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“May I?” I asked.
She nodded.
I opened the bag, took the roll out, and let it fall open. Three pieces of cloth. It felt like wool. I unfolded the first one. On it, in bright red, was a single English word written in all caps. TRIBUTE.
Shit.
The word wasn’t painted onto the banner. It had been woven into it with crimson wool.
“Penderton lost a town guard during that flare,” Ned said. “Selma Butler. We are reasonably sure this is her handwriting. She always wrote the bar in a capital T at an angle like that.”
Curran took the banner, sniffed it, and held it out to Conlan. Our son trotted over and took a long whiff.
I unfolded the second piece of cloth. A symbol for the first quarter moon, a circle split in half vertically. The left side was solid red. The right side showed moon spots with paler and darker shades of red.
“The deadline,” Curran said.
Ned nodded.
There was one piece of fabric left. I opened it. A symbol for a person, one step above a stick figure and featureless, but undeniably a person, woven in red in the center of the banner.
“They wanted a human tribute,” Curran said.
“Yes.”
A cold, uncomfortable knot formed in my stomach. This was looking worse and worse.
“The town ignored it, of course,” Ned said. “Penderton has solid defenses, and the guards are well trained. These are all tough people, lumbermen, farmers, hunters. On the deadline, at sundown, the forest people came back. The town expected them to storm the walls, but they just left. Everything seemed to have blown over. Then at noon the next day a huge brown boulder shot out of the woods, landed in the town square, and exploded into brown dust.”
“Everyone who was in the open in the square died,” Solina said. “Nine people. Two kids.”
“In the evening the women were back,” Ned continued. “Same message, but this time they wanted their tribute by the full moon. Penderton sounded the alarm, of course. It was all hands on deck. Forest service, the National Guard Magic Rapid Response unit, three teams of mercenaries, everyone came to find the cause of this disaster. They went into the forest. Four days later some of them came out. Pender Forest is a big place, over three hundred thousand acres. They’d walked around in circles. Some of them disappeared. Some were eaten, nobody knows by what.”
Great.
“Why not evacuate?” Curran asked.
“People tried,” Ned said. “Every single person that left the town after that first blast became sick two days later. Some came back to town and recovered. The others died. A day trip like coming here, for example, is fine. But any longer than twenty-four hours outside of town, and they start to develop symptoms.”
“Nobody has any answers,” Solina said.
It infected them somehow. Probably with that first boulder, although it could have been something else. And Ned and Solina weren’t sick because they’d moved out of Penderton before this whole mess happened.
“What happened with the National Guard?” Curran asked.
“They stayed a month past the tribute deadline, but they couldn’t stay in Penderton indefinitely,” Ned said. “The day after they left, a second boulder exploded at the school. It just so happened that most of the children were in a separate building for a school assembly. Only five people died.”
There was an awful flatness to his voice.
“Penderton offered tribute,” I said.
“Jimmy Codair,” Ned said. “Sixty-nine years old and dying of cancer. He volunteered. He walked into the woods with the women, and nobody ever saw him again. The next year, on the same day and hour, they were back.”
They gave it a person.
“The town fed it,” Curran said. “Of course it would be back.”
“It’s been five years since the flare,” I said. “How…?”
“The town holds a lottery,” Ned said.
I’d learned over the years that you can adjust to just about anything to survive. Penderton adjusted to the price of their survival. One person a year to let the other five thousand go on with their lives. It felt monstrous because it was.
“These people are not monsters,” Ned said, as if reading my mind. “They have no other options. Whatever you think they should have done, they have done. They have appealed to everyone, from the military and mercenaries to the Order and the Covens. Everyone has tried. I’ve personally traveled to Washington for help. Nobody could help and in the end the town paid the price every single time.”
“This is the fifth year,” Solina said. Her voice had an edge to it.
Ned looked at her.
She inhaled deeply and looked at the sky above us.
Curran fixed Ned with his stare. “That’s a terrible story.”
Ned nodded. “Yes, it is. Thank you for listening to me. I’ve rambled on for far too long. I should probably get to the reason why I am here.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded map.
