The Butcher of the Forest E-Book

Premee Mohamed

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 178

Beschreibung

A world-weary woman races against the clock to save two children from an enchanting but deadly forest in this dark fairy-tale from World Fantasy, Nebula and Aurora-award winning author Premee Mohammed. At the northern edge of a valley conquered by a merciless foreign tyrant lies a wild forest ruled by dangerous magic. The local people know never to enter—for no one who strays into the north woods is ever seen again. No one, that is, except Veris Thorn. When the children of the Tyrant vanish into the woods, Veris is summoned to rescue them. Veris knows she has only one day before the creatures in the wood claim the children for their own. If she fails, the Tyrant will destroy everything she loves. If she is to succeed, Veris must evade traps and trickery, ancient monsters and false friends, and the haunting memory of her last journey into the woods. Time is running short. One misstep will cost everything.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

The Butcher of the Forest

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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The Butcher of the Forest

Print edition ISBN: 9781803368726

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803368733

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: February 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Premee Mohamed 2024

Premee Mohamed asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For my brother

It was not yet dawn when they came for her.

Veris stumbled from her bed into an early-morning sea, deep blue light submerging the little house with no hint of sun; she swam, it seemed, to the lamp in the hall, and lit it with a wavery half-smothered match; she swam down the stairs.

The front door rattled in its frame with each blow, paint and shreds of wood flaking from it, as if the unseen callers were not knocking but rushing at it with a battering ram. It was locked from the inside, but the bolts and bars were beginning to give as she approached. She unlocked it hastily, cursing and fumbling the ancient keys, and threw it wide.

“This the residence of Veris Thorn?” The man on the doorstep still raised his gauntleted fist, as if, the door now conquered, he would hammer her as well for a wrong or slothful answer.

“I am she.”

“Then get in.”

She opened her mouth to ask for clarification, then looked past his shoulder (also armored, she noted numbly). A carriage waited at the end of the path. It had clearly arrived in such haste that in stopping it had slewed into their garden wall; the newly exposed faces of stone frowned and palely glowed. Two more armed men flanked its open door, and another sat the reins, leaning forward as if already in motion. All she could see was the skeletal gleam of starlight on the metal, so that they formed, more or less, attitudes, rather than men.

It took her a moment, but once arrived there was no escaping it: they had come from the Tyrant, and she could no more deny them than she could the rising of the sun. Her stomach sank, and her limbs began to drain of sensation; behind her, adroitly, her aunt took the lamp before it smashed on the doorstep.

“I—” Veris said.

“Now,” growled the man, and he took her upper arm, pulling her out of the doorway.

“May I get dressed, at le—”

“No.”

Veris glanced back desperately as she was towed away, at her aunt and her grandfather in the amber lamplight, sleepy, confused only, their faces not showing terror, not yet. Receding, receding, till they were no more than silhouettes, and the man slung her smoothly into the carriage so that her slippered feet did not even touch the three steps leading up into it, and then he got in and sat across from her.

The carriage squeaked as the other two men jumped onto the running-boards, and in silence, without clucking to the horses, the driver took them down the lane; and Veris thought only of these men who had come in heavy armor, bristling with swords and daggers, through the village, and how ready they were for violence, and what might have happened if she had for some unfathomable reason not been at the house.

No. Best not to think about it. Veris had no mother, and she had no father, but she had family still to preserve, and she would not jeopardize them now. She shivered in silence in the carriage, knowing that her escorts would not answer any of her questions anyway.

They bounced along the rutted lane, passing all the tiny houses just like hers, still mostly dark, then the dull apple-red glow of the bakery and the dozen ovens, tiny forms already scurrying around in the deep blue light with wheelbarrows and barrels. Then the road rattled with gravel, then cobbles, and they were out of the old town and onto the new way which the Tyrant had paved with flagstones to more easily move his armies. Past the smithies and the tanners, the small golden lights of farmhouses, and the carriage sped up now, a speed she would have called reckless but the Tyrant’s carriages ran on steel wheels which would not, like the age-old wooden ones, crack or turn on the road, and his powerful horses had been bred to the task.

