Excerpt: ONCE WAS WILLEM by M. R. Carey
Presenting an enthrallingly dark medieval fantasy—a fable of twisted folklore, macabre magic and the strangest of found families—from M. R. Carey, author of the million-copy bestseller, The Girl With All the Gifts.
Read an excerpt from Once Was Willem (US | UK), on sale March 4, below!
A Prologue or Prefatory Declaration by me, Once-Was-Willem
Well a day!
My fingers are black with ink and my head aches as if it is about to burst at the seams like an over‑stuffed flour sack, but this treatise at last is ended. I lean back from my labour and I draw breath, as God Himself did on the seventh day. His work was great and mine is small, but all makings of the mind and heart are sacred and this that you hold—good or bad as you may account it—is no exception.
The words that follow are true. I set my hand to them. I would have set my seal too except I do not have one. You will find in these pages a full and circumstantial account of all the things that passed in Cosham village and in the fiefdom of Pennick in the year of our Lord 1152. A word of warning: these events were monstrous and terrible and I have not shrunk from any part of them. The horror, the foulness, the pain and the pity: all are here without varnish. I felt I owed it to the dead, and to those for whom the blessing of death will never come, to chronicle as plainly as I could their doings and their undoings.
Ah, you will say, Pennick! It is like enough for dread things to come out of that quarter. And it is true that the land I call my home, for all its beauty, was ever a place with a grim reputation. The forests of the Chase are said to be home to nixies and boggarts. On the road that leads under Great Chell, benighted wayfarers claim to have heard bears and wolves address each other in human speech. There is a common belief, passed down through many generations, that Pennick Castle houses an unquiet ghost of terrible and malign power. These rumours I can attest are not unfounded; indeed, as you will see, they fall short of the truth by a long way.
As for what came to be called the curse of Cosham, that was a later thing. It did not come until the summer of my twelfth year. Still, I can and do confirm the particulars of it. The villagers of Cosham failed in their duty to God and man, and a great evil fell on them thereafter. Perhaps those two things were not enchained one to another, but were entirely separate. It was a dark time. Unnatural things walked the land (you may trust me on this, for I was one of them). There was enough misfortune abroad for all to take their share.
You might think me a doubtful witness of things that passed when I was still a child, but I assure you again that my word is good. Since I died and then was dug up out of the ground to live again (which I will come to in its place) my mind has had a clarity it never knew erewhile. Every moment I have lived stands before me now, as soldiers stand when their captain bids them rise and rally, ready to answer whatever they are tasked withal.
Gird yourself, therefore. I speak of monsters and magic, battle and bloodletting, and the crimes of desperate men. I speak also of secret things, of that which lies beneath us and that which impends above. By the time you come to the end of this account you will know the truth of your own life and death, the path laid out for your immortal soul, your origin and your inevitable end.
You will not thank me.
III
Which treats of my death
Now I come to my own part in this story, and I see that it will not do. I had meant to tell it as though the events of my life lay all in a straight line, but they do not. How could they? My death comes in the middle, when for most people it is wont to mark the end—and the manner of my going away and coming back bent all things out of true.
I cannot even say I and mean one thing by it, for I am two things at least and the second stands all askew on top of the first. I make mention of my mother and my father, but the words do not have the heft and weight for me that they should have for I am speaking of the father and mother I had when I was first alive. Since my resurrection I have none and do not much miss them. This is not cursedness on my part, only the acknowledging of a truth: I did not come out of my grave the same as I went into it.
I will lay these matters out for you as best I can, but I will not pretend any more that I am Willem Turling. It angers me when others do it, for its laziness and its making the wish become the word, so it is bad faith in me to do the same thing myself. I’m only a thing that bears Willem Turling’s face, and carries inside him (the way coins are carried in a purse) the memories of what Willem Turling did and said and saw. What I am now you will learn when I am come to telling you.
Willem Turling was born in the year of the long rain. His father was Jon Turling, a yardlander in the fiefdom of Baron Robert Carne, some six or seven miles north of the river called Trent. In case you don’t know what a yardlander is, the word signifies a farmer whose land, sometimes called a gyrd or a virgate, is of such a size that it needs two oxen yoked in a team to plough it. Jon Turling farmed full thirty acres, and it was goodly land that gave a proper yield. Wheat was what he mostly sowed and harvested there, enough for his family and his yearling debt, along with peas and beans, barley and carrots. There was also a patch nearest to the house where Margaret, Jon’s wife, grew sage and hyssop and dill for her cooking pot, leaving a corner full of wildflowers for her heart’s good.
