“Never trust a man if you can’t read the inside of his head.” Edrei sneered as she slammed the dinner plates down onto the table. Maya, slightly spattered with hot oil from her plate, winced and sneaked a look at her father. His expression flickered between annoyance and amusement, and she wondered what he had done now. She didn’t have to wait long to find out.

Flinging herself into a chair, Edrei shot daggers at her husband, who stared levelly at his food. “Do you know what your father was doing when he couldn’t help us with that breach birth, because he “had to work late in the field”?” Her voice was rumbling dangerously, trembling, barely controlled, close to eruption. Maya twitched anxiously. She hated when her mother shouted. It never ended well.

‘He was drinking. In the Bar. With that SLUT.’ Edrei jabbed the air violently with her finger for emphasis. Maya gasped.

‘Mother! Lana is a barmaid. Just because Papa is drinking, doesn’t mean he is drinking WITH her.’ The words, intended as an attempt to sooth the situation, were out before Maya could stop them. She regretted them the moment she saw her mother’s eyes narrow.

‘And what would you know about it?’ Edrei shrieked. ‘If I find out YOU’VE been anywhere near that stinking, rotten den of corruption I’ll skin you so raw…’

‘Speaking of which, don’t you think you’d best keep yer voice down? If someone hears you speaking ter me like that, then, well…’ Markor grunted meaningfully and raised his eyes. He left the threat hanging. Maya held her breath. Edrei was so full of rage it didn’t seem like her small, wiry body could contain it all. She wanted to let it rip through her, let it blast the smirk from his face. Her cheeks were almost purple and her eyes were wide and wild. Then, in a moment, she sagged. Maya watched her visibly deflate, as if the temper blew out of her in a long, frustrated breath.

‘That’s better,’ Markor smiled. ‘Do you have anything you’d like to say to me now you’re thinking straight?’

‘I’m sorry for losing my temper, husband. Of course you are allowed to do anything you see fit.’ Edrei’s throat tightened. ‘Within the confines of your wedding vows, obviously,’ she couldn’t resist shooting back at him. Markor smiled faintly. ‘Still full of bile, dear. That’s a shame. Mebbe missing this meal and goin’ to bed early will help dispel yer acid.’

Edrei opened her mouth to retort, but Markor cut her off. ‘Unless, of course, you want me ter mention this unforgivable behaviour at the next meeting? Then you can see how forgiving the Councilmen are to women who don’t know their place. What was it last week for Thatcher’s wife? Two days in the stocks for raising her voice to him, with mandatory pelting from all women over 16? Oh, and the Hag’s Gag for a month for gossiping that his bedroom technique wouldn’t get a baby inside her unless her womb shifted places with her bowels. Disgusting betrayal.’ He looked back down at his food, dismissively. He didn’t need to watch and see if Edrei would follow his suggestion. Picking up his fork, he started spearing meat into his mouth. His wife watched him for a few seconds, her mouth ajar, then she turned away with her shoulders drooping and clomped gracelessly up the stairs.

Maya watched her go, feeling an ache of sadness in her chest. She knew her mother hadn’t eaten since a hurriedly swallowed chunk of bread at dawn, as she’d stumbled out of the door still half-asleep to tend to the chickens. Father had left so many chores that there hadn’t been time for lunch, and Maya knew Mother would be feeling just as achingly hungry as she herself had been right up until about three minutes ago. Now dread and misery had tied her stomach into a knot and she didn’t know if she’d be able to force this food down.

Her father was eating with drunken gusto. If he was still feeling cruelly inclined in the morning, he might refuse mother her breakfast too and then she would be too weak to complete her tasks for the day. The last time that had happened, it had been Maya’s own fault. Father had refused Maya her food for the day, and Edrei has slipped Maya her own ration. It had been harvest time then, too, and they had been digging and sweating and heaving and hauling for so many long hours that eventually Edrei had collapsed with exhaustion. That night, Markor had beaten her until she could barely walk, then made her get up even earlier and go back out to the fields the next day. Her bones were cracked, her skin was broken, but her spirit still burned and she worked twice as hard as she had the day before, despite every movement tearing pain through her trembling frame.

Maya wondered where that spirit came from, whether it was a test from the gods to put the fire of a man in the weak vessel of a woman. Edrei must have taken more punishment than most other women in the village, but she still kept fighting. Where had that come from? And for how long could she deny her proper role in the world? Would she fight until she died, her exhausted body giving out before her fierce will? Or would she finally submit, let herself be tamed and overruled, as was proper?

