Page 4 of Bought By the Manticore

My breath caught, and I stared at them in disbelief. “A Bride Market? But how?” My village had been too small for monsters to pay it much heed, and the few woodland clans that neighbored it had never shown interest in our people. And yet, the Blighted Ones had a bride market.

Charon and Medea didn’t answer, and that was when I knew. Whatever I needed to pay wouldn’t be gold. “What’s the price of entry?”

“A memory,” Charon replied, as relentless as the Thorn-Sickness. “A happy one.”

A happy memory. The words sat in my chest like a jagged stone. I had expected him to ask for pain, because I had that in abundance. Happy memories were a different currency entirely. I had been running dangerously short of them long before the Sickness took root.

“I don’t have many of those left,” I admitted. “I don’t think I ever did.”

“One is enough,” Medea assured me. She said it softly, but there was a weight behind the gentleness. “It was enough for the others who came before you.”

The others who’d come before me. If there had been others, and if they’d found a home just like Medea had said, surely I could also do it. “Do I choose which one? Which memory?”

Charon shook his head. “No. The lake decides. It makes its own choices and follows its own currents.”

The water lapped against the shore. I stared at the dark surface and tried to imagine what the lake would reach for if I let it. “And if what it takes is something I can’t afford to lose?”

“Then you’ll gain something else in its place,” Charon offered, unmoved by my hesitation. “Every woman who has knelt on this shore has asked me the same thing. Every one of them boarded my barge.”

“Is that supposed to be comforting?”

“I do not deal in comfort. I deal in passage.”

Medea touched my shoulder. Her bare hand rested against my skin, warm and comforting. She wasn’t the woman who’d presumably brought the Blight upon Colchis. Not anymore.

“He’s terrible at reassurance,” she said. “But he’s right. The price for what Asphodelia offers is high… but it is worth it.”

Worth it. I wasn’t sure what to think. I didn’t know what to believe, what to make of any of it. But what choice did I have, really?

True, I could stay here. I could sit down on the wet stone and let the Blight keep the Sickness at bay until my body decided it was done fighting. The asphodels would keep me company. Somewhere on the road, Fera would carry on without me, and that would be that.

But I’d decided when I left my cottage that something was still alive inside me. I’d decided when I gambled everything on the word of a one-eyed satyr that I still had a future.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll find a happy memory… somehow.”

That was the only thing I needed to say. Medea closed her hand around my wrist and pulled me aboard. Charon planted his pole against the deck. The barge shifted beneath us, barely a tremor on the still water, and began to move.

The shore fell away behind us. The mist closed over the asphodels and the rocky slope I’d walked down. At last, all of it disappeared into the fog as if it had never been there at all, and the lake swallowed us whole.

2

A Market of Meat

Ianthe & Skaros

I could no longer remember Fera’s face.

I’d noticed it that morning when I tried to recall one of her many lessons. She was frowning over her mortar and pestle with her sleeves rolled past her elbows.“Ianthe, this is how you grind the herbs, right?”she said.

The kitchen was there. The pestle was there. The stained apron, the smell of chamomile, her ancient, steady hands. All of it remained, vivid and sharp. But where her face should have been, there was nothing. A smooth, empty absence, like a painting someone had wiped clean.

Charon had warned me the price would be real. I hadn’t understood what he meant until now. And it was too late to turn back.

I sat on the stone bench in the waiting room behind the Agora of Echoes. My body felt better than it had in months. The death energy that hummed through every stone in Asphodelia had pressed the Sickness flat. The vines were still there beneath my skin, but they had gone so quiet I could almost forget them. My lungs worked. My legs held. I had slept through the night without waking once, which hadn’t happened since before the thorns first appeared.

The rest of me felt like someone had scooped out my chest and left the shell standing.

“You’re quiet this morning,” Medea said. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bench, her back against the wall. She’d been with me since the crossing, even insisting on giving me her old room in the quarters she shared with someone she called Aion. When Charon had leaned over me and taken one of my memories as a price, she’d been by my side.