Chained to the Lycan King

The white dress had been sitting on my bed since before I woke up. That's how I knew. Nobody in Ashfen talks about the Blood Tithe the night before. It's one of those village rules that exists without anyone writing it down — like how you don't mention the Ashwood Forest after dark, or how you smile at Elder Godric even when he looks at you like you're already a problem he's solving. The dress appears, and you know, and you say nothing. You just lie there in the grey morning light staring at the ceiling and listening to your own heartbeat and wondering if this is what the others felt. The ones before you. I'd watched three Choosings in my life. Mira Salfden, when I was nine. She screamed so hard they had to give her something to drink before the escort would take her. I remember standing at the village edge with the other children, our mothers' hands clamped over our mouths, watching the cart disappear down the road into Ashwood. Mira never came back. Nobody ever came back. Petra Wols, when I was fourteen. She walked herself to the cart. Head up, back straight, wearing her mother's good brooch pinned at her collar like she was going somewhere worth dressing for. I thought that was the bravest thing I'd ever seen. I still think that. And Danna Cole, two years ago. I wasn't watching that time. I was behind the healer's cottage grinding calendula with both hands, pressing the pestle so hard into the bowl my palms were red for a week. I didn't go to the village edge. I didn't watch the cart. Now the dress was on my bed and I was the one who needed to decide what kind of woman I was going to be about it. I sat up slowly. The fabric was plain linen, which surprised me the first time I saw a Tithe dress up close. You'd think, given the occasion, they'd make it something grander. But there's a practicality to the village that overrides ceremony — linen is cheap, the King destroys them anyway, why waste silk. That's Ashfen for you. Even our sacrifices are economically sensible. I touched the hem. It was clean and well-pressed, which meant someone had been up early ironing it. That bothered me more than the dress itself, somehow. The thought of someone's hands smoothing the wrinkles out of the thing I was going to die in. Stop that, I told myself. You don't know that. But I did know that. Three women, zero returns. The math wasn't complicated. I got up and washed my face at the basin. The water was cold — the fire in the main room had been lit too recently to have heated anything — and I held my wet hands against my eyes for a moment, feeling the cold work against the tightness there. I wasn't going to cry. Not because I was brave. Because if I started I didn't think I'd be able to explain to myself how to stop, and I had things to do before the Choosing. The herbs needed checking. I know how that sounds. The world is ending and the healer's daughter is worried about her herbs. But I'd been drying a batch of feverfew for old Marta Briggs, whose headaches had been getting worse since the autumn cold came in, and if I was going to be — absent — someone needed to know where I'd left off. I pulled the dress on and left the cottage. Ashfen in the early morning was the version I loved best. Before the market set up, before the children started their noise, before the day put all its requirements on everything. Just the low mist sitting in the valley and the smell of woodsmoke from the early fires and the sound of the river two streets over doing what rivers have always done, which is move forward without stopping to reconsider. I went to the drying shed first. The feverfew was almost ready — one more day, maybe two. I wrote a note in the small journal I kept there and tucked it under the bundle so whoever came after me would find it. For Marta Briggs. Steep two minutes, not three. She'll tell you three is fine. She's wrong. I stood there for a moment looking at my own handwriting and felt something shift in my chest that I couldn't quite name. Not grief exactly. More like the specific sadness of an unfinished thing. I left the shed and walked to the river. I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough for the mist to start thinning. Long enough for the village to wake up behind me — I could hear it, the particular accumulation of morning sounds that means people are beginning their day, kettles and footsteps and someone's dog. Long enough to think about my mother. Noor Ashveil had been the best healer Ashfen ever had, which is what they said at her burial and also the only thing they said, because the other things about her — the way she laughed too loud, the way she collected strange knowledge like someone preparing for a question she'd been asked in a previous life, the way she sometimes went quiet in the middle of a sentence and looked at something the rest of us couldn't see — those things don't make it into burial speeches. She died when I was twelve. Fever that came quick and went slow and took most of a winter to finish its work. I was the one who sat with her. Maren was fifteen and useless with anything she couldn't control, so it was me, twelve years old, grinding the herbs and changing the compresses and reading aloud from the books she kept stacked next to her bed. The last coherent thing she said to me was: "Don't be afraid of the dark things, Sera. The dark things are usually just the light things that forgot the way back." I was twelve. I thought she was delirious. I thought about it more after. The Choosing happened at midmorning, in the village square, the way it always did. Elder Godric