/ SILVANA \  prologue (continued)

A tawny owl drifted past on silent wings.  Fabiom smiled, despite his predicament.  He was not really afraid of the woods, even in the dark.  There was nothing about the wildwood of Deepvale he did not love, except perhaps the nettles, he decided, as he rubbed his elbow with plantain leaves.  The brambles he forgave, despite the damage they had inflicted on  him.  Soon he would be able to enjoy their sweet berries; that was worth a few scratches.

‘Fabiom –’

The crushed leaves fell from his hand.

‘Fabiom –’

The voice was enticing, sweet and kind.  Leading him away from the path, over grassy hillocks and through dense bracken.

‘Fabiom –’

He followed without hesitation, until he came out into a small grove of well spaced ash trees.  Between the trees, the gently undulating ground was sprinkled with violets and anemones growing in profusion.  

Though he was uncertain whether he had really heard the voice calling his name, or had just imagined it, Fabiom had no doubt that the giggling he heard now was real enough.  His mother had told him stories of the merry and mischievous woodmaids, denizens of holly and hazel, whitethorn and rowan and other small trees of the wildwood.  

And they had led him here. . . .

Awed, he stood staring at the ash trees towering above him.  They had to be Silvanan.  Why else would there be woodmaids here?

“I would have brought some flowers, if I’d known,” he whispered.

Laughter like dry leaves in the breeze greeted his words.  Fabiom paid the woodmaids no heed.  He would be safe here, that was certain; and the roots of one of the huge trees formed a circle, like arms, where he could sleep.  He was hungry and sore, but most of all he was tired.  With a whispered word of thanks to the Silvana of his tree, he curled up in the woody hollow and fell asleep almost at once.

Dreams came in the night.  He was in a dark, tight space, not even sure which way was up.  There was no way out.  His body jerked and he cried out.  Suddenly he was out of the basket and running, but they were chasing him and they were catching up, trying to put the basket over his head again.  He glanced over his shoulder as he fled.  They had heads like wild pigs, with tusks and fierce red eyes and through their piggy mouths, with squeals and grunts, they called his name.  A branch lay across his path, too late he saw it and tripped.  Triumphant squealing bore down upon him. . . .  And then silence.

He had not heard her sing to him but suddenly only soft and gentle sleep was his.  And the song remained in his mind – for the rest of his life.

/ SILVANA \  prologue (continued)

“Nimo, you idiot!  You scared him.  We could have grabbed him while he was on his knees.  Now we’ll never find him.”

“I don’t know what you’re fussing about, Khime.  He’ll go home soon enough.  It’s getting dark.  He’s not going to want to stay here much longer.”  Nimo, fourteen and the older of the two brothers by almost two years, looked around and shuddered.  “I certainly don’t.”

“Oh, right.  So we just go back and tell Lord Tawr that his four year old son is lost somewhere in the middle of the wildwood.  But we’re sure he’ll come home soon?”

For a moment Nimo poked distractedly at a hole in a tree with a stick, then he grinned.  “Not quite.  We’ll tell him that Fabiom said he wanted to show us something deep in the woods and then he ran off and left us to find our own way back - that’s why we’re so late.  We’ll be all surprised that he isn’t already home, laughing at us.”

“We might get away with it, if he doesn’t decide to tell Tawr or Vida what really happened,”  Khime snorted.  “He’s such a pathetic little mouse.”

“Yes he is, isn’t he?” Nimo guffawed.  “It was so funny when you put him in that basket and put the lid on it and he couldn’t work out how to open it again.”  He threw his stick at a chaffinch above his head, and missed.  “Maybe we shouldn’t have sent him into that gully to pick strawberries and then pretended to be wild pigs coming to get him though.”

He looked at his brother for a long moment until the two of them doubled up with laughter.

“Oh, yes, we should!” Khime spluttered.  “Whatever Herbis does to us for it, it’ll have been worth it just to have seen the look on Fabiom’s face.”

Fabiom stopped running.  Short, useless breaths were burning his throat while his chest longed for air.  Blood was oozing from his knee where he had tripped over a root and had fallen, hard, onto a stone.  He wanted his mother, but he would not go home, not while Lord Herbis and his two horrid brothers were still there.  

