2021-02-04
A young woman must flee malevolent brigands in the forest in Maddox’s debut fantasy novella.
An unnamed noble is traveling through the woods with a retinue of knights when her group is suddenly besieged by attackers. The assailants manage to murder the woman’s guards, but she’s able to escape in the dense thicket of trees that surround them. However, she remains in great peril; she knows that her pursuers are “brigands from the westlands,” and that, to them, she’s an uncommon trophy: “A noble’s life was valuable to them as a hostage, but a noblewoman was also valuable as a gift to a foreign king. They would come.” To make matters worse, she’s cold, hungry, and injured, and armed only with a single dagger. She plans to make her way back to her father’s castle, but it’s not at all clear that she’ll be able to manage it without being detected. She decides that she has no choice but to take the offensive, so she sets traps for her adversaries. Over the course of this work, Maddox is at his best when he limns the hazy line between acts of bravery and acts of desperation. However, the story, at less than 60 pages, is as vague as it is brief, as indicated by the fact that readers never even learn the protagonist’s name. Also, is her father a king, and she, therefore, a princess? And where and when, exactly, is the drama unfolding? Perhaps the intention was that the omission of such details would bring the sense of danger into sharper relief, but ultimately, readers will simply feel lost—and as a result, they’ll never feel fully immersed in the plot.
A short, sketchy, and unconvincing tale.
