A Harvest of Hearts

by Andrea Eames

Genres: Fantasy Romance

Synopsis

In the beloved tradition of Howl’s Moving Castle, a whimsical and unforgettable story of fantastic adventure, common sense, and the power of love to overcome the greatest of obstacles . . .

Before Foss Butcher was Snagged, she thought no more of the magic-users than did anyone else in her tiny village. Sometimes gorgeous women in impossible carriages rolled into town and took bits of people’s hearts. Everyone knew hearts fueled their magic. But Foss, plain, clumsy, and practical as a boot, never expected anyone would want hers.

True enough, when the only sorcerer in the kingdom stepped from his glossy carriage, he didn’t intend to hook Foss. Sylvester’s riot of black curls and perfectly etched cheekbones caught her eye a moment too long, that was all. Suddenly, Foss is cursed and finds herself stomping toward the grand City to keep his enchanted House, where her only friend is a talking cat and the walls themselves have moods.  

But as Foss learns the ways of magic, she realizes she’s far from its only unwilling captive. Even Sylvester is hemmed in by spells and threats. It’s said this sorcery protects king, country, and order for thousands. If Foss wants to free herself—and, perhaps, Sylvester—she’ll have to confront it all . . . and uncover the blight nestled in the heart of the kingdom itself.

Release date: March 4, 2025

Publisher: Erewhon Books

Print pages: 464

Sample

They said that magic, real magic, not the shite that the hedge-witches peddled with all their little bags of powders and herbs, could only be performed in exchange for a human heart.

That’s why all the sorceresses who passed through our village—the ones in the big carriages with the gold scrollwork and velvet curtains—were all so pretty. The sort of pretty that broke hearts, men’s and, I’m sure some women’s as well, although, in general, the women seemed to be better at hiding it.

When they visited, the sorceresses made a show of going into the market and buying the herbs we grew, as if they made potions like any old hedge-witch. Really, though, they were sucking bits of heart out of everyone around them, and we all knew it. Yet we gathered around them rather than shutting ourselves away indoors as we should have.

That was their purpose in coming to the villages: gathering bits of heart—second-rate, hayseed hearts, little smears of heart, but enough for small spells. Each smitten man or woman gave a little bit of their heart when they saw one of these ladies, it was said, and she would pocket their devotion to use for a cantrip or a hex.

They rarely took a whole heart, which would involve luring a person away, or so we believed; they seemed to gather enough of what they needed by gradual winnowing during each visit.

I don’t know how we knew about the hearts. It was just something we seemed to be born knowing. I suppose our parents told us the story in our cradles, but I do not remember hearing it for the first time.

We knew that hearts were the only source of magic that really worked, although the odd charlatan could get away with tea leaves and herbs for a little while if their luck held; we knew a heart could be taken in bits and pieces, with the victim barely noticing, or all at once, prized from a chest like an oyster from a shell; and we knew the sorceresses got those hearts from us, those who lived in villages far from the city and the king’s palace.

And what did they do with all that magic? No one knew for sure, and no one much cared. Whatever they did, they did in the city, and they didn’t concern themselves with our affairs, so we didn’t concern ourselves with theirs. The ladies probably used their magicks for murdering and all such, we speculated—killing people the king wanted dead. Big, political things.

Our kingdom was never at war and had not been for hundreds of years, as far as anyone knew, and perhaps the ladies and their magicks had something to do with that.

They didn’t take enough from us to be a bother, and any inconvenience caused by the gradual stealing of hearts was more than made up for by the excitement of their visits, or so everyone seemed to believe.

That acceptance of what amounted to a slow mutilation seemed strange to me later, but at the time, I was as complacent as the rest of them. So long as they kept to their city most of the time, we could cheerfully ignore them.

Only one man in our village had ever actually been to the city: Goodman Whelk. (Well, one other had gone involuntarily, but more on that in a moment.) But Whelk had visited over thirty years ago, and his mind was almost gone, so he wasn’t much help.

None of us traveled away from the village, if we could help it, and certainly never away from the kingdom. Occasionally travelers passed through on their way to Somewhere Else, but more often than not, we would see them again on their way back. They always seemed befuddled at their failure to stay gone. We were remarkably incurious, it seemed to me later, but at the time, we rarely questioned it.