The sun edged over the distant hills, only a lightening of the general murk, an aubergine rather than a blue. It illuminated the bridge of the man’s nose across from her and nothing else. The carriage’s small, leaded windows were propped half-open, presumably for his comfort, but between the autumn air and the speed of their motion, Veris was chilled to the bone. She drew her threadbare robe around her pajamas, for what little good it would do, and watched the land blossom around them: the fields of wheat, barley, the strict grids of orchards, regiments of trellises heavy with grapes.

Best time of the year. Eat everything without guilt. Even this air, cool and fresh, ripe with a year’s work well done, you could enjoy. There would be Pig Days in the next three or four weeks, the big bonfires, the cauldrons pinging as they heated up . . . andwhat did the Tyrant want with her? Nothing, nothing. She had been trying to keep her mind away from it, to hold down the panic in the question, but she could control it no longer. What, what on earth? Why?

Not another wife, surely; he liked them young, and Veris was pushing forty. And fertile, too, because he had only two children, or so it was said. A Tyrant always needed more, and so more working wombs. Not hers.

Not to work at the great castle: everyone in the valley clamored for a position there, and the stewards and quartermasters simply rode down to a fair every now and then and recruited servants by the handful. And anyway, Veris would be equally useless as a maid, a groom, a cook, a valet, a footman, anything, as she would a concubine.

Not to arrest her for treason or conspiracy . . . well, one never knew, but it didn’t seem likely to Veris, who generally kept her head down and did not associate, as far as she knew, with any benighted souls who would dare to plot against their conqueror, because she did not really associate with anybody now. It was true, though, that the arrests were still happening; and for slighter and slighter a cause every time, it seemed. But they would have clapped her in irons the moment she opened the door, if that had been the case (and certainly not sent a carriage).

Why, why? What had she done?

Despite the effort at ventilation, the rotted-leather stench of her escort’s armor was beginning to accumulate; Veris pressed her face to the gap in the window and breathed the cleaner air outside, which admittedly smelled of horse-sweat and road dust. Then a burst of resin, leaf, root, as wet and pure as water splashed on her face: the border of the north woods, rising high and dark, shadowing the still-green pasturelands on the other side of the road.

Gone in an instant as they raced past. She had not realized they were moving so quickly until the woods tore away from them like a flag, and then, in the distance, she spotted the high gray walls of the castle. Her fingers tightened on the windowsill till it creaked under her grip. Still he has this power over us. And it has not waned one whit since the day he came.

Why me and why?

*   *   *

In the old days, so Veris had been told, the throne room had been an abattoir: corpses spiked and decaying both outside and in, heads suspended on chains from the ceiling like Furrowday lanterns, dripping maggots onto the princes and potentates summoned to pay obeisance to the Tyrant. Now it seemed clean enough, though the wall behind his throne remained closely paved with skulls. Teeth, horns, antlers, and the occasional gold filling sparkled as the rising sun began to fill the room.

The guard brought Veris into this place much as he had taken her out of her own: one hand clamped carelessly around her upper arm, encircling it entirely, unmindful of the sharp edges of his gauntlet digging into her goosepimpled flesh. Ten paces from the throne he yanked sharply downwards, throwing her to her knees. Probably she was meant to lie flat or perform some ritual pose, but he seemed satisfied with her kneeling, and retreated a few steps.

Close enough, Veris noted cynically, to grab her if she tried to run.

She shivered, her teeth chattering; she clamped her jaw shut tightly and looked up at the throne and its occupant, the Tyrant, the man with a thousand names and a thousand cities under his bootheel, he who had for no perceptible reason settled here in their land after grinding it into the dust and stamping his name upon it, bringer of death, lord of war, slaughterer of millions.

The first thing she noted about him was that he was drinking out of a cup made of a skull, and she caught herself just in time to forestall a bray of what she knew would be frankly unwise laughter. Well, who knew, maybe he wasn’t a drunk, maybe she too would want a cup of wine at sunrise when he told her why she had been brought here.

