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“Tell me again of the Fae Isles, Mamere,” the child spoke in her soft voice that sounded ever a breath from broken, “and of the Elan.”

Etain smiled as she teased the horncomb gently through the tangle of her daughter’s hair. Long dark tresses, the blackest of browns, and the mother lifted her hand for a moment to her own, a shadow of what once flowed wildly down her back.

And his hands, her Lyrian, his beautiful hands, she could still feel his softest of touches, gossamer, dancing across her scalp and down her neck, lulling her to sleep. And she remembered too his fiercest of touches, clasping her hair like reins in his fists, tearing from her a fire she had never known, and now could never forget.

Etain tasted the salted drops on her lips, and she closed the lids of her eyes to wring them of more.

“Ah, my Wilde,” she whispered, as visions of love and laughter and velvety moss beneath naked feet grew vivid as the morntide, and she saw about her not the cold, squalid room with three bunks and a table, but a forest glen, alive and bright.

She saw about them not a tumbledown croft with a single goat, lost in a field of mud and blackened cabbage, all the life she had scratched out for her children, but a dazzling emerald isle with crystal lakes and wildflower seas and joy, such wild, untempered joy.

“The Elan… they are beauty. And song. They are sweet plums and cool cider. They are the first gift on Yaraine morntide. They are strength, and grace, and passion. And… pain.”

“Did they hurt you, Mamere?” asked Wilde.

“Oh,” her mother whispered. “Yes, my love. Yes, they did. But only my heart.”

Wilde did not ask the next question. She listened, instead, for the small sounds that people made, not with their words, but with their thoughts. And their feelings. And she heard her mother’s heart, and it sounded to Wilde like a torn Fall’s leaf.

“You see, the Elan, they are ruled by their hearts, and such hearts, they beat like music, like storms. They do not think, like we do, here.”

She touched her daughter’s forehead. “They feel.”

And she moved her hand down then, to rest upon the bone of her daughter’s breast. “And that can be… oh, my love, it can be glorious, to be in their hearts. To feel their light, is to wake in the warmth of the brightest of summer dawns.”

Her eyes brimmed and to Wilde her mother’s voice was far, far away.

“And when it is gone, the light, and you are forgotten, it is to sleep again in the cold and dark shadows.”

Bereft and colourless, Wilde could feel it. She, too, felt the cold of the shadows, and heard their icy whispers.

She imagined her mother’s face in the sun, shining again, as once it must have, in the warmth of Aure’s light.

“They forget?” she asked, and she reached up and touched her mother’s cheek and felt her warm tears, and Etain sighed and leant over and kissed her daughter’s forehead with her moist lips.

“Yes, they forget.”

“Did our father forget us?”

But there came no words for her question that was not really one. She listened for the hidden sounds as Mamere combed her hair, but her question, it seemed, was all but forgotten.

A new sound then, and Wilde realised she had heard it for some time now. She counted the footsteps before the door clattered open, and she fretted, for in his step she heard that he was hurt.

Wolfe closed the door behind, and his mother gasped.

“It’s cold in here,” he snapped, and Wilde knew then he had hurt his mouth, and he slumped on the table the things he’d carried, the broken guiterne and the brace of skinned coneys. “Why isn’t the hearth lit?”

“Wolfe,” Etain pressed, rising from her bed, “what happened to you?”

“Nothing.”

“But your face! Are you alright?”

“It’s nothing.” He crouched by the hearth and pulled from a woven basket some dried ryegrass and sticks.

“Wolfe, let me…”

“Where’s the tinderbox?”

Etain reached up to the shelf and handed her son the flint and iron striker.

“Please, Wolfe, won’t you tell me what happened?”

He nestled carefully in the grass stalks a pinch of fine strands of dried beardmoss, and cradled the flintstone in his swollen hand. But he cursed when the iron struck, and pain stabbed through his palm, and the striker clattered on the stones in the hearth.

“Gut!” Wolfe rose and stormed outside, fighting back tears.

Etain picked up the broken guiterne, and she did not fight hers.

Wilde reached into the hearth, running her fingers lightly along the stones until she found the iron bar, and struck the flint until the beardmoss caught, and she felt the breath of heat. She blew, gently, until the straw took, and placed down the sticks and listened for the delicate crackling.

Wolfe returned with three small logs and a pail of water from the well. He hissed as he placed them on the ground by the hearth, and the pain stabbed through his ribs.