For the most part, in our kingdom, you probably lived out your life and died in the village where you were born. What was the point of leaving? All villages were much like ours; beyond the borders of the kingdom lay nothing but war and danger, from what we heard. And the city held its own horrors besides the sorceresses and their hearts.

We heard stories about children in the city abandoned by their parents—or lost, perhaps—who traveled in gangs of pickpockets. Or who simply vanished. If we were bad, the adults would threaten us with a cart ride to the city, to join them. Not Da, of course, but other parents.

The wives and sweethearts didn’t like it when the sorceresses visited—and some of the husbands, presumably, the ones who saw the longing glances their ladyfolk gave, although, being men, they would never admit it.

The women scowled and glowered and stood with their arms crossed, watching as the beautiful ladies sucked up the hearts that belonged to the womenfolk, by rights. At least, so they believed.

I quite enjoyed seeing the men squirm under the sorceresses’ gaze and the womenfolk’s fear and anger. The women would come into the shop after one of the ladies had visited and tut their tongues, complaining about the weakness of men, and I would listen stolidly as I wrapped their meat, gleeful on the inside.

I think I liked hearing of their resentment because it meant they knew what it felt like to be me, even for just a moment. Even the prettiest of them couldn’t hold a candle to the sorceresses, and I always felt like the plainest girl in the village by a long way.

I knew I would never be one of the young women with a babe on her hip, or even one of the settled matrons in a floury apron. I told myself I was at peace with it, but, as I said, seeing the women’s jealousy of the sorceresses gave me a kind of satisfaction. I couldn’t find it in myself to feel too sorry for them.

The sorceresses were charming, though. Even I couldn’t deny that. I had caught the eye of one once, as she climbed down from her carriage, and she had smiled at me as if I were someone who interested her very much, and whom she might want to learn more about, had she the time. Then I had the inkling of how they might have broken hearts, those ladies.

We had only known one person to be taken by the sorceresses, properly taken. Mostly the ladies just sucked enough heart out of enough idiots to serve their purposes on their rare visits, and then left, like picking the best fruits for the harvest.

Eventually they would run out, I supposed, but perhaps not—the ladies seemed never to age, and maybe they were content to wait till more idiots spawned and grew old enough to leer and yearn after the beautiful city sorceresses. Our village certainly birthed its fair share of idiots.

Perhaps the ladies that visited us were the same ladies who had always visited, back before the memories of even our oldest citizen.

One was taken, though, as I said, to the city. He wasn’t anything special—neither handsome nor not-handsome, not young, and not old. Far enough past the usual marrying age for most girls to forget about him, but not so far that they didn’t wink at him from time to time.

I could never quite remember his name before that, although I knew it began with a D—Dom? Denys? But after he was taken, everyone knew his name, and it became a name like one in a story, that you whisper, that has its own music to it: Dav. Dav Mallet.

A sorceress came to town as usual that day and stepped down from her carriage with a pretty white foot. Some were slim, some ripe and full, but all had faces so fine they could stop your breath; they had skin of all shades, from white to coal dark; and their hair, whatever the texture, was always as lustrous as if lit from within.

You could tell someone had fussed about with it, from all the braids and sparklies hanging off at all angles. They’d stick a jewel wherever a jewel would stick, those ladies, on fingers and wrists and ankles, and some even had their noses pierced.

They wore dresses in all colors, with skirts as big around as four of Goodman Wick’s beer barrels, held out with wires to keep them stiff.

Young Sam Stebbin swore he got a look underneath one once, as the lady was stepping up the little ladder into her carriage. He said he was on the ground trying to find something he’d dropped (bollocks), and he looked up and caught a glance of the underskirt, past those jingling ankle bracelets and right up that luscious leg. The lads made him tell this story over and over.

The sorceresses always kept those carriage curtains drawn right till the last moment, keeping everyone on tiptoes and straining to see; the menfolk’s trousers bulging out at the seams, no doubt, as if their little fellows could stand on tiptoe as well and get a quiz at the fine city ladies.

Dav worked in the fish market back then. He went out on the river enough days to bring heaps of the stinking things back, dangling from poles. He always smelled a little like fish, did Dav. That was the only memorable thing about him, before that day.

This particular sorceress, the one who took Dav, was golden-haired under her black veil, the gold glinting through the lace like daisies in the grass.

