Prologue

          “Do you know the story of the Druid?” The young boy shook his head, looking up at the old and withered priest. The room hummed with the soft flicker of firelight. A sconce behind the priest burned its last ember of the night, its warmth blanketing the old man, and reaching out gingerly towards the boy so that he felt it on his cheek. Wooden shelves reached up to the low-hanging ceiling, filled with columns of scrolls carefully stacked and named by small engravings in the wood. They were like tapestries, thought the boy, wallpaper to the mossy stone behind them.

          “If your father hasn’t told you, he’s been waiting for me to,” said the priest, “I’ll keep it short, then you can run off and get some sleep.” 

          He nodded enthusiastically, staring at wrinkled skin and wondering if his own would look like that one day; if that was the price for getting to look at old scrolls. 

          “It was long ago,” said the priest, leaning forward in his rickety chair, a small window coming into view behind him as his head bowed. “Before priests ruled the village, and when we had a chief. A strong, bold man was he. Much like your father. One day a stranger came into the village, peeking and prowling. But he was no fiend. His robes were a blackish blue, like the depths of the sea, and all the village folk were terrified of him. Not our chief though, young one. He approached that stranger-” the priest straightened, puffing out his chest, the window disappeared as his head took the place of the distant moon. “And he told him, ‘If you are here for trouble, know that I am he, but if you are here to be a friend, then a friend to you I’ll be,’ for they spoke in rhymes in those days, as the books tell.”

          “And the stranger responded with a foreign tongue, maybe Ahkovan, Simerian, or some long-forgotten language, but the chief needn’t know what the man was saying to know he was a friend. So, this stranger was welcomed and stayed for a week’s time, and while he was here there were many strange happenings. You see, this stranger was not like us. He possessed powers that no other man or woman had ever seen. The chief witnessed him wield fire like a sword, ride the wind like a stallion, and speak to trees as I speak to you now.”

          The boy’s eyes widened, “How did he do it? Where did he go? Can I use fire like a sword, if I read one of your scrolls?”

          “Hush now,” chuckled the priest, “there is more to tell.” 

          The boy rocked back and forth and scooted closer on the rug, holding his bare feet and smiling like he never had before. This is what he’d been waiting for. Everybody had told him Horntree was special, but never why. 

          The priest gave him a warm smile and continued, “His magic was not the exciting bit, but what was to come of it. The chief and the Druid became friends in the week they were together, and by the end, they were passing sad to depart. The Druid had done so much for the village in so little time, but on the day he left, he would grant us something that we could never forget. Something you know very well. He made his leave of us in the spot where the village arch stands today, and all our ancestors gathered to see him off. Just before he left, disappearing into those woods forever, he gave the chief his parting gift.”

          “What? What did he give him Crasten?” The boy’s hands went from his feet to his knees. 

          “I’ll give you a hint. Come!” The old man stood and walked towards the firelight, the sconce, and the window above it. The boy stayed seated, smiling and watching. “Come on, Harold.” 

          He stood up and walked cautiously towards the priest, who seemed to be staring through the small window. Even with his hunched back, the old man towered over Harold, and he couldn’t see the village beyond the window. Suddenly, he was being hoisted up by his waist. The priest held him shakily until Harold reached his foot out and stood on a little ledge beside the sconce. 

          “Look out there. Do you see it?”

          Moonlight painted the village a dark blue, like the robes of the stranger, and in the gap between two houses, one the blacksmiths, and the other the healer’s, Harold could see far in the distance what the priest was pointing at. A tree. No ordinary tree though, it was a horn tree, from which the village had its name. Standing in front of two thick oaks, the tree could have been their sibling, except for the long jutting branches, bare of bark and sharp as thorns, which poked out of the leaves like ears from a bushy set of hair, or… like horns. 

          “It is just a horn tree, Crasten.”

          “No horn tree is ‘just a horn tree,’ my boy. Do you think it is a coincidence that we, village folk who have no business in castles and jousts and all the rest, have answered our kings’ calls for the last 3,000 years? Do you think it is a coincidence that in all this time if you ask someone outside our village, save for a few in Soberton and a couple in Heurtain if they’ve ever heard of Horntree, that they would say no? Nay, young warrior. It is no coincidence. It is the horn tree that makes us strong. It is the horn tree that protects us.”