Gingerly, he peeled off his brat, and he flinched when Wilde reached out to take his hand, but she held him still, as only she could, and pulled him down to his knees. She lifted her fingers to his face, tracing the line of his jaw, his cheek, knowing then to avoid the cut, and she made a sound when she discovered his swollen shut eye. Silently, delicately, she wrapped her little arms around him and rested her cheek against his neck.

A sob fell from Etain’s lips, and she crouched to envelop them both.

“I’m alright,” Wolfe assured them, softer now.

“Your hand,” Wilde whispered, “let me feel it.”

And he did, and she was tender, but deliberate, and he did not know how she knew such things, but when she told him it wasn’t broken, Wolfe believed her, and he let the tears then fall.

By the warmth of the fire he sat while his sister cleaned the blood and dirt from his battered face. Carefully she felt, and dabbed, and sponged, and as the bucket darkened, and the truths of Wolfe’s wounds were slowly revealed.

Together they applied the ointment the smith’s son had given, and it stung at first, but soon dulled the harshest of aches. His hand they wrapped in strips of cloth torn from an old tunic worn beyond mending.

“I could make a stew,” Etain spoke from the kitchen bench, probing the rabbits for meat and fat. “We have mustard greens and I think still some dried rowanberries.”

“I’m not hungry,” Wolfe replied, but he cursed himself when he saw her eyes.

“Did you catch them?” Wilde asked, and she felt foolish when she heard what he didn’t say.

“Mustard greens and rowanberry sounds good,” Wolfe called back to his mother. “I’ll have some when I get back.”

“You’re going out?” she asked, and he nodded, and she too, nodded, and crossed to the table to start on the stew.

Wolfe looked to his sister. Her thirteenth winter approaching, Wilde was small, with their mother’s look. If not for the grey in her hair, Etain could pass for near half her late thirty harvests. Wilde, for her thirteen, looked ten at most.

But for her eyes.

“She spoke of him again,” Wilde whispered to Wolfe, as Etain chopped up the rabbit. “I asked.”

Wolfe sighed. “Why?”

“Do you think they’re true?” Wilde whispered, her lips close to his ear. “The stories she tells, of the Elan, and the Fae Isles. And of our father?”

Wolfe took Wilde’s shoulders and drew her close, looking right into her shadowed eyes.

“Our father was a farmer. Or a bootmaker. Or a soldier, I don’t know. And I don’t care. He’s not here, never was. What I do know is that he was no faerie prince. Mamere…” he explained, choosing carefully his next whispered words. “She dreams. And sometimes I think she finds it hard to know if her dreams are real or not. Do you understand?”

Wilde nodded her head. “Maybe he was a musician?”

Wolfe barely kissed her cheek and stood from his chair. “Maybe.”

“Your clothes still smell of goat shit,” she told him, wrinkling her nose.

“Makes a nice change from the rotted cabbage,” Wolfe retorted.

“I think I’ll never eat it again,” Wilde smiled.

“Help me with this, will you?”

And with cautious and laboured effort, they peeled off his soiled tunic and he donned his one other, died in woad to a pale blue linen, which was not exactly clean, but nor was it stained in blood, shit and mud. His brownwool longvest and patched brat he’d done his best to clean, and it would have to do, for they were all the warmth he owned.

“Take this.” Wilde handed him her soft grey linen scarf. “It matches your eyes.”

“And who told you that? It’s died bright yellow.”

“Like the sunlight?” she yearned.

“Like your laughter.”

And that made her smile, and he wrapped it around his neck.

Glancing over to check his mother wasn’t watching, he crouched down and shifted the rushes and lifted one of the cobblestones beneath his bunk. He reached down into the hole dug beneath and drew from it a small pouch made of goat’s leather, with a red woven cord.

Inside were three copper bonns and a handful of bits. Not yet enough to pay his debts. He pocketed one of the bones and a couple of the smaller square coins, and replaced the pouch.

“You going to the ‘Lass?” Wilde asked.

“Maybe.”

“To see Maeg?”

Wolfe groaned.

“I don’t imagine you look very nice,” she told him earnestly, “even with the scarf.”

It hurt his cheek and his lip both to smile. “I don’t imagine I do.”

“Can I come?”

Wolfe sighed. “Not this time. Make sure she eats something.”

I hope you enjoyed chapter 3, and I invite you to leave a comment. Your thoughts, or a question, anything you like.

Leave a comment

You can find more chapters here.

Welcome, reader, to the world of Wildelore.

You are among the first in the world to read this epic fantasy saga, chapter by chapter, before it is even published.

You can find a full index of chapters released here.