The Turlings, you will have seen, were favoured by fortune. In all of Cosham village, where they lived, there were few more prosperous and I dare say none happier. They had but the one sorrow, which was that Margaret for a very long time could not bear a child. Her womb quickened thrice in three years, but none of the babies that grew in her stayed the course.
“Is it sin in us, do you think?” Jon asked his wife after the third time. “Would confession save us, Meg?”
Margaret knew of no great sin on her own head, and had seen none in her husband, but in the absence of great sins small ones will do. “Were you not of envious heart,” Margaret’s friend Alice Randel asked her, “when Judith Post walked before you in the blessing of the river? Perhaps it’s that.”
So Margaret took herself off to the kirk and laid out her soul before Parson Lebone, who did his best to sift it. He gave her meagre penance for her meagre trespasses, and was chagrined when she demanded more. A few paternosters, she told him, would not answer her need.
So he bid her fast a seven‑day, and walk to the river and back holding a great stone in her hands. These expiations were not from any canon but from the parson’s own wit, designed to satisfy Margaret’s need for atonement without doing her any serious harm. He was not a man that held the mortification of the body to be a holy or a needful thing.
Jon made his confession too, and was given the same answer, so he fasted along with his wife and carried his own boulder to the river’s bank. Their neighbours watched them there and back, some offering up prayers for their wellbeing while others speculated on what grave fault might merit so heavy a penance. Fornication, Jem Makepeace declared with confidence. It must needs be that they had had to do with each other on a Sunday, or else in Lent. And that, likewise, was why Margaret Turling’s womb had been made barren.
But whether God was watching or whether it was only chance, Margaret was got with child again only three months after she dropped that rock into the rushing Erren. And this time she dropped the baby too, as easily and as gratefully as she had let go of that heavy stone.
It was Willem that she bore: a boy with skin as pale as a lily’s flower and a head of hair that was as light a brown as ground‑up flax seeds. Jon being dark and Margaret being blonde, they joked that the boy was a jug into which they’d poured equal halves of themselves. Whatever qualities he showed as he grew, good or bad, they fitted them all to this same tune: he had Jon’s stubbornness but Margaret’s gentle heart, Jon’s piety but Margaret’s mischievous humour. They saw in their son their union writ large and prolonged into the uncertain future. They loved him so much they came close to suffocating him.
Life was as hard in those times as it is now. Harder even. I would not have you think the boy grew up untouched by pain. He had his share of bumps and falls, of fears and fevers, even of tragedy. The time of his growing up was the Anarchy, the time when the laws slept. There were trials enough for all that lived through those years. Yet Jon and Margaret contrived to shield their beloved Willem from the worst of it. Always they found some way to cheer or console him, to soothe his sorrows and still his fright. They made of him their heart’s heart, a precious cargo for them to carry with watchful care through the thorny thickets and winding ways of the world.
And their labour was not in vain. With such cossetting Willem might have grown up selfish and wilful, but he did not. Perhaps I who am so close to him should not say this, but he had both a sweet nature and a forward wit. Almost as soon as he could walk he was carrying water to his father in the fields, shelling peas for his mother, milking the family’s goat, Ermint, and watching so she didn’t stray. Then when he was older he became Jon’s second self, ploughing and planting beside him, tending the gyrd like a yeoman born.
But then, in his twelfth year, Willem fell ill. It was only a dry cough at first, but it worsened day by day. A fever grew inside him, and the heat seemed to shrivel him and wear him away as if he were a plant left without water in the heat of August. At length, almost in despair, Jon and Margaret decided to consult a doctor. Unusually for peasant farmers in Cosham they had a little money of their own, given to them when Baron Carne had needed to build a new barn and had asked Jon to give him seven weeks’ more labour than his vassalage required. To be paid in coin was a strange thing and Jon had not liked it much, but now he had nine shillings to his name. He asked Parson Lebone whether this would be enough, and where a physician might be found.
The parson had no idea as to the first, and for the second could only say that a town such as Burslem or Wolstanton would be large enough to provide a good living for a doctor and therefore ought logically to have one. Each was at least a day’s journey away from Cosham by foot, the first to the north and east, the second to the south and west.
“But how will we go, when Willem can’t walk?” Margaret lamented.
“I’ll go myself,” Jon said, “and bring a doctor back.”
