The Ninth Tithe

Chapter 1: The Drawing of Lots

The lots were carved from ashwood, nine of them, each no longer than a finger bone. They sat in a clay bowl on the elder's table, and the whole village of Starzyn had gathered in the square to watch one be drawn.

Lise Baranova stood near the back of the crowd, her arms crossed, her jaw set. She was twenty-two, tall and angular, with clay permanently worked into the creases of her knuckles and a mouth that her mother said would get her killed before the Gloom ever could. She had spent the morning at the wheel, finishing a set of bowls for the Petrov household, and she had not changed her apron. There was no point in dressing up for this. The lots were drawn, a name was read, and someone's life ended. Ceremony wouldn't change that.

Beside her, Marta Sokolnik was pale as birch bark. Marta was the same age as Lise but looked younger—softer in the face, with ink-stained fingers and a perpetual squint from reading by candlelight. She was the cleverest person in Starzyn, possibly the cleverest person Lise had ever met, and she was shaking.

"Stop it," Lise murmured. "You're making me nervous."

"You should be nervous," Marta whispered back. "My name is in that bowl."

"So is mine. So is Tomek's, and Yelena's, and half the young people in this square. The odds are the same as they've always been."

"The odds are one in nine," Marta said. "That's not comforting."

Lise wanted to argue, but she couldn't. One in nine was terrible. One in nine meant that in any group of friends, one would be taken. The Ninth Tithe, they called it—every nine years, one young person between eighteen and twenty-five surrendered to Severin Kazimir, the sorcerer who kept the Gloom at bay. The village had been paying this price since before anyone could remember. Since before the oldest gravestone in the churchyard. Since before Starzyn had a name.

Elder Broz stepped forward. He was a thick man with a white beard and hands that had once been strong enough to fell timber. Now they trembled as he reached into the bowl.

"People of Starzyn," he said, his voice carrying across the silent square. "The Gloom presses at our borders. The wards hold, but they must be renewed. The sorcerer Severin Kazimir requires his tithe, as he has for four centuries. One of our own must go to the keep, to serve in the defense of all."

Serve. That was the word they used. As if the tithes were going off to apprenticeships, as if they'd come home in a few years with stories and skills. But no tithe had ever come home. Not one, in four hundred years. The village told itself that they stayed on at the keep, that they chose to remain, that the work was important. Nobody believed it, not really. But nobody said so either.

Broz drew a lot from the bowl. He turned it over in his fingers, reading the name carved into the pale wood.

His face changed.

Lise saw it—the flicker of something that might have been relief, followed immediately by grief. He knew whose name he held. He knew, and he was sorry, but not sorry enough to draw again.

"Marta Sokolnik," he read.

The square erupted. Not in protest—never in protest, because the tithe was sacred, the tithe was necessary—but in the low, miserable murmur of a community absorbing a blow. Marta's mother screamed, a short, bitten-off sound. Marta herself went absolutely still, her face blank, her eyes fixed on nothing.

Lise's hand found Marta's arm. She gripped it hard.

"No," she said. Not a whisper. Not a murmur. A flat, clear refusal that cut through the noise of the crowd.

Heads turned.

"Lise—" Marta started.

"No." Lise stepped forward, pulling free of the crowd. She walked toward Elder Broz with the kind of deliberate stride that her father used when he was about to tell a customer their order wasn't ready and they could wait or go elsewhere. "I'll go instead."

The silence that followed was absolute.

Broz stared at her. "Lise, the lot has been drawn. The name—"

"The name doesn't matter. What matters is that someone goes. I'm offering. Take me instead."

"This isn't how it works," said Broz, but his voice had gone uncertain. He looked at the other elders, who looked at each other, who looked at the ground.

"Show me the rule that says it can't be," Lise said. "Show me where it's written that the sorcerer demands a specific person. He demands a tithe. A body. I'm a body."

From the crowd, Marta's voice came thin and desperate: "Lise, don't. You don't know what you're—"

"I know exactly what I'm doing." Lise turned back to face her friend. Marta's eyes were wet, her lips pressed together so hard they'd gone white. Behind her, Marta's mother was clutching her husband's arm, hope and horror warring on her face.

Lise looked at Marta—brilliant, bookish, breakable Marta, who could recite the history of the Eastern Provinces from memory, who was teaching herself mathematics from a water-damaged textbook she'd found in a trader's cart, who had plans, real plans, for a life that mattered.

Lise made pots. Good pots, sturdy and well-shaped, but pots nonetheless. Her father could train another apprentice.

"It's done," Lise said to Broz. "I volunteer."

The elder looked at her for a long time. Then he set the ashwood lot back in the bowl and nodded.

"Lise Baranova," he said, and his voice cracked on her name. "The ninth tithe."

---

They gave her until sunset to say goodbye.

