Cursed By His Mercy

Elara's Pov The lottery stones were cold in my hands, and I remember thinking that was strange. Everything else about that morning was on fire the torches, the eyes of my neighbors, my own pulse but the stones were cold, like they already knew what they were about to do to me. We drew them from the ash barrel outside the chapel every year on the same day, the first frost morning of autumn. Black stone, you stayed. White stone, you were given. It was supposed to be fair. Random. The goddess's will, the elders said, though I'd never once seen the goddess do anything for Thistlewood except let the frost come early and the crops fail twice a decade. I drew black. I remember the relief hitting me so fast my knees nearly buckled. Then I watched my sister draw white. Lyssa didn't scream. That was the thing I couldn't stop thinking about later, she just stood there in the frost with the little white stone in her palm, sixteen years old, staring at it like it was a word in a language she didn't speak yet. Around us, the whole square went silent in that particular way a crowd goes silent when it's grateful it isn't them. I didn't decide to move. My body simply did it before the rest of me caught up, I crossed the frozen ground, closed my hand over hers, and pried the white stone out of her fingers. "Take mine," I said. "Black for black. No one will know." "Elara" "Take it." I was already pressing my black stone into her palm, folding her fingers around it like I could seal the trade shut with my hands alone. The elders would know, of course. They always knew. But there is a difference between what the elders know and what the elders are willing to enforce, and I was gambling correctly, as it turned out that no one in Thistlewood wanted to argue about which Voss girl got sacrificed to the Alpha King, so long as a Voss girl was sacrificed at all. That's the word we used. Sacrifice. Not tribute, not offering, sacrifice, the way you'd talk about a lamb. Every year, one household in Thistlewood gave a daughter to the Court of Duskmoor, and in exchange, the King's tax collectors left the rest of us alone for a season. Nobody had explained to me, growing up, what exactly happened to the girls who went. Nobody explained because nobody knew. They didn't come back to tell us. I was twenty-two years old and I had spent every autumn of my life being grateful it wasn't my turn, and then, on the one morning it actually mattered, I'd handed my turn away like it was a chore I didn't want my little sister stuck with. I want to be honest about this part, because I think it matters for everything that came after: I wasn't brave. People have told this story back to me since the version where I sacrificed myself out of noble love and every time I want to laugh, or maybe cry, because that's not what it felt like standing in that square. It felt like watching my hand move without my permission. It felt like the only unbearable thing in the world was the idea of Lyssa being marched down the Blackwood Road instead of me, and so my body solved that problem before my mind had time to be afraid. The fear came later. The fear came in waves, for the rest of my life, starting about four hours after the trade, when the King's men arrived at our door to collect me. There were three of them. Duskmoor soldiers don't look like village guards they're built wrong for comfort, too broad through the shoulder, moving with a loose, coiled ease that made the hair on my arms stand up before they'd said a single word. Wolves in human shape, all three, and I understood then, really understood for the first time, that I was being given not to a kingdom but to a pack. The one in front had a scar bisecting one eyebrow and didn't bother introducing himself. "Elara Voss?" "Yes." He looked at the paper in his hand, then at me, then at Lyssa standing in the doorway behind our mother, white-faced, silent, the black stone still clutched so hard in her fist I could see her knuckles through the skin. "The record says Lyssa Voss." "The record's wrong," I said, before anyone else could speak. "I'm the one going." He studied me a long moment. I don't know what he was looking for hesitation, maybe, some sign that I'd bolt the second his back was turned, the way I imagine some girls had. I made myself stand very still and stare back at him, chin level, because I had already decided that whatever waited for me at the end of the Blackwood Road, I would not arrive there as someone who had been dragged. "Suit yourself," he said finally, and something in his voice suggested he'd seen this particular substitution before, that it wasn't rare, that villages like mine had been quietly trading their daughters' fates back and forth for longer than I'd been alive. "Gather what you need. We leave within the hour." Within the hour. As if I had anything worth gathering a wool cloak, a