He walked to Burslem. The village had an ox‑cart that was owned in common, but it was needed elsewhere so there was no help for it. As you have already heard, the roads at that time were a‑crawl with bandits and desperate men: it was no small risk Jon took, but he met with no miscarriage and arrived in the town towards evening. On being directed to a doctor’s house he did not wait until morning but hammered on the man’s door and importuned him to come at once. The leech, a man named Holt, gave him a flat refusal. He saw no point in setting out so late and being benighted on some desolate heath. No, he would come to Cosham the next day, and in the meantime he would accept four shillings against his fee.
Jon slept in a doorway and headed back to Cosham with the first light. Doctor Holt had said he would follow by horse, so Jon hoped he would be overtaken on the road. He was not.
As soon as he reached the bounds of the village he knew something was amiss. The bell up at the kirk was ringing a dirge, and the wind carried the wailing of women to him. He ran at once to his own house where all his fears were realised. The boy Willem had come to his crisis in the night. His breath had come shallower and shallower, Margaret told Jon in a voice that cracked with grief, until finally it did not come at all.
The two held each other, heartbroken. Each longed to comfort the other, as they had through many lesser ordeals, but in this time of greatest need their sorrow struck them dumb. Parson Lebone offered some words of consolation, but it’s far from certain my parents heard them.
Doctor Holt, I mention for the sake of completeness, arrived at last in the middle of the afternoon, riding a fine chestnut trotting horse with a saddle of yellow leather. When he found his intended patient already passed beyond his care, he demanded another four shillings for his wasted journey. It was well for him that he made this request of the parson, out of the hearing of Jon and Margaret and the neighbours who had come to mourn with them. Lebone gave the man a blessing and advised him to begone before anyone thought to take issue with his tardiness.
It being then summer, the funeral followed hard upon the death. Perhaps that was one reason why Jon and Margaret continued so very unhappy afterwards: they scarce had time to realise their son was gone before he was put in the ground. But given how much they had doted on him, it’s not needful to look for further explanation. If Willem had been their heart’s heart, they were as bereft now as if their hearts had been cut out while they yet lived. They still went about the business of their day—farming is a labour that permits no interruption—but they were like two unhoused souls, speaking never a word, scarcely aware of the tasks their bodies were performing.
And so they might have continued, if it had not been for the magician.
Almost a year to the day after Willem Turling was laid in the ground, the rumour ran through Cosham that a sorcerer had come to live in the deep forests on the far side of Great Chell. He had cleared a circle of ground near the Wolstanton road and built his house there. Demons or damned spirits must have helped him for he had done all this in the space of a single night. He was never seen to cut timber, yet smoke rose straight and black from his chimney. He did not hunt, for he did not need to: game of all kinds came willingly to his door, where he chose what meat he had a mind to. He was green of eye and white of hair, as tall and thin as a yew branch, and his name was Cain Caradoc.
Nine tenths of all of this, Jon and Margaret thought sure, was only story—and story grows fat by feeding on itself. They did not set any store by it. But then after some little time had passed they heard more. The mage had helped this one to mend a plough that was broken beyond a smith’s skill; he had cleared that one’s field of rocks in a single day, and for yet another he had made a crop of corn that was pale and stunted with mildew to grow hale and whole again.
Jon and Margaret were fearful of hoping, but the despair that had sat in their souls since their son died was like a hot stone that they swallowed afresh every day. Their guts were wrung out with it and their hearts exhausted.
“Where is the harm,” Margaret asked after sundry such tales had reached their ears, “in going and talking to the man? If he’s a worker of miracles, it may be that he can work one for us. If he’s none he’ll bid us begone and there’s an end of it.”
“Isn’t magic the Devil’s work, though?” Jon asked her—but in truth he only asked in order to be argued out of it, and Margaret was more than ready to oblige him. “If Caradoc’s magic is of that damned sort,” she said, “why have so many of our neighbours seen fit to sue to him? It’s only us that’s stood here wringing our hands, when it may be there’s help to be had.”
Help to be had, she said. She meant the raising of the dead, a thing that reeked of blasphemy and mortal sin. But Margaret had an answer for that too. “It was well enough for Jesus,” she said. “I don’t see how it can be a trespass, if He that’s as white as the lamb rolled away the stone from His own grave!”
Jon was almost certain there was a flaw in this argument, but he did not care to go digging for it. This is how he reasoned with himself: say we do sin, Meg and me. That’s on our head, not on Willem’s. We’ll go about to shrive ourselves after, and haply find mercy. Or if we don’t, still our boy will be in the world again and that’s a good that outweighs any harm.
