Chapter 1
Chapter One
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.
In the ten years since her mother’s passing, she’d continued to return, venturing deeper into the forest’s heart.
Tilda swats a low branch out of their path, snapping Marian back to the present. ‘We’re forced to limp through this wretched fog because you couldn’t wait to sketch some mushrooms on a bloody tree stump!’
‘It’s not my fault the roads are crawling with soldiers after last week’s raid.
’ Marian pauses at the crest of a shallow rise where the fog slinks like syrup around her boots.
She picks at the skin around her thumb aimlessly, the motion restless.
‘I needed . . . space,’ she admits, half to Tilda and half to herself.
‘To get away from the manor. Away from them.’
For three days the Sheriff had lingered at Hallomere Manor like a carrion bird, circling her father’s forge, hovering over the smiths while they laboured night and day to replenish the weapons stolen in the raid.
His voice had been everywhere – echoing in the courtyard, slithering through the corridors, pressing against the back of her neck whenever he passed too close.
And always behind him is Aengus, his snivelling rat of a lieutenant, with his pinched smile and darting eyes.
Marian could still feel their gazes crawling across her, stripping her down to her value and weighing her like a piece of iron to be hammered into shape.
Neither saw her as a person; only what she might be bent into: a wife to barter, a womb to secure a legacy, a pawn to be placed at the Sheriff’s leisure.
She needed to be rid of them, if only for a few hours.
Her satchel knocks against her hip as she steps off the rise.
She touches it lightly, comforted by the rough leather and the weight of familiarity.
Inside were not the weapon sketches her father demanded her to refine, pressing her to scratch out crueller designs that could bite deeper, maim more brutally, bleed fae bodies faster, make the killing more efficient.
No, Marian’s fingers had itched to craft something that was beautiful for beauty’s sake.
By the light of tonight’s full moon, she’d managed to draw the soft blow of mist over a stream, the spirals of lichen on bark, the shape of a doe’s ear caught in a moonbeam.
Her handmaiden had found her just as dawn stretched across the sky in pale pink streaks.
Tilda places a gentle hand on Marian’s shoulder. ‘You’ll not sketch yourself into a better world by hiding in these woods, child.’ She squeezes her arm affectionately, palm warm even through the damp chill.
‘Maybe not,’ Marian sighs as her boot sinks in a patch of wet leaves. She curses under her breath and grits her teeth before wrenching it free. ‘But Sherwood’s the only place that hasn’t tried to hollow me out and reshape what’s left.’
‘You’d be lucky if that’s all this wretched place did to you,’ Tilda grumbles, plucking a leaf from Marian’s auburn curls.
‘If the fae catch hold of you, they won’t just hollow you out; they’ll gobble you up whole.
Take all that’s good and decent and spit back nothing but rot and ruin. Monsters, every last one of them.’
Marian swallows and nods, but it’s half-hearted at best. She knows she should agree. It’s what priests thundered from pulpits and her father spat between clenched teeth. What every hearthside tale whispered about babes snatched from cradles and women led astray by emerald-eyed devils.
And yet . . .
Her gaze sweeps the trees. Branches arch overhead like ribs, cloaked in a mist that’s solemn and reverent. It feels less like a place of monsters and more like a sanctuary.
How could creatures so malevolent call this hallowed wood home? How could cruelty dwell in a place that felt holier than any chapel she’d ever kneeled in?
A twig cracks in the distance and Marian’s head snaps toward the sound.
Somewhere deep, a bird’s squawk cuts off mid-cry. The silence that follows is too heavy, as though the forest itself has drawn in a sharp breath. Marian’s fingers tighten on the curved edge of her bow, her heart pounding against her ribs.
She lifts her chin, squinting into the fog. The path bends sharply, half-swallowed by ivy and shadow, and Marian glances down it. Her fingers find the fletching of an arrow, her senses prickling.
Tilda notices. ‘What is it?’
‘Something’s wrong . . .’ Marian’s voice trails off as her eyes scan the mist ahead. It’s grown colder; the kind of chill that doesn’t belong in late spring.
Her focus narrows just beyond the crook in the path. At first, it’s only shifting grey, a blur of trunk and shadow. And then something moves. Gone as quickly as it came, but every hair on her arms lifts as if the air itself has teeth.
With shaking fingers, she slowly slides an arrow out of her quiver. Her insides twist as she nocks it. She squints, stepping in front of her handmaiden instinctively.
The movement comes again, closer this time. A vast, dark mass stirs within the pale veil, broad-shouldered, impossibly tall.
‘Tilda,’ Marian whispers, her voice little more than breath, but urgent all the same. Her eyes stay locked on the dark shape unravelling from the haze like a harbinger.
It’s too large to be a man and yet too small to be a beast. It shifts and a pair of eyes flare open. They blink back at her through the veil of fog – an impossible shade of green, bright as gemstones caught in a shaft of sun.
Fae.