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

by Emily Tesh

“Perhaps you’d like to know more about the Wild Man of Greenhollow Wood?” he said. “You never know; you might meet him someday. You are living in his domain, after all.” “Go on, then,” said Tobias, and Silver leaned forward in his chair as he began to tell the local stories he’d been researching. He had a funny way of talking when he hadn’t the book to keep him on track: he kept cutting himself off to explain things, theorise, and remark about similar stories he’d heard elsewhere.

Ah, he thought, and nothing else.

He went back to his cottage and sat down with his back against the old oak. Sometimes he wondered if the tree felt sorry for him. A kind of nonsense. The tree was a tree; he felt tree-things, sunlight and earth and so on, and Tobias was only another kind of thing that dwelt upon him, no different if you thought about it from the squirrel’s nest in the nook of the trunk. Dryads might feel—no doubt Bramble was fond of Tobias—oh, all sorts of old things from the wood might feel, but it seemed to him they felt differently to mortals. Bramble could be fond, could be angry; fairies managed envy and pride easily enough; old rotting hunger-things that came out of the bogs and crept in among the willow-groves to the east felt a terrible desire, 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—