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

by Emily Tesh

He often intimidated people, being a big and grim-looking sort of fellow; he’d accepted it years ago and had long since stopped trying to be the kind of man who smiled enough to make up for it.

Silver laughed as if he’d been joking.

He’d seen nearly four hundred summers come and go by now.

did you mean to bleed out alone in the woods? Do you hate the company of your fellows that much?”

When Tobias next woke, he was lying on a bed as soft as moss and as cool as fresh water, and the throb in his leg was a steady healing pounding, not the slow burn of infection and death. He knew at once that he would be well again.

The heart of Tobias’s untidiness wouldn’t be fixed by any washing.

invalid.”

He could not say to Silver: like a thing uprooted, though he was.

He was ashamed after for losing his temper. He always tried not to: it seemed to him that being a big fellow meant you had to keep a rein on yourself. But he was beginning to get restless, lying in a bed all day with nothing to do except wait for Silver to come in and take a look at him.

After that he turned up at Tobias’s sickbed every evening with a little leather-bound volume. He had a pleasant voice for listening to, one that went up and down soothingly. Tobias didn’t always pay attention to the words. It was nice to hear a human voice speaking, the rises and falls of it.

“But so much of our heritage is disappearing in this day and age. The costs of progress. I’m interested in preserving what I can.”

The way he said it, and the look he gave Tobias with it, was flirting. Flirting! At least Tobias recognised it this time. Funny thing, to be flirted with by a pretty young fellow who wore expensive coats. Made Tobias feel young again, and at the same time very, very old.

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.

The modern Greenhollow is only a remnant of a sacred space that was much, much greater. I call it the Hallow Wood.”

Whatever else happened, no matter how many summers he endured, Tobias had this.

He knew the story. Of course he did.

Clever, generous, good-looking fellow, who kept coming back to show Tobias the stories he’d found like a child with a butterfly trapped in a jar.

Tobias was a fool and always had been. He groaned and stood up. When he looked up he found it was pitchy dark. Time had softened around him the way it so often did. Maybe that was the wood’s version of pity.

“A practical folklorist,” said Mrs Silver. “Vampires eliminated, ghouls laid to rest, fairies discouraged, and so on.

He’d never used Silver’s given name aloud before. It felt strange on his lips.

the Wild Man of Greenhollow, a lunatic, a bandit, a follower of the old gods, or at least of something like them.

In another lifetime perhaps he would have been the one to dash forward and pull someone he loved away from this ancient and ugly sorcery. Perhaps.

a parasite that had bored in deep long ago.

Tobias felt nothing about it. He felt nothing about anything.

Tobias felt the absence of the wood as an itch in his heart, but there was nothing real to it. He didn’t belong to the wood anymore, nor it to him.

The world was far bigger than Tobias remembered from four centuries ago. It was bigger than he had ever known, and he was living in it. He had thought himself a thing uprooted, like the great oak, ready to begin his death.

The hanks of hair that fell away from the scissors never turned to dead grass and scattered bark. They stayed as scruffy knots of human hair. Tobias was not now what he had been before.

Does she like you?” Silver peered at him. “She does! Heaven help me, I’ve made a terrible mistake.”