Muddled Magic (HOMESTEADER HEARTH WITCH #5) by Kat Healy EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Kat Healy
- Language: English
- Genre: Paranormal / Sci-Fi
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2.8 MB
- Price: Free
~ Four months ago ~
Darkness dominated the old forest beyond the manor’s stone
walls. Though the summertime sunlight was strong, even at this early hour,
it couldn’t penetrate through the needles of the thickly clustered pines nor
the dense leaves of the ancient oaks and beeches. So the forest floor was
dark, yet beckoning, a vault of secrets calling my name. I’d heard its siren
song since I was a child, its lure growing with every year. Maybe, someday
soon, I finally pluck up the courage to risk Grandmother’s wrath and slip
over the wall and into that ancient wood, a bottle of Riesling in hand.
“Meadow.”
That was my father’s voice, pitched low so he wouldn’t startle me. After
marrying into the Hawthorne family, he’d been renamed Tod, after the fox,
and he certainly was as silent and sneaky as his new namesake.
“Of all days, this is one you should be spending looking inward, not
outward,” he chastised lightly, coming even with me to look over the wall.
It was chest-high and thick enough to sit on comfortably, but no one
ever did that. While the boxwood hedge surrounding the Hawthorne estate
was imbued with enough wards to protect an emperor’s palace, here, along
the southern edge that faced the forest, was a secondary barrier of
enchanted stone.
Uncle Hare, a former archeologist and the historian of our family, had
often told us youngsters that the stones had been carefully portioned off old
henges or taken from Faerie itself—the realm of the Fair Folk. Apparently
such measures had been needed to protect us womenfolk from the fabled
Stag Man.
Beware the Stag Man who hunts in the forest deep.
His arrows never miss a maiden’s heart to keep.
“You’ve been in there,” I said, finally tearing my attention away from
the forest to look at him. Dad had thick black hair, light brown eyes, and
olive-toned skin that neither my brother nor I had inherited, the Hawthorne
line asserting its dominance in each generation regardless of outside
influence. His coloring did, however, provide a type of all-natural
camouflage when he and Cousin Boar disappeared into those trees twice a
week to hunt, almost always returning with venison.
“What’s it like?”
He was staring at the forest like he would a prey animal, or a threat.
“It’s like any other wood, Meadow. Full of trees and brush and birds and
annoying gnats in May.” His fingers whispered up my neck to tickle around
my ear and ruffle the hair there, simulating the same pesterings of a swarm
of little insects.
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