Marrying A Monster

Prologue It was ten years before Independence, the end of Imperial rule over the country of Jaiya, although Raki did not know it at the time. She did know that she was six and small for her age, that she could more or less read, and that she could not write well enough to ever be expected to learn more about it. She was eating a simple dinner of flat breads and barley soup with her parents. When she’d asked for cheese and honey, they’d told her that only the big girls, the Mountain King’s Brides, got to eat those at this time of year. When she sulked about that, her father said, “Don’t worry. It will be your turn soon enough. And in one of the safer years.” And her mother had looked like she was going to cry. Raki had never seen her do that before. Her mother could slaughter a chicken without blinking an eye, and bullied the lazy young men of the town back to plowing their terraced fields if they stopped to sneak a nip of moonshine. A sound Raki had never heard before shattered the still night air. It sounded like a cat’s snarl, only far deeper. It sounded like her father shouting, only far bigger. It sounded like thunder, only it came from...a something that wasn’t a cat or her father, but was more like them than whatever made the thunder. The downy hairs on her arms stood on end at the sound. “What was that?” she asked her father. For a moment, he looked like he was going to cry too. Then his face smoothed out into a grim calm, and he picked her up and carried her to her little bed. “It won’t come for you, little one,” he said, hugging her tightly. “Every nine years is the masting, and every eleventh masting is the greater one, like this one. A night like this will not happen again in your lifetime.”