Category: Oak King Holly King

Sunday Snippet, 4.16.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

Butcher cleared his throat and held out his left hand. Dark lines wore through his weathered palm like tree-rings, and his long fingers bore more than a few calluses. It looked more like a sailor or farmer’s hand than the hand of a thespian or an aristocratic eccentric. “Tonight I join the Wild Hunt to slay the beast that has devoured the children of the Court of Moons. If you will venture out with me, I will show you that all I spake of rings true.”

This, then, was the trick. No shell hidden beneath a cup or ha’penny pulled from behind an ear. Just a fairy tale to lure Wren out of the city. To what end, he couldn’t fathom.

Yet even as his rational mind supposed that such an adventure could only end in mugging or murder, his Romantic soul stretched its withered wings and soared at the notion of leaving the suffocating fog of Staple Inn behind to venture out into the wilderness beneath the full moon.

Furthermore, if he did end up murdered, it meant he’d never have to copy out another account-book again. And if he must end in murder, Wren supposed he’d rather have a strapping specimen like Butcher slide the knife into his heart.

~

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Sunday Snippet, 4.9.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance collection, Tales from Blackthorn Briar, a sequel to Oak King Holly King featuring hurt/comfort and many happily-ever-afters – available wherever fine books are found!

~

“I’m sorry,” said Wren as their lips parted.

Shrike furrowed his brow. “What for?”

“It’s my fault you lost your chance at the white hart.”

Shrike continued staring at him for another moment or two. Then his hand came up to brush Wren’s hair off his brow and trail down his cheek in a tender caress.

“I did almost lose my heart,” Shrike murmured. “But he is found again, and reawakened, and now all is well.”

~

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Sunday Snippet, 4.2.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

“Larkin had fled across the countryside,” Shrike went on. “More concerned with the knights gaining on him than the path ahead, he fell through a fairy ring. He stumbled through the forest—he knew not for how long—until he heard a child wailing and followed the sound until he stumbled upon me. I remember I had fallen out down from the tree. The other fledglings had pushed me out of the nest.”

“The other fledglings?” Wren interrupted.

“Aye,” said Shrike, confused by Wren’s confusion.

Wren hesitated, not wishing to offend, before he ventured what felt like the obvious question. “Were you born a bird?”

Much to Wren’s relief, Shrike didn’t appear offended. Merely befuddled. “No.”

“But you were born in a nest,” said Wren. When Shrike confirmed this with a nod, Wren added, “From an egg?”

“Aye,” Shrike said as if no one had ever questioned it before.

Wren supposed such circumstances were common in the fae realms. That conclusion didn’t prevent his mind from reeling. “Do all fae come from eggs?”

“Some do. Others grow in flower buds, or on the under-sides of leaves, or beneath toadstools, or in hollow logs—or sometimes in bonfires or particularly sooty chimneys. And,” Shrike added with a sceptical twist of his mouth, “some are born from other fae in the same manner kits come from vixens, or a fawn comes from a doe.”

“Or as human babes come from human mothers,” said Wren.

Shrike’s eyes widened with dawning horror.

~

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Sunday Snippet, 3.26.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

In the moonlight, and without his hood, Wren could see Butcher’s ears quite clearly. Now there was no mistaking them for waxwork. He could see, as well, the black woollen tunic Butcher wore and how it clung to his muscular frame, tied off with a belted leather gyrdel at the waist and hanging down not much farther than that. Nothing covered Butcher’s thighs save medieval hose, likewise black, and his black cavalier boots came up to his knees; a motley assortment of costuming eras in a monochromatic assembly.

Wren shut his mouth but kept on staring in wide-eyed wonder at his new surroundings. He’d never seen so many stars in his life. Had seen none, in fact, since he’d moved to London. The silence was new to him as well. Moreso than the muffled angles of Staple Inn, the forest had no wagons rattling endlessly over cobblestones, no people shouting, no bells ringing, none of the millions of incidental human sounds that tumbled all on top of each other every minute in the city. Just the rustling of pine needles in the wind.

Then he heard it.

An eerie sound, a howl that began low and swooped upward to end in a triumphant blast that echoed throughout the forest as if from miles off. A hunting horn.

Butcher took hold of the stag’s antlers and dug his knees into its flanks. The stag leapt off once more, darting to and fro between the trees at harrowing speed, along no path Wren could perceive. He clung to Butcher’s waist, his chest flush with Butcher’s spine, the closest embrace he’d known in more years than he cared to count.

~

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Sunday Snippet, 3.19.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

The terrible impact rang out across the field like a thunderbolt cleaving a tree in twain.

Wren’s hands flew to his mouth. The crowd leapt and cheered, surging in a bloodthirsty tide. The young man amidst the milkmaids let out a particularly gruesome guffaw. Wren didn’t dare breathe. It seemed the world had ceased turning the instant the blow fell.

The sword had struck Shrike in the side. The Holly King’s blade came away crimson. And the horrible noise, the crunch of metal against boiled leather and bone—

But Shrike rolled.

At first it seemed as though the force of the blow had thrown him aside, but as Wren watched him tumble, he realized Shrike had purposefully dodged. Not entirely, not quite fast enough for that, but dodged all the same, and when his feet came under him again he staggered upright.

