The Withered King Publishes Today
My latest novel, The Withered King, publishes today (Sunday, May 31, 2026). Here’s the blurb:
When Colin Cameron's dying father entrusted him with the protection of his baby sister Effie, neither anticipated that Colin and Effie would one day stumble through a portal into the kingdom of the Green King. There, the king's winsome daughter’s first words to Colin are a proposal of marriage, and the entire kingdom mistakes Effie for their long-promised savior, the Spotless Maiden. The ancient scrolls say that only the Spotless Maiden can pierce the heart of their great enemy, the Withered King. Colin is not about to let his little sister ride to war against a demon king, but not everyone in the Green King's kingdom is willing to take no for an answer. And saying no to the Green King's daughter's proposal is not as easy as it seems.
Here’s the Cover:
And here are the first couple of chapters to whet your appetite.
Chapter 1: The Ruined Town
Once upon a time, if you had walked south on Main Street in Solomon’s Harbour, Nova Scotia, and passed to the right of the second, fifth, and seventh telephone poles, then, just beyond the eighth pole, you would have passed through a portal into the Kingdom of the Green King.
Our world, as you know, is full of such portals. You have heard many tales of them. But you should imagine them not as a door, but as a maze without walls. It is hard to stay within the maze and easy to stumble out of it. This is why, though you have read of them many times, you have not stumbled through one yourself. You may have come close once or twice, but you put a foot wrong here or there. To find one and pass through would require extraordinary ill luck, special knowledge, a secret map, or else, perhaps, a guide.
It was just last year, on a warm Saturday afternoon in Spring, that Colin Cameron was following his little sister Euphemia—call her Effie if you wish your presence to be acknowledged—southwards down the Main Street of Solomon’s Harbour. Effie was hurrying, trying to leave Colin behind, and, despite his longer legs, he was having to take a few quick steps now and then to keep her within a safe distance.
“Oh, look,” Effie said, turning around suddenly and pointing. “There’s Melanie Knickle in Tim Horton’s. Why don’t you go talk to her while I go to Foodland for my ice cream?”
Melanie Knickle was, by common consent, the prettiest girl in Colin’s year at Parkview. After he had won the high-school wrestling meet in Truro a month ago, Melanie had given him a trial run as boyfriend. They had been on two dates, and he had kissed her, but then Melanie had said, “I’m too young to have a boyfriend with a twelve-year-old daughter.”
“Effie’s my sister,” he had told her. “I was five when she was born.”
“You’re still her daddy,” Melanie had said. “That doesn’t work for me.”
“I broke up with her,” Colin said to Effie, catching up with her.
“Oh,” said Effie, vexed that a promising means of distracting her brother had come to nothing. She looked around hastily for another. “Isn’t that Dougie Vienot’s boat coming in?” she asked, turning and pointing to the harbor. “You should go down to the wharf and see if he needs help unloading.”
“I don’t see why I should,” Colin said. “It just encourages him.”
Dougie Vienot was a genial man, always ready to lend a hand, but his interest in their mother was more than neighbourly.
“You owe him for that hike he took you on,” Effie said.
“We can go down and help after we get the ice cream,” Colin said.
“You can’t unload fish with an ice cream in your hand,” Effie replied.
“You can hold mine for me till I’m done.”
“It will melt.”
“You can eat it then, if it starts to melt.”
Effie turned on her brother, exasperated. “I would rather get my ice cream by myself,” she said. “You don’t have to take me everywhere. I’m not six.” And then, “Oh! A butterfly.”
A butterfly of particularly startling hue had fluttered in front of Effie’s face, almost as if it were trying to attract her attention. As soon as she noticed it, it flittered off down the street. Effie hurried to catch up with it, and when it flittered behind the second telephone pole, she hopped down from the curb without looking and stood in the road, transfixed.
“You’re not safe to get ice cream by yourself,” Colin said. “Get out of the road.”
“Come look at it,” Effie said. “It’s beautiful!”
“Get out of the road.”