She did not even make the usual pretense of going to the herbalist’s that day, but instead stepped her dainty feet in their buttoned boots onto our dirty village ground and looked boldly about her. If she had been a goodwife at the fruit stand, she would have been squeezing melons and measuring the weight of apples; that’s the kind of look she had as she eyed the staring crowd with her yellow green eyes.

She saw Dav standing at his fish stall, with his big tub of brine and his dried fish dangling from his pole like a fringe about him, and pointed one long finger at him.

Dav looked about himself gormlessly, to either side and then behind, then realized to whom she was pointing and poked his eyebrows up so high that they disappeared into his hair.

And then she smiled, and he lurched forward, almost overtipping his tub of salted water, and made his stumbling way through the silent, watching crowd.

They stepped aside for him as they would step aside for Goodman Trew, the village drunk, but with none of the laughter and ribald comments. There was just a sense that he should be left to go his way, with no interference.

The sorceress kept her hand outstretched, and her finger crooked for all the time he took to wobble up, with nary a tremor in her well-shaped arm. When he reached her, he stood, swaying on his feet, staring into her perfect face. We all stared with him.

She smiled, and all our hearts leaped like Dav’s dying fish. Then she opened the door to her carriage and stepped up and inside. He followed, stumbling up the steps, looking like the bumpkin he was. We saw an elegant hand reach from the darkness inside and close the door, and we heard the small snick of a lock.

None of us went about our business. None of us spoke. We all waited. Not much time passed—four minutes, maybe five? It was hard to tell. And then the carriage started to rumble, the wheels sucked themselves out of the dirt, and the whole mess of it started to drive back the way it had come.

When it was out of sight, the chatter started. Low-voiced at first, and then louder. Speculation. Lewd suggestions as to what Dav was doing in there with the sorceress. Calls for the guardsmen—she can’t just take him! Who knows what she’s going to do with him? It must be against some law, surely?

And the men looked yearningly after, all wishing it had been them. Maybe they imagined that one day a carriage would stop, and a lady would hold out a hand and take them into the city with her, to be used as she saw fit, and maybe they wouldn’t care if she wizened them out like an old fruit. Maybe they imagined the sorceresses were magic all up in their quaints, too. That they had cunnies that glowed, maybe, or shot sparks, or opened up like flowers.

No one called the guardsmen. After all, Dav might have been taken, but he went willingly. We had all seen it. Besides, the guardsmen were as ineffective as the holy men when it came to sorceresses. Why did we need the law, or even gods, when we lived under the sorceresses’ all-powerful protection? Their authority trumped all.

Dav’s mother cried. There were half-hearted attempts to contact the city, send letters, but no one knew exactly where to send them.

When Dav came back—must have been a week, maybe ten days later?—he came back alone. They found him lying in his fish stall in the early hours of the morning, when the first market-keepers were trundling in their barrows of produce and flowers.

He was snoring, head on the ground, and feet dangled over and into his tin tub of stale, briny water, which no one had bothered to empty. And he was naked with, some said, a great bruise on his chest. I never saw him without a shirt after this, so I can’t confirm the truth of it.

They shook him awake, splashed the souring water on his face, slapped him about a bit, and draped him with enough cloth to make him decent. They asked him what had happened. He seemed dazed, looking over their shoulders as if searching for someone else. He looked like a child hunting for his mother in a crowd, on the verge of tears. His great rough, dry lip wobbled.

Dav’s mother kept him out of sight for a while. She kept her curtains closed, too, so none of the village nosy-parkers could peek in.

When he finally emerged, he looked like a man recovering from a long illness. He even walked with a cane, for shite’s sake, which I thought was probably for show. After all, his legs weren’t what the sorceress had been interested in, presumably.

“Poor fellow,” Da said once, shaking his head, as we watched Dav pass by.

“Weak fellow, to be so easily dazzled,” I said, blowing a strand of damp hair out of my face. It had been an unusually warm and busy day in the shop, and I was more irritable than usual, and perhaps less generous of spirit. Da shot me a look.

“Don’t be so quick to judgment, Foss,” he said, but gently. “We don’t know what manner of magicks she used on him, nor how we would have behaved in his place.”

“I wouldn’t have fallen for it, I can tell you that,” I said. “No matter how pretty she was.”

