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…
“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.
You can find more chapters here.