“Already the animals starve. Soon the bonemen will follow, the Moss Folk and woodlings, the watermaids and humans. Then the charmed will fade. And all who will roam a dead world are dead things. Until they too vanish for lack of remembering. Still, Weaver, it is not too late.”

In the frost-kissed cottage where the changing seasons are spun, Erith wears the Weaver’s mantle, a title that tests her mortal, halfling magic.  As the equinox looms, her first tapestry nears completion—a breathtaking ode to spring. She journeys to the charmed isle Innishold to release the beauty of nature’s awakening across the land.

But human hunters have defiled the enchanted forest and slaughtered winter’s white wolves. Enraged by the trespass, the Winter King seizes Erith’s tapestry and locks her within his ice-bound palace. Here, where comfort and warmth are mere glamours, she may weave only winter until every mortal village succumbs to starvation, ice, and the gray wraiths haunting the snow.

With humanity’s fate on a perilous edge, Erith must break free of the king’s grasp and unravel a legacy of secrets. In a charmed court where illusions hold sway, allies matter, foremost among them, the Autumn Prince. Immortal and beguiling, he offers a tantalizing future she has only imagined, one she will never possess—unless she claims her extraordinary power to weave life from the brink of death.

**

In the lyrical fantasy tradition of Margaret Rogerson and Holly Black, D. Wallace Peach spins a spellbinding tale of magic, resilience, and the transformative potency of tales—a tapestry woven with peril and hope set against the frigid backdrop of an eternal winter.

Coming January 2, 2025: Preorder Link

Prologue

A silver stag, antlers wide enough to cradle the moon, bounded through the meadow, its cloven hooves kicking up fountains of blowing snow. Lothar stood firm, bowstring taut, knuckle to his chin. His exhales billowed into ghostly clouds that curled and vanished into the squall’s biting cold. He whispered a prayer for mercy and, squinting through winter’s falling shroud, loosed his arrow.

In a blast of bitter wind, a white wraith swept from the charmed wilderness, screaming like a banshee. Her frozen breath slashed the rising storm with the keenness of a blade, casting splinters of frost into Lothar’s face. They crusted on his eyebrows and dangled in clattering icicles from his gray beard.

His oaken arrow, true when it left his bow, halted in mid-flight and would have tumbled into the mounding drifts had the spirit not flung it free. The quarrel drove, cruel and swift, into the stag’s ribs. The doomed animal bellowed as it collided with a thicket of brambles marking the meadow’s edge. It thrashed in the thorns, great antlers tangling, and with a final heave, it broke through into the darkness beneath the forest’s enchanted trees. Branches shuddered and swept closed, powdering the frigid air as they concealed the giant beast’s fate.

“We should chase it down.” Connovir tramped ahead of the other men, his boots crunching through the icy pack buried under the blizzard’s softer blanket. He wiped his nose on a coat sleeve as he joined his father. “Your aim was true. If not for the charmed, the stag would be ours.”

“Hunting here was a gamble.” Lothar narrowed his eyes at the shadows creeping between the snow-laden boughs. He knew well the whispered warnings of the elders, tales of ancient boundaries and charmed creatures that lurked in the deep places no man dared enter.

Nonetheless, his youngest boy had spoken the truth. On human land, the animal was fairly won. Whatever the wind’s nature, ordinary or magical, it had robbed the village of much-needed food.

Petrar, looking formidable in his shaggy bearskin coat, trudged down the meadow’s slope in Connovir’s prints. Midwinter reddened his cheeks and ruffled the fur trimming his woolen hat. “Connovir speaks sense, Lothar. We cannot return to our families empty-handed. Not in this winter.”

Three other hunters gathered around him. Niklas, a long-toothed grandfather, exhaled into his cupped hands. Twin brothers, Arne and Baldir, had young ones at home, and though Lothar’s family also suffered from hollow bellies, Petrar’s challenge bristled his nerves.

“We will hunt tomorrow,” he said. “I will leave an offering for the Winter King on the border stone from my own stores.”

“That does nothing.” Connovir’s chin tucked into his collar. “I say we take what is ours.”

Lothar’s eyes thinned into gray fissures, his son’s recklessness encouraging the others. “No. This is not your decision. We’ll not tempt fate for the price of a meal. The charmed are forces of nature who will steal a fool’s life without conscience. We do not trespass where their shadows fall.”

