Bought by the Manticore: Monsters’ Bride Market

Ianthe

“I’m not leaving you, Ianthe. I’m not abandoning you to die alone.”

I leaned against the wooden headboard and scowled at the old healer. She’d been the one to raise me when my own mother died in childbirth. I refused to drag her down with me, especially when I’d known for months this was coming.

“It’s all right, Healer Fera. This is for the best. The others need you more.”

Outside the small cottage, the panicked yells of the villagers grew louder. The day before yesterday, a ragged satyr named Silenus had come in with the terrifying news. The Blighted Lands were expanding and would swallow our small settlement within days. There was only one solution. To pack up and leave. But that wasn’t an option, not for me.

Fera reached for my arm, trailing her aged fingers over the dark thorns curling underneath my skin. “This is all my fault. I should have been better. Should have found a way.”

“Even the ancient nymph clans can’t heal the Thorn-Sickness.” I shook my head and forced myself to smile. “You can’t mend what the gods have decreed.”

Fera pressed her lips together so tightly they went white. I wanted to thank her for all the care she’d given me, for everything I’d learned at her knee. But the words simply refused to come. Somewhere in the distance, a satyr bellowed, “Leave everything we don’t need behind. We’re running out of time.”

The door to the cottage burst open. A familiar one-eyed satyr rushed in, his face flushed with exertion. It was Silenus, the same man who’d notified us of our imminent doom. “Healer, it’s time. The last of the centaurs have just left. You can’t stay any longer.”

“Watch me,” Fera insisted, refusing to look away from me.

But Silenus wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, thank the gods. He let out a loud whistle, and two other burly satyrs came from outside. Fera tried to cling to me, to fight them off. They dragged her out anyway. Before long, her angry wails faded into the distance. I was left alone with Silenus.

“Do you want to take pity on me, satyr?” I asked him. A part of me hated him because he’d been the final herald of my misfortune. The man who’d made all of them leave me behind. Maybe it was only fitting that he helped me find peace, instead of leaving me here to die alone. “One last good deed. To kill the cripple.”

The satyr made no move to kill me. Instead, he eyed me with something akin to… regret. “Listen, girl. Before I came here, I was an innkeeper in Colchis. I heard many things, some true, some not. But five years ago, a group of men came into my tavern.”

His gaze grew distant, and for the longest time, he didn’t speak at all. “They called themselves the Argonauts,” he finally continued. “Their leader… his name was Jason. A hero, many called him. And maybe he was. But that night, when he came to the inn, I heard him speak to his people.

“He knew where it was, the city of the dead. It’s real. He was looking for it. And… he had a girl with him. A quiet, pale woman.”

Silenus covered his mouth, as if he was struggling with the urge to throw up. “The woman ran that night. And then, the Blight came and ate Colchis whole.”

“W-Why are you telling me this?” I asked him. Perhaps it was uncharitable, but right then and there, I didn’t care about anyone else’s misery. “Why does it matter?”

If Silenus noticed my resentment, he didn’t show it. “Jason called that girl ‘death-touched’,” he replied between gritted teeth. “And I don’t know if it means anything, but he said the women who carry death in their blood belong with the Blighted Ones.”

I lay there, on the tiny, blood-stained cot, and stared at him. Was that supposed to be comforting? Maybe it was.

“I ran after that,” Silenus confessed, shaking ever so slightly. “I’ve been running ever since. From Colchis, Jason, and that pale girl. But you are not me. Maybe… maybe you should be running toward the Blight, not away from it.”

Without another word, Silenus turned on his heel and left the cottage. He didn’t even bother closing the door. Instead, he left it ajar, as if he’d decided to mock me one last time.

Running toward the Blight, indeed. I couldn’t even get up from the bed. I wasn’t going to run anywhere anytime soon. The best I could hope for was to close my eyes and sleep forever.

A stubborn vine slithered around my wrist and squeezed. The skin stretched taut in an obscene display, and the delicate bone threatened to snap. I stared at my own pulsing flesh, almost fascinated by the vicious cruelty of the Sickness.

Some wide-eyed nymphs in the village called it an ‘ancient gift’. “How blissful it must feel,” they’d once told me, “to have Korinos itself grow underneath your skin.”

But the older shamans did not share their awe. Fera had once said it was an old illness, so ancient it might very well predate the Shift. I believed her, and above everything else, I knew the intimate reality of the weakness and pain the Thorn-Sickness loved to inflict.

“Do you understand me?” I murmured, half to myself, half to the vines. “Can you tell if I have any hopes and dreams left? Do you want to consume those, too?”

Underneath the ragged blanket that covered my half-naked body, another vine squeezed my leg. That was answer enough.

I slumped onto the bed and stared at the wooden ceiling. I couldn’t close my eyes, not with all the pain I was in. But perhaps… maybe I could distract myself. Surely, the gods would show me the mercy Silenus hadn’t. Surely the Blight would come soon.

By now, the villagers had long left. I was all alone in the only home I’d ever known, in a cottage that already smelled like my own death. My only company? The thorns consuming me from the inside out.

And then I saw it. The glow. When Silenus had spoken of the Blight, I’d expected a dark fog, the kind that always lurked over the distant lands of the dead. Instead, a silver-blue light danced into the room through the cracked-open door. Any other day, I might have called it playful. Today, I found it… curious, perhaps? Intrigued?

Or maybe it was the Thorn-Sickness that was curious. Suddenly, the vines no longer seemed so inclined to devour me from within.

