The Wolf At Woods Edge

She is the one window still lit when the whole village sleeps. He is the thing the village won't name.Paige Brencott has spent her life being needed. As the healer of Thornmere, there is no door she hasn't tended, no fever she hasn't sat through, no neighbor whose small private sorrows she doesn't carry. She gives everything and keeps nothing - not even the warm food pressed into her hands, not even a bed slept in since the first frost. She has made a quiet art of refusing care. She calls it being useful. It is really a wall.Then a knock comes in the blue before dawn, and a request no one in the valley would dare make: come up to the wood's edge, and tend the wolf.For nine winters Mason Steele has lived alone among the old standing stones, the last keeper of a cursed bloodline, a man who becomes something else on the dark of the moon. The village leaves him what he needs and never speaks his name. But the wound on his arm has gone bad, and Paige has never once in her life been able to walk away from a hurt she could mend.What she finds at the woods edge is not a monster. It is a loneliness as deep as her own - and the first person who has ever tried to take care of her in return.As winter thaws toward spring, healer and keeper begin to mend each other in ways neither expected: a shared watch through the longest dark, a fire kept warm, two locked doors slowly opening. But the wards that bind the curse are thinning, the dark of the moon grows harder to hold, and the only way through is the one thing Paige has spent her whole life refusing - to stop carrying it all alone, and to let someone in.Lyrical, tender, and quietly magical, The Wolf at the Woods Edge is a slow-burn fantasy romance about found family, the courage it takes to be cared for, and the truth that the deepest healing is never done alone. For readers of Katherine Arden, T. Kingfisher, and Sangu Mandanna who love cozy folklore, an aching slow burn, and a hard-won, hopeful ending.Trade the safety of the wall for the risk of the open door.

Pages: 184, Paperback, Ramona A. Scott