Da smiled—the same smile he got when he talked about my Mam, sad and happy all at once. “We’ll see,” he said. “You’re young yet. There’s more than magic that can make a person foolish—or weak, as you call it. Stronger men than Dav have succumbed to it.”

I snorted, but I was laughing. He had a way of making me soften up, did Da.

There had been much speculation about Dav’s adventures with the sorceress, naturally. Most of it was shouted in the pub or muttered between men on the street and kept away from the womenfolk, but no one really considered me womenfolk, and so I got to hear a lot of it.

It was what you would expect. Talk of dungeons with all kinds of instruments for inducing dark pleasures. Enslavement, Dav in a collar, forced to feed his lady grapes—or, in the gorier versions, little pieces of his own heart, wrapped as elegantly as hors d’oeuvres, perhaps stuffed with pitless olives and silky cream cheeses.

Everyone was eager to hear the musk and moisture of Dav’s stories—or, failing that, the blood and horrors. Perhaps a mixture of both.

But Dav said nothing. Whenever he was asked—and he was, subtly at first and then more insistently when he vouchsafed no details—he started to cry like a child, his face open and loose and wet, so that the other men looked away in embarrassment.

He would cry for hours into his ale, himself as free of shame as a baby, but it made everyone else sit at the edges of the room and eye him sideways. After a while, they stopped asking.

Dav never spoke about his time with the sorceress. Nor did he ever marry, nor have a sweetheart. I heard the rumors and saw him often as he passed before the shop window, looking lost and bereft, searching the crowd as if looking for someone.

I didn’t think to talk to him myself about the sorceress or ask him about his time under her spell. Back then, I thought I would have nothing to do with the magic ladies besides watching them pass through—more fool me, as it turned out.

Da and I lived right in town, behind our shop, in the mess and bustle of it all. Da was a butcher, and a good one, with arms that looked like legs of lamb themselves, and a way with a cleaver that could make a carcass grateful to be boned.

I worked in the shop with him. It suited me all right. I liked being behind the counter, able to watch the happenings of the village square through the big window while being partly hidden myself, and I liked the work itself.

Most of the running of the place fell to me. Da did the butchering, while I took the orders and the money. Every day, I stood beneath the disapproving portrait of the king that hung on our back wall—every business had to have one, by law—and counted up our coins, doing all the calculating in my head, which I liked, because I took pride in my skill with numbers and the quickness of my mind.

As I’ve said, our village was pretty much like any other. A few shops, including our butcher shop and the smithy, clustered around a market square where smaller vendors set up stalls once a week, with houses spiraling outward to the farms and the fish market by the river.

For a village where no one really traveled and where few moved away entirely, we were a diverse lot, as the land had been settled and resettled over hundreds of years—by nomads and hunters and farmers first, then by armies in long-past wars.

Despite all the intermarrying that had no doubt occurred, there was still a fair amount of variation in the people. You could look at Goodwife Meg’s nut-brown skin, for example, and see that her ancestors had come from somewhere with a good deal more sun, or notice the high cheekbones and near-giant limbs of Big Cully and see that he had some tall warrior race in his family tree—although Cully himself was a gentle man who walked half-bent over to make himself smaller and unthreatening. As for me, my mother had skin that was almost golden, and hair as dark as good tobacco, but somehow Da’s paleness had won out in me.

For as long as anyone could remember, though, or their grandparents and great-grandparents, we had lived under the king and sorceresses’ protection, and no invading forces had ventured into our kingdom. The idea of war lingered only in stories of blood and death, seldom told.

I had always been somewhat of an outsider. Mam had been a merchant’s daughter, wealthier than most, and surprised everyone—including her own parents, whom I had never met—by marrying a humble butcher. She died giving birth to me, her first and only child, and I couldn’t help thinking it had been my fault somehow.

Death in childbirth in our kingdom was almost a curse—not for the mother, but for the child. An old belief, but one that lingered.

One of the benefits of having the sorceresses harvest our hearts, or so we were told, was that mothers survived childbirth, and babies were born healthy. Children, and the offspring of animals, too. It was one of the loudly touted advantages of having the sorceresses’ blessing.

Before their magic protected the kingdom, or so the stories went, ewes would regularly lose their babes in lambing season; calves would sometimes be born dead, pulled from their mother encauled and unbreathing.