“There’s no cars coming,” Effie declared, without checking. “Just look at it.”
Colin took a long, cautious look in each direction and stepped down into the street to see what had distracted his sister this time.
“It’s a butterfly,” he said.
“But look at it!” Effie said. “Have you ever seen one like it? Even in books?”
“It’s a butterfly,” Colin repeated, though now he looked at it, he saw that it had wings like flowers. Before he could get a proper look, though, the butterfly took off and fluttered down the street. Effie hopped up onto the sidewalk and chased after it, Colin following dutifully behind.
You can see where this is leading, I’m sure. The butterfly performed the same maneuver at the fifth telephone pole, and Effie, still enchanted, again hopped recklessly into the road without looking. Colin would not have followed her into the road a second time, except that Mrs. McDonell with her baby carriage and Mr. Scott with his schnauzer on a long leash were approaching in opposite directions and would meet just at the spot where he was standing. Colin stepped down into the road to let them by, and the butterfly immediately flew off again, flying an unnaturally straight and rapid course towards the seventh telephone pole. Effie dashed down the sidewalk in pursuit, leaping past the startled schnauzer that yipped nervously at her passing. Again Effie hopped into the road to follow the butterfly behind the pole. Colin had to run after her, dodge the protesting schnauzer, snatch Effie up, and carry her back up onto the sidewalk to avoid her being struck by Dave Oickle’s approaching pickup truck. Such, at least, was her danger in his eyes.
“You nearly got killed that time!” Colin exclaimed as he put his sister back on her feet. Effie was as tall as a woman, but Colin was six three and had a farmhand’s muscle. Her weight meant nothing to him.
“I’ve told you not to pick me up,” Effie protested furiously. “I’m not a kid anymore. Oh, there it goes!” She shot off down the street again in pursuit of the disappearing butterfly.
“You could have been killed,” Colin said, sprinting after her. “I’m supposed to keep you safe.”
He caught up with her just as they passed to the left of the eighth telephone pole. They were in a meadow. Beside them, the asphalt of the road had turned to rough and overgrown cobbles. The world was suddenly silent, like in a power cut when all the machines you did not even know you were hearing suddenly stop. The clatter of Dave Oickle’s broken exhaust and the screech of his worn-out brakes had suddenly vanished.
“Oh, there’s more!” Effie exclaimed.
The butterfly she had been following was now lost among a crowd of its own kind that flittered among the wildflowers in the long grass where a moment before the United Church parking lot had been.
“Wait a minute, where are we?” Colin asked, looking around quizzically.
They had stepped between worlds without notice, effort, or fanfare, and so the realization dawned slowly on him. They were standing at what seemed to be the end of a small ruined town. Buildings of squared stone stood on either side of the road, but their walls were tumbling down. Trees soared skyward where once their roofs had been. Bushes bulged from the gaps that had once been windows. On one side of the road, there stood a row of columns, but these too were half fallen down. Stones shaped like racing wheels lay on the ground with wildflowers growing around them.
Nova Scotia is criss-crossed with forgotten and abandoned roads, and along those roads there are the remains of old settlements and mining towns. Last fall, Dougie Veinot and his son Don had invited Colin on a hike to Paradise Lake. The route was a decaying dirt road half flooded by a beaver dam in one place, but along the way to the lake lay the ghost town of Roxbury, where stone foundations still stood with trees and shrubs growing up out of them, the timber walls and roofs long decayed or gone. But Roxbury was miles away in the Valley, and Colin had lived in Solomon’s Harbour his whole life and never heard of a ghost town nearby. Besides, no Nova Scotia ghost town had a cobbled street, dressed stone walls, and especially not columns of fluted stone that looked like they came from the façade of the courthouse. But the courthouse pillars were made of wood and held up the roof. These columns were stone and stood like telephone poles along the side of the street, not supporting anything.
“Effie,” Colin said.
“What?”
“I think we chased your butterfly right out of town.”
Effie turned around and saw where they were. “Oh!” she said. “But we can’t have!”