Enjoy…

The road up the headland was more a dirt trail, barely paved and too steep for most wagons, cutting the ruddy heath of browning thistle and wild thyme. A trip of stunted goats, their thick browncoats matted and damp, grazed on the bushes of golden buckthorn where the heath fell away to the Aragean sea.

A lone fishing curach bobbed in the waters that sloshed in ebbs and flows against the tidewall rising from the beach of pebble and black sand. More would return at dusk with their briny gillnets full of mackerel and herring, to be grilled fresh for Bretons, or salted and sent by cart to Hart, and sometimes even as far as Lodor.

Out past the breakwater in the pale early mists they would push each dawn, the seafarers, toward the Isle of Mor where the fish were bolder, or east across the deep for mussels and whelks at low tide on the sunken reef.

And overlooking it all, defiant and proud atop the storm battered headland, stood the Wind’lass.

A two-storey roundhouse of dark oak and limestone, weathered grey by the yaren of salt and gale, it was here the fishermen, farmers and freemen about would gather after their labours for a drink or three and a warm-cooked meal. To the ‘Lass they would go, with the hearth always lit, where a stout and a tale brought a kind of richness to the life of an honest Breton.

Needed all the moreso, in these worried times.

Reardon the Poet had been her proprietor ever since Old Ronit set out at dawn for cockles and samphire, never to be seen again.

“Laying with the Storm Queen, and lucky blighter too,” the Bretons would toast with their horns of stout, and the Poet honoured the Old Seal’s passing with cockle and samphire soup served hot each Tidesday.

“Shouldn’t you be gettin’ that broth on the fire?” chided Maeg, crossing round behind the bar of old driftwood to pull a horn of stout from the tapped oak.

The Poet’s thick grey brows furrowed as he scooped up another cockle from the brine, rinsed off the grit, gave it a tap and tossed it in the pot full of cold stock and samphire.

“Don’t see you bustlin’ to help.”

“Bad enough I’ve the stink of old stout on me,” as she skimmed the froth with a flat wooden paddle worn soft as driftwood from lacing off ale.

For nigh on a yare Maeg had maided at the ‘Lass, since coming to Breton to live with her uncle. She knew the Old Seal and his damp demise only in soup and legend, but the Poet had earned in her orphaned heart something of a fatherly place, though he’d still not earned his name. Not to her ears, anyways.

“Don’t let ‘im try to short you on that one,” Reardon called after, as she carried the stout to Dirty Declan, oft the first in from the fields. The dark foam spilled over the lip of the horn and she cursed and wiped her hand on her apron. The ale mugs of clay didn’t spill, but the goat’s horns were half as wide and always did. Yet the Poet prided the ‘Lass on her horns, and would have his stout served in nothing less.

“That’s eight bits.”

“Eight?!” moaned Declan, “Pilfery! Ought to be five, for me ‘orn o stout!”

“Was five. Now it’s eight. You know we’ve no rye.”

“Aye, I know, lass! Ne’er mind me whole cabbage plot, rotted. An’ half me leeks!”

“Pox on yer leeks!” squawked Lottie the Grey from the table next, a pinch-faced woman with thinning wisps. “Three stillborns I birthed last moon, an’ another, young Marie’s, lost in her bloods. ’Tis an ill season, aye, an’ it’s more than cabbages an’ rye we’ve lost.”

“Worried times,” muttered Enit of Gull’s Head.

“Worried times,” muttered others around, in what might have been a commoner’s prayer, were the ‘Lass a temple for worship of more than stout and cockles.

“Lucky the fish have been bitin’!” called out Tall Ilard, who ran the largest curach in Breton.

Declan glared. “Aye, good fer business, is it?” the farmer growled, “a blighted harvest?”

“Heard you order yer cockle soup,” the fisherman retorted.

“Soup’s the only thing the Poet ‘ere hasn’t raised the price of!”

“You’re lucky we have any ale,” Reardon snapped from the bar, his yet bright eyes flashing irritably. “You find me some rye or barley they’re not askin’ an ear for, and I’ll drop the price of my stout.”

And he picked up the heavy pot and carried it to the kitchen out back. Maeg sighed and returned to the bar.

A bell that hung above the door jingled, and a breath of late Fall wind chilled the freckles on her forearms and she shivered.

Strangers were seldom enough at the ‘Lass, and moreso from outside the Five Hearths. And so it was enough to stop her step, these grey-cloaked, pale-robed strangers who came through the doors.

