The Butcher of the Forest

by Premee Mohamed

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Dark Fantasy; Gothic

Synopsis

At the northern edge of a land ruled by a merciless, foreign tyrant lies a wild, forbidden forest ruled by powerful magic.

Veris Thorn—the only one to ever enter the forest and survive—is forced to go back inside to retrieve the missing children of the Tyrant. Inside await traps and trickery, ancient monsters, and hauntings of a painful past.

One day is all Veris is afforded. One misstep will cost everything.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: February 27, 2024

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

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 . . . and what 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. ...