Song of the Huntress
This novel takes us on an exhilarating ride with the Wild Hunt and the 8th-century warrior queen of Wessex, Æthelburg. The novel draws on the history and geography of 8th-century Wessex and Dumnonia but adds a thread of fantasy in its engagement with the scop Emrys and the stories of Annwn from the Mabinogion.
The story begins at Taunton and moves to Wilton, Glastonbury, Exeter and Tintagel, as Æthelburg and her husband King Ine fight to retain control of Wessex. Æthelburg is aided by, and strongly attracted to, Herla, the Lord of the Wild Hunt. The story is told through the eyes of the three protagonists: Æthelburg, Ine and Herla. Herla is fighting to regain her humanity after many years of being cursed to reap souls, ‘to live as a wordless bloodlusting beast’. Hundreds of years before, Herla was an Eceni female warrior and the lover of Boudica, and now she desires Æthelburg. She moves with ‘the dangerous grace of a wildcat’. There is a wonderful handling of the charged desire between Æthelburg and Herla, and the mutual love and pain between Æthelburg and Ine. Holland’s writing vividly depicts Herla’s hall inside the Tor of Glastonbury:
‘At the top of the hall is a bench, its back formed of two rearing stags, hooves raised like pugilists. It is a wild seat, and the figure upon it is wild, almost too real to look at … A hunter’s eyes, fierce and afire, pulled from the wilderness where humans should not go… Mercilessness would be at home there … Her arms are inked…’
She conjures up the fearsome Wild Hunt as it ‘wheels upwards, their hooves trampling clouds still saturated with night’. This is irresistible storytelling. I was reluctant to part from Herla, Ine, and Æthelburg at the novel’s close. Highly recommended.
