The seven year crow, p.1
The Seven Year Crow, page 1
Table of Contents
Books by Lanne Garrett
Title Page
Legal Page
Book Description
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Foreword
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
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A Cursed Crow
THE SEVEN YEAR CROW
LANNE GARRETT
The Seven Year Crow
ISBN # 978-1-83943-713-7
©Copyright Lanne Garrett 2023
Cover Art by Erin Dameron-Hill ©Copyright April 2023
Interior text design by Claire Siemaszkiewicz
Finch Books
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Finch Books.
Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Finch Books. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2023 by Finch Books, United Kingdom.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorised copies.
Finch Books is an imprint of Totally Entwined Group Limited.
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book”.
Book one in the A Cursed Crow series
Fear nothing, trust no one…
The bells toll over Whitwick.
The Gate has opened.
The fog fills the streets.
The Fae have come.
The screaming has started.
The Taking has begun.
The Gate closes once again.
They have their Crow.
In Whitwick Gates, where every mortal child faces the risk of almost certain death at the hands of Fae, Perdi is named the next Crow, a sacrifice to Elphame. But once inside the Sidhe, the Fae will question if they’ve taken the wrong Crow.
Dedication
For Dave, who always has the right word.
And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years
We pay a tiend to hell;
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I'm fear’d it be mysel’
— excerpt from The Ballad of Tam Lin by Robert Burns
Foreword
Elphame, the land of the Fae, is not without sacrifice.
Every seven years, the Fae pay tithe to the Gods and Goddesses. They sacrifice one member of their courts, priests and priestesses, only the most deserving of an offer to the Gods. Before they are sacrificed, as payment for giving their lives, they are king for seven years. From the day they are chosen for sacrifice to the day they commit themselves to the Underworld, they want for nothing. But the mortal realm, the land outside of Elphame, would not offer sacrifice. They only reaped the rewards of their fertile lands, the rain for their crops, the fish in their nets, children in their bellies, the recompenses of the Fae offerings.
Because of the oaths between Fae and the mortal realm, the Fae could not force mortals to sacrifice one of their own. Fae died every seven years for both worlds to prosper. Soon, to the demise of mankind, Elphame began to refuse an offering to the Gods for the mortals. When the crops of man failed, their fish no longer came and the mortals died of starvation and disease, they agreed to give sacrifice, but only of a halfling bloodline—those birthed of both mortal and Fae blood and seen as lesser in the eyes of mortals.
The Fae, slighted that the mortals would not offer their greatest, their poets and artists, their beautiful and strong, grew angry and vengeful. Since halflings could never rule in Elphame, they would never be called ‘kings’ or treated as such. Instead, they are Crows, scavenging on the powers and plunders of Elphame, eating the scraps of what Fae have thrown away. The court from which the Crow’s line originates is the court that holds the Crow, where they remain for seven years as a sacrifice from the mortal lands, as punishment for reaping reward and offering so little in payment. Upon the death of a Crow, a new Taking begins.
As it has done for decades before and will continue to do for centuries to come, tonight, the Gate has opened once again, spewing Elphame onto the streets of mortals. Solas, leading the Taking, could feel it in his bones, like the fine rusted dust settled on the Gate, the next child of man to be dragged from their home. He could hear the very heartbeat of the next Crow—the pitter-patter of a scared caged cottontail and he the wolf of the night. It was both exhilarating and sickening to feel the fear of another tied so closely to his own heart.
With guilt and hatred hanging heavy on his every step, Solas stalked the streets of Whitwick Gates. Unlike his brethren, he was here for one purpose. He would not dabble in the delights of death, the warmth of a Fae bloodbath. No. He came for the girl. But he knew he would coax her out in whatever hellish ways worked, even if it meant he stood at her door and forced her to see what her delay would cost her people, the suffering life dripping from the hands of creatures, the forced mothers and fathers upon children, the will to live milked from a feeble farmer. Experienced in how very vulnerable mortals were, the Fae would never run dry of ideas. He envied their weakness, their ability to die so quickly. For he could withstand the force of an army without even taking a knee. Mortals were fools to wish for everlasting life, because with it came more life than one bargained for.
His morose loathing blanketed the ground he walked on, casting shadows with each step. Although thick and bloated, his darkness did nothing to dampen the screams of the townspeople. He was birthed for death and war. And yet, he detested the fear that soured the air around him. No matter which side of the Gate he stood, the stench of the dead never appealed to him. To Solas, seven years only went by slowly for the Crow. For him, in every blink of his eye, he was back and Taking another soul, like the devil he knew he was, the devil he had to be. Too much rested on how monstrous he could be, how utterly vile and terrifying he could become. He had nothing but time to perfect his song and dance. That was his curse, after all…to have life everlasting.