comb, the little carved wolf my father made me before he died, small enough to fit in a closed fist. I packed it all in less time than it took my mother to stop crying long enough to speak to me. "You didn't have to," she said, gripping my wrists so hard it hurt. "Elara. You didn't have to." "I know." I didn't, not really but there was no version of that morning where I let it be Lyssa, and my mother knew that too, underneath the guilt she was performing for both our benefit. "Look after her. Look after the house." "What if you don't come back?" I didn't have an answer for that. Nobody ever had. Lyssa found me in the yard while the soldiers loaded a small covered cart I hadn't been told I'd be riding in rather than walking behind. She pressed something into my hand, a strip of red cloth, torn from the hem of her only good dress, the one she wore to the harvest dance. "So you remember you have a name that isn't 'sacrifice,'" she said, and her voice cracked right down the middle of the sentence. I tied it around my wrist before the scarred soldier could tell me to hurry. It's the only piece of Thistlewood I carried with me past the village gate. "I'll come back," I told her, and it was the first outright lie I told that day, though not the last. I had no idea if it was true. I said it because she needed to hear it and because saying it out loud made it feel, for one dishonest second, like a promise I had the power to keep. She hugged me hard enough to bruise, and then the scarred soldier said my name not unkindly, just efficiently, the way you'd call a dog that had wandered too far and it was time. The cart rattled over the frost-hard road for most of that first day, and I watched Thistlewood shrink behind me through a gap in the canvas until it was nothing but smoke rising from familiar chimneys, and then not even that. None of the soldiers spoke to me except to give instructions, eat, drink, we stop here and I was grateful for it, because I didn't trust my voice not to shake if I used it. I spent the hours running my thumb over the little carved wolf in my pocket and trying not to think too hard about what waited for me. I failed, of course. I thought about it constantly. I'd heard the stories, the way every village child hears them whispered at the harvest dance by boys trying to scare the girls, repeated more soberly by grandmothers who claimed to have known a girl who went. The Alpha King of Duskmoor was cursed, they said. Cursed to turn feral at the full moon. Cursed to need something from the sacrifice girls that no one would say out loud, though everyone seemed to agree it ended badly for the girl. I told myself these were just stories. I told myself that the way you tell yourself anything you desperately need to be true and have no actual evidence for. By the second day, the road narrowed and the trees on either side changed taller, closer together, their leaves a black so deep it looked wet even in daylight, even though it hadn't rained. I asked the soldier nearest me, a younger one who'd occasionally glanced back at me with something almost like pity, what the forest was called. "Blackwood," he said. "You'll want to stay quiet through it. Things listen." I did not ask what things. I decided I didn't want to know, and then spent the next several hours unable to think of anything else. The forest went on longer than I expected, the black canopy swallowing what little afternoon light there'd been, until the trees thinned all at once and I got my first look at the place I'd been given to. Ashgrave Castle sat on a cliff above a sea so dark it looked like the sky had fallen into it, black stone walls rising straight up out of the rock like the mountain itself had decided to grow teeth. Torches burned along the battlements even in daylight, a hundred small orange wounds against all that black, and somewhere above the gatehouse a banner snapped in the wind, a silver wolf's head on a field the color of dried blood. I had grown up hearing this castle described as a place girls went and didn't return from. Looking at it, chained in stone above that black water, I finally understood why nobody had ever bothered arguing with the description. The cart rattled to a stop at the outer gate. The scarred soldier turned to look at me really look, for the first time since Thistlewood and something in his face made my stomach drop before he even spoke. "Last chance to run," he said. Not a threat. Almost, unbelievably, a kindness. I thought about Lyssa's red cloth around my wrist. I thought about the black stone I'd taken from her hand. "I already made my choice," I said, and stepped down from the cart into the shadow of Ashgrave's gate and didn't yet know that the girl walking through it and the girl who'd wake up chained inside it by nightfall would be, in almost every way that mattered, two different people. End of Chapter One.