Chapter Text
Depending on who you ask, I was a debtor, used to pay a debt, a criminal, or simply inconsequential.
Generally I’ve been able to talk myself out of the worst of it. The North is hard, and it’s harder when you’re trying to feed a full family. So I took myself away and found myself in Whitewall. My hands weren’t my own anymore, but my voice was. I could speak my way into a little more food, out of the worst of the trouble. And maybe sometimes I asked for more forgiveness than permission.
I didn’t do anything worth a death sentence, but Whitewall needs sacrifices, the same way home had. I gave myself to Whitewall, and eventually, it took.
But the Fair Folk at least listened, as long as my arguments were pretty and well-formed. I caught one of them nodding along when I argued that we needed more time to find them something better suited, interlaced with comments that I was so far beneath them, so minor, that I was hardly worth their concern.
One looked at me with a face that is not a face and cupped the side of my head. “All right, little thing. You can go.” (At their touch my ears shifted to match their fins, my eyes changed how they saw and later I would learn they had changed from palest blue to true violet.) In the same moment, the light of Sol Invictus surrounded me.
I had lived in Whitewall long enough to rattle out in one rapid breath: “I have been sent with these eleven and claim them as my retinue.” The fae who had been touching me hissed and jerked back, and so did every single one of them from everyone I was with. My tongue was suddenly quicker than it had ever been. I argued for time. I got it.
The Syndics—all smiles, now, all love now that I was one of their chosen—granted me aid. Led me to Ridi. Whose mind twisted well enough to help me out of the tithe entirely, with only a courtesy gift for the inconvenience.
“I had been cast out of Whitewall. No citizen, no Syndic, and no hired mercenary has interfered with your tithe. It is served.” The argument is full of holes, but to argue it the Fair Folk would have to argue that the payer is responsible for the payment, and once the precedent is noted they are too eager to keep their ability to give rotten payments to argue.