lit from within, as if the sun had risen from her palm.

A healer, Aressa murmured in a mocking tone. "Yes. Of course. Seers have expected something like you. A healer who would unsettle the kingdoms; a new queen for a magical age returned to its former glory. No, lovely girl. My prophecy is staying the course. My prophecy is set in stone and that stone is dusted with the ash of the old magic, a force that is dying and will remain dead."

She smiled, tapping on the woman’s face in the glass. I’ve ways to tie you up. Slow you down. We’ve no use for your healing light here. I’ll not risk your presence in these halls, so I’ll have to be sure all that golden light is drained right out of you . . .

And here, the healer’s visage vanished, replaced by an open mouth, blackened lips, and a familiar, howling face. The scrying glass began to shriek. Even though Aressa clapped her hands to her ears, a harpy’s cries still reverberated against the stone, her guardian’s voice impossible to block out.

"Have you put your plans in place, child?! Have you obliterated any opposition? Once the king and queen are deposed by this deathdealer’s spell, you shall rule the whole of the land, provided, only, you keep Burningwood from coming to Devilsbane! Are you prepared?!"

Yes, yes, Great Sorceress, I still hear you and I am no longer a child, Aressa snapped. I will ascend. Your prophecy will rule above all. I will prove you right and the ancestral usurpers of our throne will pay.

The howling face disappeared from the scrying glass, leaving only still liquid behind. Aressa unclenched her fists and tried to breathe normally again.

Her eye fell on a shard of amethyst that sat before a great mirror: a reminder to herself of what she’d been, where she’d come from. A reminder to be grateful. But in this moment, all she felt was hollow. Glancing up in the mirror, she looked it too—deepening circles under wide dark eyes, long dark hair streaked with gray at a far younger age than it should, sharp features that had sharpened under the constant shrieking and demands of the woman that had plucked her from the mines and set her on this path.

Trembling hands picked up that shard that had been around her neck from her earliest memories, a pendant meant to magically calm children into obedient labor. There in the triune mines between the court lands, abandoned and forsaken spaces where veins of precious gems and minerals had been exhausted, children were secreted away to suppress magic by placing their own inherent gifts into stones and building materials to make the whole world think that there was no longer any magic to be wielded past childhood.

Save the Evergreens—the rarified few who could still wield magic into young adulthood. And Aressa had been discovered to be one of them. That’s when she was plucked from the mines and became the ward of the Amethyne Court’s Great Sorceress, deposited in a citadel called Devilsbane, groomed and molded for the day in which she would live into the fate her guardian had prepared for her.

Staring out the window of her tower at the graveyard below—an elegant promenade of marble statuary that had cracked and weathered in a precipitous state of decay—Aressa glanced at her guardian’s headstone. Dead some three years, the woman still hovered at the blurry corners of Aressa’s every glance, invaded her magic and screamed through her prophesy.

At any moment, Aressa expected the necromancer herself to walk back through the doors, having figured out at long last how to resurrect herself—the one magic she couldn’t manage. But the graveyard remained still, the statuary and soil beneath the graves undisturbed. One small mercy.

Magic in the Amethyne land was turning. Inverting. Rotting. But so were the old kings and queens, the greedy wretches that had provoked this world into decline by their actions and