Under the king’s rule, however, hardly any babe was stillborn, and rarely did a mother pass from the strain or exhaustion of birth. Fewer babes were born all round, but that was a small price to pay, even if it meant the elderly in the kingdom outnumbered the young significantly. So many elderly and so few sprouts gave the villages a slightly sleepy, ponderous air—but then, we were a sleepy, ponderous type of people anyway.

My Mam was one of the few who lost her life while bringing another into the world. When I was a sprout, the others would taunt me, tell me I belonged with the abandoned children who wandered the streets of the city or who disappeared entirely.

After all, on the rare occasion that a cow or an ewe or a mare died while laboring, there was presumed to be something wrong with the calf or lamb or foal. Rather than waste time and good feed waiting to find out what it was, farmers usually just had the animal’s offspring slaughtered right off. Saved trouble later.

The other sprouts’ parents didn’t agree with them, not outright, but they didn’t tell them to stop, either. They never did it where Da could hear. They knew what he was like, how fiercely he loved me. And I never told him; it would only have hurt him.

He had married above his station, and some speculated that my mother had been too delicate for the life of a butcher’s wife, our simple life, and lodgings.

As I grew to adulthood, I developed strong arms, as suited a butcher’s daughter, a round face, and a figure that could best be described as “solid.” My hair was a carroty red, barely long enough to touch my shoulders, no matter how much I combed it through with honey. Because I tucked it under a mobcap while working, however, it was rarely visible.

I wore an apron every day that started out pristinely white when we opened, and ended up crumpled, damp, and blood-stained by the time we closed. It was always hot in the front of the shop, with all that meat and chopping and activity, and I looked a sight, but it didn’t matter. Da didn’t care, and in the shop, everyone expected sweat and red cheeks, and didn’t look at me in any way odd.

It was different when I had to dress to go out, to services or for visits, and squeeze into hose and dress myself up in ribbons and such. In the shop, people knew what to expect, and they expected me, and they got me, as I was, no trussing up. I usually didn’t trouble myself with all that nonsense either.

True, sometimes I would see girls, girls with whom I’d gone to the schoolhouse, walking arm in arm with their sweethearts, and I’d feel a twinge.

Sometimes the girls became wives, and then they came into the shop to buy a nice pair of chops or steaks to make a nice dinner for Ned or Niall or whoever was waiting for them at home. And then, usually not much later, they’d be coming in again, this time for practically a whole hog, or the guts to boil up for soup, and I would know they had spawned other little Neds or Nialls.

I had my own Ned or Niall at one point, I’m embarrassed to say. Well, I didn’t have him, but I wanted him, and it never occurred to me that women like me—plain, forgettable, sensible women—aren’t allowed to want things, although that seemed clear as cold water to everyone else.

I thought I was allowed to moon after a boy, as the others did, and to have fantasies of posies dropped on my doorstep and pebbles thrown at my window at night. That was when I was younger, before I realized I was not really a woman but something more like a mule or a laying hen—for use but not for adoration.

It hurts to remember it even now. I had smiled and simpered when he came into the shop for his cuts of meat—the youngest Hodges boy, Aron, with ears that stuck out and chapped lips. Men are allowed to be ugly, you see, and it doesn’t make a smack of difference. I had stood and talked to him with my head cocked to one side like I had seen the other girls do.

Now I look back and picture my red, sweaty face under the bloodstained mobcap, staring at Aron like he’d hung the moon, and it’s like someone poking me in the ribs with a pointed, malicious finger.

Anyway, I had harbored hopes that Aron was sweet on me. I had certainly dropped enough hints. Every time he came into the shop, I imagined it was to see me. What was worse, so did Da, because he thought the sun shone out of my arse and that I was more beautiful than a thousand sorceresses.

“You’ll be giving me grandchildren before I thought, then,” he would say. “We’d better make extra space in the pigpen out back for them all to bunk down.”

“Da!” I’d say, and I’d swat his arm, but secretly be pleased.

It took me a shamefully long time to realize that not only did Aron not return my affections, but he also had noticed mine, and thought it was all simultaneously humiliating and hilarious.

I know it will sound ridiculous to you, but I did not think to be suspicious when Aron slipped a note under our door. I had lived my whole life with my Da, who loved me more than anyone, and despite the childhood taunts and the inauspicious circumstances of my birth, I didn’t know yet that I was worth less than shite to any other man.

