The sun had barely crested the low hills when the day's second round of work began.
Elara knelt at the riverbank, the cold water biting at her hands as she scrubbed a shirt against the smooth washboard stone. The icy current numbed her fingers until she could hardly feel the fabric beneath them, but she kept going. She always kept going.
Upstream, the river split the village's farmland from the border woods. A thin, sagging rope-bridge connected the two sides, though few humans crossed it willingly. On the far bank, beastfolk hunters sometimes paused to watch, their strange eyes unreadable, their animal features both fascinating and unsettling.
Marla's voice carried from behind her. "And mind you don't waste the soap! It costs more than you're worth, girl!"
Elara pressed her lips together and said nothing. Words, here, were coins she could not afford to spend.
When the washing was done, she carried the damp laundry back toward the house, her arms aching beneath the weight. She passed Garrick on the porch, sharpening the curved blade of a hay scythe. He didn't look up from his work, but his words found her.
"Don't think I didn't see you lingering by the fence this morning. Beastfolk'll gut you as soon as look at you. Stay away from that treeline, unless you're looking to end up like your parents."
The words landed like stones in her stomach. She wanted to say that the beastfolk were not all killers. That the draybeasts in the stalls treated her with more respect than this family ever had. But she kept walking.
By midday, the smell of baking bread curled out of the kitchen windows. Marla's voice barked orders between the clatter of pans, set the table, fetch water, mend the tear in Garrick's coat.
Elara obeyed, silent as shadow, until she noticed the loaf of bread cooling on the windowsill. Perfect, golden-crusted, and fragrant. Her stomach tightened painfully; she'd eaten nothing but a crust and weak broth at dawn.
Marla never let her have the first cut.
Elara glanced toward the doorway. No one. Her hand hesitated, then darted forward. She tore off a piece no larger than her palm, slipping it into the pocket of her apron.
It wasn't much. Just enough to keep the hunger from gnawing quite so loudly. But it was hers, taken, not given.
The tiniest of rebellions.
That evening, she was sent to gather firewood from the edge of the forest. The trees there grew close together, their trunks dark and slick with moss, the canopy thick enough to turn daylight into green-shadowed dusk.
She moved quickly, gathering fallen branches into her arms, but her gaze kept flicking to the deeper woods.
Somewhere in there, that cloaked figure had stood. Somewhere in there, a voice had told her she had "her" eyes.
A shiver ran down her spine. She told herself it was just the cold.
By the time she returned, the sky had gone bruised-purple with dusk. Smoke curled from the chimney, and the faint hum of distant music from the village drifted through the air, laughter, fiddles, and the deep thrum of drums.
Elara paused, watching the faint glow of festival lanterns far down the road. She had never been to one. Marla always said they couldn't spare the help.
For a moment, she imagined walking there, slipping into the crowd, letting the music wash over her. For a moment, she imagined no one calling her name, no one telling her where she belonged.
But the moment passed. She stepped back into the yard, the firewood heavy in her arms.
Far away, in the shadowed forest, something unseen shifted. A spark of awareness.
The world was watching her now.
And though Elara didn't yet know it, the quiet rebellions would not stay quiet for long.