“Aoife…” Solas whispered into the night. He felt her heart skip a beat and plunge into her stomach. Her butterflies ran a shiver down Solas’ back. Her fear tickled his nose.
He closed his eyes and pushed beyond the stolid dark. His ears twitched at the hint of freight that escaped the Crow’s lips. He could sense her desperation, almost taste it, like wafting a fine wine under his nose—a slight whiff of a bottle not yet poured, hinting at what was yet to come. As Crows always had, and likely always would, Solas knew Aoife would test and twist the bindings of her fate until the very last minute. Countless townsfolk would die because one girl would not accept her destiny. They were not brave, nor were they weak of heart. They were, to him, brazen and frail, wishful and so utterly flawed that they died in swaths. They were fools to think they could withstand the torrential force of the Fae. If there had been room for pity, he would feel it for them all. However, there was no space for human emotion when hunting a human.
Prologue
Death rolled in casually, hand in hand with the night. Its purpose hung heavy as a soiled diaper on a lost and starved child. Through the reaching of the fog that crept over the dew-covered ground, its hate slinked along with it and tarnished black every inch it touched. The clouds crawled upon the earth as if the heavens had closed their doors in disgust, leaving mankind to fend for themselves. Even the Gods had turned their backs on the people of Whitwick Gates, the makers of deals with devils. It was no wonder the Gods shut their eyes to our suffering when it was we who had cast our own darkened fates.
Aoife watched as the haze tiptoed around St. Bartholomew’s Church. Its hushed footsteps glided around the empty graves of her mother and grandmother. Neither dead matriarch had been returned by the Fae, and both lay dead and twisted on Sidhe land. The markers above their empty graves were nothing more than reminders of why mortals never challenged the Fae, why the Fair Folk came and went as they pleased on the heels of the mists from Elphame. The Sidhe were why mortals feared the dark.
T he fog had come again tonight, and its sights were on Aoife’s life. She could feel it in her halfling blood. She could do nothing to stop it, as so many had tried and failed in the past. And so, she waited and watched the fog suck the sun from the earth, leaving barely enough light for the shadows. Whether Aoife liked it or not, the night would come, and under its spell, everything in Whitwick Gates would fall prey to its delights, to the sheer pleasures of the abominations called the Fae. As the fog moved, even the moon and stars cowered behind a dense layer of cloud, protecting their eyes from the unfolding night. The air held a tincture to the world before a storm, but it would not be the kind of squall you could simply close the shutters to. No, this storm was anything but the tempest in the wind. The gale rolling over Whitwick Gates carried fate at its fingertips. The destiny of Aoife, the death of many—they would become the puppets of the Fae. Aoife was not yet eighteen, and she knew she, like the other half-blooded in her village, could be selected by the Fae. She’d rather be one of the slaughtered.
Aoife’s ears became sharper, like the knife she held in her left hand with cramped fingers. The blade stretched her flesh until her dripping blood echoed against the wooden floor. Each snap of a twig was an aide-memoire, a painful reminder that she stood in her home utterly alone. It was the type of alone that not even the devil himself could instill in your bones. There were no terrors, real or figment, aside from Fae, who could construct such a hell on earth, where death was the mercy.
In the distance, scrapes and scratches were of a predator she knew she couldn’t possibly battle against. Every new aroma charged her mind with the most dreadful thing she could think of. As she breathed in the odors, her body prepared for flight, even though it knew she stood no chance against whatever rolled in with the fog. Aoife commanded her feet to be steady, to freeze her on the spot. Running from the safety of her home would surely mean death in a thousand unspeakable ways—or worse, being left to live. She could hear her fellow townspeople run to that very fate, their Fae-drunk laughter cut short, followed by terror and needless, sloppy death. If she didn’t die tonight, the screams of her kin would haunt her until her last days. All she could do was wait out the inevitable. The moment she had dreamed for years would come, long before she knew the difference between the waking and dreaming worlds, was waiting in the darkness. The night, printed in the books of destiny, had been set to unfold long before Aoife had been born.
If the Gods allowed her to wait out the blackness still yet to come and bring dawn to her still-beating heart, she would have saved her line for another seven years. Aoife prayed to the Goddesses and Gods for the morning to come. Her heart hammered in her chest. The muscles in her thighs twitched with the need to find a place to hide. But she had been prepared for the moment she now stood in, and her heart could pound all it wanted. She had no plans to move from her home until daybreak. She wished she were braver and could step outside, freely leaving with the Fae and saving the rest of her people, but fear kept her rooted in place. The horrors beyond her walls had stripped away any semblance of bravado from her bones, leaving behind only foolish desperation and wishes that wouldn’t come true.