Fabiom had not wanted to play with them.  But when Herbis asked Fabiom’s parents to show him around Deepvale’s silk mills, the two boys offered to look after him while the adults went off.  They promised to take good care of him.

“Watch that he stays in the garden,” Tawr had warned them.  “He’s a terror for going off into the woods on his own. . . .” 

At four, Fabiom was far too young to recognise the look of malicious glee that had passed between the brothers at that moment.

“Ooh, Fabiom.  You mustn’t go into the woods.  A Silvana might see you.  Out she’d come from her tree and swallow you up!” Nimo tried, as soon as the adults were out of hearing.

Fabiom laughed.  “Silvanii don’t swallow people,” he told the older boy disdainfully.

“Her roots and branches would wind around you though, and you’d be trapped, stuck fast in her tree, deep in the woods, where no one could hear you cry for help,”  Khime elaborated.

Fabiom giggled at that.  “Don’t you know anything about the Silvanii?” he asked.  “They won’t hurt you unless you hurt them.  They’re nice.  They sing and they dance.”

“And they take your mind and you go mad, mad, mad!”  Khime looked at the little boy, who was still laughing.  “D’you know where they dance, Fabiom?  Bet you don’t.  Bet you’d be too scared to go there even if you did.”

“No I would not.”  Fabiom smiled innocently.  He would not tell them that he knew exactly where the Silvanii danced.  That was his secret; his and Tawr’s.  Not even his mother knew he had persuaded that information from his father.

Earlier that summer, after days of pleading, Tawr had finally brought him to the Dancing Glade.  Twice since then he had gone there on his own, despite strict instructions about staying in the garden.  It was easy to find, once you knew the way.  So how had he got lost?  All he had to do was follow the stream and he was bound to arrive at the Dancing Glade.  How had he lost the stream?

The unending canopy no longer seemed so friendly.  It really did seem as if it went on and on, that there was nothing else in the world besides.  He sniffed loudly.  Somewhere near here there was a wide grassy glade, encircled by trees, with a stream running through.  It did exist, just as his father’s House existed and Deepvale and all the towns and villages and Holdings beyond existed.  

Standing there, lost in the evening gloom, surrounded by towering trees, he was not entirely sure that was true.

Branches arced over Fabiom’s head and the branches of each tree grasped those of the next to form an unbroken canopy that went on - forever.  Wildwood.  That was the entire world.  Unbroken, unending, safe.

Here he was safe.

The last light of day gilded the leaves of autumns past so that he trod a golden path between the burnished trunks of ash and elm that supported the living canopy above him.

He was not going home.

Evening chorus rang out from amid the branches as the daytime birds of the wildwood prepared for the night, calling their final farewell to the sun and a warning to their neighbours that all territorial disputes were merely on hold and would be resumed at first light.

The boy tried to impersonate the chaffinch, as his Uncle Tarison had taught him, “chip chip chip, cherry-erry-erry.”  And the stream running alongside the path chuckled and gurgled as if in amusement at his efforts. 

The stream could laugh at him, he did not object to that.

As he got down on his knees to take a drink a shrill voice shattered the tranquillity of the woods, silencing the birds. 

“I see him!  I see him!”

Fabiom took one, startled, look, scrambled to his feet and ran as fast as he could, regardless of the briars that tore at his clothes and his skin or the nettles that burnt him as he hurried past.  He knew where he was going, where he would be really safe. 

SILVANA - prologue

The first draft of Silvana was some 34,000 words.  It began with the sixteen year old Fabiom’s decision to risk his life, or his sanity, by attempting to win a wife from among the Silvanii – the tree spirits that dwell in the wildwoods near his homeplace – and ended with his death, many years later; favourite of the Ruling Prince and father of Lesandor and Elzandria.  The final draft is 40,000 more than the original – and that’s only Part 1.  In proper fantasy style, Silvana is now a trilogy.  