Petrar scraped a mitten down his face. “I do not wish to argue, Lothar, but the stag is gravely wounded. Let us follow the blood to the meadow’s edge. If the beast is within reach, we drag it out. If it’s run off, I agree that we abandon the hunt and turn back.”

Lothar frowned at the forest. The trees stood silent. Watching. Waiting. Snow whispered through the branches, and he tasted magic in the air. The wind-wraith keened her omen of death.

“No,” Lothar said. “I forbid it. Crouching amidst the brambles and gazing at the lost food will do us no favors. Even if the stag lies a single stride within the boundary, we will not chance it. Why add grief to our families’ plight?”

Before anyone could object, he swung toward the tracks leading home. Head bent to the pelting weather, he plodded up the meadow’s incline without a backward glance at the vast depression cradling the bewitched woodland and its bottomless lake. Only a fool would provoke the Winter King or risk drawing him from the island. “Winter may taunt us, but our people will endure until spring if we are careful with our stores. We will find a way to feed us all. My decision stands.”

No one responded, neither in favor nor against. A sigh uncoiled the muscles in his shoulders, the lack of argument a small comfort. “Come dawn, we could head east or hunt in the southern hills.”

Silence. The only sound aside from the wind’s howl came from his own plodding boots and yammering voice. Dread welled in his chest, and he spun. At the forest’s edge, Connovir, Petrar, and the other men hacked a path through the brambles.

“You dare disobey me!” Lothar broke into a wild, stumbling run. Crusted snow snared his feet and hampered his pace. Winter had laid a cunning trap—he would never reach them in time. “Connovir! Petrar! You must not enter. Niklas, stop them.”

Connovir glanced back at him and beckoned, his words stolen by the storm. He gestured between the trees, and the hunters darted through the boundary. The forest swallowed them whole.

Moments behind them, out of breath, Lothar charged through the thorny gash, expecting to find his party within strides of the meadow. Fists clenched, he raged at the trampling footprints leading deeper into the evergreens. If not for his son, he would have abandoned the men to their fates, but no such option lay before him. He cursed their rash choices, cursed his own, and loped down the blood-speckled trail, the trap sprung.

The afternoon’s veiled light dimmed under the boughs, and the woods wrapped him in its cheerless embrace. The cold deepened, trickling down his collar and up his coat sleeves. “I mean no harm,” he whispered to the mutating shadows of woodlings and Moss Folk, refusing to acknowledge the more treacherous creatures lurking beyond his vision. “I seek my son, nothing more.”

Rime embroidered the glossy edges of hollies and laurels. Stripped of leaves, branches thumped to the ground under winter’s ponderous weight. Lothar sniffed the wind, inhaling scents of pine and balsam.

And the musky odor of death.

He tracked the spattered blood over a ledge that crumbled beneath his boots. Not a hundred paces farther, the stag had surrendered its life on the bank of an ice-fringed stream that purled over boulders and collected in murky pools. The hunters attempted to drag the stag’s enormous body by its antlers, their voices muted and grunting with effort. Blood leaked from the creature’s mouth. Viscera spilled from its slit belly and oozed from a deep gouge in its neck, dyeing the snow crimson.

Lothar’s fury seethed. The men ceased their labor, unable to meet his eyes, and though they deserved a thrashing, his rage bent to reason. They had crossed a boundary that could not be uncrossed. Denying the meat now would not change what they’d done. Silently, he knelt beside them and carved into a haunch, nodding to the others to do the same.

The men sliced the flesh, noses wrinkled in the bloody steam wafting from the still-warm body. Connovir sawed at a shoulder joint, teeth gritted and hands doused in gore. “I was right to follow.” He tossed a piece of gristle into the stream’s lowest pool and smiled at his father as if expecting praise.

“We will discuss your choices later,” Lothar said. “If you have not killed us all.”

A white shape flashed between the pines. Lothar’s gaze slanted sideways, but the creature had vanished into the gray gloom like a boneyard wraith. He peered over his shoulder and blanched to see the way they’d come blinded by trees. A haunting, high-pitched howl soared from the shadows. A second song joined from across the stream, a third from beyond the ledges.

