Chapter One - Not Plain

(Adelaide)

The house was too quiet for the day before a sacrifice.

Adelaide felt the silence pressing against the walls, thick and heavy, like the air before a storm. Even the dust motes seemed to hang motionless, suspended between breaths, as if the whole house were listening for a sound it dreaded but knew was coming. No clatter of pots, no humming from the hearth. Just the creak of old timbers and the soft hiss of the fire in the stove. Somewhere in the roof, a loose shingle ticked faintly with the shift of the cold, a slow, irregular heartbeat.

“Stand still.”

Her mother’s fingers pinched at the back of her dress, tugging the neckline higher. Adelaide stared at her reflection in the warped bit of polished tin hanging on the wall. The girl looking back at her had restless eyes, a stubborn jaw, and dark hair that refused to stay pinned no matter how many times her mother spat on her fingers and smoothed it. A lock slipped free, defiant as smoke, curling along her temple like it had a will of its own. Adelaide almost smiled; even her hair refused to submit.

“You’re strangling me,” Adelaide said, voice flat.

“You’ll live.” Her mother yanked again. “You will not slouch in front of the Elders. Shoulders back.”

Adelaide rolled her shoulders anyway, deliberately loosening them. The linen rasped over her skin, rough and familiar, smelling faintly of lye soap and cold air

“They’re just old men in long coats, not kings,” she groaned in annoyance.

“Adelaide.” Her mother’s voice snapped like a whip. “You watch your tongue.”

From the doorway, her younger sister sucked in a breath. “Please don’t start,” the girl whispered.

Adelaide met her sister’s gaze in the tin. Lyra hovered there, fingers twisting in the hem of her own faded dress, big brown eyes already shining with unshed tears. She looked too small for fifteen. Too soft. Too breakable.

Too easy to choose.

Adelaide’s chest tightened. A strange, prickling heat crawled over her arms, like the moment before she touched a spark—an old, familiar warning she couldn’t name, only feel.

“Are you listening to me?” her mother asked sharply.

“I hear you,” Adelaide said. “You’ve been saying the same thing all week.”

Her mother stepped around to face her. There were new lines around her mouth this year, carved deep by worry. The candlelight made her look older than her thirty-odd years. She smelled of lavender soap and woodsmoke and the faint sour edge of sleepless nights. There were shadows beneath her eyes that hadn’t been there last winter, hollows Adelaide could fit all of her questions inside.

“This is not like every year,” Mother said. “This is a Selection year. The Devil’s decade closes at midnight tomorrow. The Elders will be watching every girl who’s come of age. They’ve already been…talking.”

“Talking about what?” Adelaide asked, even though she already knew. They’d felt the eyes in the market. Heard the whispers when she walked past. She could still feel the brush of those glances against her skin, a crawling sensation that clung long after she’d stepped out of sight.

“About you.” Her mother didn’t soften the blow. She never did. “About your temper. The way you speak. The way you look.”

Adelaide’s skin prickled, as if all those unseen eyes had suddenly turned on her in this cramped kitchen. “What about the way I look?”

“You’re…not plain,” Lyra offered carefully. “That’s all she means.”

“Not plain,” Adelaide repeated, one brow lifting. “That’s what they think the Devil cares about? Looks?”

Her mother’s hand flew to the charm at her throat—a small disk of iron stamped with the old symbol of the sun, worn smooth by years of grasping. “Lower your voice.”

Adelaide’s lips twitched. “Are you afraid he’ll hear me?”

“Yes.” Her mother’s fingers tightened until her knuckles blanched. “I am always afraid he will hear.”

The words hung between them, colder than the draught seeping under the door. For a heartbeat, Adelaide imagined a presence pressed against the world just beyond their walls, listening the way the house was listening. A weight on the other side of a thin, invisible curtain.

Silence wrapped around them again. Outside, in the narrow lane, a cart creaked past, wheels crunching over packed dirt and stray pebbles. Somewhere, a dog barked once and was sharply shushed. The entire village of Fire’s Peak felt like it was holding its breath. Even the crows—usually noisy and quarrelsome at this hour—were quiet, perched like smudges of ink along the chapel roofline.

