Feeding the Woods with Stolen Princes

von Harees Hasson

110 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

"The monsters of Oakhaven do not crawl beneath roots; they wear velvet and perfume their rot."In the shadow-choked borderlands of Oakhaven, survival is measured in bushels of bitter turnips, blistered knuckles, and the cold heft of rusted hedge-shears. For nineteen-year-old Isla, the spires of the High Citadel mean nothing compared to the fragile life of her mute twelve-year-old brother, Bran. But when the great iron church bells toll to inaugurate the dreaded Seven-Year Rite, dread sweeps the scrub-farms: the Briarwood stirs once more, demanding its tribute of royal blood.Desperate to shield Bran from the measuring stares of the King's press gangs, Isla schemes to flee across sealed mountain passes. Instead, she walks straight into the web of King Victor Hale-a monarch with the unnerving, waxen visage of eternal youth and eyes dead as winter stone. Rather than executing her, the King bestows a treacherous mercy: the siblings will accompany the convoy to the perimeter, armed with an ornate silver bell guaranteed to summon imperial wards if the forest attacks. But at the border, the trap snaps shut. Shoved across the cyclopean iron threshold as expendable proxies, Isla and Bran are abandoned to the predatory timber.Yet the Briarwood is no mindless thicket. Within its shifting, hostile canopy, Isla faces the legendary "Briar Demon"-only to discover Prince Tristan Knight, the royal tribute taken two decades ago, now transformed into a bark-skinned sentinel crowned in living dogwood. Through Tristan, Isla uncovers the horrifying truth of Oakhaven's gilded glory: the crown has never sacrificed its true darlings. Peasant children are culled from the fringes and boiled in alchemical vats to distill the King's youth, while the living forest is made both scapegoat and refuse trench.As Isla descends into the subterranean Root-Labyrinth, an even darker legacy unfurls. Entombing the mutilated, translucent gods of the valley beneath a vast lake of molten glass, Queen Saint Rosamund remains fused to the taproot as a weeping seal-and Bran's hidden lineage is laid bare as the ultimate harmonic key. Worse still, the silver bell tucked against Isla's ribs begins its frantic, alchemical tick: a walking bomb dispatched by the Usurper King to burn the deep woods and slaughter every living witness.To halt the inferno and sever a four-hundred-year-old blood covenant, Isla must defy kings, saints, and cosmic titans. Armed not with royal lineage but with the enduring fury of mortal labor, she will prove that the living earth cannot be saved by stolen blood-only redeemed by the hands that tend it.Dark, mythic, and dripping with gothic atmosphere, Feeding the Woods with Stolen Princes is a haunting folk-fantasy tour de force for readers of Naomi Novik, Katherine Arden, and Hannah Whitten.

• Themen: Belletristik Fantasyliteratur Dark Fantasy
• ISBN: 9798869141583
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 12.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: HAREES HASSON