So they took themselves away to the sorcerer’s house. It was a long journey, a great deal further from Cosham than they had ever been. Night overtook them still on the road, not even halfway yet to the wooded slopes of Great Chell, and they were obliged to seek shelter in the trees.
They would have been happy enough on a bed of moss, but there were only brambles as thick as rope knouts. And then a cold rain began to fall.
“I’m chilled to the bone,” Margaret lamented. “Better to keep on walking than to suffer this.”
“And turn our ankles in the ruts, or break our pates by tripping over stones?” Jon said. “Nay, Meg, it won’t do. But see, yonder is a light. It might be some shepherd’s bothy, and the shepherd might give us leave to sleep on his floor.”
The light he spoke of was a good way off among the trees, but the trees seemed to part before them as they walked towards it. In less time than it takes to tell the thing, they were there.
It was no shepherd’s hut that greeted them, nor a charcoal burner’s cottage. It was smaller than either, no more than a lattice of woven branches with a door that was more of the same and a roof of poorly banded thatch. It did not look as though it would keep the rain out but it was the only shelter offered, and the light that shone through the only window shifted in a way that suggested a fire was burning within.
With the rain drenching them and a rising wind buffeting their shoulders, Jon and Margaret did not hesitate long. They went to the door and Jon made to knock. Before he could, a voice called out to them from inside. “Come in,” it said. It was a thin, high voice that somehow could have been either an old man’s or a child’s. It was impossible to tell.
Jon and Margaret opened the door and entered. The room in which they found themselves was very different from what they had expected. To be short, it was not a place that sorted in any way at all with the hut’s exterior. It seemed to have walls of stone, which was impossible, and it was far greater in extent than the narrow sides of the hut could have compassed. Not only was there a fire but there was a fireplace, wide enough to accommodate an ingle‑seat beside the embers. There were niches in the walls where tallow candles burned. On a broad oaken table were piled up a great number of books (Jon and Margaret had only ever seen a single book in their whole lives, which was the parson’s Bible). On the floor, animal skins were strewn instead of rushes. More skins had been spread across a bed in the far corner of the room.
“Well, close the door,” said that high voice, “ere the wind puts out my candles!”
There arose from the ingle‑seat a strange figure. If the inside of the hut did not match its outside, so this man did not match his voice. Despite his white hair, which reached to his shoulders, he was young. His pale face boasted no beard. He had the slender frame of a stripling boy. Only his eyes betrayed him. They were the wrong eyes to be looking out of that youthful face, and their green, ageless gaze made the face seem a mask put up hastily to hide something unseemly.
This was the sorcerer Cain Caradoc, who I may rightly call my second father.
IV
Which recounts my resurrection
“You’re late,” Cain Caradoc said. “I expected you here before nightfall. It sits ill with me, being made to wait.” Jon and Margaret were all outfaced. They guessed easily enough who it was they were speaking to, for they had gone to seek a magician and this man could be nothing else. But they could not for their souls’ salvation make sense of the rest. What was this place? And how could they be expected here when they had found their way by merest chance?
“So please you, sir,” Jon ventured, “my name is Jon Turling, a yardlander of Cosham village, and this is my wife, Margaret. If you’re the mage Cain Caradoc, we looked to find you on Great Chell, many miles hence. But… but we did not imagine that we were expected! Perhaps we should have thought that a man such as you would know a great many hidden things. But for you to extend your hospitality to us is more than we ever…” His store of words failed him and he ended by ducking his head in a bow.
“You were best sit,” Cain Caradoc told him. He pointed, and the Turlings saw there were chairs set at the table now that had not been there when they entered. They went and sat down. Their wits were in such a pother that they would have sat on the floor if the mage had told them to. He came and joined them, taking his place at the head of the table in a carver chair whose high back was wrought with intricate designs of birds looking out from under leaves. The wood was darker than oak and had such a high lustre it looked as if it had been dipped in oil.
“You are in the right of it,” Cain Caradoc said. “My house is on the slopes of Chell. But at the same time it is anywhere else I wish it to be. And seeing how slow a progress you were making I became tired of waiting and decided to meet you on the road. Even so you were tardy. You must have taken many rests on the way, which speaks no great urgency in your suit to me.”
Jon and Margaret were distracted while the magician spoke by the carvings on his chair. Were those birds that were peering from between the leaves, or some other kind of creature? Whatever they were, they seemed to move whenever the eye was not upon them.
