a tale of Bramblewood Hollow
When wolves come out of the trees and the peaceful Hollow burns, a brother and sister are driven into the deep forest, where something unknown keeps pace in the branches above them.
Alora wakes knowing, in the certain way of children who are usually right, that today will not stay ordinary. She cannot say how. It sits under her fur like a held breath, through the warm bread and the ringing forge, through a whole golden afternoon chasing fireflies across the village green with her brother Alister.
She is right. Something has stood at the tree line for days, patient as stone, watching Bramblewood Hollow count its blessings. Too big for a fox. Too quiet for a deer.
That night the wolves come. By morning, everything Alora and Alister have ever loved is smoke behind them and dark trees ahead. Alone in a forest built to swallow them, they are not quite alone. Something moves above them, branch to branch, always a breath out of sight.
His name is Shadow. Fur that drinks the shade rather than throwing it back. He crosses a branch without bending it. The last of his kind, with no home left standing to call him back to it, and no reason at all to help two lost rabbits.
He helps them anyway.
the last black squirrel
Fur that drinks the shade, a close-cut cloak, a patch of worn leather over one eye, and a bow across his back. Half legend, half stranger, he has been making life hard for the wolves since before the children were born.
the brave one
A young rabbit with sharp ears and a sharper sense that today will not be ordinary. She runs first and thinks fast, and she notices the things the grown-ups are trying not to say.
the steady one
Alora’s brother, a patient whittler who carries the first knife he and his father ever made. Quiet where his sister is loud, he keeps them both moving when the night turns dark.
the baker
A lean jackrabbit with notched ears and a stern face that folds into a smile the moment he starts talking about crust. Gruff, watchful, and never far from a fistful of jellybeans.
A Morning Like Any Other
They washed, traded their day clothes for soft tunics, and sat to a plain supper of stew and fresh bread and the last of the honey. Alora found the swallowing harder than usual, around all the questions she was still carrying.
At last she could not hold them any longer. “Dad?”
“Mm.” Zeke did not look up right away. He knew that tone.
“Will everything be all right?”
He set his spoon down and leaned back and looked at her a long moment. For one breath she saw the worry plain behind his eyes, with none of the hiding on it.
“We don’t get to choose what comes out of the forest,” he said. “We only get to choose what we do when it does.” He reached across the table and took her paw, and then Alister’s, and his grip was warm and sure. “We will do everything in our power to keep you safe. That is our work. That is our promise.”
Alora nodded. It was not the tidy yes she had wanted. But it was true, and true was better.
She padded back to her own room, climbed under the blanket, and watched a square of moonlight inch its slow way across the floorboards. Her eyes went heavy. Downstairs the fire settled with a soft crack. Her last clear thought was of the warmth of her father’s grip on her paw, and of the tiredness in Jack Bean’s eyes.
Outside, the forest shifted.
The leaves whispered together. A breeze moved through the high branches and moved on. Far past the gardens, at the very last edge of Bramblewood’s small world, something paced just inside the tree line, and a pair of yellow eyes watched the glow of the distant windows.
The rest waits in the book. Get word when it’s ready.
Maggie Fallon did not set out to write a book about rabbits.
Her grandsons had a village, a forge, a wolf general with a name that made her raise an eyebrow, and a black squirrel who was the last of his kind. What they did not have was a way to get it out of their heads and onto the page. So they made a deal. They would decide what happened, and she would help them find the words for it.
That turned out to be the harder half of the bargain, and not the half she expected. Boys know exactly what a story is supposed to feel like, and they are ruthless when it doesn’t.
Every question worth asking about this book, why Shadow is the last, what it costs him, what he leaves behind, was answered by a child and not by the grownup with the keyboard.
This is their first book together. They are already discussing the second.
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