Episode 1 · Mature · 18+ private alpha

Chapter One: The Thirteenth Winter

#Romance#dark romance#romantasy#fantasy#epic dark fantasy

Table of ContentsEpisode 1 · 30 episodes available

The bell starts at dusk, and it does not stop.

I am elbow-deep in a bucket of boiled linen when the first toll rolls down from the chapel tower, and my hands go still in the scalding water. I don't feel the burn. I don't feel anything except the slow, heavy beat of that bell moving through the floorboards and up into my bones, the way it has moved through every woman in Gallowmere for three hundred years.

Thirteen winters. It has been thirteen winters since the last time.

I was eleven then. I remember the white dress. I remember Saoirse Penhallow walking past our door with rowan berries in her hair, her face so pale she looked carved from tallow, and I remember my mother pulling me away from the window and pressing my face into her apron so I wouldn't watch. I watched anyway. I saw Saoirse reach the iron posts at the edge of the village. I saw the mist come up out of the Thornwild to meet her like something hungry lifting its head.

She didn't look back. None of them ever look back.

"Maren." Old Hettie's voice cracks behind me. She is standing in the doorway of the stillroom with her cane in one gnarled hand and a sprig of dried yarrow forgotten in the other. Her eyes are wet. "Leave the wash, girl. Go home to your sister."

I pull my hands out of the bucket. They are red to the wrist, scalded, and I watch the angry color fade from my skin faster than it should. Faster than anyone's should. I fold my arms before Hettie can see, though she knows. She's the only one who knows.

"The lots aren't drawn until midnight," I say. My voice sounds steady. I'm proud of that.

"And your sister is nineteen and unwed and frightened out of her wits." Hettie thumps her cane against the flagstones. "Go."

I go.

Gallowmere is a village built by people who were afraid. You can see it in the bones of the place. Every door is painted rowan-red. Every lintel has a horseshoe nailed above it, points up, rusted black. The houses huddle shoulder to shoulder along a single crooked lane, all of them turned away from the east, as if the whole village is a crowd of people refusing to look at something.

What they refuse to look at is the Thornwild.

It starts a quarter mile past the last field, past the ditch and the line of iron posts the old ones call the Veil. On a clear day you can see where the ordinary birch and alder give way to something else, something taller and blacker, with trunks that twist like wrung cloth and branches so thick with thorns that the canopy looks like a sky full of knives. Nothing grows right near it. The grass along the Veil is the color of ash. Sheep that wander too close come back with their eyes gone milky, or don't come back at all.

And every thirteen years, on the last night of autumn, the Thornwild takes a girl.

No one in Gallowmere calls it a sacrifice. We call it the Tithe, as if we are paying a fair rent on our lives. As if the thing beyond the posts is a landlord and not a monster. The elders say that if we pay it, the Thornwild stays behind its line. The crops grow. The children don't sicken. The mist stays in the trees where it belongs.

The elders say that the one time Gallowmere refused, a hundred and sixty years ago, the mist came over the posts and in the morning there were no children left in the village. Not one. Their beds were still warm.

So we pay.

Lise is sitting on the floor of our kitchen with her back against the cold hearth, her knees pulled up to her chin, her golden hair falling around her like a curtain. She looks up when I come in, and her blue eyes are huge and swollen.

"It's ringing," she whispers.

"I know." I kneel and pull her against me. She is shaking so hard I can feel her teeth chatter against my collarbone. "I know, Lise. I know."

"Tomas says they never pick the betrothed ones. He says the lot always passes over a girl who's spoken for." She clutches at the front of my apron. "Is that true? Maren, is that true?"

It isn't true. Saoirse Penhallow was three weeks from her wedding.

"There are thirty-one girls on the list this year," I say instead, smoothing her hair. "Thirty-one, Lise. Think on those odds."

"You're on the list."

"I'm twenty-four and I smell like boiled bandages. The Thornwild doesn't want me." I make myself smile. "It has better taste."

She laughs, a wet broken sound, and it is the best thing I have heard all day.

Our father is not home. He will be at the Crook and Crow, drinking his way toward the bottom of whatever grief keeps him there. He has been drinking since our mother died four winters ago, and I stopped expecting him to come home on nights that matter. I make Lise tea with honey and valerian. I braid her hair the way our mother used to, tight against her scalp so it won't come loose in the wind. I don't let myself think about the bell.

But it rings and it rings and it rings.

At half past eleven we walk to the chapel green with the rest of them.

The whole village is there, packed into the frost-stiff grass with lanterns held high. No one speaks above a murmur. The thirty-one of us on the list stand in a line before the chapel steps, each wearing a cloak of undyed wool, and the mothers stand behind us with their hands pressed over their mouths.

