Butcher of the Forest

For a moment only she allowed herself to be irritated that the woods could take as much of her blood as they liked, while she was not permitted to take even a drop of theirs; it wasn’t fair, nothing in here was fair. That was how it worked. No different without than within.

Forced into a second journey into a magic forest that nobody has ever gotten out (but her), Veris is tasked with going back and retrieving a tyrant's two children before the day is done and they are lost forever. It opens strong, with Veris being kidnapped from her home and forced into this very unwanted task. The forest is deeply creepy in a way that manages to feel fresh--there's dead sentinel deer corpses; a floating "cloth" manages to be one of the most terrifying monsters; there's also bargains, games, and tricks galore. I quite enjoyed this novella.

“In exchange? You dare, you worm, filth, you ask anything of me? If you do not recover my children your village will be razed to the ground and burnt, and we will roast your people alive upon it and eat them.”

Many pieces of fiction also have fey creatures ask "are we truly the cruel ones, given the action of humans", but I quite enjoyed the parallel that this book makes about the unfairness of power dynamics within and without the magical realm. Veris must play the games and take the deals of the fey creatures, but she also is forced into taking whatever deal the Tyrant forces upon her too. When the reader discovers later that one of the rules of the forest is to never try to negotiate deals, it echoes the way the book opens with Veris's attempt at negotiating with the tyrant.