In his note, Aron had said that I should come to his farm, to help make the wine. That’s what his family did, the Hodges: they made wine that they kept in big barrels in the pubs and sent it to the city as well. He told me a day and time. I told my Da, and he gave me his blessing. I wore my dress with the yellow sprigs of embroidered flowers and braided my hair into a crown. It was the best I had ever looked.

Aron was there to meet me, on the farm. He had a barrel of grapes, and he was cleaning his feet with rags and water, ready to trample the grapes. He smiled from one sticking-out ear to the other and asked me to take off my boots and do the same. Then he gave me his hand to help me step into the barrel of grapes after I had washed. I remember the green, sweet-sour smell they had, and how they felt bursting between my toes.

He walked me home afterward. I had hoped for a kiss, or at least the holding of a hand, but we merely walked side by side up to the butcher’s shop. My feet were still tingling from the grape-crushing, and I could still smell the fruit on me; it was a nice change from the stale butcher’s-shop smell of blood.

I have to credit him for the planning of it. It took a while for his scheme to come about, and I just thought he had gone off me when he did not call on me again.

I wet my pillow with tears every night, until the morning I walked out into the market and saw, beside the usual bottles of Hodges wine, one that was called “Toad Wine.” Just three bottles of it, with a crudely drawn toad in a butcher’s apron on the labels. There stood Aron and his friends, who had been waiting for me to trudge outside the shop, and they were laughing. I turned around and trudged back in.

Da went mad. I’d never seen him like that before. He practically overturned the stall before Aron’s father appeared to calm him down. Goodman Hodges had nothing to do with it, after all—only Aron and his friends.

Da smashed the bottles, and a green mush came out, and for a moment I believed the label and thought I had infected the wine with some terrible, ugly disease. Worse, that this green mulch was me, somehow, my insides made visible. My wrongness, that had killed my mother and should have killed me too, but for some godsforsaken reason had not.

Of course, it was no such thing. Aron had tipped the grapes we’d squashed directly into the bottles and sealed them up without straining them or turning them into wine, for the sake of the prank.

Still, I kicked sand over all the mess that was left in the square that night, so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

I didn’t waste time on any boys after that. I had learned my lesson. Perhaps it was all part of the curse I imagined my mother’s death had placed on me, that I should be unlovable by anyone but Da. And Da’s shine and glow when he looked at me was now as much a mockery and a hurt as my own reflection in the glass.

I had never seen a male sorcerer—no one in the village had, as far as I knew. I hadn’t even known they existed. Afterward, folk sounded knowledgeable about it—oh yes, of course, some of the sorcerers were men—but I think it was a load of shite, and they hadn’t known either.

We had grown used to seeing the carriages come through once every couple months or so, but they had become more frequent of late, and the sorceresses were more high-cheekboned and lusciously curved than ever.

We’d had an unusually hard year—more sick livestock than usual and poorer crops—so people were looking for entertainment, and we didn’t mind the extra visits as much as you’d think. After all, the sorceresses brought our kingdom its prosperity, and surely seeing more of them meant things were looking up.

There was always a bit of a stir whenever one showed up, of course. It was bad manners to crowd around, or stare, but people would find themselves suddenly with urgent business that required them to stand in the middle of the square staring into space, pretending they were remembering their shopping list or some such.

On the day we saw our first male sorcerer, there were even more people milling about than usual, because each recent carriage had been more splendid than the last, and the panting lad who had come running into the square to tell people that a sorceress was coming had said that this carriage would be the most splendid of all.

He wasn’t wrong. The carriage was black, but shiny. Not shiny like paint, or like dark wood, but a hard-edged shiny, like stone—although, of course, it couldn’t have been stone, because not even the two hulking, great black horses pulling it could have dragged along a stone carriage, however much they showed off with their tossing manes and rolling eyes and the sharp clip of their feathered hooves on the cobbles.

There were black curtains at the windows as well, spangled and hung with beads, and black jewels clustered like frogspawn in the wheel arches and around the doors. Da watched me watch it, the way he did, with his mouth quirked to one side, and then lifted an eyebrow.

“You want to go out, Foss?”

“Nah.”

“’S a pretty one.”

“I can see it fine from in here.”

“G