After years of city life, Tiller is finally ready to revisit the magical forest where she grew up. But the forest has turned deadly, and Tiller has no magic of her own. To survive, she’ll need a bodyguard.
Tiller finds only one mage willing to escort her. A woman named Carnelian: a soldier with a pretty face and a dodgy reputation. Carnelian loves parties, drinking, flirting, big spending, and taking risks that others would find downright unthinkable. She’ll happily lead Tiller to the heart of the
Devouring Forest.
But she won’t do it for free.
The two of them live in a country where magic-users like Carnelian labor under lifelong legal restrictions. The fastest ticket to greater liberty: getting married. Which is why Carnelian—known far and wide as the mage who no one would wed—demands Tiller’s hand in marriage as her payment.
Cautious, reserved Tiller never lets strangers invade her personal space. She’s horrified by the prospect of marrying a mischievous gambler. But she still needs Carnelian’s magic to overcome the wild monsters blocking the path back to her childhood home.
And the deeper they go in the forest, the greater the danger. Tiller will have to learn very quickly how to deal with the darker side of her would-be wife.
The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage is the story of Tiller and Carnelian. They live in a world where there are mages, each with a ‘core’ that fuels their magic. The cores branch out, somewhat like a tree and when the mage uses their magic, the branches tangle about a bit, so each mage needs what is known as an operator, who performs magical maintenance on them to untangle everything, keeping the mage from going berserk.
Tiller is a forest-dweller who has been living in the city for some years now, but who needs to go back into the forest to lay the ashes of her grandmother to rest. The Forest has become way more dangerous though, and so she’ll need someone, hopefully a mage, to escort her. She’s an operator, though not a very experienced one, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Carnelian is a unique mage who has not one core, but nine. When she was a child she was held and experimented on by a mad mage only known as ‘The Scholar’, and had other people’s cores transplanted into her on top of her own. She needs more maintenance than normal, but more importantly, mages in this country are under very strict restrictions, and the only way to be free from government control is to get married.
Carnelian agrees to take Tiller through the Forest in exchange for her hand in marriage, and Tiller agrees. And that’s where the shenanigans start, but they don’t end there.
I quite liked this story. It was very unique in how magic works in this world. The world was well built, especially the parts where they were in the Forest. The different kinds of wildlife that live there were well described. The Forest’s biggest predator, phages, which are somewhat like a combination of ghosts and zombies, were interesting. I just really liked this world.
The relationship between Tiller and Carnelian was really cute. They were both characters that were easy to cheer for, so it was quite nice to read about them being in a cute relationship, especially considering that both of them had quite traumatic pasts, and… well, quite traumatic presents as well.
There was also a twist in the story that I absolutely wasn’t expecting, and so that was awesome and made the last quarter of the book hard to put down.
All told, I had 8.5/10 stars of fun with The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage. I thought it was a very well written and well paced story. I will definitely try to read more of this author’s work in the future, because as far as I know, most of their novels take place in this same world, so I’m quite interested to see what else is going on in it.
superstardrifter 
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