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Maybe he means simply to make me a slave?
Mind, a slave for a whole year—a sickly one at that—should not survive.
Is he taking me to my death sentence?
Before my thoughts can become too wild and tangled, the prince speaks behind me, “Jump if you wish. It will only injure you and bring upon punishments that will have you wishing you had died.”
Mutely, I manage a nod, feeling the colour drain from my face.
I make to ask if he will make me a slave, but I clamp my mouth shut, instead recalling his earlier warning. Don’t speak unless spoken to.
So I’m silent as he takes his steed at a trot through the village—
And I’m all too aware of the eyes peering out of windows at us as we pass.
5
The trotting steed takes us far out of the village, beyond the nearby gateway that’s tucked between a charred tree split down the middle, as though lightening has struck it at one point in time. It’s when we pass the path that forks off to the split tree that I realise the prince comes from a further away gate between the worlds.
He might rule all within the dark realm, but my village is not a neighbouring one to him, and so I wonder how he found himself making bargains in my village at all.
When the prince first came to my little plot of dark earth, there was nothing. The surviving humans lived beneath torn fabrics draped over posts and huddled around fire pits. It was with the deals of the dark fae—and the prince—that these humans were allowed to live andgrow. Nearby trees were cut down for timber to build homes, lands were cleared where seeds could be planted and crops farmed, and soon, there was a village in place of an old campsite.
It does make me question the role of the prince. Does he travel around all the villages, collecting on debts from all the farms? Surely if he’s to travel this far from his home gateway, then he wouldn’t do it for only one family, he would do it for many.
But then, there are no provisions on the steed with us. No satchels or sacks full of apples, no other humans stolen away to his part of the realm. It’s almost as though he has come just for us—for my family, for our apples, forme.
A chill clutches my spine, not from the cold, but from the wretched thoughts that start to invade my mind.
A whole year of slavery.
My shoulders bow inwards as I wrap my arms around myself. The cloak warms me through to the bones, and yet that chill seems eternally coiled around my spine.
Slavery is not a future I imagined I would face.
Sure, the threat of becoming a lost one hung over me from a young age. But there were options. I could have married an older widow if finding a husband my own age didn’t work out, I could have volunteered myself down at the market stalls for a small pay and lodgings. Even death seemed an option—that maybe, just maybe, my sickness would steal me away before the dark fae could.
Now, the next year of my life is to be one of most dreaded of all. Slavery.
To stop myself from rolling off the horse and hoping it tramples me to death, I hold onto the one sliver of hope, that one slice of hope that I can muster up.
A year in my world is less in the prince’s world.
We might be part of the same realm—his world at the heart of it—but time moves differently through the gateways. So really, to me in his world, it might only be three months of slavery, but a whole year back at home.
I only know of these time shifts from the less fortunate souls in the village. When families are too down on their luck, to the point where they cannot afford to put bread on the table or keep fresh wood above their heads, then a dreadful option faces them—
Bargains with the dark fae.
At the podium in the village centre, one can sign themselves over to a year of slavery to a fae household in the dark realm—but when they return to our world after that long, gruelling year, they claim it was only a few months.
Few months or not... they always returned somewhat damaged.Off. Never quite right again.
Three months. I have a chance of survival here. My sickness might not take me down that quickly. And when I return home, I can rest and heal.
Still, I can’t kid myself into believing any other way than this will be the worst experience of my life, and by no means is my survival guaranteed.
Just do as he says.