And Wren’s hopes rose with him.

~

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Sunday Snippet, 3.5.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance collection, Tales from Blackthorn Briar, a sequel to Oak King Holly King featuring hurt/comfort and many happily-ever-afters – available wherever fine books are found!

~

Shafts of sunlight pierced the water from the jagged hole in the ice overhead. By their illumination, Wren glimpsed a shadowy thing. It glided through the water beneath him; he knew not how many fathoms down, but not far enough. Its smooth undulating form, dappled like a leopard in shades of grey, ran some three yards long, if not longer, from head to tail. It had a maw like a hound on a skull the size of a horse’s—as long as Wren’s thigh and as broad as his shoulders. The eyes were pure black, almost human in their shape, but nothing human in the promise of cold death behind them. And as it rolled through the water, it fixed its hungry gaze on Wren.

~

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Sunday Snippet, 2.26.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance collection, Tales from Blackthorn Briar, a sequel to Oak King Holly King featuring hurt/comfort and many happily-ever-afters – available wherever fine books are found!

~

Later, when he had a moment to reflect on the incident, Wren would realise his error. He, a mortal man, weighed some ten or eleven stone. The white hart, being ethereal, weighed nothing unless it chose to.

And in that instant, it chose for its hooves to prove as hard as adamant as it struck the ice and bounded away.

A sound like a thunderclap resounded across the lake. The crack shot across the ice from the point the hart had struck, spreading from the drinking hole and shooting between Wren’s boots. He had just time to perceive it before another noise burst the air, this one like lightning cleaving an ancient oak in twain, as the ice shattered beneath him.

Wren plunged into darkness.

Cold like a thousand knives raking his skin. Cold fit to turn his very veins to ice. Cold that burned in his bones in a way he’d never realised cold could do before. He wanted to shut his eyes against it. He couldn’t.

And a very good thing that turned out to be, for he was not alone.

~

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Sunday Snippet, 2.5.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

Wren, meanwhile, rummaged through his satchel. From its depths he produced a hand-mirror and held it out to Shrike.

Shrike took it. Throughout his centuries he’d heard of mirrors in stories and songs and glimpsed them in the hands of fae and mortal gentry. Then Wren had brought his to Blackthorn—a plain thing, he’d called it when he caught Shrike staring, merely a palm-sized circle of silvered glass set in an oaken frame and handle. Shrike had watched him ply his razor with it many a morn.

But he’d never held it in his own hand until now.

His face looked rather like it had in reflections of still water and in Wren’s sketches. There were but two difference—the bulbous, velvet-covered sprouts of a pair of antlers, one on either side of his brow.

“Ah,” said Shrike.

“You don’t seem terribly surprised,” said Wren.

“It’s a bit early for the first tines to split off,” Shrike admitted. He gingerly touched the tips of the new prongs, then pulled his fingers away with a hiss of pain.

“So,” Wren said, filling Shrike’s mug again—minus the laudanum—and pouring another for himself. “Antlers.”

“Aye,” Shrike replied.

“And this has never happened to you before?”

“Never.”

“So you don’t know how long they’ll take to grow in. Or how broad they’ll be when they do.”

“No,” Shrike admitted. Then, “Do you mind them?”

Wren looked at him as though he’d just asked something absurd. “I mind the pain they’ve caused you.”

Shrike chuckled into his tea.

“But, no,” Wren added with a smile of his own. “I don’t mind them.”

Shrike supposed he ought to have surmised as much, given Wren’s reaction to the Court of Hidden Folk, but it still relieved him to hear the answer.

“Do you?” Wren asked. “Mind them, I mean.”

Shrike shrugged. “They’re coming in whether I mind them or not.”

Wren blinked. “Fair enough.”

~

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Sunday Snippet, 1.29.23

Sunday Snippet from my gay Victorian fae romance, Oak King Holly King – available now wherever fine books are found!

~

The following se’en-night passed much like the first. By the end of it, Shrike’s antlers bore twelve points, and spread far beyond the breadth of his shoulders to span over a yard—very nearly an ell.

This made passing through the cottage doorway rather more difficult than otherwise.

The first time he knocked his antlers against the door-frame it rang through his skull to his very teeth. He staggered back to clutch at the rim of the hollowed stump for support whilst he waited for the pain to recede and his vision to return. He only felt thankful Wren hadn’t witnessed his stupidity. Still, he repeated his error twice over that very morning before he learnt to turn his head aside and duck and so work his way through.

As for the pots, cobwebs, and bundles of dried herbs hanging from the hooks on the rafters—well, he gave thanks again to fortune that Wren didn’t see him tangled up in sprigs of rosemary or knocking a copper cauldron down onto his own head. Shrike spent much of the afternoon taking down the herbs and pots and stowed them elsewhere in the cottage wherever he could fit them.

For some minutes after Wren’s arrival, in the evening, Shrike hoped his idiocy might remain unknown. Until, after Wren had kissed him, he pulled away to gaze in confusion at something over Shrike’s head. Before Shrike could ask after it, Wren reached up gingerly between his antlers and plucked something out of his hair.

“Is this… parsley?” Wren asked, turning the sprig over betwixt forefinger and thumb.

“Aye,” Shrike admitted, and hurried to turn their talk toward supper.

~

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