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Closest thing I have to a friend, I said. But I didn't say she was exactly a friend. We still do the performance of trades—the bartering, the pretending not to be interested, the manipulating.
I find it a funny thing that, according to Grandfather, this was not the way people once bought things for themselves back in the old world. They had things called coins and notes—money—and everything was at a fixed price. No room for negotiations.
“I’ll take two metres,” I counter her offer, “for one apple.”
Her face crumbles into something grim. After a beat, she shakes her head. Strands of loose ginger hair whip her freckled cheeks.
“One and a half metres,” she says, “for one apple.”
My hand has stuck out before she even finished speaking the word ‘apple’, ready to shake on it. So we do and, for good measure, she gives me a stiff nod.
I pluck out a juicy-looking apple from the basket as she rolls up the fabric. We make the trade, passing treasures from hand to hand, a second before it happens.
We both look over at the same time.
Wrapped in a torn shawl, a villager—abeggar—trips over his own boots and spills all over the damp dirt road. His meagre belongings roll over the soil; a single potato, too dirty to yet be eaten, with sprouts blemishing its skin, and a packet of matches.
My heart sinks at the sight of the matches. Those ones aren’t like the kind we use around here. Those ones look nothing like the imported matches we get from the fae lands. Those matches are very much looted from somewhere in our village, remnants of what has survived from the old world.
And that’s terribly illegal. Contraband, the guards call it.
Before the beggar can push to his feet, two guards have homed in on him. They stride down from their wooden podiums to advance on him.
Quick to scramble, he reaches for his dropped belongings—the matches first. But it’s too late for that. It’s too late for him.
And it’s not just the contraband, I suspect.
He’s a beggar. A lost soul, we call them. A terrible thing to be in this village.
As I said, we all have a purpose—a skill or a trade, or have at least married into one.
If by some way, you find yourself without a purpose in the village, the dokkalves make you vanish. They steal away the lost ones and do whatever wickedness to them. It’s left up to the imagination of the village to fill in the blanks after a lost one goes missing.
I’m a lost one.
Or at least, I will be.
Of my family’s three children (all girls), I’m the youngest—and by far the weakest. Poorly, you see. Some sickness that we’ll never have answers to with our single healer who visits (if we are lucky) once a year and pays us little mind unless we have something decent to bargain with.
So, when my parents pass on, and my eldest sisters marry—I’ll be pushed out. A new family will run our farmhouse, and there won’t be room for me anymore.
That’s why I need to marry. Marriage will tie me to someone else’s purpose in the village and save my life.
Slight problem. Who wants to marry the sick girl?
And with so few of us, the pool of eligible bachelors isn’t exactly teeming at the seams. There are a mere five men around my age who should be looking to marry soon, but including myself and my sisters, a total count of seven women.
My sisters and I have been eligible for a few years now. And still, no takers.
It’s not because of how we look, exactly. It’s more the details of our bargain that has suitors spooked.
Me, too. That’s why I’ve never seenhim.
“It’s sad,” murmurs Eve, tearing me out of my self-pitying thoughts.
I glance at her before I’m pulled back to the now and recall what’s happening around me. The beggar is being dragged up to the wooden cages behind the podiums. Before he’s thrown inside, they search him for any belongings they need to confiscate. Then they find a short knife whose blade is the size of my crooked pinkie finger. I pale, fear flooding me for his sake.
A knife...
