The north star, p.1
The North Star, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Katherine Genet
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Wych Elm Books
Otago, NZ
www.wychelmbooks.com
contact@wychelmbooks.com
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ISBN: 978-1-7386030-9-1 (ePub) 978-1-7386030-8-4 (Kindle)
Also by Katherine Genet
The Wilde Grove Series
The Gathering
The Belonging
The Rising
The Singing
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Wilde Grove Series 2
Follow The Wind
The Otherworld
Golden Heart
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Wilde Grove Prayer Books
Prayers Of The Wildwood
Prayers Of The Beacons
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Wilde Grove Bonus Stories
Becoming Morghan
The Threading
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Non-Fiction
Ground & Centre
The Dreamer’s Way (coming 2024)
For all who would be beacons.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Prayer of the Wildwood
Join the Grove
About the Author
Chapter One
I am Morghan, Lady of the Grove. Lady of the Wilderness, Lady of Life. This is the vision given to me.
Awakening, I find myself on top of the great hill, looking down at the sea. This is the rise behind Wilde Grove, but now it is a tor, tall like a steeple of a great church. I stand upon it, the wind in my hair, and I look out to sea where the ocean churns and heaves itself in a maelstrom.
I am reminded of the vision the Queen gave to me months upon months ago. The vision that broke my sight so that I could see the web, the threads that bind us all together, the beauty of the world so exquisite it hurts my heart every day.
And beneath it all, spreading across our world like the great blight upon humanity that it is, the creeping darkness.
Not upon us. Within us. Our light dimmed, consumed by the world we have built ourselves.
But this hill, this tor, is mine, on land that I call my own. It is my home for I have built a relationship with it, and I love every stone, every blade of grass, every creature who shares it with me.
I stand upon it looking about, at the storms that rage, at the shadows that are dim at the edge of my sight, but that grow and spread like stains upon the land.
Grief cuts into me, sharp-edged, wounding. That we have come to this!
I want to close my eyes to the view, to the vicious storms, to the darkness waiting to devour, to the souls who have become unattached to the web, who wander in the night.
But it is not my job to look away. It is not my task, nor yours.
So do I stand and look, and a new sound comes to my ears. It rises above the wail of the wind, above the thrashing of the sea, the scream of the birds wheeling above the waves.
It is a song. Someone is singing.
There is more than one voice. I look down the grassy banks of the hill upon which I stand and see the track that spirals around it. A procession comes up the path, and it is they, walking single file, each lifting a lantern, who sing as they come.
I recognise those at the front, for they are people I know and love. Erin, who grows and matures, whose heart fills with more magic each day, and behind her the other women from the village. Clarice, my daughter. Winsome, friend dear to me, Lucy, Krista, Charlie.
Others.
Behind them, the men, lanterns also held aloft to light the way, though the darkness has not reached them yet. Their presence is a balm to my heart, lifting me to a sudden, wild hope. Ambrose, my dear brother, Stephan, Simon, Henry, Martin. More come after them.
The procession winds its way higher up the hill, voices lifted to the sky, to the world, until they come to stand behind me, their rows like sentries, their voices warding off the darkness, singing the truth out into it.
A subtle shift in the atmosphere, a slight pressure, and then beside me, flanking me, Ravenna, eyes dark, spiralling tattoos prominent upon her cheeks. She gazes out at the churning ocean, face impassive.
Upon my other side, Catrin, as muscular in spirit as ever she was in flesh, hand resting upon the hilt of her sword. She glances at me, then turns back to the view.
And so this is my vision. We stand, all of us, lifting the light to the world, the singing upon our lips. Ranged against the darkness.
Ranged against the darkness.
Chapter Two
The Aotearoa New Zealand sun pushed its lemon-coloured light in through the flimsy curtains. Clover blinked at it, knowing from years of waking early that the colour meant the sun had not long lifted its bulk above the ocean and into the sky. She lay still, curled in the bed, watching the brightening eastern light slide over the windowsill and make the leap to the floor.
The dream clung to her, more real for the moment than her room, the chair where she’d flung yesterday’s clothes, the small table next to the door with its untidy stack of tarot decks, the guitar leaning against the wall. Even the light at the window.
Clover pressed her lips together and slid out of the bed, feeling a momentary reluctance to leave its warmth. She padded bare foot across the floorboards to the door and out of the room.