No one had told her not to speak unless spoken to, but Veris was a sensible woman, and no one needed to tell her. Yet for all this urgency, snatching her out of the morning’s darkness, galloping here at speeds inimical to life and limb, he said nothing. Not to test her, she thought at once, but because he had one of those lumps in his throat that she knew very well: apricot-sized, difficult to swallow past, let alone speak. It might come out in a scream or a sob.

The Tyrant was supposed to be in his early sixties, but he looked younger; mostly this was the effect of his long hair, which was glossy and still very black, and only beginning to gray in much the same way as Veris’s, giving it a slaty, gilded effect rather than making itself known. He was tall, rangy, powerful, skin of a milky white even tinged with the bluish color you saw sometimes as milk first hit the pail. The numerous small scars upon his face were also white, and barely visible; he had been lucky in healing. Long thin nose, wide thin mouth, white lips invisible as they touched the bone goblet.

His eyes were exactly as rumored, and they froze Veris in terror the way a ghost story will even if you don’t believe in ghosts: golden-brown, even reddish, a shade that should have seemed feline but made her think instead and immediately of some far bigger and more bloodthirsty beast that she had never encountered. And they burned, partly with wine, partly as if a match had been lit behind either one. They gave off more light than the gems on his crown.

How many had this beast-eyed man and his followers killed so far? Thousands in their valley alone. Maybe millions all told. Most pertinently, her parents, in the last war that had brought him here. Mother, then father. She would never forget that, should she live to be a hundred. Mother first. Father trying to look after her for weeks. Then him too.

Her heart thudded unevenly in her chest; the room went gray around her. His voice cut through it: “You are Veris Thorn.”

“Yes, my Lord,” she said automatically. She tried to focus on him again. From the corner of her eye, she spotted servants crouched low and trying to move in silence, kindling a fire in the great hearth set into the other wall. One small reprieve: maybe she’d warm up. There was no glass in any of the windows, and they admitted a bright but chilly sun.

The handful of spectators clustered on either side of his throne were shivering too. He gave no indication of the cold.

“You are the one who went into these curst woods and brought back a child,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and her stomach sank. Oh. Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, no . . .

“Alive.”

“Yes.” Technically, she almost said; at any rate now that she knew what he was going to ask of her, it would do him no good to know of the child’s fate. She felt hollowed out—scraped out, like a knife going in to get every last shred of something inside her. I can’t, she wanted to say, and knew she would not.

At last he moved, and handed the bone cup to a wan-looking girl who scuttled off with it held aloft as if it were a burning coal. “You are to go into the woods again,” he said, “and recover my children.”

She had known it was coming; it was not phrased as a request. What burned in his eyes was desperation and that surprised her, somewhat; she had gotten the idea that, like the previous kings of the land, there was no great attachment to the children of the throne except as potential future heirs. You could always, the thinking was, have another child; or you could adopt with equal legitimacy. That was all in the laws, if he cared to obey them, which he didn’t.

Veris took a deep breath. The room was warming and her wits were settling, if only a little. “My Lord, when did they go into the woods? The exact hour. If you know it. Please.”

“We do not know.” He clasped his long hands together, the bones beneath the skin no whiter. “Their absence was discovered this morning when their nurse went to raise them up from bed. I had her questioned—” And here Veris shuddered again, scratching her knees on the stone: they would have tortured the nurse, of course, fearing that she had betrayed the throne. Arranged for the kidnapping of the children, perhaps. Or even their deaths. But the nurse must have been a local girl, and had given them, in the extremity of her pain, Veris’s name, and a scrap of local gossip.

“She said she checked on them at midnight and they were asleep,” the Tyrant said slowly. “So, two hours ago was when they were found to be gone. I sent out the dogs.”

“The trail grew cold at the edge of the woods?”

“Yes. At the edge.” His face reddened with sudden anger. “The dogs would go no further. Even beaten, whipped.” His accent in her tongue made the harsh words harsher still, as he clipped consonants, swallowed whole vowels. “And the guards who took the dogs . . . they also disappeared. Only the dogs came back. All bloody. Like meat. Afraid.”

