Page 1 of Wench

Prologue

For as long as there have been crowns and courts, mortals and fae have shared the same soil. At first, they lived like neighbours at the edge of a great wood: wary, watchful, yet bound by the same rivers and stars. But where the fae sought to keep the balance with the natural world, mortals sought to master it. They came with their hunger for timber and ore; the fae met them with fire and blade. What might have been shared was seized. What might have been bartered was broken.

And so began centuries of blood. Fae raiding parties swept through villages, taking vengeance for each tree felled, each sacred grove cut down. Mortal armies answered in kind, their forges fed by veins of ore ripped from the earth. Hatred sank deeper than roots, passed from parent to child, until it seemed no one remembered a time before the war. Mortal children were raised on stories of fae cruelty, taught that their beauty was a mask for malice. Fae young were taught that mortals were nothing but greedy thieves, blind to the natural magic woven through the world. To be human was to fear the fae. To be fae was to despise the human.

But war is a hungering beast, and even kings tire of its teeth.

One such king had seen enough of broken fields and ash-choked villages to know the realm could not endure another century of bloodshed. He sought a different path. If mortals and fae could not share the same hearth, he reasoned, then perhaps they could share the same land – divided, but at peace.

He set his sights on Sherwood.

A forest older than crown and court. A place that was still wild, thick with the breath of fae magic. Mortals feared its shadows and fae revered its roots.

He decreed that Sherwood would be set aside, not as a spoil of war but as a sanctuary. Within its borders, the fae would be free to dwell without the threat of mortal axe or iron blade. It would be the beginning of something greater: a pact to divide the land in measure, each step pulling both peoples further from the jaws of slaughter. Peace, he swore, would take root where blood had so long been spilled.

His council, divided though it was, could not deny the need. Even the most hardened among them feared the cost of another hundred years of war. Word spread that an end might finally come to the endless cycle of blood. Some mortals scoffed, unwilling to cede even a strip of land to those they had long called monsters. Some fae bristled, mistrusting a king whose people had hunted them for generations. But beneath the murmur of dissent, a fragile thing began to stir – hope. It flickered in quiet corners, in the whispered prayers of humans who had buried too many sons, in the tired songs of fae who had grown weary of sharpening blades.

Sadly, fate does not always bow to kings.

The summons came, swift and holy, carried on banners that bore the cross. A crusade, declared in the name of God, calling all sovereigns to distant fields where the gullet of war demanded to be fed all the same. The king, bound by duty and oath, could not refuse. He marshalled his armies, raised his banners, and departed, leaving Sherwood’s fate to linger in silence.

Years passed. Seasons bled one into another. The king’s banners faded on distant fields, and still the pact remained undone. What might have been the first step toward peace instead became another scar, and Sherwood remained what it had always been: neither haven nor prize, but a place between. While the king fought on distant sands, others built kingdoms in the shadow of an absent crown. Mortals who coveted its ore crept closer, pickaxes glinting at its edge. Fae who called it sacred withdrew deeper within, unwilling to surrender root or stream. Suspicion festered. Skirmishes flared. And with each clash, the fragile whisper of peace grew fainter, thinning in the wind.

And through it all, Sherwood watched, waiting for the day when blood or mercy would decide what kind of place it would become.

ChapterOne

Mist rolls through the trees like an omen.

It coils low over the forest floor, blurring roots and stones, softening the world until Sherwood seems painted in washed greys and pale greens. Branches dissolve into shadowed silhouettes, the whole wood caught between waking and dream as sunlight spills across the sky like yolk pours from an egg.

Marian pulls her cloak tighter, her breath ghosting in front of her. In the silence, every sound seems sharper: the soft squish of damp earth beneath her boots, the faint creak of the bow strung across her back, the occasional rustle of Tilda’s skirts as her handmaiden hurries to keep up.

They shouldn’t be here. Not like this. Not on foot, and certainly not this deep.

If the mare hadn’t thrown her shoe, they would be halfway back to the manor by now, but the iron had torn clean from the hoof with a sickening lurch. In order to make it back to the manor before her father stirred, they left the horse in a nearby field to graze and prayed the mist would keep their mortality hidden.

Marian’s pulse thrums in her throat, but she forces herself forward, fingers brushing the fletching of an arrow as though touch alone could steady her. She knows this path like the lines on her palm, knows which oaks are hollowed by lightning strikes and which streams run shallow enough to cross without soaking her hem. But in the fog, even the familiar feels strange. Roots stretch like grasping fingers, stones crouch like watching beasts, and the silence hums with the weight of eyes unseen.

Tilda’s breath clouds the air. ‘Remind me again why we’re not sticking to the road like sensible folk?’

‘The Roman road will take twice as long,’ Marian answers, stepping over a gnarled root slick with moss. ‘And I’d rather face the forest than my father’s wrath.’

‘We shouldn’t be out here to begin with, milady.’ Tilda glances up warily at the thick canopy overhead. ‘You’re the baron’s daughter, not some thief sneaking through fae-cursed woods like a bloody outlaw.’

Marian scoffs. ‘The fae stick to the deep. They haven’t been seen near the edge in ages.’ Despite the ease with which she answers, she can’t keep her voice from hitching higher.

From the time she could walk, her parents had barred her from the woods. Her mother, Isadora, hated Sherwood in a way that couldn’t be softened by reason. Each morning, she made Marian drink a bitter tonic she claimed would ward against the fae and whatever wild magic drifted in from the trees that bordered the Hallomere estate. It was that same dread that led Isadora to place a bow in her daughter’s hands, fearing the fae more than the wagging tongues at court. Whenever Marian’s father, Eamon, rode into Nottingham on business, Isa would lead Marian out behind the stables; she taught her to string and draw, to breathe between heartbeats, to loose an arrow so straight that it could split the horizon if she willed it.

Marian had always struggled to quiet her thoughts. But the moment she pulled back the string, the noise stilled. The world narrowed to the whisper of the bow and the sure pull of muscle and breath.

The lessons were quiet acts of defiance disguised as discipline. Each arrow fired was a small rebellion, a refusal to let her daughter grow helpless in a house that prized obedience over survival.

After Isadora died, Eamon refused to leave the estate. His spirit soured with the loss, and cruelty slithered into the gaping maw left behind by grief. He turned his mourning into a weapon, wielding it against everything that bore her likeness, and the calm that the bow had once granted Marian vanished with her mother. One night, when he found her practising behind the stables, he shattered her bow across his knee without a word, then struck her. The sound of the splintering wood was worse than the blow. It was as if he’d broken the last piece of Isadora still left in the world.

Barefoot, breathless, still tasting blood and salt, she fled into the dark. When she stepped beneath Sherwood’s canopy, the quiet she’d been chasing finally found her; not as stillness but as belonging.

There, no one measured her worth by the width of her hips or the size of her dowry. The trees did not care if her stitching was neat or if her posture was pleasing. Out there, the Hallomere name wasn’t a leash her father could pull to remind her of her place.