With only the smallest of fires in her hearth to warm her, the darkness allowed Aoife’s mind to conjure the worst of magical beasts moving outside her window. They moved to music only they could hear—some graceful, some with two left feet, some dragging their bodies, others soaring through the skies like the dragons of tales long forgotten. She watched through the leaded windows as they moved in unnatural ways, with limps and missing limbs, hunched over or too tall to see their shoulders. They were the beasts of the dreams that had plagued her since she had been old enough to know what crept in the darkness. Her mortal father, not the creature who helped birth her, warned her from sharing her thoughts and dreams with the Lords and Ladies of Whitwick Gates for fear of being named a witch—an accusation that came with fire and stones. Halflings could never announce their happening, who they were or they’d be killed on sight, blamed for what their full-blooded brethren did—blame they so deserved, for they were the halflings that kept the Fae coming. Half-Fae blood kept the gates open. Fear of consequence kept Aoife from warning others, while the guilt of her knowledge kept her soul twisting. She could only watch and pray to the Gods that the Fae would spare her and her child. But she wasn’t a fool. The Gods were not that generous nor that forgiving of wickedness.
Each moment passed slower than the last. Aoife stayed hidden within the darkness of her home, alone. Her father was gone, trampled by a horse ridden by a small child in a dreamlike state, not but three hours previous. Aoife had sent her daughter away, just moments after her birth, in preparation for the night the fog came. It was a sacrifice more significant than she had imagined. It ripped her soul in two. But to keep her daughter this close to the Gate of the Fae would undoubtedly be the death of Aoife’s line in one fell swoop. If the Fae spared the child from their own hands, Aoife had seen a mother drown her baby, a father beat his children to death. Aoife didn’t know what was worse, having the Fae kill the child or having the magick of Elphame force a parent to become the executioner. Aoife, like other halflings, was less susceptible to the pull of Elphame magick, but she still felt it, always heard the whispers and fought against the nudge to fall into madness. She felt guilty for saving her daughter and allowing every other child to face a fate reserved for devils and demons, but she couldn’t protect them.
The night started with the death of the man who’d raised her, the death of her child’s father, the longing to see her daughter one last time and the end of her lifelong friend, Abelia. Both Aoife and Abelia had been born on the same day, bound together until the end by friendship and sisterhood. Their souls were tied together by an unspoken truth. Their fathers were both Fae, the same man.
Aoife’s pulse throbbed in her ears. She felt every beat as it radiated down her body and into the ground at her feet. The stillness of her home surrendered to the deathly screams of her neighbors. The fear in their voices and last cries had painted her body in a thin and cold chill. Aoife watched out of her front window as her community ripped each other apart. Violence erupted, man turned on man, animals rebelled and wives, mothers and sisters ran through the streets in fear. Crazed mothers drowned their babies, and horses carelessly tossed children from their backs. Watching the shadows with many legs, Aoife trembled at the sounds erupting from her village as it burned by their own hands. Chaos happened every time the Fae were near, when they came to collect their newest Crow.
From every corner of her house, Aoife could hear the creatures of the fog trying to get inside. Although she was scared, she knew not a single twisted finger could enter her home. She had spent years preparing, guarding against the strangers in the night. Her doorway, lined in cold iron, an expense she had carried by working on two farms and selling jams and cheeses at the weekend market, offered Aoife safety that no other in her village had. Each window held chimes made of old iron nails, decorated with herbs to ward against those who now sought to enter. Horseshoes covered every entrance and were fixed tightly to every corner. Around Aoife’s neck was Abelia’s necklace of blackberry stems, ivy and rowan. Built into the very foundation, walls and roofing were constructed of boxwood. The magick within her walls made her skin crawl, like tiny spiders dancing upon her flesh, but she was only half of what crawled through her village.
Aoife’s ears twitched at the calling of her name. It was carried over the wind and pushed under her front door. Adrenaline flooded her system, forcing her muscles into a twitchy dance. She could taste saliva thickening on her tongue and feel beads of sweat trickle down her brow. Her heart pumped like a bird trying to escape the clutches of a cat. Aoife’s eyes widened with horror, yet she forced herself to remain where she was. There was only one thing she had left to do, and that was pray she didn’t die before sunrise, pray the outcome would not leave her body open for the birds. Every seven years, they taunted her. Every seven years, she thought it was her time.