Elder Brannock comes down the steps carrying the brazier.

He is a tall, stooped man with a face like a split walnut, and he has done this three times now. He sets the iron brazier on its tripod at the foot of the steps, and the coals inside glow the color of a wound. Beside it, on a wooden plate, are thirty-one small chips of rowan wood, each one carved with a name.

The way it works is simple. Every name goes into the fire. Every chip burns. Except one.

The one that does not burn is the one the Thornwild has chosen.

I didn't believe it when I was a girl. I thought it was a trick, that the elders soaked one chip in something to keep it from catching, that it was just men choosing which daughter to throw away. Then I watched Saoirse Penhallow's name sit in the heart of those coals for a full hour, untouched, while every other chip crumbled to ash around it. The wood didn't even blacken.

I don't think it's a trick anymore.

"By the Veil and the iron," Brannock intones, "by the rowan and the red, we keep our covenant."

"We keep our covenant," the village answers.

The chips go in one by one. Brannock reads each name aloud as he drops it. Agnes Coyle. Brigid Farrow. Ellen Marsh. The coals hiss. Little blue flames lick up around each one. Lise's fingers are wrapped around mine so hard my knuckles grind together.

Lise Ashby.

Her chip drops. I watch it land in the coals.

Maren Ashby.

Mine lands beside it.

And then there is nothing to do but wait.

The chips begin to burn. They curl and blacken and split. One by one they fall apart into glowing red flakes, and every time one goes, a mother somewhere behind me sobs with relief. The minutes stretch. Frost creeps up the hem of my cloak. The bell keeps ringing, and I realize I am counting the tolls without meaning to, the way you count the seconds between lightning and thunder.

By midnight, there are two chips left in the fire.

One of them is mine.

The other is Lise's.

I stare at them, and the world goes very quiet. I can hear my own pulse. I can hear the hiss of the coals and the creak of the chapel weathervane and, beneath it all, something I've never noticed before: a low hum from the east, from the Thornwild, like a single held note on a bowed string. Like something breathing.

My chip catches.

It goes up in a sudden bright flare, too bright, as if it had been soaked in oil. In a breath it is ash.

Lise's chip sits in the heart of the coals, pale and whole and perfect, and does not burn.

She makes a sound I will hear for the rest of my life. It isn't a scream. It's smaller than that. It's the noise a rabbit makes when the snare closes.

"No," Tomas says from somewhere in the crowd. "No, no, she's promised, she's promised—"

Two of the elders' sons step forward to take Lise's arms. She doesn't fight them. She just stands there with her mouth open, looking at the chip, and her knees begin to fold.

And I hear myself say, "Wait."

Everyone turns.

I don't remember deciding. I think the decision was made years ago, the night our mother died with her hand in mine and said, Look after her, Maren. She isn't strong like you. I think it was made every time I stitched Lise's scraped knees and lied to her about where our father was. It was waiting in me. Tonight it just stood up.

"I'll go in her place," I say.

The murmur that goes through the crowd sounds like wind through dry leaves.

Brannock's face doesn't change. "The Thornwild has chosen."

"The Thornwild wants a girl from Gallowmere. I'm a girl from Gallowmere." My voice shakes now, but I push through it. "Is it written anywhere that it can't be the sister? Is it written in your covenant that a tithe can't be traded?"

He hesitates. It is only for a heartbeat, but I see it. I see him not know.

"Maren, no." Lise has found her voice. She twists in the grip of the men holding her. "No, you can't, you can't—"

"I can." I step up to the brazier. The heat of it washes over my face. "Let me prove it."

Before anyone can stop me, before I can stop myself, I reach into the coals.

The pain is white and total. It goes through my palm like a nail through a board. I hear women scream behind me. I close my fingers around Lise's chip and pull it out of the fire, and the smell of my own skin cooking fills my nose, and I hold the little piece of rowan up in my blistered fist for the whole village to see.

Then I drop it back into the brazier.

It bursts into flame. In a moment it is ash, just like all the rest.

The bell stops.

The silence is so sudden and so complete that my ears ring with it. Three hundred years, and I have never heard of the bell stopping before the tithe reaches the posts. Every face on that green is turned east, toward the Thornwild, and in the dark beyond the fields I see the mist begin to rise. It comes up out of the black trees in a slow, rolling wall, silver under the moon, and that low hum I heard before grows louder, deeper, until I can feel it in my back teeth.

The Thornwild has heard me. And it has accepted the trade.

