The Surprising Tribute

(Sorrel POV)

They washed me in cold water at dawn, dressed me in grey wool that had belonged to three dead women before me, and told me it was an honour.

That's Greywater for you. Twenty-two years of calling me mutt and witch-get, twenty-two years of the back rooms and the blamed-for-everything and the door shut in my face on the coldest nights - and now, the morning they hand me over to be killed, suddenly there's a comb dragged through my hair and a word like honour in Petra Mott's mouth like it didn't taste of vinegar going down.

"Stop fidgeting," she said, yanking the last knot. She'd wanted to do it. Of course she had. "You'll want to look pretty when the King puts you down."

"And here I thought you'd miss me."

She pinched me, hard, under the arm where the bruise wouldn't show. I didn't make a sound. That was the one coin I'd never let any of them spend - the satisfaction of watching me flinch. I'd gone hungry before I'd hand it over. I wasn't about to start at a King's teeth.

The whole pack came to watch me leave. That's the part I keep turning over, even now. Not one of them would share a fire with me on a winter night, but every last soul in Greywater dragged themselves to the muddy rise above the river to see the half-breed marched out as tribute. Garrick Mott stood at the front in the wolfskin he wore when he wanted to look like more than the small, mean Alpha of a small, mean pack. He didn't look at me. He looked past me, up the moor road, to where the King's men were coming.

You could feel them before you could see them. The air changed. Even the dogs went quiet.

I want to be clear about something, because the songs always get it wrong. Nobody in Greywater handed me over out of cruelty. Cruelty would've been a kindness; at least cruelty pays attention. They handed me over because Ashmoor demanded a tithe, the tithe was steep, and a barren year had gutted the stores. Somebody clever - Garrick, probably, in the one cunning thought of his life - realized you could pay a blood-tribute with blood nobody wanted. Send the mutt. Let the monster on the black throne have the witch-get the pack had been trying to be rid of since her mother died birthing her. Two problems, one road.

"You should thank me," Garrick had said last night, when he came to tell me. He'd had wine in him. "Anywhere else, you'd have starved."

I'd thanked him. I'd smiled while I did it. I've found a smile unnerves them more than spitting ever did.

The King's party crested the rise, and the whole pack lowered their eyes at once, like wheat going flat under wind.

I didn't.

I'd like to tell you that was courage. It was just the only thing I had left that was mine, and I wasn't about to lay it down in the mud for a man who'd come to kill me. So I kept my chin up and I looked at them - the King's guard in grey and black, the great rangy war-horses, the banners with the moon-and-thorn - and I looked for the monster.

He wasn't hard to find.

The stories said the Alpha King of Ashmoor was eight feet tall with a wolf's eyes and a man's cruelty, that he'd torn out a rival's throat at his own coronation, that the land itself had gone sick in fear of him. Half of that is the kind of thing frightened people say. The eyes, though. The eyes were true. Pale as river-ice, set in a face someone had carved while they were angry at stone. He rode at the front like the others weren't there. He didn't look bored, exactly. He looked like a man who had stopped expecting the world to show him anything new a long time ago.

Garrick stepped forward, all teeth and bowing. "Your Majesty. Greywater pays its tithe. We offer - that is, the girl, she's -" He floundered. He hadn't planned what to call me. Garbage didn't sound generous enough. "A tribute," he settled on. "Witch-blooded. We thought, given your hunt for such -"

He never finished, because that was when the wind shifted.

It came down off the moor and across the rise and it carried Greywater to him, wet wool and woodsmoke and horse, and it carried me. I felt the exact moment my scent reached him, because I watched it land.