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Graynelore
Stephen Moore
Rogrig Wishard is a killer, a liar and a thief.Rogrig is the last person the fey would turn to for help. But they know something he doesn’t.In a world without government or law, where a man’s loyalty is to his family and faerie tales are strictly for children, Rogrig is not happy to discover that he’s carrying faerie blood. Especially when he starts to see them wherever he goes.To get his life back, he’s going to have to journey further from home than he’s ever been before and find out what the fey could possibly want from him. But that’s easier said than done when the punishment for abandoning your family is death.
Graynelore
STEPHEN MOORE
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2015
Copyright © Stephen Moore 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Stephen Moore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-810353-8
Version: 2016-10-31
For Carol
‘Whenever you think I’m lost, and you cannot find me, look here. I am always here.’
Epigraph (#u983b8df8-1683-5bb8-b6ad-b6bf17865eaa)
If every man’s life has the makings of a story, the comings and the goings and the things in-between, where does my story truly begin?
For want of a narrator, for want of a name and the soul it belongs to, I fear, it must begin here…
[From: A Beggar Bard’s Tale. Anon.]
Contents
Cover (#u9af68964-39e6-5231-8824-5d794dc7af83)
Title Page (#uca7a9e7f-1fa9-5acf-864f-a81bc16f8225)
Copyright (#ua3633a06-920f-597b-99e4-0964a910770d)
Dedication (#u7b90933d-8192-5f06-a756-de0dcb9e8df8)
Epigraph (#u1df2a6c1-2b13-5b32-ab2d-fe5d2b449d22)
Prologue (#uca1da0ed-0162-5625-8083-6c057d025a2a)
Part One: The Beggar Bard’s Tale (#ub98af344-832c-53e8-8325-98150a6c5eb2)
Chapter One: Graynelore (#udccdb840-deae-5f93-8d10-4849b9de6448)
Chapter Two: How the World was Made (#u3064686b-88c1-589b-85f4-1ca031f0089d)
Chapter Three: The Beggar Bard’s Burden (#u3bac71f9-caec-5149-b446-7a18898605c8)
Part Two: The Bereaved (#ue6432940-8f24-5885-abf8-2de0ca4e0d32)
Chapter Four: At the Mark of the Wishards (#u9cb9b0d6-b686-5aaf-b0a7-7a01adaf5fad)
Chapter Five: The Elfwych Riding (#ufcc171a8-2927-5525-a52c-e423d0a15c0c)
Chapter Six: The Killing Field (#u074ca34e-25df-5c49-ab3f-2dbb465b8fa4)
Chapter Seven: The Unspoken Voice (#u14bd26e5-0b88-567b-85fb-8deb9553af8a)
Chapter Eight: The Broken Tower (#u55211633-ccb7-5162-a252-18616fd6d1e1)
Chapter Nine: Aftermath (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten: Against the Grayne (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: The Wycken Mire (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven: Into the Mire (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Wycken-on-the-Mire (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen: Faeries (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: Joining the Dance (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: The Secret Meet (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four: The Faerie Riding (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen: The Changelings (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen: A Brief and Intimate Respite (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen: Upon the Threshold and a Dream (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen: The Gateway (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty: The Faerie in the Tower (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One: An Unexpected Murder (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Eye Stone (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Pain of Norda Elfwych (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four: As the Crow Flies (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Debateable Land (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six: Night Sounds (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Five: The Great Riding (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Gibbet Tree (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Rogrig the Wishard (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Gigant (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty: The Illicit Agreement (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One: The Quickening (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two: The Battle of the Withering (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three: A Cry Among the Mists (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Six: The Faerie Ring (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four: A Ring of Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five: When the Dust Finally Settled (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Eye of the World (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Faerie Isle (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue: Rogrig the Confessor (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#u983b8df8-1683-5bb8-b6ad-b6bf17865eaa)
I am Rogrig, Rogrig Wishard by grayne. Though, I was always Rogrig Stone Heart by desire. This is my memoir and my testimony. What can I tell you about myself that will be believed? Not much, I fear. I am a poor fell-stockman and a worse farmer (that much is true). I am a fighting-man. I am a killer, a soldier-thief, and a blood-soaked reiver. I am a sometime liar and a coward. I have a cruel tongue, a foul temper, not to be crossed. And, I am – reliably informed – a pitiful dagger’s arse when blathering drunk.
You can see, my friend, I am not well blessed.
For all that, I am just an ordinary man of Graynelore. No different to any other man of my breed. (Ah, now we come to the nub of it. I must temper my words.)
Rogrig is mostly an ordinary man. The emphasis is important. For if a tale really can hang, then it is from this single thread mine is suspended.
Even now I hesitate, and fear my words will forever run in rings around the truth. Why? Put simply, I would have preferred it otherwise.
Let me explain. I have told you that I am a Wishard. It is my family name…it is also something rather more. I say it again, Wish-ard, and not wizard. I do not craft spells. I do not brew potions or anything of the like. No. My talent, such as it is, is more obscure. You see, a Wishard’s skill is inherent, it belongs to the man. You either possess it or you do not. (Most men, most Wishards do not.) It cannot be taught. As best as can be described, I have a knack. Rather, I influence things. I make wishes, of a kind.
Aye, wishes…(There, at last, it is said.)
Forgive me, my friend. I will admit, I find it difficult, if not tortuous, to speak of such fanciful whimsy. Make what you will of my reticence; measure Rogrig by it, if you must. I will say only this much more (it is a caution): by necessity, my testimony must begin with my childhood. But be warned: if I tell you that this is a faerie tale – and it is a faerie tale – it is not a children’s story.
Please, humour me. Suffer Rogrig Wishard to lead you down the winding path and see where it takes you. There is purpose to it. Else I would not trouble you.
Part One (#u983b8df8-1683-5bb8-b6ad-b6bf17865eaa)
Chapter One (#u983b8df8-1683-5bb8-b6ad-b6bf17865eaa)
Graynelore (#u983b8df8-1683-5bb8-b6ad-b6bf17865eaa)
Children remember in childish ways. So, through a child’s eyes, I will look again upon Graynelore. I can see a frozen wasteland. Deep winter’s ice lying broken and sharp upon a horse-trodden path. The riders are long departed. My breath is a broken kiss upon the air. The land before me is a magical silence.
I can pass a child’s hand across the ruts and crevasses of a cold, wet stone wall. It is the wall of a house, and built so thickly this Rogrig can stand at his full height and yet hide safely within the depth of its wind-eyes.
I can find a child’s delight in the crackle and spark of burning logs, the heat of an open fire.
I can lift a child’s finger to my tongue and taste the iron of an abandoned broken war sword. I can feel the dead weight of it again, as I struggle to drag it across a stone floor for the lack of body strength to lift it.
I can sting my nose with the smell of the piss and the shit of fell beasts – animals sheltered indoors against the rumour of coming raiders – and yet still know the comfort of it.
I can raise the beat of my heart and laugh at a tangle of drunken men, falling through an open doorway, playing at the Old Game. And I can wince at the foul cry a young woman gives them in chastisement.
‘Ah! Be-having-you! Do you have to come kicking that fucking head about in here? You’re spilling blood across my freshly strewn floors!’
I can ache to my soul for the death of my father; only slaughtered, it seems, for his surname. I can hear words, murmured together in a single breath: murder, blood feud, Elfwych, and understand them, with a child’s innocence, only as the unbearable pain of my father’s absence…and a mother’s tears.