Maya realised the room was dangerously silent. Looking up, she met her father’s glassy, questioning gaze. Smiling, she raised her food to her mouth and chewed automatically. He nodded and carried on, his plate nearly empty. She wished she knew how to make him happier, but he had always resented that she had been a pointless girl instead of a healthy heir. Her only use to him was as trade to another farmer who wanted a wife for their son, but sadly many girls had been born in the same years as she had so as a commodity Maya had limited value in a saturated market. She had tried so hard to make herself a more worthy trade – she worked endlessly, and kept any shadow of dishonour from her name, but her endeavours made her muscular, and she was considered plain and dull. Her father used to joke that when she was mucking out the pigs, he lost sight of which was his dinner and which was his daughter. His friends laughed riotously when he told them; they called her Piglet for months afterwards, and pinched her roughly to make her squeal.

She had taken to scurrying around with her head down, avoiding eye contact and trying to be beneath notice, until her father had caught her at it and whipped her in the street with his belt. ‘You’re a month off marrying age. I don’t want people to think I sired a mouse,’ he screeched through gritted teeth. ‘If no-one wants you, you know where you’ll end up.’

Maya had prayed he meant the Spinster hut, where single women lived together in a cold, stone bunkhouse, hoping a widowed husband would come and pick them out. Mostly, though, they spent their days completing the communal tasks the wives were too busy for, or helping them around the house if they had recently given birth. Yet, knowing her father, he intended on offloading her completely and making some money to boot by selling her to one of the slaving ships that sailed up to the coast every couple of months. She remembered being five years old when Smirna, her neighbour, spitefully whispered to her a story about a slave who had had her wrists tied to a barrel, before her little fingers were chopped off joint by joint and fed to her after she had answered her master back. Smirna had wanted Maya to fetch some firewood he had been sent out for, but the shadows in the woodshed had scared her too much. She had refused, and earned the tale as a punishment from a child only two years older than she was. The image had haunted her dreams for a week after, and when she finally admitted to her furious father why she kept waking up screaming, he had burst out with laughter and wished he’d had a son like that instead of a wet, snivelling daughter. The next day, he had come home with an empty Smokewater barrel which he set next to his chair by the fireplace. Maya had stared at it with wild-eyed terror. Her father tapped it meaningfully any time he felt she wasn’t completing her chores fast enough, or if he just wanted the enjoyment of seeing her footsteps hurrying twice as fast across the kitchen floor to bring him his food.

After dinner, Maya cleared away the plates and wiped down the table while her father smoked silently, his feet up on that very barrel. She wondered if she would be allowed to go up to bed early when she had finished putting away the animals, but as soon as he cleared his throat she could tell something was wrong. She pretended not to notice him staring at her, and was just about to slip out of the door to see to the pigs when he called her to sit back down. She took a place near him, aware of how hard it was not to shift uncomfortably under his scrutiny.

‘Yer mother was right abou’ one thing,’ he began, sounding as always like he had had the first part of a conversation in his head and was bringing her in half-way through. ‘I wasn’ alone in the bar. A group of us got to talkin’, an’…’ he shrugged. ‘Well, you’re not the brightest spark, but you must have realised marrying season will be done with once the harvest is finished, and that’s just a half turn from now. Turns out most of the wedding matches have been made already. The lads have all been paired with the lasses they fancied, or a second choice if that lass’s father got a better offer. Thing of it is, all the lads of a promising age have been an’ done their transacting, and none asked fer you.’ He looked her square in the face, and she blushed under his obvious distaste and the shame of his statement. No offer at all, not even from one of the lowly Tanner boys who always smelled of piss and lived together in a single cold basement room.

Markor enjoyed her discomfort for a while, even breaking out into a smile when her eyes inevitably travelled to the Smokewater barrel for the merest second before she snapped her gaze back to the floor. He rapped his fingers in a gentle manner across the top of it for a few moments. ‘So you’ll be happy to know I came to another arrangement for you.’ His grin widened as she shuddered and clenched her hands into fists, as if trying to keep her fingers hidden. Suddenly he slammed his whole hand down hard on the wood, and Maya leaped from her seat with a little scream. Markor laughed until he was wheezing, gesturing between each struggling breath that she should sit down again. She nervously perched on the edge of the stool, dreading what he might tell her when he could speak. Eventually he managed to choke down his guffaws, and cleared his throat again. ‘No no, little Piglet, I’ve not sold you to the slavers. Tho I may have got a better price for you if I had.’

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A…price? Maya’s heart was pounding almost as loudly as her ears were rushing. Knowing her father when he’d been drinking, he could have traded her for anything. She didn’t have to wait long to find out.

