RELEASE DATE: 15 April 2020
The small town of Renph: a cosy, happy little place—at least until recently. Now, violence explodes in the streets, rumours whisper in the dark, and people hang in the square.
And no one knows why.
No one—except Tikva. But what can a seven-year-old do against a tidal wave of hatred? Or against the strange flame-haired woman who rode into town on her jet-black horse?
A richly imagined tale that demonstrates the power of love—no matter what the age.
When War Came to Town
When the woman with flame-coloured hair rode into town on the demon horse, nobody knew it would happen.
Sure, old Marley was ripped from his slumber in the room over the pub, dragged into the streets and flayed to within a half inch of death, but those kinds of things happened sometimes. All it took was a downturn in the economy, a few farms going sour, whispers in the wind of a witch, of black magic…
No. It was sad, ludicrous even, to think that people really thought Marley was clever enough for magic, but it wasn’t the thing nobody knew could happen.
The bodies lining the street to see the woman, that was unexpected, the way they thrashed and elbowed and tromped, all trying to catch a brush of plate mail, or of the sharp, crackling hair of the deep-black horse. Unexpected, but also not that thing—not It. If people had stopped to think, they could have known she’d draw them to her like moths.
No. Not It.
The body, more meat now than human, with strips that hung from its limbs and a torso that still, days later, shuddered torturously in a parody of breathing as it lay caged over the square—that was a pity. Not a tragedy, because Virani had deserved, more or less, what he got—you don’t steal from the Mayor’s own treasury and deflower his teenage daughter without flirting with death as well. The flogging was perhaps a trifle unnecessary, as least to that degree. But still: not It.
Because the thing is, see, all these things are terrible. And if anyone had bothered to look into the eye of the demon horse as it pranced into town on Tuesday at dusk, they would have known immediately by the flicker of fire deep within that bad things were going to happen. And if they’d taken a moment to stare past the woman’s captivating beauty with her hair of flames, they would have seen not the same flicker in her eye, but something worse. Much worse.
And so really, all the violence? While it surely wasn’t expected, it also wasn’t surprising.
So what, then, was It?
That one surprising thing that nobody knew would happen, that nobody could have predicted, that one thing that reminded everybody who they were and what really mattered?
That thing—it was Tikva.