The messenger reins his horse around and disappears back down the mountain path before I can ask anything else. Typical. The Fae like to deliver their ultimatums and leave before anyone can argue. It makes them feel powerful, I think—the knowledge that we’ll spend hours agonizing over their demands while they’ve already forgotten our names.
I break the seal and unroll the scroll.
The first section is expected—ore quotas that would take eighteen months to fill, demanded within three. We just gave them everything we had six months ago. The mines are nearly tapped out, the equipment is failing, and we lost four men to a tunnel collapse in the spring. There’s no way to meet these numbers. There never is anymore.
The second section makes my blood run cold.
In lieu of the ore tribute, Stone Court will accept three (3) young women of marriageable age for Fae cultural exchange. Candidates should be healthy, unmarried, and between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five. Selection will be made by Stone Court representatives upon arrival.
Three girls.
I think of Marta’s daughter Lily, who just turned seventeen and still has a gap-toothed smile, who brings me honey cakes when I come back from patrol because she says I look too thin. The blacksmith’s niece Sara, who dreams of becoming a healer and practices her stitches on the wounds I bring home from fighting monsters, her young face fierce with concentration. Little Sera who used to bring me wildflowers when she was a child and who’s now old enough that her father has been saving for her dowry, hoping to marry her off to some distant village where the Fae don’t reach.
Three girls, spirited away to Stone Court. Three letters home about happiness and purpose and fulfillment. Three empty chairs at family tables, three mothers who never stop crying, three more pieces of Ironhold ripped away to feed Fae hunger.
I’ve seen what happens to the women who go. Seen them come back years later with delegations—glassy-eyed creatures who smile too much and speak in soft, rehearsed phrases.I’m so happy. I’ve found my purpose. I never knew what I was missing.They look at their families like strangers and touch their swollen bellies with the mindless contentment of breeding animals.
That’s not going to happen to Lily or Sara or Sera. Not while I’m still breathing.
My hands shake as I roll the scroll back up.
Not again. Never again.
They’ll have to go through me.
The village council meets in the hall that used to belong to my father—a long, low building that smells like old wood and candle smoke and the particular staleness of people who have given up. When my parents were alive, this hall rang with laughter and arguments and the sounds of a community that still believed in itself. Now it just holds silence and fear.
Every adult in Ironhold has crowded inside, though crowd is generous—we’re down to forty-three souls, less than half what we had when I was a child. Some died to monsters. Some died to illness and accidents and the slow grinding despair of watching everything fall apart. Some just left, slipping away in the night to try their luck elsewhere, willing to risk the chaos-beast-haunted roads rather than stay in a village that’s clearly dying.
I don’t blame them. Some days I think about leaving too. But then I look at Marta’s lined face, at the baker’s boy who’s never known a world without monsters, at Elder Brennan’s shaking hands, and I know I can’t. They need someone to stand between them and the dark.
It might as well be me. It’s always been me.
“We could try to meet the ore quotas,” Elder Brennan offers into the heavy silence. He’s eighty years old and looks a hundred, his voice thin as paper. “If we sent teams into the deeper shafts—”
“Those shafts collapsed three years ago.” I keep my voice flat. “We lost eight men trying to reopen them. We don’t have the equipment or the manpower to mine that deep anymore.”
I don’t mention that I was the one who pulled the survivors out, crawling through gaps in the rubble while the earth groaned and shifted around me. Don’t mention the nightmares I stillhave about the ones I couldn’t reach, their voices fading to silence as the tunnels filled with dust.
“Then perhaps we could trade with Millbrook?” Councilman Harrick suggests. He’s fifty and soft in a way that says he’s never missed a meal, even when others have. I’ve never liked him. “Their quotas are lower, they might have surplus—”
“Millbrook gave their surplus to Stone Court six months ago. I negotiated that deal myself, remember? They’re barely feeding their own people now.”
Harrick’s face tightens with the particular resentment of a man who doesn’t like being corrected by someone half his age and twice his competence. “I’m simply trying to explore options—”
“There are no options.” I spread the scroll on the council table so everyone can see. “Ore we don’t have, or girls. That’s what Stone Court is offering. Three young women for ‘cultural exchange.’ We all know what that means.”
“My Lily is only seventeen.” Marta’s voice is barely a whisper. Her hand grips her daughter’s shoulder so tightly the knuckles have gone bone-white. “She’s never—she doesn’t know anything about—” Her voice breaks on a sob. “She can’t become one of those… thosethingsthey make women into.”
“She won’t.” The words come out hard as iron. “None of our girls will.”
“How?” Elder Brennan’s voice cracks with despair. He’s looking at me the way he always looks at me—like I’m a weapon he can point at whatever problem frightens him. “We can’t fight them. We can’t run. What choice do we have?”
“There’s always a choice.”
I say it more harshly than I intend, but I’m tired of this. Tired of being the only one in this room willing to think past the fear. I look around at the faces watching me—hollow-cheeked from rationed meals, pale from too many winters spent huddled around failing fires, eyes that have watched this village die piece by piece without lifting a finger to stop it.
They’re waiting for me to save them. They always wait for me to save them.