“Wolves.” Lothar rose into a crouch. A soundless prayer that they were mere animals slid from his chapped lips as he slowly pivoted to take up his bow. His gaze snapped to the stream’s pool where a toad-skinned face watched him with bulbous, blinking eyes. Slick green hair floated like spilled oil, and the monster beckoned with a reedy finger, her seductive smile rimmed with razor teeth.

“A lochalai.” His heart drummed in his ears. Numbing fingers, thick and clumsy, fumbled with his bow. “The charmed know we are here. We must leave this place.”

“No, Father!” Connovir severed the foreleg from the stag’s body. “When we’ve cut free the haunches. We keep working.”

“Our efforts are wasted if we are dead.” Lothar drew his bowstring, shaking with cold, and the slime-skinned creature sank beneath the churned-up muck. The pool stilled, but not his nerves. A branch cracked, and he pivoted toward a veil of showering snow.

A lone wolf skittered from a holly’s leafy shelter. Petrar reached for his quiver, and the howling chorus cinched around them like a hangman’s noose. Three animals, pale as pearls, traipsed through the encroaching twilight. Others dashed between the shadows. Closing in.

Niklas scrambled to his feet. Bow drawn, the old man spun like a needle on a compass, and the forest seemed to rotate with his dizzying dance. Arne and Baldir stood back-to-back, knives ready. Magic swirled with the snow, and more than winter’s wolves stole through the gloom.

Lothar fought for control of his heartbeat, forced his mind to focus. “Remain calm,” he whispered as the same terror mounted on his men’s faces. “Petrar, Niklas, listen to me.”

Petrar backed into the underbrush, bowstring taut. His wild-eyed gaze darted like a hare with a fox in pursuit, no hideaway in sight. Connovir alone knelt by the slaughtered stag, thrusting his jagged knife into its haunch.

Lothar lowered his weapon and raised a hand that trembled as though he’d strung its sinews too tight. If the stag was an ordinary animal, no hunter had slain one of the charmed Folk. Not yet. He’d leave an offering, make amends, swear an oath on his life. “Rest your bows. It’s not too late. We—”

Leaves rustled behind him.

Petrar’s arrow flew.

It sliced into the holly’s branches, and if Lothar could have lunged into its path, he would have made the leap. A wolf bolted from the brush and collapsed. Its keening whimpers, high and agonized, filled the still air with a sound eerily human.

Lothar’s breath strangled in his chest. “What have you done?”

The men gaped at Petrar as blood drained from the hunter’s face. A cry ripped from his lungs. Dropping his bow, he charged to the ledges, hands empty but for a bloodied knife.

“Petrar!” Lothar shouted. “Wait for us.” With his boot, he shoved his son from the carcass where the boy hacked wildly at a joint. Four wolves leered from the deepening shadows, lips drawn back, eyes gleaming like yellow opals. Low growls rumbled between bared teeth.

Lothar faced them with a bargain bordering on a plea. “Killing the wolf was a mistake, a misfortune we didn’t intend. We will leave the stag. As a gift. A feast for your kind. I give my word that the village will make amends.”

Connovir stood, face twisted in a scowl, the bloodied leg dangling from one fist, a knife gripped in the other. Rage bloomed in Lothar’s chest, his son determined to defy him. He grabbed the venison haunch and flung it to the beasts. With a sharp curse, Connovir plunged into the snow after it.

Petrar screamed.

Fumbling to nock an arrow, Lothar whirled. The other hunters yelled threats and backed away, pupils wide, eyes pitch black. Three white wolves tore at Petrar’s clothing. Flat on his back, the man punched and kicked as they snapped at his limbs. Teeth scored his flesh and scraped grooves in his bones.

If Lothar bore a choice, it eluded him. Raw fear crackled in his veins, and he drew his bowstring, ignoring the terrible possibility that the creatures were charmed. In the flurry of violence, he hadn’t a clear shot.

Then Petrar broke free of their attack and crawled on his elbows, begging for mercy. A wolf lunged, and its canines carved through the tender skin of his neck. Lothar’s quarrel streaked from his bow, hurling him into a fate he dreaded but couldn’t avoid. The steel tip felled the beast. The other predators twisted and fled.