I look down at my hand. The burn is already closing. Pink new skin crawls over the blackened wound, knitting itself shut, and in the lantern light I am the only one close enough to see it. My stomach turns. I shove my hand into the folds of my cloak.

Brannock looks at me for a long time. Then he bows his head.

"Bring the white," he says.

They dress me in the chapel vestry, three old women with cold fingers and averted eyes. The dress is the same one they put on Saoirse Penhallow, and on every tithe before her, washed and mended and stored in a cedar chest for thirteen years at a time. It is white wool, long-sleeved and plain, and it smells of cedar and something older underneath, something like grave dirt. They lace it tight. They take down my dark hair and comb it loose to my waist, and then they set the crown on my head.

It is made of black rowan berries, strung on wire and woven through with thorns. One of the thorns pricks my scalp as they settle it. I feel a single warm bead of blood trickle down behind my ear.

Hettie is allowed in for the last minute. She hobbles to me on her cane and takes my face in her hands.

"You foolish, foolish girl," she whispers, and kisses my forehead.

"Look after her," I say. "Lise. Please. And don't let Da sell the house for drink."

"I'll take a stick to him myself." Her thumbs brush my cheeks. Then she leans close, so close her lips touch my ear, and she breathes, "Whatever you find in there, don't let it know what your blood can do. Do you hear me? Don't let anything know."

I nod. I can't speak.

She presses something into my palm. A small knife, no longer than my finger, with a handle wrapped in red thread. I tuck it into my sleeve.

They let Lise hold me at the vestry door. She is sobbing too hard to form words, and her tears soak through the shoulder of the white dress. I hold her until Brannock clears his throat, and then I hold her a little longer.

"You marry Tomas," I tell her. "You have a dozen fat babies. You name one after me, and you tell her I was brave."

"You are brave," she chokes out. "You're the bravest person I know. Maren, please, please don't—"

I peel her fingers off my sleeve one at a time. It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

Then I walk.

The village walks with me as far as the last field, a silent procession of lanterns, and then they stop. No one in Gallowmere crosses the ditch. The mist has rolled all the way up to the iron posts now, and it hangs there like a curtain, glowing faintly in the moonlight, thick enough that I can't see the trees behind it. The hum is so loud this close that it vibrates in my chest.

I step over the ditch alone.

The ash-colored grass crunches under my bare feet. They take your shoes; I don't know why. The cold is so sharp it stops feeling like cold and starts feeling like fire. Behind me I hear Lise scream my name one last time, and then someone hushes her, and then there is nothing but the crunch of frost and the sound of my own breath.

The iron posts are taller than I thought. Up close, they are twice the height of a man and pitted with age, and someone long ago carved words into them in a language I don't recognize. The carvings are full of old red paint, flaking away. Between the two center posts, the mist parts. Just a little. Just enough for a girl in a white dress to pass through.

I think of Saoirse Penhallow, walking this same path, not looking back.

I understand now why she didn't. It isn't courage. It's that if you look back, you will run, and if you run, the mist will come over the posts in the morning and the children's beds will be warm and empty.

I put my hand on the cold iron of the left post. The carvings shiver under my palm, as if they're alive.

I step through the Veil.

The world changes at once. The cold vanishes. The air on the other side is warm and damp and smells of crushed moss, wet stone, and something sweet and rotten, like fruit left too long in the sun. The mist is so thick I can't see my own feet. The hum is gone. In its place is a silence so deep it feels like being underwater.

Then, from the white nothing in front of me, I hear hooves.

They come slowly. Unhurried. A heavy, wet clop, as if whatever is walking toward me has just stepped out of a river. I hear the soft blow of breath through large nostrils. I smell salt and pondweed.

The mist thins, and a horse steps out of it.

It is the blackest thing I have ever seen. Its coat is so dark it seems to drink the moonlight, and its long mane hangs dripping down its neck, tangled with waterweed and tiny white shells. Water runs off its flanks in steady streams and pools around its hooves, though there is no river here. Its eyes are not a horse's eyes. They are pale green and luminous, and they are looking at me with something that is very much like amusement.

I know what it is. Every child in Gallowmere knows. Never touch the black horse by the water. Never climb on its back. It will carry you down to the bottom of the lake and eat everything but your liver.

Kelpie.

The creature lowers its great dripping head until its nose is level with mine, and its lips peel back from teeth that are far too sharp for any horse.

"Well," it says, in a voice like a deep current over stones. "You're not the one he was expecting."

Finding your place.

Chapter One: The Thirteenth Winter

Sonja Flowers

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Finding your place.

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Sonja Flowers

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