The first wiped the mud from his boots on the rushmat and crossed to the wide stone hearth around which the ‘Lass was built, to pull his gloves and warm his hands. She could not help but stare, with his bleached white hair and his bright blue eyes. The five who followed shrugged their hoods, revealing pates shaved smooth as riverstones.

A hush fell over the inn’s early patrons, gawking up from their horns.

“Find yourselves a seat,” Maeg called to the strangers, crossing back behind the bar. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

Maeg, with her seventeenth winter approaching, and blessed as she was with her late mother’s eyes and father’s dimples, was well enough accustomed to the leering of men. She’d heard the talk of coming to the ‘Lass for ‘a horn o stout an’ an eyeful o’ sweet Maeg’s bosom’, thought it all harmless enough, sure, and at times played it up for the tips.

These men did not leer as she passed. Some of them glared, some averted their eyes, but she felt their reprove crawl on her skin, a cold and spiderly thing. Maeg flushed, wanting in that moment nothing more than a bath, though it hardly be the season for it. And though unaware, and had she been, would have chided herself, she shifted higher the bodice of her smock, and her shoulders stooped ever so slightly thereafter.

“Welcome to the Wind’lass,” called Reardon the Poet, returning from the kitchen. He wiped his hands on the soft brown rag that had hung from his belt for as long as the place had been his. “What can I get for you noble sers?”

“We are none of us nobles,” the white haired one spoke, in a soft voice that was yet compelling, and Maeg could not place the accent. “Rooms for the night. For myself, a single. Share rooms or bunks will suffice for my Brothers.”

“Don’t look like brothers,” snorted Declan at his horn, and the tallest stranger with the hardest scowl shifted his gaze to the farmer.

“Hush yerself!” urged Lottie the Grey.

“And feed and stables for our horses,” added the stranger.

“Ah, beggin’ yer pardon, ser,” Reardon simpered, “but we’ve only one room left, what with the festival an’ all. Ore merchants from north o’ the Shins came in on the yester, takin’ up three of the rooms ’til the morrow. I can offer you sers the one we have left, and bales and blankets in the cellar.”

The pale-haired stranger paused, still as the veiltide, and even Dirty Declan held his tongue.

“It’s dry,” said the Poet, “and there’s ale close at hand.”

Somebody coughed. Declan most likely.

“The cellar will suffice,” the stranger nodded.

Reardon brightened at the promise of coin. “Good then. Fine, fine. Take yerselves a seat at the table by the window. Supper and ale, while we ready the cellar?”

The stranger nodded to his companions, who shrugged their thick grey woollen cloaks and hovered by the hearth ’til Enit of Gull’s Head, sat alone at the longer table, up and shifted on Reardon’s order, none too pleased at that.

And while some of the patrons continued to stare, most then turned back to their stouts and their fears.

“You’re in luck,” sung the Poet, well in his stride now with patrons secured for the eventide’s trade, “it bein’ Tidesday an’ all. We’ve a soup on the fire of cockle and samphire, a house special here at the ‘Lass. Or we’ve Tomard’s catch from the morntide’s run, an’ finer herring you’ll not taste this time o’ the season.”

Tall Ilard snorted.

“Well, if you’ll go ‘an salt all yer catch for the festival,” Declan called back, “then what’s the Poet ‘a do?”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Reardon muttered. “We’ve also some goat and cabbage stew left from yester, only it’s kelp ‘stead o’ cabbage, on account o’ Declan’s patch goin’ sour. Maeg, bring these good sers a horn each of our finest stout!”

“We’ve only got one stout,” came her tart reply, but she fetched down the horns nonetheless.

“We’ll take the soup,” spoke their leader, “but water will suffice. And a cup of it hot, for a tea.”

“Aye, kettle’s on the fire, Maeg here’ll get your waters. If ’n you’d like to settle now, that’ll be six an’ five, two… call it one ’n dozen bones. Er, thirteen copper bonns, if’n ye please.”

The stranger took out a small purse of softside leather and drew from it a handful of coins, silver, each the size of a thin slice of crabapple. He placed two on the bar, slipping the rest back into their pouch.

“This will suffice, I trust?” and he lifted his pale blue gaze.

“Don’t get much ‘ears in ‘ere,” Reardon frowned, “not from this lot.”

But they were not Silver Eirs, Maeg noted, leaning across the bar. They were stamped with the bust of a laureled child, and etched in some sort of rune. She shook her head as the Poet lifted one of the coins and bit it in his teeth, mimicking the Lodor merchant who’d come through last summer, and left for the kitchen to fetch the waters.