Silvana grew slowly, over a number of years.  The better I got to know the characters and the world they inhabited, the more pieces of the story came to light.  However, the original story remained unchanged.  It feels like history, not fiction; I can’t change it, even if I wanted to.  About half-way through, Lesandor, whom I have watched grow up on the pages before me, is distraught: terrible things have befallen him.  I can’t read it without wanting to cry.  Every now and again I say, ‘I must save him from this, he doesn’t have to endure it,’ and then I stop myself at the last moment because what I have written, what I am reading is what really happened.  Having reached that stage I know the time had come to stop creating and let the story loose.

It wasn’t difficult to grow the story from novella to full-length trilogy.  There were incidents crying out for explanation or elaboration; there were characters who deserved more of their own stories to be told, there were places that needed to be explored.

There’s a prologue now that didn’t exist before – the story of how the four year old Fabiom found Casandrina’s tree for the first time.  That incident was referred to in the original but only in passing; so too the trip Fabiom and Prince Ravik made to Varlass where the prince meets his bride-to-be.  Fabiom’s favourite book, Tales of a Woodsman, no longer simply exists as a title but is quoted quite extensively (and writing a book to appear within a book is an interesting exercise in its own right.  It is essential that it has its own voice.)

I could have gone on . . .  and on.  Somewhere, somehow, you’ve got to call a halt.  The story spans a lifetime, 600 pages hardly begins to scratch the surface!

Bronwen and Pawl, with sewing and pipes. 

Bronwen's Dowry was published, along with the eleven other finalists of the inaugural Ian St. James literary awards, in an anthology called 'At the Stroke of Twelve'.  An Irish magazine, Next, also published it, alongside this lovely picture.  I really wanted to buy the original but the editor never answered my letters to let me know who had painted it - so all I have is a now somewhat faded page from the magazine.
It is fascinating to see how someone else imagines your characters.  It gives your writing a totally new dimension.

Now that Silvana is heading towards publication, my main concern is the artwork for the front cover.  It needs to be eye-catching but more than that, it needs to capture something of the spirit of the novel.

I have long since come to believe that writing a book is the easy part.

Writing hint #1.  

Words conjure images.  Just because something is correct doesn’t mean readers won’t be confused and get a somewhat different picture in their minds than you intended.

 “As her head came through the door, her eyes fell on the table.”

I wrote the first draft of Silvana rather more years ago than I care to admit.  I had daydreamed the whole story over about a fortnight - in the time between going to bed at night and falling asleep (I was single and childless at the time. . . .) During the day, I constantly thought about it and it wouldn’t let me concentrate on much else - it demanded to be written.  It was the first thing I didn’t write longhand.  Up until then I had been a ‘flow of consciousness’ sort of writer - a specific colour ballpoint pen (black) on a specific size notepad (A4) with specific line spacing (wide) and always with margins. I didn’t need that with Silvana as I knew exactly what happened and so I could go straight to the keyboard for the first time in my life.  I wrote for several hours each days for three weeks until I had the whole story down - all 34,000 words.  I could relax.

Of course, I had no idea what to do with a story that was just short of 100 pages.  I read bits out at the Wexford Writer’s Circle meetings and someone there read the whole thing and told me in a beautiful letter (that of course I still have) how much she loved it.  Beyond that, I was stumped.

So Silvana joined Minimus Goes to the Moon, The Binding, and The Bond Stone of Eishe in the filing cabinet and I returned to writing copy for local council calendars, travel brochures and car hire companies and doing the odd ‘arty’ interview for the local paper.

Little did I know then that I was only beginning a journey that would take so long to complete, or one that would be so much fun.

Welcome to 'Bronwen's Dowry'.  This is a writer's diary and an editor's advice surgery all in one.
Here I intend to chart the progress of my various writing projects from seeds of inspiration to whatever they grow into.  Along the way, I hope to be able to share some ideas, lessons learnt and good advice - from various sources.  Mainly, I hope to have fun and make some new friends.
'Bronwen's Dowry' was the title of my Ian St. James award winning fantasy short story.  Bronwen had no money but she had her own special talents.  Through the use of these, step by step she built up her and her new husband's fortunes until he was in a position to realise his potential and she to see her dreams come true.  It seemed an apt name.