stood at the stone basin wearing his formal grey — a color that had always struck me as the least reassuring possible choice for a ceremony of this nature — and the whole village assembled around the square's edges the way they always did. Close enough to witness. Far enough to feel like they weren't responsible. I stood with the other unmarried women of eligible age. Eleven of us. The eligible range ran from eighteen to thirty, though in practice it skewed younger because the older women had families that complicated the community mathematics of sacrifice. I was twenty-two. Right in the middle. Statistically unremarkable. Godric said the words. The same words every year, the ones about safety and pact and the ancient agreement between Ashfen and the Lycan King that had kept our village intact for thirty years while others around us had been absorbed or raided or simply ceased. He said them with the gravity of a man who had meant them once and now said them by muscle memory, which is a different thing. The marked stone went into the iron bowl with the others. He reached in. I looked at Maren. She was standing with the married women, which is where she'd stood since her wedding two years ago to Carver Wols — Petra's cousin, which had always struck me as a strange kind of symmetry. She was beautiful, my sister. Always had been, in the specific way that made rooms reorganize around her without her trying. Dark hair, our mother's cheekbones, the confidence of someone who has never doubted that the world intends to cooperate with her. She was watching Godric's hand in the bowl. I want to be precise about this, because I've gone back to this moment many times and I've been careful with what I let myself say about it. I'm not interested in cruelty for its own sake. Maren is my sister and I love her in the complicated, scar-tissue way you love people who have let you down in specific and memorable ways. But when Godric's hand came out of the bowl and he opened his mouth and said my name, I watched my sister's face for one unguarded second. And I saw relief. Just for a moment. Just before the performance started — before her hand flew to her mouth and her eyes went appropriately wide and she said "No, no — Sera—" in a voice that wobbled in mostly the right places. Just before all of that, for one second, her shoulders dropped. Relief. I filed that away somewhere quiet and deep and turned to face Elder Godric. Here is what I felt, standing in that square in my linen dress with the whole village looking at me and my name still hanging in the morning air: Not fear. Not yet. Something more like clarity, which I've since learned is what happens when the worst thing finally arrives and takes the uncertainty away. You spend so much energy being afraid of the thing and then the thing happens and there's this moment of terrible peace because at least now you know. I was going to the Lycan King's castle. I was probably going to die there. My feverfew was almost dry and my sister was relieved and my mother had once said something about dark things that I'd spent ten years failing to understand. I nodded at Elder Godric. I picked up my basket of herbs from where I'd set it at my feet — because I'd brought it to the Choosing out of habit, which in retrospect says something about me — and I set it carefully on the ground in front of the woman nearest to me. An older widow named Cass who'd been my mother's closest friend. "For Marta Briggs," I said quietly. "One more day. The notes are in the shed." Cass looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were wet. She was one of the ones who'd loved my mother specifically for those things that don't make it into burial speeches. She took the basket. I walked to the center of the square. I didn't run. I didn't scream. I didn't look back at Maren. I walked the way Petra Wols had walked, all those years ago, head up and back straight, because there are only so many things you can control in the world and how you carry yourself toward the things you can't is one of them. My mother taught me that. Not in words. In the way she moved through her illness, the way she managed her pain, the way she kept asking questions about things she'd never live to see answered. The escort was four guards and Elder Godric, and a cart that smelled like pine resin and the particular staleness of something used rarely. I climbed in without being asked. Elder Godric settled across from me and his expression was — I don't know what that expression was, exactly. Not guilt. Too complicated for guilt. Something that had been sitting with itself for a long time and had run out of things to say about itself. "The journey is two days," he said. "We'll stop at the waystation in the Ashwood." "What happens when we get there?" I asked. A pause. "You'll be met by the Beta. He'll explain the arrangement." "What happened to the others?" Longer pause. "The King doesn't harm them." I looked at him. "That's not an answer." He looked out at the road. The cart had started moving. Ashfen was pulling back from us through the pine trees, getting smaller, the sound of it fading until there was just the cart wheels and the horses and the Ashwood settling around us like something that had been waiting. "No," Elder Godric said, very quietly. "It isn't." I watched the village disappear. Then I turned forward. The Ashwood opened ahead of us, dark and enormous and smelling of pine resin and wet earth and something older underneath that I didn't have a name for yet. The trees closed over us. Ashfen disappeared. I turned forward and didn't look back again.