Her father, Gregor, sat at the kitchen table with his big hands wrapped around a mug of tea he wasn't drinking. He had her mother's face—or rather, Lise had her mother's face, and her father had spent fourteen years since her mother's death seeing his wife every time his daughter walked into the room. He did not cry. He did not argue. He sat, and he looked at her, and he said, "You are your mother's child."

"Is that a compliment or a criticism?"

"Both." He set down the mug. "She would have done the same thing. She would have been wrong to do it, and she would have done it anyway."

Lise sat across from him. The kitchen smelled like clay and bread and the dried herbs her mother had hung from the ceiling beams fourteen years ago, which Lise had replaced with fresh bundles every autumn because she couldn't bear to take them down.

"Marta has a future," Lise said.

"And you don't?"

"I have a trade. It's not the same thing."

"It is exactly the same thing, and you are a fool." But he said it gently, the way he said everything, and when he reached across the table to take her hand, his grip was so tight it hurt.

They sat like that until Marta came.

Marta did not knock. She pushed open the door and stood in the frame with her arms rigid at her sides and her face blotched red from crying.

"Take it back," she said.

"I can't."

"You can. Go to Broz. Tell him you've changed your mind. It's my name on the lot, Lise, it's my—"

"And now it's my name on the record. It's done."

Marta crossed the kitchen in three strides and grabbed Lise by the shoulders. She was shorter than Lise by half a head, and she had to look up, and the fury in her eyes was the most beautiful and terrible thing Lise had ever seen.

"You don't get to decide this for me," Marta said. "You don't get to sacrifice yourself and call it friendship."

"I'm not calling it anything. I'm calling it math. You're worth more to this village than I am."

"That's not true."

"It is true, and you know it, and if you waste what I'm giving you by feeling guilty, I will haunt you from whatever hole the sorcerer puts me in."

Marta's grip tightened. Then she pulled Lise into a hug so fierce that Lise's ribs ached, and she whispered into Lise's shoulder, "I will find a way to get you back."

"Don't," Lise said. But she held on.

---

At sunset, two of the village men came for her with a cart. They would take her to the edge of the Gloom, to the place where the road ended and the sorcerer's path began, and there they would leave her.

Lise climbed into the cart with a single bag—a change of clothes, her mother's bone comb, a wedge of cheese, and a small clay figure she'd made when she was twelve, the first piece she'd ever been proud of. It was a bird, roughly shaped, with one wing slightly larger than the other. It fit in her palm.

Starzyn fell away behind her. The fields, golden in the late light. The orchards with their heavy branches. The river, slow and brown, winding toward the east. And beyond everything, at the horizon, the Gloom.

It did not look like a marsh. Not from a distance. It looked like a bruise on the world—a dark, spreading stain where the land simply stopped being land and became something else. Even in full daylight, it seemed to absorb the light around it, pulling color from the sky, turning the sunset sickly at its edges.

The cart rolled on. The road narrowed. The fields gave way to scrub, then to bare earth, then to mud that sucked at the wheels. The air changed—it grew heavy, damp, and carried a smell like rotting iron.

"This is as far as we go," said Tomasz, the older of the two men. He would not look at her.

Lise climbed down. Ahead, a path of flat stones led into the murk—each stone carved with symbols that glowed faintly, a dull, greenish light that pulsed like a slow heartbeat.

"The path will take you to the keep," Tomasz said. "Don't step off the stones."

"What happens if I step off the stones?"

He looked at her then, and his face was gray. "Don't step off the stones."

Lise shouldered her bag. She looked back once—at the cart, at the road, at the distant smudge of Starzyn against the evening sky. Then she turned and walked forward, following the carved stones into the dark.

The Gloom closed around her like a fist.

It was not merely dark. Darkness was the absence of light, and this was the absence of everything—warmth, sound, the feeling of solid ground beneath her feet, though the stones were still there, she could feel them. The air pressed against her skin like wet cloth. She could hear her own breathing, loud and ragged, and beneath it, a sound like whispering, though she could not make out words.

The stones pulsed under her feet. Green light, then nothing. Green light, then nothing. A heartbeat. She matched her steps to it without meaning to.

She walked for what felt like an hour but might have been twenty minutes. Time was strange here. The whispering grew louder, then softer, then stopped entirely, replaced by a silence so complete that she could hear the blood in her own ears.

Then the keep appeared.

It rose out of the Gloom like a tooth from a diseased jaw—gray stone, crumbling at the edges, covered in the same carved symbols as the path stones. It was not large. Three stories, perhaps, with a single tower that listed slightly to the east. The windows were dark. The door was open.

Lise stopped at the threshold. She looked at the open door, at the darkness beyond it, at the faintly glowing symbols carved into the lintel.

"Well," she said to no one. "Here I am."

She went inside.