Silver in the Wood (The Greenhollow Duology, #1)

by Emily Tesh

Just listening, to the hills and valleys of Silver’s voice.

The way he said it, and the look he gave Tobias with it, was flirting. Flirting!

But the nonsense made it easier for Tobias to be amused by the whole thing: lying in a soft white bed, with his wood too far away, listening to old wives’ tales of himself.

He had a fine, clear voice, a steady voice that made Tobias think of good strong wood grown straight and tall under the sun.

but to feel as mortals felt—to laugh

as mortals laughed, and look up under the eyelashes, and sing old songs to the plucked strings of a whatever-it-was— Tobias was a fool and always had been.

Here was the wood. Slow and green he felt the life of it, the life that had been his life as well these four centuries past. It poured around him thick and steady, binding all together: the long patient strength of the trees that anchored, the deep bright power of the handful of dryads—Tobias felt Bramble clear as day among them, young and strong—and then the small and necessary, the bracken and ferns, the mosses and mushrooms. Here were the songbirds and ravens and solemn wide-winged owls, shy deer and burrowing rabbits, fox and badger and snake, beetles and moths and midges, all the things that were the wood, that lived each in their own way under the shelter of the old oak.

“Mr Finch,” said Mrs Silver, the one time he said anything about it, “you are not, in point of fact, a tree.”

He felt heavier to Tobias than he should have been; there was a weight and solidness to him now that went beyond the physical, that had deep roots. Tobias paid it no mind. He put his big hand round the back of Silver’s head, into his mud-coloured curls, and kissed him.

“Good,” said Bramble. “He’ll need you.” “You won’t, though.” “No,” she said patiently, “because I’m not a people. But I will still love you.”