‘Arta Butcherson mentioned how he was lonely since his wife had that unfortunate accident,’ he told her. ‘Said he wasn’t picky about his women, so long as they could cook and clean and didn’t faint at the sight of the blood when he was working. I told him he could have my little Piglet in exchange for a full-grown breeding sow, and he accepted. So you’re to be married after all, and he’s not so old he can’t make a breeding sow out of you too!’ His crude joke set him off laughing again, and his eyes were so blind with tears of mirth that he didn’t see her horror.

Arta Butcherson was 63, so fat he couldn’t stand from a chair without sweating and panting, and was well known to be just as brutal outside his meatfarm as he was in it. The ‘accident’ that had finally killed off his long suffering wife Melli had been widely disputed amongst the gossipers in the market; Arta’s story - that she had fallen down the stairs when carrying too much laundry, then in her disorientation wandered (on a broken leg, with a fractured skull) down to the lake where she had tumbled in and drowned – seemed too ridiculous for words. Who would even be doing laundry so many hours before dawn? But Arta was a long-standing councilman, and his word, however ridiculous, was law. ‘She was well known for being clumsy’, Arta had postulated at her burial, ‘as attested to by the constant bruises on her face and arms. Forever walking into doors and tables, that one.’ Maya had not been even slightly surprised at the lack of sorrow in his face, or the shortness of his mourning period afterwards. She didn’t doubt for a second that her own fate would be any different, and just as torturous at it might have been on a slaver ship. In fact, those cleavers he used to hack at the meat were just perfect for taking off a finger joint…

Thanking her father quietly for his actions on her behalf, Maya hurried outside. Arta’s hanging, pouchy jowls and bulbous red nose floated in front of her eyes as she secured the pigs in their pen and hurried round to shoot the fox-locks on the chicken huts. His giant, hammy fists swung pendulously through her thoughts as she quickly gathered eggs from the nesting boxes and slipped them into her apron pocket. The goats looked up hopefully as she shut them in, but she hadn’t even thought to bring them any scraps today and they bleated their reproval as she walked away. Finally, she checked into the separate little pen where the recent births were kept, and saw mother and kid were doing well despite the difficult labour. Only the strong survive, she thought to herself bitterly. Usually she would return home straight away, rather than risk her father’s accusations about where she had been, but he had drunk enough that he would be passed out and snoring by now and she could risk a walk to calm her racing thoughts.

The moon was at the mid-point of its turn, an almost invisible sliver amongst the clouds. There was no fear of her being seen as she wandered to the centre of the village, as long as she avoided the soft pools of firelight gently glowing from the nearby windows. She trod quietly, picking her way carefully along the cracked and dusty path until she got to the crossroads. Should she go down to the lake, with its peacefully lapping waters and the softly whispering rushes dancing in the breeze? Or should she go up, past the golden rows of wheat and the verdant fields of corn? Up would eventually bring her to the coast path, and she could breathe the salt into her lungs and dream of escaping on a ship. Not the filthy, stinking tubs the slavers hauled about in, but a large, graceful swan of a ship which could fly fearlessly through the waves and carry her to a different life. One where she wasn’t condemned to be wed to Arta Butcherson and his glinting, wolfish eyes.

Up it was then, up to allow herself one last fantasy before the final link on her chain was forged and she was irrevocably bound to a despicable man.

As she climbed the hill, Maya found her tension relaxing, as if her distance from the village was unclenching something in her chest. She loved the feel of the red, crumbling earth on the soles of her feet and between her toes, loved the dust as it kicked up and clung to her bare legs. She thought of how some of the richer men in the village liked to dress their wives up in clingy stockings, painfully narrow and tiny shoes with staggeringly high heels, and breathlessly tight dresses, to show them off and taunt other men with what they could not have. Maya felt lucky that she would not be one of those women, until she remembered exactly how far her luck had carried her. Pushing the thought away, she climbed faster, brushing her hands over the whiskery heads of wheat and enjoying the scratchy roughness on her palm.

It was so dark she could only see an arm’s stretch or two in front of her, but she knew this path as well as her own home and wasn’t worried about wandering off course. As soon as she passed the final field of towering corn, the path started to rise steeply and veer off to the right, and she followed it up to the boundary post then turned left, to the clifftops. She had a favourite spot up there, a little hollow between two rocks where she could nestle safely and stare out at the vast inky expanse of the Tertian sea. Maya had only ever been up here at night, and only when she knew there was no risk of her parents noticing her absence. Hoth only knew what kind of a beating she would get if her father ever caught her sneaking out at night. Probably her last ever one, knowing his temper.

