Elara's Pov

The lottery stones were cold in my hands, and I remember thinking that was strange. Everything else about that morning was on fire the torches, the eyes of my neighbors, my own pulse but the stones were cold, like they already knew what they were about to do to me.

We drew them from the ash barrel outside the chapel every year on the same day, the first frost morning of autumn. Black stone, you stayed. White stone, you were given. It was supposed to be fair. Random. The goddess's will, the elders said, though I'd never once seen the goddess do anything for Thistlewood except let the frost come early and the crops fail twice a decade.

I drew black. I remember the relief hitting me so fast my knees nearly buckled.

Then I watched my sister draw white.

Lyssa didn't scream. That was the thing I couldn't stop thinking about later, she just stood there in the frost with the little white stone in her palm, sixteen years old, staring at it like it was a word in a language she didn't speak yet. Around us, the whole square went silent in that particular way a crowd goes silent when it's grateful it isn't them.

I didn't decide to move. My body simply did it before the rest of me caught up, I crossed the frozen ground, closed my hand over hers, and pried the white stone out of her fingers.

"Take mine," I said. "Black for black. No one will know."

"Elara"

"Take it." I was already pressing my black stone into her palm, folding her fingers around it like I could seal the trade shut with my hands alone.

The elders would know, of course. They always knew. But there is a difference between what the elders know and what the elders are willing to enforce, and I was gambling correctly, as it turned out that no one in Thistlewood wanted to argue about which Voss girl got sacrificed to the Alpha King, so long as a Voss girl was sacrificed at all.

That's the word we used. Sacrifice. Not tribute, not offering, sacrifice, the way you'd talk about a lamb.

Every year, one household in Thistlewood gave a daughter to the Court of Duskmoor, and in exchange, the King's tax collectors left the rest of us alone for a season. Nobody had explained to me, growing up, what exactly happened to the girls who went. Nobody explained because nobody knew. They didn't come back to tell us.

I was twenty-two years old and I had spent every autumn of my life being grateful it wasn't my turn, and then, on the one morning it actually mattered, I'd handed my turn away like it was a chore I didn't want my little sister stuck with.

I want to be honest about this part, because I think it matters for everything that came after: I wasn't brave. People have told this story back to me since the version where I sacrificed myself out of noble love and every time I want to laugh, or maybe cry, because that's not what it felt like standing in that square. It felt like watching my hand move without my permission. It felt like the only unbearable thing in the world was the idea of Lyssa being marched down the Blackwood Road instead of me, and so my body solved that problem before my mind had time to be afraid.

The fear came later. The fear came in waves, for the rest of my life, starting about four hours after the trade, when the King's men arrived at our door to collect me.

There were three of them. Duskmoor soldiers don't look like village guards they're built wrong for comfort, too broad through the shoulder, moving with a loose, coiled ease that made the hair on my arms stand up before they'd said a single word. Wolves in human shape, all three, and I understood then, really understood for the first time, that I was being given not to a kingdom but to a pack.

The one in front had a scar bisecting one eyebrow and didn't bother introducing himself. "Elara Voss?"

"Yes."

He looked at the paper in his hand, then at me, then at Lyssa standing in the doorway behind our mother, white-faced, silent, the black stone still clutched so hard in her fist I could see her knuckles through the skin.

"The record says Lyssa Voss."

"The record's wrong," I said, before anyone else could speak. "I'm the one going."

He studied me a long moment. I don't know what he was looking for hesitation, maybe, some sign that I'd bolt the second his back was turned, the way I imagine some girls had. I made myself stand very still and stare back at him, chin level, because I had already decided that whatever waited for me at the end of the Blackwood Road, I would not arrive there as someone who had been dragged.

"Suit yourself," he said finally, and something in his voice suggested he'd seen this particular substitution before, that it wasn't rare, that villages like mine had been quietly trading their daughters' fates back and forth for longer than I'd been alive. "Gather what you need. We leave within the hour."