          Harold turned his head towards the priest, staring once again at wrinkles, and gray hair, and this time into old, weary eyes, watery and droopy-lidded. It is just a tree, he thought, one of a million that surrounds us. Tears welled in his eyes.

          “What is the matter? Don’t you understand? The Druid gave us the horn tree, and we have been protected ever since. We have been strong and fierce like that great chief ever since. It is a great thing! You should be happy. Why do you cry, Harold?”

          The boy stared into the eyes of his elder; this man, who for all his books and scrolls, and all his wrinkles and grayness, believed in something that could not be true. Tears rolled down his cheek and snot bubbled in his nose. 

          “Why didn’t the horn trees protect my mother?”

          “Oh, Harold.” The old man wrapped Harold tightly in his arms, the green sleeves of his robe smothering him like a blanket to a fire, and he gently stroked the top of his head. 

          “Some things are too powerful for even the horn tree to protect us against.” The little boy sobbed into Crasten’s shoulder, heaving and sniffing and making a mess of the robe. The priest didn’t seem bothered at all. “That sickness…” the man paused, “nothing could stop it but time. You will know, later in life. You will understand after I am gone. The horn tree brought your father home, and Pearce’s father, and Oggy’s, and all the rest of your friends’ parents.”

          Harold brought his face away from the green cloth, and snapped, “Gamry’s parents are dead, and my dad wishes he never came back!” He squirmed out of the old man’s arms and fell to the floor. 

          “Harold-” A knock came on the door. Both of them stopped where they were, Harold, looking back at the priest. “That would be your father, I’m sure.”

          Pouting, Harold wiped his cheeks. “I’ll tell him about the Druid and the horn tree.”

                    “He already knows, my boy, better than most, and now more than ever.” 

          Harold ran to the door and pulled it open, his father’s figure appearing in the moon-touched dark. A broad-shouldered, kind-faced, bull of a man, with a wild beard that had at one time been kept trimmed. Behind him a dirt road and the black outlines of houses. Crasten walked slowly and painfully to catch up to the boy.

          “I am so sorry, High Priest. My boy is a troubled sleeper, but I thought he knew better than to make it someone else’s trouble too.” The little boy walked to his father and leaned against his side, sliding his head in the space between his arm and his thigh and sniffling away the last of his tears. 

          “Ever since Beth-” the father stopped, his words catching in his throat, maybe because they were too painful to say, or maybe because he was afraid saying it would remind his son that it was real, “-he’s been having trouble sleeping.”

          “No no, Henry. There is no trouble. He’s just eager to learn, is all. I was teaching him some history. He’s shown an interest. If he was someone else’s son, I may have tried to snag him as one of my clergymen.” The old priest knelt down to face the boy, a grueling task for a man of his age, and Harold could tell picking him up had taken every ounce of strength from him. 

          “Do not forget what I have told you tonight, young Harold. There is nothing so relevant to you as this old story. The horn tree is a powerful thing. It will work its magic on you, whether you believe in it or not. And do you know what?”

          “What?” Harold said, wiping tears and snot from his upper lip.

          The old priest smiled with enough warmth to melt even the coldest of hearts. “I believe you’ll grow up to be a great warrior like your father one day. Maybe even greater.”

          I started writing stories when I was a kid and stopped until I graduated high school and went off to Fort Benning, Georgia for basic training. As soon as I got on the plane I wrote a poem about this character, Harold, and throughout basic training the poem turned into a novel which I would read to my platoon in the barracks at the end of each week. It became something they all looked forward to, and gave us all relief from the hard training and intense drill sergeants. I wrote this prologue when I came home to introduce the theme of questioning magic and religion that is present throughout the rest of the novel. I felt that the story needed a prologue to explain the Horntreemen's belief in the Druid and in the power of the horn trees. I also wanted to introduce Harold as a child, before the reader meets him as an adult, to show the pain he feels from losing his mother when it is fresh, so that the reader might feel it deeper in the later scenes when he feels it as an adult.