When Autumn was a little girl, she and her sisters used to climb into her mother’s bed at sunset and beg her for stories. Her mother wasn’t a great storyteller, and she didn’t have the patience to learn many different tales. But there was one that she knew by heart, and it was the story of why their land was cursed.
Once upon a time, there was a great king who undertook a perilous journey across the mountains to find a new land for his people. He discovered the vast prairies of Esternia, and split the land into four kingdoms, one for each of his sons. But his court wizard was an evil, twisted man, who also wanted a kingdom for his own.
There are many versions of this story, which ascribe many different sins, desires, or dark deeds to the wizard. But there are a few things that all of the tales agree on, and one of these things is the story of Esternia’s very first betrayal.
According to Autumn’s mother, and her mother before her, and everyone else in their family line going all the way back to the very first wife of the very first son, one night, in the height of summer, the Evil Wizard slit his king’s throat and used his blood in a dark ritual meant to bind the land of Esternia to his will. The four sons brought their armies together to avenge their father, and managed to drive him back to a dark forest at the foot of the mountains. There, it is said that the wizard lured them into an ambush. He killed each of the four sons, and their bones he ground into dust, and this dust he used to salt the limits of the forest. He claimed that long, dark stretch of land as his kingdom, and declared that no living being could cross into the forest without his curse befalling them.
For a thousand years, the Evil Wizard King has haunted the borders of Esternia, cutting their people off from the mountains and the lands beyond. For a thousand years, the four kingdoms have had to walk the tightrope between placating him and suffering his wrath. Sometimes, evil spirits pour out of his lands, slipping out from in between the trees and slaughtering everything in their path. Other times, droughts and famines befall the kingdoms for interminable years. The prairie dries up, the crops die, and the sun beats down on their people without regard nor mercy.
Every few decades, the kings of the four kingdoms decide to go to war; they raise vast armies and march upon the forest, intent on ridding the land of the wizard king once and for all. It always fails. The kings and their men make their ways into the trees, and do not come back. The years immediately afterwards are always dark ones. The spirits come in greater numbers; the earth shakes under their feet.
Inevitably, this is then followed by another bout of placating. The remaining royal families bow and scrape; they send tribute to the forest in a bid for forgiveness. Vast riches in elaborately carved coffers, the finest fruits of their orchards, and richly embroidered textiles get piled up on chariots and brought to the very edge of the trees for a tense hand-off.
The king, himself, never appears. Twisted, dark creatures emerge from the forest in his stead. They are his knights, made from the seeds of his very own magic, neither men nor beasts. Tall and hulking figures all of them, with helmets covering their faces and sporting an assortment of horns, claws, and hooves. They usually accept the tributes wordlessly, and then disappear back into the woods never to be seen again. Eventually the wrath of the evil king stop coming down on them quite so heavily, and life goes on.
But there is one type of tributes that always get a reaction from the knights, and seem to warrant the attention of the Dark King himself: brides.
Every few years, one of the kingdom will try their hand at finding the Evil Wizard King a wife. They will put forward a princess — or a duchess, or any number of pretty well bred young maiden — and offer the Dark King some agreement regarding alliances or succession, in the vain hopes that he will act like a proper king, for once, and engage in a spot of diplomacy. The answer is always the same: the poor young thing is invited to his castle for ‘consideration’. If she is still — well, the word he uses is ‘eligible’, but everyone knows it means ‘alive’ — if she is still eligible in two month’s time, then the Wizard King will agree to a wedding.
No maiden has yet reached the two months mark. None of these offers are ever sincere, in any case. The girls are merely another tribute to be given away as a necessary sacrifice to appease a capricious neighbour. The girls chosen are usually sick and already dying, or they volunteer for reasons no one dares to ask about. It’s been a long time since a girl went unwilling to the forest, not that this makes the whole thing any less of a tragedy. Merely a more palatable one.
No one knows what, exactly, the Evil Wizard King does with the princesses and maidens and other assorted young girls that are sent up to his castle. Perhaps he does marry them. Or he uses them in dark magic rituals. Or he eats them. But there is one thing that everyone knows for certain: things calm down when a wife is sent to him, so surely he must be doing something with them.
When Autumn was fifteen years old, her father went to war.
When she was twenty-five, her mother decided that she was pretty enough — and expendable enough — to be sent as an offering to the Dark King.
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