Cradled between the boulders, Maya closed her eyes and listened to the comfortable roar of the waves bursting over the rocks below. A few years ago, when she was 12, she had developed a strange fascination towards a boy four years her elder. Lucien had the typical dark tanned skin of a labourer, and thick, wild black hair which fell into the most piercing, rich blue eyes she had ever seen. She had worried she was getting ill, as her legs had become weak every time she caught sight of him and her gut roiled under her tunic. One day her father had sent her off to buy four sacks of sowing grain from Lucien’s uncle, not considering for a second how she might carry them home again; just one weighed half as much as she did. Lucien had taken pity on her, loaded them into a handcart and set off with her towards Markor’s farmstead. As they walked, he had told her that he resented being a farmer, that he had always wanted to be a fisherman as he had been told his own father was.

Maya had wanted to ask where his father lived, and why he wasn’t in the village with Lucien, but her tongue was tied. Instead, she listened, awestruck, as he told her about the mer-people who lived under the sea. They were beautiful but fierce, he told her, and they fell in love with fishermen who were brave enough to ride the storm-waves in their little boats. Once they were in love, they would never give up the hunt, tempting their marked man with plaintive songs and rare shells and shining treasures from sunken ships. The fishermen would fall under their spell, tangled in the magic they wove, and allow themselves to be pulled under the churning, foaming waters by slender but powerful white arms and coral kisses. Those men didn’t die, but they couldn’t live without the air in their lungs, and when their chests filled with water and their lips cracked with brine they became creatures of the sea, ghosts with pale faces which floated just below the waterline where the waves break, singing the songs that lured them to their graves, fingers webbed with seaweed reaching up, up, longingly up towards the air that they would never breathe again.

By the time they had reached Markor’s farm, Maya was spellbound by Lucien, and the mer-people, and the haunting world beneath the sea. It always returned to her, that memory, whenever she came up here. Every crash of the waves brought her visions of those pale faces with staring eyes and gasping mouths, and she shivered deliciously at the memory of Lucien’s eyes shining as he span his story. He had never married, even though he was long past the age and much sought after. He had declined every offer, even when one came from the richest landowner in the village. Instead, he had begged his uncle to let him join the travelling market, carrying the village’s produce over the mountains to the other settlements in order to trade for whatever the village didn’t produce itself. He was on the move for 9 out of the 13 turns in a year, and Maya always looked forward to the four turns over winter when he was forced to come home while the mountains were so heavy with snow they became untraversable. She would willingly give her left arm to be wedded to him instead.

The evening was warm, and Maya was reluctant to return home. As long as she stayed up here, she could be transacted to Lucien, making plans to buy their own boat and spend their days fishing and their nights telling stories. Or they could travel further afield, to fabled lands like Mercura, where you could buy anything your mind could imagine, and Rasci, the land of fire and spice. Why waste your life trading goats’ cheese and woollen blankets, when she had heard you could buy a ball so smooth it felt like warm ice, which glowed inside with the fire of some trapped spirit.

That’s not the world for you, though, Piglet. Her traitorous thoughts hauled her back down to earth before her imagination could take her flying too far. That’s the world for the beautiful and graceful, for the brave and the spirited. Definitely not the world for the dumpy, clumsy, filthy, unmarriageable mouse you turned out to be.

Maya opened her eyes, the fantasy shattered with her own grim reality. She had lost track of how long she had been up here, but she knew it would be pushing it to extend her stay. Pulling herself up, she dusted off her tunic and turned for home. Instantly, her heart shot into her mouth in terror. The blood red glow in the sky signalled dawn. She must have slept without realising! She would never get back without being noticed by the wives and daughters going about their morning chores. Tripping over her own feet in her panic, she stumbled forwards a few steps before her brain took over again and pulled her to a halt.

The village was south-west from here. The sun would be rising behind her, not in front. So that glow couldn’t be dawn.

It could only be fire.

Running again now, she ignored the sharp rocks and stones her feet landed on as she flew down the path along the cliffs. The fire must be enormous, to have lit up the sky like that. Was one of the fields on fire? They were so dry at this time of year…

Maya skidded to a stop as the path turned towards the village. It wasn’t one of the fields. It was all of them. Every field, every building, everything in sight. All of it, burning with a heat she swore she could feel all the way up on the cliff. Sounds were floating up to her now, along with the smell of the smoke. She could hear wood cracking, and straw sizzling, and….and…screaming, the thoughts forced their way into her head despite her trying to resist them. The animals are screaming, and the people are screaming, because none of them can escape the flames. All the chickens and the pigs and the goats you closed in, they’re trapped, and all the people in the houses, they can’t get to the doors because the doors are burning too, and it will be just like a giant oven, crisping up their skin and scorching their flesh and shrivelling their hair and…

Maya collapsed before she knew it was happening and lay unconscious in the dust while her home turned to ash.