The forest fell into a deadly silence, save for the ragged breaths of the remaining hunters. Lothar squatted, shaking, at his friend’s side. The man gurgled, fingers pawing at his throat as if he could tear away the strangling blood. His body choked, chest heaved and caved, and when at last he stilled, Lothar reached to close the man’s eyes.

But he hesitated, hand hovering above Petrar’s lifeless face.

Something stirred beside him—the tremble of an arrow’s fletching. Beneath it, the wolf he’d shot shuddered. The animal convulsed and slowly began to shift until what lay before him was no beast at all, but a pale being—long of limb, sharp-boned, and sylvan-eyed. One of the charmed shifters, her life slipping away with her blood. Her breath came in ragged gasps, each more labored than the last until her transformation stalled.

“Weregield.” The horrifying confirmation left Lothar’s lips in a frozen cloud, and he stared at the stricken men. Their folly had ended with the death of the Winter King’s own. “We need to escape this place. Now.”

This time, he met no objection. Yet, the forest had changed, the way out no longer clear. He harried his companions to the jutting rocks, abandoning Petrar’s body, a sacrifice to feed winter’s demons.

Bow in hand, he scaled the low ridge. Dusk pressed down on the huddled boulders, and a leaden fog curled between dead branches as if seeking the hidden warrens of doomed souls. Wolves darted through the moving shadows like phantoms. Atop the rise, Lothar scanned the snow for their old tracks and found none. But the meadows were near. Even without a trail, if they hurried, they might survive their folly.

A scream tore through the forest. Lothar whirled, notching an arrow as the other hunters fumbled for their weapons. Below, Niklas scuttled backward, his boot torn from his foot. A wolf tugged on his bloodied ankle. At the base of the incline, four wolves dragged Connovir between the trees, the recovered haunch abandoned in a smear of scarlet snow.

Lothar roared and freed his arrow. A snarling beast tumbled. Blood bloomed, bright as a summer rose, and in the space of a heartbeat, its pelt dissolved into smooth, winter-washed skin. Lothar bounded down the ledges and slipped on an icy rock. His ankle twisted. Bellowing a curse, he swept quarrels from his quiver and let them fly. A silver wolf writhed in the snow. Another yipped when an arrow scored its hind leg. Pale fur flashed as the creatures scattered into the falling night.

Desperate cries erupted beyond Lothar’s vision. Arne and Baldir had vanished into the dark, and there was nothing he could do to save them. He found Connovir, the boy alive, face and hands nearly stripped of flesh, irises pinpricks of terror. No time for gentleness, Lothar clutched his son’s collar, hoisted him over his shoulder, and limped toward the ledges.

A rumbling growl, deep as thunder, halted him with the finality of a steel trap. The vastness of the sound gripped him in its fists and echoed in his chest. He glanced up.

At the peak of the rock wall, Valanoth, the massive black wolf of legend, stood like a monarch upon a granite throne. The creature’s eyes blazed with ruby fire, and his gleaming coat bristled in the spectral wind. He was a creature of the wild, of the deep untamed places of the world, and no man could stand against him.

Lothar lowered Connovir to the forest’s white crust. He met his child’s vacant stare and released the bloodied collar as if the fur trim had singed his fingers. Horror drove the breath from his lungs. He felt hollowed. Dead already. As though fate had reached down his throat and ripped out his insides for a feast. Bow and quiver slid to the ground. Useless.

Misshapen, craggy-faced oaks formed an arena wall, the circle within clear but for a litter of copper needles. Charmed creatures crept between the boles. They gathered in the branches, eyes gleaming with unnatural light. Red-eyed spirits of the dead, their ivory bones draped in rags, glided from the deeper shadows, features wrought sideways on their spectral faces. The jakobus had come to eat their fill of human souls before they reached the underworld.

The legends curling around firelit hearths were true after all, and Lothar would bear their weight.

A figure stepped to the wolf lord’s side, a Skaarman, massive and white furred, with spiraling horns that scraped the sky. Lothar’s knees buckled as the giant glared at him through narrowed, ice-glittering eyes and pointed a clawed finger. “Woe to him who slays the Winter King’s weregield.”

Lothar folded with the falling snow, mind incapable of thought, voice silent, and death assured. A pack of wolves padded into the clearing and circled him like a constellation of stars might lay siege to the moon. The Lord of the Wilderness howled.