‘Rue?’
She touched her sister’s shoulder gently but firmly. Rue’s room was darker than her own, the curtains thicker. The sun barely pushed past them, which was the way Rue liked it.
‘I’m awake,’ Rue said, and her voice wasn’t muffled or clogged with sleep. She’d been awake for several minutes. ‘What is it?’
Clover looked down at her, frowning. ‘I had a dream,’ she said.
Rue raised herself on an elbow and regarded her sister. Clover was twenty years old now, but the tousled hair and the cute PJs with a black and white panda face on the shirt made her look young again, made Rue feel protective, just as she had when Clover was a toddler and there was only Rue, her teenage sister to look after her.
Before Selena Wilde had arrived.
‘Are you all right?’ Rue asked, thinking she already had a good idea that something was brewing inside Clover.
Inside herself too, and the very air around them, which seemed to be filled with an unseen weight.
Because she’d dreamt as well. Although not so much dream, she thought, as memory, vision.
Portent.
‘Did you dream about the Forest House?’ Rue asked, looking up at Clover, a pale, golden blur in the dimness.
Clover nodded, then sat on the edge of the bed. ‘You did as well.’
She hadn’t said it as a question, but Rue nodded anyway.
‘I think Selena did too,’ Clover continued, and closed her eyes, checking the ripples of energy inside the house. She nodded. ‘It feels like it.’ Selena, who had been Lady of the Grove before Morghan, who had left Wellsford and Wilde Grove and come all the way across a great ocean to find her and Rue when they had been children.
Come for them and stayed. Taught them much of what she knew.
‘Probably,’ Rue agreed, then pulled back the blankets when Clover shivered. The morning was warm enough, but Clover was often chilled, no matter the weather, and Rue had long ago come to believe it was because she was never properly in the world but walked instead some broad and far liminal space.
Where the weather was cooler.
Clover tucked herself into the bed next to Rue and closed her eyes as its warmth cocooned her. She relaxed slightly.
‘I don’t think I like it,’ she said, opening her eyes to gaze at Rue. ‘The dream.’ She paused. ‘Or the memory, rather, because that’s wha
Clover thought about it, about the way she’d felt as Rhian, the priestess she’d been in a past life, thousands of years ago, at the time of the Great Turning. There’d been something different about her this time. A sense of purpose, of direction.
Of a task.
In the dream, she’d been somewhere dark that smelt of smoke and fragrant herbs, and yet she’d had the sensation of the room — cave — whirling around her, and her mind had been filled with whiteness, a thick mist she’d waded right out into.
Clover stared at her sister, thinking. Rhian had been doing some kind of ritual, casting some sort of spell, but Clover didn’t understand what it was. Only that there was a sense of urgency to it that hadn’t dissipated when she’d woken. It still churned inside her.
Rue looked at her. ‘You all right?’
Clover gave a tight shrug under the blankets. ‘I’m not sure what was going on in the dream. It seemed just a glimpse, and yet…’ She trailed off, not knowing how to put the sense of portent into words.
‘What did you see?’ she asked Rue instead.
Rue looked at her sister then turned onto her back and stared up at the ceiling. The room was brightening, despite the curtains, but it was still early. Six o’clock, perhaps.
Selena would be getting up soon to greet the day. Even at eighty years old, she still rose early. Rue knew that Selena slept little these days, bursts and starts only. A symptom of old age, Selena had said. Dandy had been the same. Rue felt a prick of loss at the thought of Dandy. She’d been surrogate grandmother to them, her warmth and wit a great balm. She’d been gone to her next adventure seven years now.
‘Rue,’ Clover said in a low voice, interrupting Rue’s swerving thoughts. ‘The dream.’
Rue wasn’t sure she wanted to think about the dream.
It was going to change things. She felt it in the pit of her stomach, in the way her skin prickled.
She shook her head slightly. ‘At the Forest House.’ she said at last, and she sighed. The Forest House was the place Wilde Grove had used to be. Millennia ago.
‘I was with the other priestesses, and the men too, standing on the grass and looking at the trees, as though waiting for something.’ Rue paused, searching for more information. She shook her head.
‘I don’t know what. Something heavy, something really important. I felt like we’d been planning it for a long time.’ She swallowed; her tongue stuck dryly to the roof of her mouth. The room was suddenly too dark, and she wanted to leap from the bed, fling open the curtains and flood everything with light.