She cursed the pale-haired stranger beneath her breath as she returned with her tray, for she’d scalded her palm on the kettle’s handle.

The stranger took from his satchel a small parcel of folded grey cloth. Laying it carefully open on the table, he pinched some of the dried leaves in delicate fingers, and sprinkled them into the steaming cup as she placed it down.

The tea smelled of heathgrass and honeysuckle, and it reminded Maegellin of summers in Aelwynd, when her father and brother were still alive.

I hope you enjoyed chapter 2, and I invite you to leave a comment. Your thoughts, or a question, anything you like.

Leave a comment

You can find more chapters here.

You are among the first in the world to read this epic fantasy saga, chapter by chapter, before it is even published.

You can find a full index of chapters released here.

Enjoy…

The village of Breton had no gates, though that would not be its downfall.

No stonewall or palisade to mark passage from the sunken farm hovels and sodden fields of cabbage and rye to the town proper. If proper were a word one could ever ascribe to such a place as Breton.

Wolfe could not, and he would know, having been stuck here for well enough all of his seven and ten harvests.

“Another fine day to be canting for bones,” muttered Wolfe, cursing the damp that seeped through the patch in his worn and mud-soiled turnshoes.

He stopped on the crest of the hillock, looking down upon the village of Breton.

Three potholed roads of granite and mud, narrow as the minds of those who trod them. Two dozen thatched roof cottages of rough hewn oak, wattle and daub. All greys and browns and green with moss, huddled against the icy gusts that buffeted from the southeast where the strait met the sea this close to winter.

He drew close his thinning goatswool brat, tracing the tendrils of hearth smoke rising like unspun wool in afttide sky, which was at this time, as his temper, grey and sullen.

Down he walked.

The waft of smoked meats and salted herring set his scrawny belly to moan, and his eye was drawn to a fresh-skinned brace of coneys hanging on the dryrack out front of the smokehouse. He lingered a beat for the Smoker to show, then the rabbits were gone, tucked swiftly and deftly beneath his brat. Had any who passed borne witness to the theft, they’d likely have missed it as blinked.

The stink of the pens behind Breasel the butcher’s hung thick in the mist, scored by the hum of maddened meatflies swarming over the carcass of a bled pig.

Wolfe hurried on to the village square, the bustling heart of Breton life, though not on this day, it seemed. On the morrow, perhaps, if the weather be fair and the stalls were out for the festival, but the blighted harvest had given the Bretons scant cause for festing this season.

The strike of hot iron rang from Goban’s smithy, as ever it did, familiar as brine on the wind. And to the end of his days would its cry bring Wolfe back to the village square in Breton.

He caught the scowl of Scarface Erdna watching him from the well, warding some sign in the frosted air and slopping her pail back to the chandler’s. Hard to miss Tall Ilard, in from the docks, giving wider berth as he made his way toward the road that climbed the northern headland to the Wind‘lass tavern.

Old Irnan’s goat puckered its rump and shat a warm pat on the cobblestones not three steps from Wolfe’s turnshoes as he rounded the well, coaxing a bitter smirk from his wind-chapped lips.

He crossed to his patch by the crier’s steps, and slipped the coneys from beneath his brat, stowing the catch under the weathered boards, lest the Smoker come searching for her missing meat. Sat on the step, and brought to his hands the three course guiterne slung over his back by a soft hide strap. A precious thing of honeyed spruce and hope. Not thieved or gifted, but lent him.

The one true thing in his life of worth, borrowed.

He cupped his hands and breathed life to callused fingers numb with the late Fall chill, and he turned the polished rosewood pegs and plucked the strings ’til they, each in their pairs, sang in tune.

Ursul, wife of Donagh the Chipper, and little Moninne approached the step, the timid girl tugging her mother’s hand. The bruised chipper’s wife sighed, her sad sea eyes far, far away, and Wolfe nodded to the daughter and opened his set with a tender refrain from The Highland Brae.

Alder Gaelric of Orm pulled up on the crest and looked down upon the hamlet from the perch of his ambler. The hardy mare’s dun coat was slick with sweat from the hard ride. Spittle frothed at her bit, and her huffing breath steamed against the brisk ocean winds.

He rode not alone.

Five Brothers halted behind on chestnuts and bays, cloaks of grey over bleached woollen robes, the vestments of Orm, scrubbed pale each night. Their shaved pates were hidden beneath hooded cowls, but for the Alder, whose crown was adorned with a shock of bone-white hair.

