The Offering

Chapter One - Daella

Today was going to be a bad day, I wasn't sure why, I just had that feeling, you know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach right before you get bad news? Well I did, and this morning it had started from the moment I woke up.

I went about my morning routine as normal, dressing and making sure the younger children were all dressed and sitting at the table for breakfast.

It was a sparse affair of bread and cheese as usual, even the tea tasted more watered down than usual.

"Quickly children, Tully, Ryder, make sure you are ready to go with your father." Mother calls out, coming in from outside with a load of wood in her arms. Tully stands quickly to help her with the wood and sets in down by the fire. She smiles at him in thanks. "Winnie, Ruth, you are both to go to school and I want you straight back here when you're done, no taking the long way and getting into trouble."

"Yes mum." They call out together.

Tully and Ryder are already heading to the door with a wave over their shoulders where father would be waiting for them, they are eighteen and sixteen and had finished school years ago, now they went to work with father out in the woods hunting. I wished I could go with them, I don't think I would be able to kill anything, but just being out in the woods would be an experience.

"Dae, you can get started on the chores." She says to me and I finish my piece of bread and start clearing the table.

That feeling of dread follows me throughout my day even though my day went on as any other. I clean the dishes and the kitchen, helping mother with baking bread, then go out into the garden to harvest some vegetables, next out to the animals, feeding the chickens and the goats. My days were always the same, monotonous and dull. And why was that? Because I was born a female. I had finished my schooling the day I started bleeding. I was officially a woman and my sole purpose was to prepare to become a wife and breed more children.

It had been that way for years, ever since my people made the treaty with the fae to get more land. It's been over a hundred years since the treaty was made, and now, every few decades the fae come to collect girls who are unmarried and over the age of eighteen. Those girls are taken to the fae kingdom and never seen again. Then the fae increase the borders of our land and all is good in the world.

That is how we are told to see it anyways. Our offerings are a blessing for our people, without the fae increasing our borders we would run out of space and not have enough room to farm or hunt, our already crowded villages would become even more so, everyone crammed into tiny huts, sharing beds and starving.

It has been almost thirty years since the last offering was made. They never told us when they would come, there was never any warning, my mother had been a teenager when they came last. She had told it like a story, strong handsome males in shining armour riding into the village on horseback, choosing the select few that met the rules of the treaty and whisking them away to a life of lavishness and happiness, being looked after by the fae lords and treated like princesses. As I grew older, listening to her tell the story to my sisters, preparing them just in case it was their future, there seemed this kind of want in her eyes when she spoke of the girls that were chosen. Like she imagined their lives in the fae kingdom, imagined the kind of lifestyle they would live, and I couldn't shake the feeling that she had wanted that life, that she had wanted to be one of the chosen and offered to the fae kingdom. Instead she had married my father and stayed here in the village, living a simple life of hard work and selflessness.

She had given the village six children, the youngest was Raine, he was almost four now and would keep both of us busy during our days.

The village elders never made it a rule to have more than four children, but it was always encouraged and those who did were always treated differently, at least that is what I thought. My mother was always treated kindly by the other women in the village and those that would come from neighbouring villages. She had even managed to be lucky enough to keep all of her pregnancies and not lose any, there were many other women who were not always so lucky. They were never blamed, but it was hard to look at them for a while after, there was always this pain and a level of shame, almost as if they blamed themselves for what happened.