‘It felt like we were doing something that so much depended on.’ She fell silent.
The glimpse she’d had of being Bryn again, the priestess she’d been far back in that past lifetime, was the first she’d had in such a long while that Rue had no memory of when the last time had been. She’d been back at the Forest House in the dream, and the feeling of reaching and striving and hot, hard determination, had been so strong, so consuming, that when she’d woken, Rue had cried out into the darkness of her room.
‘There wasn’t much else but that,’ she said now, glancing over at Clover, and she frowned. ‘You weren’t there,’ she said, and cast about in her memory for the reason why. ‘Rhian wasn’t there.’
In the dream she — Bryn — had been standing on the grassy slope below the low-slung buildings that made up the Forest House, looking down at the tree line. The other priestesses, and the men of the community, had stood ranged across the grass with her.
Except for Rhian. Clover.
The sun had been a silver disk in the sky, shrouded by thick white clouds. She’d stood on the grass, waiting, watching, an older Bryn than Rue had ever remembered before. She’d grown into a priestess of the Forest House for certain, a woman whose connection to her path, Rue could feel, had become something solid inside her, the driving force in her life, with a purpose that was, in the dream, about in some way to truly unfurl. Rue shook her head slightly; she didn’t quite understand the sensation of heavy anticipation, except that it hadn’t drained away when she’d woken up. It rolled around inside her now, as though her very organs had consumed it, were heavy with it. It sat in her chest, atop heart and lungs so that she could scarcely breathe.
She thought that if she was ever sent to war, that was how she would feel.
The thought frightened her.
‘Where were you?’ she asked Clover, turning her head to look at her. ‘Where was Rhian? Why wasn’t she with the rest of us?’ Rue drew a breath. ‘What were we doing?’
Clover considered the vision of her memory, the dream. ‘I wasn’t with you,’ she said. ‘But I could feel you.’
Outside the cave, magic was furled and waiting. Clover didn’t know for what. Waiting for what?
A thin slice of light from between the curtains carved across the ceiling.
‘I was — I mean, Rhian was — in the cave, getting ready to do some sort of ritual or spell.’ Clover bit down into the soft flesh of her lip. ‘You all were going to do a spell too, I think.’
Clover rolled onto her back as well, keeping a grip on the blankets. She glanced at Rue then looked back at the ceiling.
‘We were…’ She paused, frowning, trying to find the right words to describe what she wanted to say. ‘We were preparing for something.’
Rue nodded. ‘Something we felt very grim about.’
‘But determined,’ Clover agreed. ‘It was a necessity.’
She rolled back onto her side and gazed in the gloom at the shadows on Rue’s face.
‘We need to go there,’ she said after a few silent minutes had passed.
‘I’ve got work,’ Rue said, understanding straight away where there was. She didn’t want to go to Wilde Grove. Not if it was that dream pushing them to, with its sense of heavy duty and grim necessity. Plus, to some extent, she’d grown away from all that, once she’d left school and did the fashion design course.
‘It was just a dream, Clover,’ she said. ‘Even if it wasn’t a dream, but a memory, then that’s all it was — a memory.’ She kept her gaze resolutely on the ceiling. ‘It doesn’t have to make us change anything.’ She shook her head, waved a hand in the air. ‘It’s all so nebulous. A centuries-old memory, a heavy feeling. That’s no reason to make us uproot our lives.’
She paused. ‘Besides, it’s been years since we were at Wilde Grove. Things have changed since then.’
Clover nodded slowly, reading the temperature of Rue’s fears as they echoed her own. ‘But they’re going to keep changing,’ she said, and stopped herself from burrowing deeper into the bed searching for comfort she wouldn’t find. ‘And we need to be part of the next step.’
Rue gave her a sharp look. ‘Because of the dream? Why? It was just an old memory.’ She found herself very much wanting to downplay it.
‘An old memory that we happen to experience together now — why?’
‘I don’t know.’ Rue threw back the blankets in a sudden movement. ‘I don’t want to know.’ She blew out a breath. ‘I need to go to work.’
Clover sat up, looked at Rue in consternation. ‘You can’t go to work. This isn’t an ordinary day anymore.’ The whiteness of her vision in the cave filled her mind.
Rue tugged on her dressing gown and gave in, something collapsing inside her. She sat down on the side of the bed.
