One Charm to Rule Them All

The Will and the Wilds by Charlie N. Holmberg

Enna and her mentally-damaged father live far from the village, but close to the Wilds, a dangerous locale for anyone who doesn't know how to control or fend off the "mystings," ravening creatures that can come into the world from its shadowy depths.

Her father's damage came from descending into the normal world of the mystings, to retrieve a charm to help his daughter track them so she can avoid them. Now he has just sufficient memory to grow mushrooms, although he frequently mistakes Enna for her mother, who was killed by a mystings pack of "grinlings" in the Wild when Enna was younger.

Enna lives a semi-secluded life, caring for her father and their small farm, selling their mushrooms in the village, tending her herb garden, and studying the Wild and the mystings. She dreams of attending a school and sharing her knowledge with the world, but neither the money it would require nor her need to stay close with her father will allow this luxury.

All that changes when a demon-beast from the Wild charges past their protective herbal boundary, and marks Enna for destruction. Her solution is to make a bargain with a different kind of mysting, and trade a willing kiss for a pledge to destroy the pack that has targeted Enna.

And that is when things really begin to go wrong...

Charlie Holmberg's material magician novels—starting with The Paper Magician—often share this tension between gifted-yet-ignorant young women and powerful, skilled men who serve as their tutors. In The Will and the Wilds, Enna and her pledged demon Maekellus are equally ignorant of each other's worlds and abilities, and the tension comes as much from what they share with each other as it does from their battle to save both worlds from the power invested in Enna's Ring-like charm.

The tale neatly skirts the trap of fairy-tale Beauty and Beast, and goes directly to a deeper question: can a woman surrender to a man, yet retain her self? Can a man truly love a woman, yet not conquer and consume her?

The answer is worth the trip into the deep, dark Wilds.