Veris nodded, her mind beginning to race even though she hauled back on its reins with all her might; fear trickled through her, thin and acrid, like some light poisonous liquid lurking atop clear water. Everyone in the village, everyone in the valley, even those several days’ ride from the north woods, knew not to go into them.

But no one had told the Tyrant that, and so perhaps no one had told his children. Or, worse yet (much worse), someone had, and their curiosity had impelled them to go adventuring.

It really was only children that the north woods captured anymore. And even then, it was not the woods themselves but what lay within them. The south woods were used, and had been for many generations: carefully stewarded in terms of harvesting and planting trees, seeding berry bushes and planting tubers, cutting trails, keeping them signed and marked, hunting the game within, clearing debris from the streams.

The south woods were tame. The others, the north, were wild. You could not go in further than where you lost the light—five or six trees, usually, they were so old and thick. In that thin strip you might pick herbs, gather twigs, or hunt squirrels or hares. But you could not go in deeper.

Never, never, never. It had been drilled into them their entire lives; they had taken in the fear of the place with their mothers’ milk. One more step and you risked falling into the Elmever. Where the other people of the woods lived. And they would not give you up.

And the Tyrant had found that out, hadn’t he? When he had come. He had sent a detachment into the north woods, and they had not come back . . .

With her terror-sharpened eyes Veris spotted, she was certain, the children’s mother next to the throne, not daring to lay a hand on it. Shockingly young, she seemed half Veris’s age, but that could not be right if the children were as old as she thought they were. But fear had a way of changing your face too. The woman looked barely adolescent, thin, flat-chested, her fawn-colored hair intricately braided and studded with gems, but her face haggard, dark-circled. Her plum-hued silk gown had slid off her shoulders in a way that should have seemed alluring, but only rendered her unkempt now, and made her collarbones look pitiful rather than seductive. She would not speak, Veris thought, to cry out for help. From Veris, from her husband, from anyone.

“What do they look like?” Veris finally said. “How old are they? What are their names?”

The Tyrant grunted, and servants staggered over under the weight of an immense gilt frame containing an oil portrait nearly as tall as Veris herself, showing two children and a brown-and-white hunting hound sitting alertly at their feet. “This is not recent,” he said, pointing. “But they are much the same. Eleonor, the girl. Is nine. My heir. Aram, the boy. Is seven.”

Veris studied the painting, her mouth dry. The children were larger than life, and the artist had been talented, perhaps dragged in from abroad, as the Tyrant sometimes did. He was said to be a man without culture but with vanity, and that could be a dangerous combination for the artisans he conquered.

The children looked very much like one another, Veris thought, or the painter had made them so; they looked ineradicably like siblings, and like siblings who had picked up all each other’s facial expressions and mannerisms so that they resembled each other even more than they naturally would. They wore similar velvet suits of burgundy and navy, trimmed with gold braid. Very white skin, like his, and the same black hair, and large brown eyes from their mother.

“Might the dog be with them?” Veris said, not hoping for much.

“No. We found her chained in her usual place. The children do not have the key.”

Veris nodded. Oh spirits, oh lights, they were so young. Poor things, she thought, and almost slapped herself for it. Yes, poor things, out there without their good dog, poor children of the monster before her. And yet . . . Veris knew she was being unfair. They were innocent of their father’s evil. The old women of the village would say they were tainted with it, but there was no taint in blood alone, truly. Veris knew that well enough from experience.

“I thought at first,” the Tyrant finally said, his voice thickening, “bandits in the woods. Or some enemy of my reign . . .”

Veris shook her head slowly. “My Lord, I assure you there are no . . . bandits, no brigands, living in those woods.”

“But the nurse tells me people live there. Many people.”

“It is complicated . . .” Veris’s voice trailed off. The nurse would have tried to explain this as well, and been unable to. How could she do any better? And she was acutely aware, too, of something else that the Tyrant might or might not know by now: that she had but a single day to get the children back, if she was going to get them at all. And that day was burning away in the strong golden light of morning.

“The north woods themselves are . . . are probably perfectly safe. Like the south woods. But inside them, they are . . . another woods. Not the same. And when you are inside you cannot tell the difference between the north woods and this other place . . .”