“We must have,” Colin said. “You weren’t paying attention, and I had to chase after you…”
“Well let’s go back,” she said. “I still want ice cream.”
“Right,” Colin said, his mind for the moment unwilling to recognize that which was both obvious and impossible. “Do you remember which way?”
“Don’t you?” Effie asked.
“We can’t be far from the highway,” Colin said. “If you’d shut up for a minute, maybe we can hear it.”
They stood and listened. The silence was stunning, as it had been when Colin, along with Don and Dougie Vienot, had stood among the ruins of Roxbury in the deep woods.
“I don’t hear anything,” Effie said.
“Shut up. Listen. There’s not that many cars on the road. Maybe we’ll hear a truck.”
They stood and listened in the awful silence until they had to speak again to be sure they had not gone deaf.
Effie slipped her hand nervously into her brother’s. “We didn’t chase the butterfly out of town,” she said. “It was only a few steps. We can’t have come this far.”
“If I’d let you go for ice cream by yourself,” Colin said, “You would be here all alone.”
“I want to go home,” she said.
“No ice cream?” he asked, trying to tell himself that the town must be just around the corner.
“Home,” Effie said. She looked up at him with frightened eyes. “This is too weird, and I want to go home.”
“We have to figure out which way we came,” Colin said.
“We didn’t come this way at all,” Effie said.
Colin knew this to be true, but did not know what to do about it. “Downhill,” he said, “Downhill until you find water, then follow the water.” The quasi-parental wisdom of Dougie Veinot.
“Shouldn’t we follow the road?” Effie asked.
“Yes,” Colin said, with feigned conviction. “Downhill.”
They began to walk down the cobbled road between the broken columns and the vacant houses.
After a few minutes of walking, Effie said again, “We didn’t come this way.”
“We’ll be back to the highway soon,” Colin replied.
Effie stopped and stamped her foot. “We didn’t come this way,” she said again.
He turned and looked at her. “I know,” he said. “But it’s a road. It has to lead to a house or a highway somewhere. Then we can figure out how to get home. Someone will give us a ride if we explain.”
They were between fields now, with a low green crop that looked like small, untidy cabbages. The butterflies were gone. The road ran in a depression between the fields. There were no ditches. Nor were there the two bare lines worn by passing tires that had marked the road to Paradise Lake. Here a single more meandering bare patch was worn down the middle of the road. The fields were not fenced, but brambles with small green berries grew between the fields and the road. The land was so silent that they could hear birds singing in the trees far across the fields.
“I’m scared,” Effie said.
“It’s an adventure,” Colin replied, squeezing her hand. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Chapter 2: Royal Colors
The one thing that gave Colin hope was that there was clearly a crop in the field. It was a sickly crop and poorly planted, but it was a crop all the same, and a crop meant a farm, and a farm meant farmers and a farmhouse. Being country-born, he expected that hospitality would be offered to anyone who knocked on the door of such a house. If nothing else, he had hope of putting a roof over Effie’s head and a meal in her stomach before nightfall. If this wasn’t just a dream. Perhaps Dave Oickle’s truck hit us and I’m in a coma, he thought. But even in a coma dream, it was still his duty to see Effie safe.
Among Colin’s earliest and most vivid memories was that of his father placing the newborn Effie in his five-year-old arms and saying, “You are a big brother now. Your job is to keep Euphemia safe always.” “Yes, Father,” he had replied with large and shining eyes. And before the year had been out, his father had died. He had been driving the quad bike through the woodlot with Colin seated behind him, holding on with his small arms as far around his father’s belly as he could reach. Melt from the spring runoff had undermined the road. The quad bike hit a soft patch and rolled into the ditch. Colin was thrown clear, but the machine landed on his father’s chest, and by the time Colin scrambled from the ditch, bruised and damp, his father’s face was white and there was blood trickling from his mouth. “You’re the man now,” his fathered whispered with labored breath. “Your job is to keep your sister safe always.” It had taken half an hour for Colin to run back to the house, and another hour before the RCMP and the ambulance had come to get the quad bike off his father’s body. Since that day, he had been his sister’s guardian and refuge. And so he would be here, wherever here was, until he could find a way to bring her safe home. He tried to remember if he had had time to spin Effie away from the speeding truck, to take the blow on his broad back. Then she would be safe beside his hospital bed, begging him to wake up. But that was not how he remembered things.
