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“I understand there is a handful, leftovers from various tribes. Why do you ask?”
Whoa.“But they’re still here?”
“Did I not just say that?”
Humans are considered a delicacy by many monsters. If any First People are still alive, then they must be exceptionally skilled at avoiding predators. “I’m shocked. No one’s ever mentioned them.”
“Why would they? They are very few in numbers, ruled by no one, and without any land. They are nomads without the protection of a kingdom.”
They’re outsiders.I always wondered how Benicio found a human male to hunt me down. It happened weeks ago when I was Benicio’s prisoner. But Benicio wanted me dead without being directly involved. He found a man to do the job. I escaped death with the help of Uhrn, Benicio’s sister.
“You actually met the very last of the First People who mattered to anyone at the Blood Battle,” he adds.
“You mean the little girl?”
Rool nods. “The last living proxy.”
Holy shit.“You mean the humans, the ones used as proxies, are these First People?” I was made to believe the proxies came from my world, but I could never figure out how the hell all these human families were originally chosen. What were their ties to Monsterland? What made them agree to proxy for a particular kingdom in the Blood Battle?
He nods. “When the Proxy Vow was put into place, there were over sixty First People tribes. The strongest twenty were chosen to proxy. In exchange for agreeing to this, their families were offered shelter and protection by their kingdoms.”
Alwar told me about this. Each kingdom had to select a human bloodline—a family like mine—to represent them in theBlood Battle, which was the only way to challenge the ruler of Monsterland for the throne. Until now, I had no idea how these human families were selected, only that all of the proxy families were gone except two. The Norfolk, me, and the Wesfolk, the little girl who showed up to the Blood Battle the night I was turned into a vampire. I refused to fight her, of course.
“What happened to the other bloodlines?” I ask.
“Their protectors did not do a very good job. Most did not last more than a hundred years. Killing off proxies is a fine way to ensure your enemies never take the throne.”
Killing proxies was prohibited under the Proxy Vow treaty, but there were ways around it. Benicio found one.
“So that little girl is the last of her family’s bloodline,” I conclude.
“Yes. Just as you are the last of yours. Even Alwar could not keep your bloodline safe. He even went as far as to send your family across the bridge.”
My insides twist into a hard knot. “Did you just say that my family is from…here?”
“How did you not know this? Did your elders teach you nothing?” he scoffs.
Oh God. Oh God!“How long ago was this?”
“Two hundred years, give or take. Right about the time Alwar took the throne, which he eventually lost to our glorious Blood King.”
That’s when my family built River Wall Manor.The pieces of all my unanswered questions start falling into place—my family’s connection to Monsterland, the real reason I’m bound to their laws and rules, the reason we Norfolk agreed to proxy for the War People.
“Alwar was trying to protect us,” I mutter. And in return, we vowed to come and fight in the Blood Battles if called.
“His official justification for sending them away was to find a solution for the drought. But we all knew he merely wanted to protect the Norfolk bloodline, while allowing the other kingdoms’ proxies to die off here in Monsterland. As a new king, it was seen as unjust and almost became his downfall. But then the water flowed, like he promised.”
Rain came. Rain Norfolk.That was when my great-grandmother was born, and the drought back home ended. It brought much-needed water into to the Tionesta River that flows through our property. Since then, the War People have seen us Norfolk women as good luck.
My eyes start to tear.We are from here. We’re from Monsterland.How’s that possible? No wonder Grandma Rain hated everyone back home and saw them as weak. She was rude and unkind, too.It was probably how she was raised by her parents. Monsterland culture.
I never would have guessed it. Then again, there was so much about her I didn’t know.
I think of her sitting on her old gray couch in her office, her nose buried in a book about gardening, surrounded by piles of books. How could someone know so much about gardening and still be such a bad gardener? She literally read from sunup to sundown, like it was her job. Her office was stuffed with thousands of gardening books from all around the world—the plains of Africa, the mountains of Japan, the coasts of China. Yet she killed her rose garden by putting some strange fertilizer in the soil. After that, they never grew back. You’d think she’d know how not to kill her own flowers or restart her garden.
I mean, I did see her putter a few times and put some stuff in the soil, but they were mostly rocks and weird crystals. Once she even planted a bunch of charcoal. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was trying to grow black beans.
I shrugged it off. She was always eccentric.