Time seemed to slow, and each individual fragment of light crystallized into a perfect, glowing bloom. An asphodel. Fera had told me of the flowers of the dead, but I’d never seen one myself. I hadn’t exactly hoped to, but maybe I’d been wrong about that. Maybe the nymphs hadn’t been entirely mistaken, and sometimes, even death could bring you unlikely blessings.

Slowly but surely, the cottage filled with flowers. They crawled toward me, their light blinding, yet impossibly soothing.

This was my chance. If I closed my eyes now, I’d fall asleep and never wake. I’d feel nothing. It would be easy. The beautiful glow of the flowers almost seemed to encourage me. But at the same time…

“Maybe you should be running toward the Blight,” Silenus had said before he left.

I’d thought the one-eyed satyr had lied to me, but what if he hadn’t? Ever since the Thorn-Sickness crawled underneath my skin, I’d known I was damned. Where, then, could I belong, if not in the lands that oozed damnation?

I had no strength left. The vines had drained me dry a long time ago, and without Fera, I wouldn’t have been able to even feed myself.

Somehow, I managed to throw the blanket off my frail body and slide out of bed. I didn’t know where I was going, but perhaps I didn’t need to. The Blight had come for me. It might lead me in the right direction.

Chapter I. The Satyr’s Advice

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The asphodels lit a path through the Blighted Lands. I followed them over black rock and dead earth, into groves of petrified trees. I fell more times than I could count, but each time, I got back up. The asphodels kept blooming ahead of me, patient and unhurried. It was almost as if they understood I could only move so fast.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped falling. The deeper I went into the Blighted Lands, the stronger my legs became. The Blight was doing something to the Sickness itself. It pressed the thorns down, the way a heavy snow quieted a restless field.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, the ground began to slope. The asphodels kept leading me forward, toward a distant, dark beach. Beyond it lay the water, a lake that spread as far as the eye could see.

The mere glimpse of it froze me in my tracks. But then I heard it. A woman’s voice drifting through the fog.

“Why are we waiting here, Charon? You said she’d come tonight.”

Charon. The name was unfamiliar, but it still made shivers rush down my spine. Each syllable carried a weight that threatened to bring me to my knees all over again. But I didn’t fall. Instead, I kept listening.

“She will come, or she will not,” Charon said, and somehow, his voice was both a whisper and a shout. “Either way, we do not leave this shore until the water releases us.”

He knew I was here. I could tell. But he wouldn’t come for me. I needed to step forward myself.

The woman huffed, obviously frustrated. “You’re talking in riddles again. You know that’s not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I have. The only one she needs.”

The woman fell silent, and I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I followed the final echoes of the voices down the slope, half-walking, half-sliding on the loose rock.

The mineral smell of the lake rolled over me as the ground leveled out. My bare feet found the wet stones of the shore. I kept moving until the mist parted enough to show me what was waiting.

A barge sat on the water close to the shore. It looked deceptively harmless, simple in build. Upon first glance, there was nothing particularly ornate about it. But when I squinted, I could see that the wood seemed to twitch and twist underneath the barge’s passengers. It was almost like the way the Thorn-Sickness moved underneath my skin, and yet, it didn’t scare me.

The woman I’d heard earlier was standing near the front with her arms folded. She was silver-haired and pale, and her skin carried a glow that reminded me of the asphodels. The moment she saw me, something in her expression shifted. It was a quick reassessment, as if she’d been expecting something different. Perhaps… worse?

Next to her stood a massive, hooded figure. Ancient coins drifted in slow orbits around him, and his eyes glowed with blue fire. He held a pole the length of a ship’s mast in one hand. When he turned toward me, the coins moved with him.

“You are death-touched,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“So I’ve been told.” I stopped at the water’s edge. “And you are… Charon.”

“Indeed.” He tilted his hooded head. “I am the ferryman of the dead. And you have walked a long way to ask a question you already know the answer to.”

“I like to be sure.” My legs remained steady beneath me, which still felt like a small miracle after months of barely being able to stand. “A satyr in my village told me the city on the other side takes women like me.”

“Takes is perhaps… a poor word.” The woman smiled at me, a small twist of lips that somehow made her look more alive. “We’re welcomed on the other side of the lake. We have a chance.”

It was almost too good to be true. My skepticism must have shown on my face because the woman kept speaking. “Perhaps you feel afraid or alone now. But you should know… my name is Medea, and my touch used to kill everything it came in contact with. Flowers, animals, people. Anything living that brushed against my skin withered and died.”

I looked at her hands. They were steady and uncovered. They looked completely harmless. Just hands. “What changed?” I asked. “What did you find there?”

“A home.” Her hand drifted to her chest, the kind of gesture that came from habit. “People who look at me and don’t see a weapon. Someone who touches me and doesn’t—”

She stopped herself, and the softness that crossed her face finished the thought better than any words could have.

I thought about what Silenus had told me, about the pale girl who’d run away from the Argonauts. This was her, the woman who’d guided the Blight toward Colchis. But it didn’t matter, not really.

“Medea, I’m sure she’s heard enough.” Charon’s pole scraped against the deck with a low grinding that cut through the quiet. “We are not here to trade histories.”

“I know.” Medea didn’t look away from me. “But she needs to know it’s worth it before you tell her the price of the Bride Market.”

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 something swallowed wrong. I had expected him to ask for pain, because I had that in abundance. Happy memories were a different currency entirely. My supply had been dwindling 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 gently, 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?

Oh, 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.