Margaret gathered her courage and spoke up. She swore on the four gospels and the gospel saints that she and her husband were no frivolous suitors, that their errand was a solemn one and close to their hearts. Jon showed his purse, in which sat the five shillings they still had to their name. He put the coins on the table and spread them out so that Cain Caradoc could count them. Together both husband and wife told him of their son Willem’s death, how heavy it was on their hearts, how much they longed to have him back. “And you being a man of such art and such power,” Jon finished, “we thought it might lie within your skill to help us.”
“To help you?” Cain Caradoc leaned forward and rested his chin on his fist. “Help you how? Speak plainly.”
“To bring back our son.”
“From his grave?”
“Aye.”
“For five shillings?”
“Aye.” Jon’s heart sank, and so did his wife’s. The mage had made no move to take their coin, and his voice dripped with disdain.
But his next words astonished them. “I will consider what may be done. And whiles I think on it, you must break bread with me.”
He reached out and took up a glass decanter, pouring three stoups of dark red wine. Worked glass was a thing my parents had never seen outside of a church, so that was a marvel in itself, but more marvellous still was the fact that neither the decanter nor the cups had been there a moment before. Nor had the repast of roast meats and black bread that was now of a sudden set before them. The table had been stacked with books, now it was full of good things to eat—such bounty as these simple people had never imagined.
They ate and drank, and by and by they dared to hope again. Why would Cain Caradoc have put himself in their way if he meant to deny them? And what could his kindness portend except more kindness to come? These expectations, along with the wine and the warmth of the room, loosened their tongues. They talked at length about their home and the recent doings there. They were ashamed to confess what had befallen Geoffrey Carne when he came to Cosham, but everything else they unpacked, from the coming of Maglan Horvath through the fall of Pennick Castle to the present moment. And the mage listened with great interest.
Cain Caradoc was then two hundred years old. If he seemed younger it was because he had found ways of gleaning youth from the places where it was most readily to be found, which is to say the young. All his care was to prolong his life for as long as might be managed, and so to put off indefinitely a conversation with his maker that he feared might be irksome and unpleasant. A dead child was a piece of business Cain Caradoc could turn to profit, and all this show of hospitality was a way of wooing Jon and Margaret to his purpose.
But there was more besides. As part of his striving to ensure his own immortality, the sorcerer was wont to scry his future and find what opportunities and obstacles might lie in his path. The magics he bent to this purpose were volatile and the insights thus gained were of necessity oblique and obscure. Still, he had been brought to know through conversations with unhoused spirits that the lands around Trent were important to him—which indeed was why he had come there. Furthermore, the spirits had promised that he would reach the height of his art and attain his dearest wish in the service of a foreign lord lately raised to power and eminence in this northern clime.
So when these two guileless peasants told him of Maglan Horvath’s coming into the fiefdom of Pennick, Cain Caradoc felt the satisfaction of a knot pulling tight or a circle drawn to its full round. He had ventured forth this night only looking to conclude a bargain; it pleased him greatly that he had gained such useful intelligence besides.
All three of them had supped and drunk. The man and the woman were drowsy with wine and wearied from their journeying. It was time to bring the matter to a conclusion. “You may keep your shillings,” Cain Caradoc said, pushing them back across the table. “I have no use for wealth. I am a scholar, and my needs are few. For God’s grace and my soul’s weal I will answer your plea and give you back your child.”
Hearing this, Jon and Margaret could not contain their joy. They fell to their knees and thanked the sorcerer, taking hold of his two hands and kissing them ever and again. They swore themselves to his service, pledged to pray for him and to light candles for him at Cosham kirk, and much more to the same purpose.
“There is yet one other thing, though,” Cain Caradoc told them, enduring their excessive gratitude with scant patience. “Take your seats again and listen to me. The spell that will bring your son Willem back from his grave is not a simple one. It will take a great toll of me. It might even kill me if I am not fortified against its effects. So I ask you this. Let me take a tithing from Willem’s soul. The thinnest wafer, so small it will never be missed. And I will use it to replace the vital energies that I will lose in casting the spell.”
The Turlings were somewhat dismayed at this proposal, but the sorcerer assured them Willem would take no hurt from it, and was adamant besides that there was no other way the thing could be achieved. It was this, he said, or else it was nothing. Still, Jon and Margaret hesitated. To be dealing in souls—and their own son’s soul, no less—seemed no Christian business, and for all their grief and longing they could not quite bring themselves to agree to it.
