Clan of Three Staffs (Hill Chargers Book 1) by Chloe Garner

Author:Chloe Garner [Garner, Chloe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Horse Called Alpha
Published: 2023-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

Down, further and further into the valley between the mountains they followed, more and more elves assembling into two lines to either side, just watching.

They whispered amongst themselves, but they didn’t approach. Persephone had no idea what they were thinking or what they were going to do about it, but she was between Oak and his mare, and they appeared to be protecting her adequately, for now. Her body calmed, and she started actually looking around.

There were trees here.

Big ones.

They’d dropped dozens of feet, maybe a hundred, and yet the tops of the trees had failed to follow. She would have never known this place went so deep down into the mountains, from above, because the canopy kept getting higher overhead.

At first, the trees had just been normal ones. Big. Old. Enough that she couldn’t reach her own fingers, trying to encircle one with her arms.

But only just.

Now, they were big enough that she couldn’t reach Marco’s fingers on either side of one as they reached out to each other, and she saw below her trees that you could nearly hide a horse behind, turned sideways.

There were elves overhead, looking down at them, and a solid line of elves going along a path that was increasingly firm underfoot.

And then someone started to sing.

And Persephone shivered as the entire population took up the song, something sad with memories as deep as the trees.

She pressed her shoulder against Oak’s side, wondering what story they must be telling, with sounds that cool and slow.

They dropped further, passing trees with stairs built up in rings around them and dwellings up in them, and then they started to pass multi-story buildings on the ground, built around the feet of the biggest trees of all.

There had to be thousands of them, these stone elves, singing and watching as Oak and the dun mare went past with Persephone, a group of half a dozen stone elves at the front. None of the leading elves ever looked back until they came to a clearing.

It was in deep shade, but it was lit with torches, and the elves that had been lining the path flowed in to encircle the clearing as Oak and the mare stopped just inside of it and the cluster of stone elves ahead of them turned and formed themselves into a wedge shape behind one of them. Persephone saw nothing remarkable about him, not in build or demeanor or clothing, but she was relatively sure that he had been the one who had spoken before.

She shivered again as he indicated her and spoke, and Oak stepped aside, quickly enough to surprise her, rotating back far enough to catch her shoulder with the top of his nose and shove her forward.

And then she was standing by herself in front of this group of stone elves, completely surrounded by them.

And he was speaking.

She looked around wildly, but Oak and the mare had closed together, and there was nowhere to go but around and under their bellies.

And Oak had been clear.

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