Ember Penrose Returns to Nine Ashes with WHAT THE PLANTS ARE SAYING

Book Seven in Her Beloved Cozy Fantasy Series

An apprentice healer, a teacher who taught him everything she knows, and a season of careful argument between an old craft and a new way of listening — now available in ebook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook.

GLADBROOK, IOWA — August 15, 2026 — Cozy fantasy author Ember Penrose has released What the Plants Are Saying, the seventh novel in her acclaimed Elves of Nine Ashes series. The book is available now in ebook, paperback, and hardcover on Amazon, and in audiobook on Amazon and Audible.

Scorian has been Mother Whisperwind’s apprentice in the village of Nine Ashes since he was fourteen. He knows the drying shed by smell, the herb garden’s clock by touch, and the angle of every cut his teacher’s shears make in the dusk mugwort. He knows the work.

What he is only beginning to know is that the plants have been talking to him.

Not in words. In a warmth held back at the yarrow when it is not yet ready, in a single drop of honey the ribwort asks for when it agrees to a tincture, in the silence of a stand that should be in season. The impressions are quiet, specific, and unmistakable — and when Scorian uses one to soothe an old farmer’s stubborn cough, his teacher hears about it from a daughter at the bakery counter and walks to the drying shed with her basket over her arm.

She is not angry. She is afraid.

What follows is a season of careful argument between an old craft and a new way of listening — between the dosages a healer has measured for two hundred years and the way the comfrey wants to be held a quarter-turn cooler than the book says. Between the woman who has kept Nine Ashes well since before Scorian was born and the apprentice who has started, in secret, to keep a second journal of what the woods have been saying. Between what you can teach with your hands and what only the woods themselves can pass on.

From the slow, sensory village of Nine Ashes — its forge smoke and bakery tea room, its ranger walking the dawn ridges with a silver-grey owl on her shoulder, its Motherstone humming under a child’s flattened palm — What the Plants Are Saying is a cozy fantasy about lineage, listening, and the difficult kindness of asking the world what it has to say and believing the answer.

Book 7 in the Nine Ashes series. Reads as a standalone.

If you loved the herb-garden patience of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes, the village magic of Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale, the apprentice-to-master cadence of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, or the slow-craft attention of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass — this book is for you.

Set in the world of Nine Ashes, the novels can be read in any order — though readers who have visited Nine Ashes before will find familiar faces in the bakery, the forge, the chandlery, and at the edge of the Whisperwood.

Where to Buy

Ebook: $3.99 — Amazon (also free for Kindle Unlimited members)

Paperback: $14.99 — Amazon

Hardcover: $19.95 — Amazon

Audiobook: $3.99 — Amazon and Audible (also free for Audible Plus members)

Buy link: https://amzn.to/4g9yqO0

Kindle Unlimited and Audible Plus members can enjoy What the Plants Are Saying — and the rest of the Elves of Nine Ashes series — free with membership.

About the Elves of Nine Ashes

The Elves of Nine Ashes is a cozy fantasy series set in the elven village of Nine Ashes, in the world of Aldenmere — a place founded on an old promise of peace and still shaped by it. Each book is a standalone novel following a different resident of the village through a gentle, character-driven arc centered on craft, community, and belonging. There are no villains in Nine Ashes, only neighbors — and magic that moves quietly through ordinary, kind things.

Also in the series:

Book 1: The Weaver’s Thread

Book 2: The Forge and the Flame

Book 3: The Long Road Home

Book 4: Soft Light, Slow Fire

Book 5: The Hum at the Heart

Book 6: The Tea Room at the Bakery

About Ember Penrose

Ember Penrose grew up in a small New England town, reading under a particular oak tree she has never stopped thinking about. After a decade spent doing something sensible with her literature degree, she decided sensible was overrated and began writing the stories she actually wanted to read: slow, quiet stories where nobody is chosen, nothing needs saving, and the magic lives in ordinary kindness between neighbors. Nine Ashes, the elven village at the heart of her books, is the town she has always been trying to find. She lives with one elderly cat named Sorrel and a deeply unreasonable herb garden.

Media Contact

Lisa Woodward

We Woodwards Publishing

Email: Lisa@wewoodwards.com