“Well then, go your ways,” Cain Caradoc said with asperity. “You’ve eaten my bread and drunk my wine, but I make no charge for that. Only I could wish that you had not wasted my time, when you do not love your boy enough to see the matter through.”
“It’s not love that’s wanting.” Margaret wept. “Only how can we give what’s not ours in the first place?”
“You may give it freely. The two of you are the two halves of Willem, are you not? The authors both of his spirit and of his flesh. None else besides you could do it, and neither of you could do it without the other, but if you both agree then the bargain will have force.”
“Surely, master,” Jon pleaded, “there’s some other payment you’d take!”
“I told you,” said the magician, “it’s not payment. It’s a needful thing for the spell to be performed. But hey ho, I am done. I have told you what I can do for you and what it will require. If you won’t give what I ask freely, I’ll not beg for it. Please to go out by the door whereby you entered.”
Jon and Margaret stood, trembling as if an ague had seized them both. They looked each to other, and each saw their own face reflected in the other’s tears. They had come so close to their heart’s desire, and now must they go out again into the rain and the cold and the emptiness of a life without their boy?
That dread prospect helped them, in the end, to find their resolution.
They said yes. They swore to it.
“You have made the right choice,” Cain Caradoc applauded them. “Go home now and wait. When the thing is done, which will be soon, you will know it.”
And this at least was no lie.
Six feet under Cosham kirkyard, without a coffin but wrapped in cerements of lead, Willem Turling had lain now for a year. The cerements were to keep his flesh from insult, and they had done their job well. No worms or flies had found their way to Willem’s body. No rats or dogs had got the scent of him. If death is a sleep, his sleep had gone undisturbed.
But a body carries its own corruption within it, and you cannot keep out what was inside all along. Have you ever known any meat to keep fresh for a year? Within the leaden shroud Willem’s flesh and sinews had putrefied, unlacing themselves from his bones and then rendering down and down until at length the greater part of him had been distilled to a liquor. The bones were still whole, though they had separated each from other and lay all tangled at the bottom of the fleshy broth.
It is said by some that when a caterpillar spins a cocoon its body within that envelope becomes just such a liquid before taking on the winged form in which it will finally burst forth. However that may be, Cain Caradoc’s spell began now to work on what was left of Willem and transform it.
The sorcerer’s command was that Willem should rise up out of his grave and stand again in his own likeness. That likeness being lost, the liquid mass within the cerements did what it could. It congealed into a kind of semblance of a body, picking up in the process such of Willem’s bones as seemed to fit. It was not an hour’s work, or even a day’s. On the one hand the cerements being moulded to the outline of Willem’s body gave the liquor some hints to start with as to the general shape towards which it should tend. But this was of no great use when it came to the fine detail. As for the bones, they were more of a hindrance than a help, for they were embedded in the quickening flesh every which way, and stuck out at unavailing angles.
What clawed its way up to the surface at last, having cast off the heavy cerements and burrowed upwards through the earth as blind as any mole, did not look much like Willem. It did not look much like any child ever born of woman.
Then again, it was not. I was not. I was born from death. Cain Caradoc conceived me and the cold grave bore me. It’s a miracle I’m not more thwart than I am.
But it’s not a miracle that Jon and Margaret Turling were thankful for, when at last I came stumbling home.
From the international bestselling author of The Girl with All the Gifts comes a wildly original and enthrallingly dark medieval fantasy unlike anything you’ve read before – a fable of twisted folklore, macabre magic, and the strangest of found families.
“A masterpiece of medieval dark fiction.” – Christopher Buehlman, author of Between Two Fires
“A wild fever dream – monstrous and beautiful.” – Seanan McGuire, author of Every Heart a Doorway
Eleven hundred and some years after the death of Christ, in the kingdom that had but recently begun to call itself England, I, Once Was Willem, rose from the dead to defeat a great evil facing the humble village of Cosham. The words enclosed herein are true.
I speak of monsters and magic, battle and bloodletting, and the crimes of desperate men. I speak also of secret things, of that which lies beneath us and that which impends above. By the time you come to the end of this account you will know the truth of your own life and death, the path laid out for your immortal soul, your origin and your inevitable end.
You will not thank me.
“It’s been a long time since a book has reached out and just entirely enveloped me in its world the way Once Was Willem did. Astounding, and I loved every moment of it.” – RJ Barker, author of The Bone Ships
