Briarwood

Publisher's blurb:

The briarwoods are shadowed, ancient and dangerous; the ruins of civilisations that tried to conquer them in ages past, choked with thorn and root, are riddled with cults and monsters too wild and too fearsome to show their faces in the towns and cities that surround it.

YOU are an outcast yourself – a sell-sword, an apostate, an outsider. An ailing village on the outskirts has hired you to venture within and reclaim their chapel’s stolen relic that, they claim, will rid them of the curse that has befallen them ever since it was stolen by the inhabitants of the woods.