With piercing blue eyes, bright and watchful, he looked in these lands otherworldly.

An engel. A harbinger.

He clucked his tongue that was dry and stale, nudged his heels to the mare’s billowed flanks, and down they rode at a cautious amble, these six ghostly strangers, into the village of Breton.

A solemn veil of mist draped thick across the land, carrying with it the stench of brine and ignorance. A hard-eyed woman in a brown-spun smock with the stink of smoked fish looked up with a scowl. A moment’s respite from her smoke-tainted life, she watched them, these riders who’d come from the west, till they’d passed.

He did not judge them, these rural folk, nor did he mock. His pity was tinged, in truth, with envy. For the commonness of their lives, and the ignorance that numbed their fears.

Spittle flung across mud and stone as the dun ambler snorted, bringing to ear the sounds of their world. The lapping shores and the crying of gulls; pontoons creaking, goats bleating; a crying child, hungry or cold; the distant ring of a hammer striking poor iron.

And a voice in the village square.

A boy. A beggar. A canter, playing the guiterne. An uncommonly fine instrument, the Alder noted with keen eye and familiar ear as he approached. Played, perhaps more surprisingly, in tune and with some skill. The boy’s voice was pure, his face unwashed.

Brown and black chickens scratched in the mud and straw at his feet. A short-legged, grey-haired goat tugged at the hempen leash in an old man’s hand that kept it close for milch or slaughter. Three onlookers watched the canter, lost in the mournful, poignant tune that so perfectly accompanied their lives. The old man with his goat, a mother and a girl, not yet of her moonblood.

Unremarkable, all.

“Boy,” the Alder called down from on high. “We seek an inn.”

The beggar looked up and met his gaze, a flash of ire in his storm grey eyes. He nodded toward the road up the headland, a dismissive gesture. Impudent, though not without merit.

Behind the Alder, Brother Oeric, a hulking figure with a hawkish scowl, shifted in his saddle, and his belaboured mount shuddered beneath the rider’s weight. Warm shit splattered on the cobblestones as the pony dumped its bowels.

“You play well,” offered Gaelric, and he tossed the boy a copper.

He did not break his tune to scramble in the mud for the coin.

The Alder nodded, and goaded his horse toward the road that climbed the headland.

Wolfe watched as they rode on up toward the Wind’lass, plucking idly at the lower strings. They were not Eirean, the riders, and he imagined some place far across the sea where eyes were blue as sapphires and soaring palaces with spired silver domes gleamed white as fresh-licked bones.

He let a chord ring open and reached across to scoop up the muddied coin, a bonn no less. He wiped the coin clean on the leg of his trews and tucked it away inside a secret pocket in his brownwool vest, which, too, was frayed, and patched as his brat.

“Ey, Faerie!” a thin-pitched voice rang from across the square, and Wolfe recoiled as a warm slop stung his hands, splattering like a wet rag against the guiterne’s spruce shell.

He looked up to see three lads striding toward him, the biggest of them wiping shit brown hands on his trews, grinning through blackened teeth.

The Goat. Named for having been kicked by one as a boy, his face left bent and misshapen. Not hard enough, Wolfe rued, wiping the gobs of stinking dung from his hand and cheek. And walking beside, his brother Domnal, who was close as big, and twice again as mean. Fatherless sons of Fenore the Smoker, as hard a woman as ever was met.

The third, who’d called out, was Finn Owan.

Dwarfed by the Smoker’s brutes, Finn was lanky, not particularly tall, but not exactly stunted. His hair was redder even than his father’s, his spotted face gaunt and ghoulish. Flat eyes that locked now with Wolfe’s were sunken beneath the hard bones of hollow cheeks and a brow that rarely creased. Not in mirth nor ire, for he’d grown to be cold and cruel, had Finn, as Wolfe had come to learn.

Domnal and the Goat, thick as they were, followed the runt because Finn Owan was son of Fearghal Owan, Baile of Breton. Worse, he was one of Meester’s Hoods, and on the streets, even in Breton, that was good as law.

Ursul the Chipper’s wife hurried her daughter off, and Old Irnan and his greyhair goat shuffled away with not so much as a copper bit for The Wistful Shepherd, a tune that reminded the old man so sweet of his dead wife’s eyes, and Wolfe thought that miserly, given the herder had watched over goats all his life.

He knew what was coming. Yet on he played. Damned if he wouldn’t make them earn their take.

“Ey Faerie, it’s gone past Moonday,” Finn began in his thin-pitched voice, standing over Wolfe like he was taking a piss, and Wolfe truly hoped he wouldn’t. “Know what that means? It’s payday.”

