Resources. The word makes me want to vomit. But that’s exactly how they see us.
Kari sinks her face into her hands. “Sweet merciful Goddess.” Her shoulders shake. “Why me?” She looks up suddenly. “I translate scrolls! I’m the world’s clumsiest lady. I once spilled tea on thequeen, and was banished from court. Nobody wants to marry me at home.Nobody. My father curses the day I was born.We barely even have visitors, and even when Father offered 100 rigors for my dowry, not even a beggar lord would take him up on it. Why would this cursed God do this to me?” Her eyes bleed with desperation. “How do you know so much about this place?”
Because I made it my life’s mission to find out what happened to my sister.
“I wasn’t captured for this hunt. I volunteered.”
Kari’s mouth forms a soft ‘O’. “But why? Why would you do that?”
There’s no easy answer.
“Once upon a time,” I whisper, staring into the pond and seeing beyond my reflection to an enormous, screeching winged black monster, “I was happy. I had a sister. She was the most important person in the world to me… until the Knights of Malus took her from me and sacrificed her to this Labyrinth.”
“Sacrifice?”
“They claim it’s an ancient deal with a powerful God. Every year a pristine virgin is chosen from their harem and offered to the shadow gates. She’s never seen again. Or so they believe. But I managed to track down rumors that spoke differently. Some brides managed to return, though they keep such news secret from the knights. The knights would most likely blame them for any disaster that befell us, and they would be burned alive as dissenters for failing in their duty to submit to the hunt.”
Kari’s gasp softens some of the pain I’m feeling. “And your sister?”
“She never returned. I know she’s not dead. I’d feel it somehow.” A world’s worth of distance might separate us, but every night I see Aylin in my dreams. On those rare nights when I cry myself to sleep, she slides into bed with me, wraps her arms around me and sings the lullabies Mother used to sing. It feels so real that sometimes I wake with the sensation of her kiss still pressed to my forehead. “She’s here on this world somewhere.I know it. I plan to find her and murder the prick that claimed her.”
“Oh, sweet ashes. You’re so… brave.”
“I’m not brave.” Stupid, possibly. Incredibly driven, definitely. “Aylin is all I have. And if I can do this one thing… If I can get her back and save her…”
Then maybe I’ll have a chance to forget that I’m the reason she’s here.
I wasn’t there when she was taken.
I was so fucking angry with her that I stormed off to hunt, and…
I force the thoughts away. This is no place to lose my focus.
“Every year I watched the Knights of Malus make their choice of tribute. I watched them walk her to their keep through the streets, the crowd casting beautiful blue rose petals at her feet as they led their Chosen Bride to her doom. Her sacrifice would bring the rains and the harvest, they claimed. They would lead her down into their keep, deep into their cellars, where some whispered that a marble arch awaited the light of the Blood Moon. It was a portal to another world, a place to make their sacrifice to the Trickster God.
“Nine years ago, they took my sister to that keep and that was the last time I ever saw her.”
That loss left a gaping wound inside me that sent me reeling from one tavern to the next, searching for a reason to keep living after the loss of my entire family.
“Three years after Aylin disappeared, I heard a whisper that one of the sacrificed brides had returned. It was the first time I’d felt hope.” The little flutter of that emotion lights up inside me, even now. “Mariam didn’t want to be found—especially by the knights—but I tracked her down after a year or two, and she told me of this world. She was living with her lover, Serissa, in atiny cottage on the edge of the Beldt forest. The two of them had found each other in the Labyrinth, fallen in love and escaped.”
It was Serissa who had given me the greatest hope.
She’d been stuck in the Labyrinth for two years when Mariam had been sent there, and had bartered with the Trickster God to return to Mariam’s world with her, once they had found the portal at the end of the Labyrinth.
But she had also been sacrificed the same year as Aylin, and remembered a plump brunette with bronze skin, a strong nose, and a scar through her eyebrow.
“The Beast took her,” Serissa had whispered. “The Beast of Kerawan. He was a monstrous creature with wings as black as night, and eyes like the fires of a forge. He plucked her from the Labyrinth and flew away with her. I can still remember her screams…”
“I knew what I needed to do. The knight’s keep was impenetrable, their ranks overwhelming. And there is only one way to access the portal inside their deepest cellars.” Sheathing my knife, I look down at Kari. “I volunteered to be sacrificed. I passed their tests. I curtsied and pressed my head to the floor, and whispered of how desperately I wished to make my family proud, how much honor I would bring to the knights if I were chosen. They will only choose from their anointed girls. And on the night that the sacrifice was to be made, I helped all the other women escape, and made myself theonlychoice of Bride.”
“I’m not going to take those words back,” Kari says primly. “Youarebrave. And you are kind.” She bites her lip. “If not for me you’d probably be miles away by now, quick on the heels of your wretched monster.”
It’s an uncomfortable feeling because she’s right. If I left her behind, I’d be so much faster, unencumbered by the need to protect her as well as fight.
“You’re always running away to the woods,” Aylin yelled. “What’s so wrong with this place? With me? Why do you always want to get away from me?”
“It’s not you. I just need space to clear my head. Time alone.” The weight of everything we’d survived kept pressing on upon me. The only time I could clear my head was when I was hunting. And then there was the link between us, that ever-present reminder of what she’d done to me. “I feel trapped when I’m here with you. I can feel you inside my head all the time. Feel you pressing in around me. I just need some space to be me again.”
