Excerpt from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"When I was young, I was married to a peat man and sent out here to the moaney to live with him. The bog was drier then, and less stenching. He was a good man, and we were happy for many, many years before it all went wrong. It took years before I conceived of a child, and when it finally happened, I went about singing for weeks on the strength of it. (It always seems a shining miracle, in spite of it being the most ordinary thing in the world.) There was still a rash of sickness about after the last Hunger, but I was well and the baby kicked me strong enough, so I had no bother or worries.

"I remember that spring well." She sighed, and her nose ran.

"The babe arrived, and he was a big, bonny boy. He already had a full head of hair, and his father nearly busted his jaw smiling as he held his son for the first time, and he said, 'Look at that arm, Mureal. He's already mighty . . . mighty like a Christian!' We were about as pride-puffed as two new parents can be, feeling as how we were the only ones to ever do this thing, and how our boy was the beautifulest baby ever born, and other such sinful thinking.

"Well, we were punished for it. One morning I go to his cradle to feed him, and he's gone. In his place is this shriveled, wailing thing, looking more like a stick than a babe. Its arms and legs are twigs, and its face withered and covered in bark rings. As soon as it sees me, it starts up shrieking, and it doesn't stop. I knew at once what it was.

"It was a changeling. Having heard of the birth of a fat, healthy mortal baby, the Others had come in the night and taken our boy. It's a simple truth and well-known fact that their babies are thin and ugly and they're jealous of us human mothers.

"It being generally agreed that the old days were gone and the Other Ones vanished, if they'd ever been at all, we couldn't find any help. The charmers all remain silent these days. You can't find a body to remove a curse or eat a sin anymore, not even for real coins. I searched and asked all about the markets and public houses, but nobody listened. I went to the Little Brothers; they were kind and told me to pray to Jesus, but I could tell they didn't believe me.

"At last, a so-called friend told me that in the villages pity for my loss was running thin and I'd best stop spreading stories and hunting charmers before folk ran out of patience completely. She looked at the unnatural lump in the cradle and declared it human but sickly. A mother knows, though. A mother knows.

"That awful offspring I found in the cradle that morning didn't live. I stopped feeding it, and it soon perished. We had to bury it in the churchyard despite knowing its Otherwise origins. It was terrible to hear the poor Father praying over that ungodly lump and see the waste of the holy water and suchlike. Everyone thought it was grief made me so white and jumpy, but it was fear. I expected their Christian grave to spit the body back up at every moment of that service."Ma stopped to blow her nose and to spit. She lit her pipe and stared into the flames for a long while. I waited. I didn't want to talk in case she stopped. I'd never been so happy. Ushag and I were warm and safe at home; we were content in our company as animals in their den are, we were soothed by the breath and body of each other, cozy in the smells and the sounds of home, and content in our work, but however com-fortable I was at home, I missed something. It was something I couldn't grasp, something nameless and shapeless but so real I could feel the hole inside me where it would fit. Here, by Ma's messy fireplace, I could feel that place filling a little.

"Well, that was that," Ma went on, "and Pherick and I gave up our quest to find that first boy. I won't say we got over it, but folk have ever lost children and there's nothing to be done about it, though I envied mothers and fathers whose children had simply died. As is its habit, life went on, and within a month of the burial, I was expecting again, and we poured our hope into this coming child.

Excerpted from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.