“Fairly sure you said the morrow…”

“Ey? What’s that? You singin’, Faerie? I can’t hear you.” Finn kicked over the wooden almsbowl at Wolfe’s feet, spilling the coppers, a handful of bits, across the stones and mud and shit.

“I thought we had an understanding. You come to me, beggin’ for help. Didn’t you come to me, beggin’ for help? An’ me an’ the Bor, we open our arms. Our hearts. We look after you. Like I said we would.”

“And I’m grateful,” Wolfe muttered.

“Grateful? That’s good. ‘Cause the Lord of Feldhart, he likes his debts paid. And he don’t like to wait. Takes it real personal. You want I should go back to him, tell him to wait? Is that what you’re saying? Are you stupid, Faerie? Eh?”

Sweet mercies, he talked a lot.

Wolfe drew a slow and steady breath, lowered his eyes and moved to the bridge, fingers cramping with the four-fret stretch his teacher had bid him master.

Just take the damn bits and leave me be.

“This is pathetic!” Finn spat, stooping to pick up the coins from the mud, oblivious to the difficulty of the chords in the bridge. “You’re a better pilfer than a minstrel, Faerie. Maybe you ought to rethink your profession.”

“Well,” Wolfe replied, unable to shut his mouth as he knew he should, “you scared off my audience, didn’t you, before they could show their appreciation…”

The mudstained cap of the hobnail boot on the foot of the Goat, son of the Smoker, lashed out, crushing Wolfe’s fingers. The catgut sliced through skin and flesh before the strings snapped and the spruce body splintered.

Wolfe gasped, clutching his hand, scrambling backward in pain and shock, cradling the broken instrument like a crippled pup.

“Look what you’ve done,” he cried, “you gutless…”

His jaw snapped shut as another boot struck, this one laced on the foot of Dom, splitting his cheek and burning his ear.

Wolfe reeled and fought to rise from the mud as fear and fire lit in his belly. His mouth went dry and he heard a scream, and it was his, as he lashed out with the broken guiterne that became a flail in his bleeding hands. What was left of the spruce and its jagged shards shattered against the fatherless face of Dom, who staggered backward, clutching his thuggish, bloodied mug.

Wolfe steadied on his feet, hands trembling, still wielding the mangled mess of the once fine instrument.

Finn whistled, watching wide-eyed. “That was brave, Faerie, I’ll give you that.” He laughed. “But stupid, ‘cause now you gone an’ upset the Goat.”

Dom looked up through fat fingers, brow dripping with blood, and spat, and the Goat’s bent and crooked mouth twisted.

“But I’m glad you did it,” carried on the Baile’s boy. “Know why?”

“Enlighten me.” Wolfe felt betrayed by the quiver in his voice.

“I don’t like you, Wolfe. Never did. You’re faespawn. An’ yer sister, the both o’ ye. And that makes yer ma a whore. A dirty, faerie lovin’ whore.”

Wolfe rued the weight he gave this stupid bully’s taunts that should mean nothing.

“I don’t like faeries,” the voice droned on, “and I don’t like you. An’ now Dom ere an’ the Goat are gonna hurt ye. Bad.”

Wolfe couldn’t say then why he did not run. Why he did not fight, when the brothers came, when the Goat grabbed the front of his tunic in his giant hands and dragged him off his feet and smashed him in the face with his cudgelled forehead hard as horns and hurled him to the mud like a broken dog.

He clasped his arms over his head and shut his eyes tight as they kicked and kicked and kicked, and he saw his mamere’s eyes, wide and lost, and his stomach caved and took his wind and his ears rang with the piercing highnote of a whistleflute and he feared for them as the world tilted, and the shadows closed in, and he tried to breathe, fates knew he had to breathe…

And then it stopped.

Wolfe opened his eyes.

Only two people in the village of Breton were stronger than the bastard sons of Fenore the Smoker. One was Goban, whose smithy stood across the square. The other was Goban’s son, Eammon, who’d worked the forge since he could hold a hammer.

He held a hammer now, and he strode across the square. With one hand he yanked Finn by the scruff, and the Baile’s boy tumbled back across the cobblestones. He struck the Goat with the soft worn hilt between the blades of his shoulders. The Goat grunted and arched and turned and Eammon swung again. And the hardened iron of the hammer of Goban, tempered by many thousands of blows, met the Goat’s misshapen face, tempered by a cloven hoof and a life neither a father’s hand or a mother’s love.