Adelaide glanced at the small square window above the basin. The sky beyond was white-grey, winter clouds layered thick like wool. Smoke from distant chimneys rose in thin columns, straight up, unmoving in the windless air. They said that was a sign—when the smoke rose like that, the veil between worlds thinned, and the Devil could slip through. As she watched, the smoke from their own chimney wavered, then speared skyward in a perfect line, as if something unseen had taken hold of it and pulled. A shiver dragged down her spine.

“If you can’t be modest,” her mother said, dragging her attention back, “at least try not to draw attention to yourself.”

“So you want me invisible?” Adelaide asked.

“I want you safe.”

“Being chosen is supposed to be an honour,” Adelaide said, letting the word drip with scorn. “Isn’t that what they teach us every Feast of the Veil? ‘To serve ten years is to shield the village for ten more.’”

Her mother’s face twisted. “That is what they say to sleep at night.”

Lyra’s breath hitched. “Mama…”

Her mother caught herself, closing her eyes briefly, as if pulling her words back inside. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, but no less intense.

“You both listen to me,” she said. “Tomorrow, when the bell rings, you will stand straight. You will keep your eyes down. You will not fidget. You will not speak unless spoken to. You will look like good, quiet daughters. Not…trouble.”

Adelaide’s mouth curved. “I’m not very good at that.”

“I know,” her mother said quietly. “That is what frightens me.”

The honesty in the admission struck harder than any sermon. For a moment, Adelaide saw past the stern lines and sharp words to the girl her mother must once have been—wild-eyed, perhaps, and unafraid to speak. A girl who’d learned fear the hard way. Adelaide swallowed against the sudden tightness in her throat.

Lyra stepped closer, the floorboard under her bare foot squeaking. “I’ll do it,” she said quickly. “I’ll be good. I’ll be so good they won’t even see me. They won’t have any reason to pick me.”

She pressed her hands over the iron charm that hung at her own throat, identical to their mother’s, her fingers trembling. Her wrists were thin, bones sharp beneath pale skin. Adelaide’s gaze lingered there. Tomorrow, those wrists would be tied with red thread—marking her as sixteen. Eligible. If she had been born just two days later, she would have been free. The injustice burned like swallowed coal. Two days. Two days was the distance between the girl and the offering.

Adelaide looked away. “No one is going to pick you,” she said, forcing certainty into her voice. “They have fifteen other girls to choose from.”

“Sixteen,” Lyra whispered. “There have to be sixteen.”

“Then you’ll be the seventeenth,” Adelaide said. “Too many. So, safe.”

“You know that’s not how it works,” her mother said tiredly. “The Devil does not care what the records say. Only who runs.”

“He only cares about one, doesn’t he?” Adelaide snapped. “One woman killed. One woman’s life taken, every ten years. One woman gone. And the rest of you call it mercy.”

Her mother’s hand cracked across her cheek before Adelaide saw it coming. The slap echoed in the small kitchen, sharp as a breaking twig.

Adelaide staggered back a step, hand flying to her face. Heat flared under her palm, the sting making her eyes water. For a heartbeat, no one moved. The fire popped, spitting a spark up the blackened stone. The scent of singed ash and hot iron flooded her nose, grounding her in the moment.

Her mother stared at her own hand, horror and regret chasing each other across her features. “I—Adelaide, I didn’t—”

Lyra made a small sound, like a wounded animal. “Mama…”

Adelaide tasted metal from where her teeth had caught the inside of her lip. The pain cut through the fog of dread that had hung over her all morning. Strangely, it steadied her. Pain she understood. Pain obeyed rules. Fear did not.

“That was for blasphemy?” she asked, voice low.

“That was because I cannot bear to hear you talk about it like you’re…above it,” her mother said, breathing hard. “You think you see clearly, but you are blind. You do not know what it is to wait for the day the Devil comes. To count the ten years not in seasons, but in screams in your dreams.”

Her eyes glazed over, staring somewhere past Adelaide. “I was your age when they called my name. I remember the way everyone looked at me. Some with pity. Some with relief that it was not them. Do you think I felt honoured? I was sick with fear. And yet I smiled, because that was what my mother needed to see to stay sane.”