Presently he saw a thin ribbon of smoke rising into the clear sky, trailing off into dark whisps as it encountered a stream of air aloft.
“Someone must be burning trash,” he said. “Come on. They can tell us where we are.”
Presently they came to a place where there was a rough stile made of split logs and beyond it a narrow footpath worn into the meadow. There were a few scrawny sheep grazing on the other side of the meadow. The rising smoke seemed to be coming from somewhere close along the footpath.
“What is it?” Effie asked, looking at the stile. Four posts had been driven into the ground, two on each side of the fence, two short and two taller. Rough-cut planks spanned criss-cross from one post to another through the rails of the fence, forming a pair of steps up and down.
“It’s a stile, I think,” Colin said. “I saw one in a book once.”
“How do you open it?”
“You don’t. You climb over it.”
“Oh, I see.” And Effie was over the stile and in the field before he could protest. “Come on,” she said, setting off immediately down the narrow path.
Colin climbed over the stile and followed her, glancing about to be sure there was no bull in the field.
“Why are the sheep so small?” Effie asked as they drew nearer to the flock.
Indeed, the sheep looked very small, hardly bigger than lambs. But they were not lambs, for they had lambs with them that were smaller still. The sheep looked lean and rough, and their coats were not as full as those of any sheep he had seen before.
“Heritage breed,” he said. “They are hardier. Easier to keep.”
“The little lambs are so cute,” Effy said, changing course towards them.
“Stay on the path.”
Effie gave him a backward glance of annoyance, but returned to the path.
The path led them to another stile set in a fringe of trees, and once they were over it, they saw the source of the smoke, which was not trash burning but a small round hut with a roof thatched with reeds. There was no chimney. The smoke came from a hole in the middle of the roof. Beside the path there was a dung pile, buzzing with flies. There were chickens in a pen made of wattle—thin branches split in half and woven around similarly thin uprights. The chickens, like the sheep in the field, were smaller than any he had ever seen. A scrawny goat was tied to a stake. It bleated a protest at their arrival, and its bleating attracted the attention of a dog. There was an outbreak of furious barking, and a small nondescript mutt came tearing from behind a pile of broken sticks that seemed to be the firewood supply.
The mutt’s fury turned to worship when Effie dropped to her knees and held out her arms to embrace it. The dog yipped with delight and licked her face as if Effie were its long-lost owner returned from the grave. Effie always had this effect on dogs.
There was a familiarity in the scene that almost made Colin think he had been imagining the strangeness of the place. But set against this was the fact that though they were clearly in a farmyard, there was no farmhouse, no barn, no stable or garage, and nowhere could he see the tire tracks that invariably impressed themselves into the muddy ground of a farmyard.
A small child emerged from the hut. She was perhaps two years old, though small and thin. Her feet were bare and she was dressed in a rough, undyed woollen smock that fell to her knees. Her yellow hair was wild and thin, and her hands and cheeks were grubby. She stood stock still when she saw him, her mouth hanging open. For all the strangeness of her person, however, she was clearly human, a race that Colin had begun to doubt he might meet here.
“Hello,” he said to the child.
The child gave a wail and burst into tears. Immediately, a young woman emerged from the hut. Her appearance was not much different from that of the child, save that she had what were clearly hand-made shoes on her feet, and her hair was darker and bound by a thong. She did not seem to Colin to be any older than he was, yet she picked up the child as if she were its mother, and the child immediately quieted and clung to her neck.
The young woman looked at Colin, then at Effie, who had got to her feet when the young woman emerged, though the dog still leapt adoringly at her feet. Then the young woman’s eyes came back to Colin, then flicked towards the ground, as if she thought she was committing some sin by looking at him.