He’d pulled the blow. Eammon was no killer, and knew well his strength. But it was blow enough to fell the Goat, and give his brother Dom something to ponder. Like his own face, which though not pretty, was well enough formed to want to keep it that way.

Finn rose from the stones with a dagger in his hand and murder in his eyes. “You’re dead, Eamonn!” he spat. “You’re guttin’ dead! And you, Faerie. You’re dead too, you hear me?”

Eammon stood unflinching, as they all three staggered away, one brother dragging the other. Not until they were gone from the square did he lower his hammer and draw a deep breath to slow his heart and still his hands.

“You alright?” the smith’s son turned back to Wolfe, who had crawled his sorry self up on elbows and knees. Blood and bile rose with a ragged breath, and he groaned as his body convulsed and he retched.

When again he could breathe, he sat back on his haunches, touching the fingers of his unbloodied hand to his face. His cheek was split and bleeding, lip cut and fat, half his face numb.

Eammon stepped closer and held out his hand. Wolfe looked up at his saviour through the one eye not swollen shut. He ignored the hand, for he couldn’t move his fingers, and did not trust he could yet find his feet.

“I’m sorry about your lute.”

The smithy’s son bent down and picked up the tangle of spruce and mahogany, brass and rosewood and catgut and blood that lay on the sodden cobblestones.

“It’s not a lute,” Wolfe croaked.

“I hear you play.” Eammon placed the thing that was once not a lute on the ground beside Wolfe. “I like to listen, when I work, between the strikes. I try to keep the beat, sometimes.”

“I know.”

Eammon looked down at the empty bowl, copper bits gone. “You alright?”

Wolfe nodded slowly, grimacing with pain and a streak of irritation he knew was undeserved and ungrateful. “Thank you, for…”

He didn’t have the energy to finish the thought, so he just waved, vague.

Eammon nodded.

“Wait here a moment.”

And he walked back across the square, disappearing inside the smithy. When he returned he was carrying something small in one of his hands.

“Here, put some of this on your face,” he said with a boyish rush of enthusiasm, and he passed Wolfe down a small clay jar. “It stinks, but it’ll help some.”

Wolfe took the jar.

“Da makes me put it on my hands when I hit them or burn them.”

Wolfe nodded.

Eammon stood.

The square was silent.

“You sure…”

“I’m fine.” Wolfe slurred the word and wiped a string of bloody spittle from his swollen lip. “I’ll be fine.”

Eammon nodded. “Well, alright then. Guess I’ll see you round.”

And Eammon, son of Goban, returned to his father’s forge, and the ring of iron on steel sounded up again, and Wolfe felt each blow and he cursed this place, and he cursed the tears that blurred his eyes and stung his cheek as he stared at the broken mess of a borrowed guiterne in his lap.

“Fuck,” he muttered, and closed his eye.

I hope you enjoyed chapter 1, and I invite you to leave a comment. Your thoughts, or a question, anything you like.

You can find more chapters here.

Welcome, fellow epic fantasy reader.

This is the humble beginning of an epic fantasy saga, the tale of Wolfe and his blind sister Wilde, shunned siblings swept up in the prophecy of a wrathful and righteous new god.

Wildelore is a character-driven, literary adult fantasy debut with heart and grit.

If you love genre classics like George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) and Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, I think you’ll love Wildelore.

And if you found your way here through Sarah J Maas or Rebecca Yarros, I think you might like it too.

As I write the series and pitch to agents and publishers around the world, I thought I’d share book 1, which is complete, with a small but growing community of readers here.

Each week I publish a new chapter. If you’ve subscribed, you’ll get it in your inbox, you can read it there or here on substack, and they’re all archived below so it’s easy to catch up.

A bit like a TV series.

You’re the first readers. And because it’s not published yet, it’s still evolving, so I invite your thoughts and ideas to help shape the story and the world of Wildelore.

Enjoy…

Wildelore Book 1: Rise of the Harvest Moon

Chapter list and links

Part 1: Tidesday

8^th day of Fall, 874 AC - Five days from Soaine

Chapter 1: The Boy in the Village Square

Wolfe is canting for bones in the Breton village square when a stranger, a missionary, rides into town, and trouble arrives with the local Hoods.

Chapter 2: Cockles and Samphire

Maeg is working at the Wind’lass tavern when the strangers arrive.

Chapter 3: A Torn Fall’s Leaf

Wolfe’s sister Wilde is with their mamere, Etain, who is lost in her dreams of the Fae Isles, when he returns home.