“Lord,” she stammered, clearly frightened. “How can I serve you? My husband will be home soon,” she added. Whether she said this to warn him that she had a protector or because she thought it unfit to greet him without her husband present was more than he could read in her face or tone.
“I’m Colin,” he said. “This is Effie.”
“Lord Colin,” she said, deepening her curtsey to the point where Colin feared that she would topple over and spill the child onto the ground. And then she turned awkwardly without rising and bowed her head towards Effie. “Lady Effie. Your servant.”
“We’re not lords and ladies,” Effie said.
“We’re really not,” Colin said. “Please get up.”
The young woman rose, deftly balancing the child as she did so. She looked them over again.
“You wear royal colors,” she said, looking at them with puzzlement and awe.
They were both dressed in blue jeans. Effie was wearing a purple T-shirt and Colin a red flannel shirt. The young woman, Colin noted, was dressed in a woolen smock like her child, but it had been dyed the color of a grass stain. The bright colors that he and Effie were wearing must be something outside the young woman’s experience, something she assumed only a rich person would own. His and Effie’s clothes had been bought second-hand at Guy’s Frenchys in Bridgewater, but here, it seemed, they were badges of nobility.
Would it help keep Effie safe if people here thought she was a lady? Colin changed his tune. “It is true,” he said. “I am the Lord Colin. This is my sister, the Lady Euphemia.”
“But you wear no silver or jewels,” the young woman said, looking at him with growing puzzlement.
“We sought to go unknown in this land,” he said, trying to speak as a lord ought to speak and sounding like a storybook character as a result. “Among our people, everyone dresses in royal colors, for we have many plants rich in bright dyes. But we left our silver and jewels at home, thinking we would be able to pass here unnoticed. But I see this is not so, and I beg your pardon for the attempt at deceit.”
“I’m Effie,” Effie said, who had caught nothing of his speech but the use of her despised full name.
“That was the name that we agreed my sister should go by in this country,” Colin said. “Euphemia is a noble name among our people.”
“It was granny’s name, and I hate it,” Effie said. “Why are you talking like that?” she added, turning to Colin.
“This is the proper speech of nobles,” Colin said. “You should speak it too, since this peasant woman has seen through our disguise.”
“Well I’m not talking like that,” Effie said. “She doesn’t. What’s your name?” she added, turning to the young woman with the child on her hip.
The young woman dropped into a deep curtsey once again, “They calls me, Egwith, Lady Euphemia,” she said.
“Egwith?” Effie said. “That’s almost as bad as Euphemia. What would you like me to call you?”
The young woman looked at Effie blankly.
“Call her Egwith,” Colin said. “It’s her name.”
“But,” Effie protested.
“You can’t keep changing people’s names just because you don’t like them,” Colin said. “It’s not polite.” Back home, Hilda McPherson had given up trying to get Effie to stop calling her Betty and now just went along with it when she was called Betty by half the school. Their mother had assured Colin that this was just a phase and Effie would grow out of it. But Effie showed no signs of doing so.
Colin turned to Egwith, who was hesitating, seemingly unsure if she should rise from her curtsey. “Please get up,” he said. “I don’t think you need to curtsey more than once. What’s the child’s name?”
“She is Eghild, Lord,” Egwith said. “It was my mother’s name.”
“It’s a lovely name,” Colin said politely.
“It’s awful!” Effie said. “It’s wrong to call children after their grandmothers. Grandmothers have the worst names. I’ll call her Alice. And I think I’ll call you Joan.”
“You must forgive my sister,” Colin said. “It’s a game she likes to play.”
“Yes, Lord,” Egwith said, looking at the ground and clutching her child to her more tightly, as if she feared that by stealing the child’s name, Effie meant to steal her soul.
The Withered King is available from Amazon in ebook and paperback, and on Kindle Unlimited. As always, if you like the story even a little bit, taking a moment to leave a review would be a great kindness.
Thank you.