The Tribute

The ropes cut into my wrists, but I stopped feeling them an hour ago.

My father's crew lashed me to the mainmast at dawn. They used the good rope, the expensive stuff they save for heavy cargo. I suppose that's fitting. I'm the heaviest cargo they've ever carried, even though I weigh less than a barrel of salt fish.

Burden. Liability. Mistake.

Now: tribute.

"The kraken rises at sunset," my brother Finn had said, not meeting my gaze. "It'll be quick."

He doesn't know that. No one does. The tributes don't come back to describe the experience.

I watch the sun sink toward the water. Gold bleeding into orange into red, the sky split open and spilling. The crew stays below deck, cowards, every one of them. They tied me up here and fled to their bunks, leaving me alone with the dying light and the endless, patient sea.

My father didn't even say goodbye.

I'd known since I was twelve he'd sell me eventually. To a merchant, a minor lord, someone who wanted a wife who could read ledgers and wouldn't complain about loveless arrangements. I just didn't expect him to sell me to the depths themselves.

The water changes color as the sun touches the horizon. Darker. Deeper. Something moves beneath the surface, a shadow that shouldn't exist, spreading like something alive.

I should be screaming. That's what tributes do. They scream and cry and beg, and the monster rises anyway, and their fear is the last thing they taste before the dark swallows them whole.

I'm not screaming.

Maybe I'm too tired. Twenty-five years of screaming silently, where no one could hear, that wears on a person. I've spent my whole life being afraid: afraid of failure, afraid of my father's disappointment, afraid of being exactly what everyone said I was.

Disposable. Forgettable. Nothing.

If I'm going to die, I'm dying on my own terms. Not as a screaming sacrifice. Not as prey.

As something else.

The shadow rises.

I've heard the stories, but stories lie. They say the kraken is the size of a ship. They say its tentacles can crush hulls like eggshells. They say its eyes glow like lanterns in the deep.

The stories are wrong.

It's not the size of a ship. It's bigger. The shadow that surfaces blocks out the sunset entirely, and I realize I'm looking at one tentacle, just one, rising from the water like a god's finger pointing at the sky. Then another. Another. Eight massive limbs breaching the surface, each one thick as our mainmast, each one covered in suckers the size of dinner plates.

The head rises last.

The eyes aren't like lanterns. They're like moons, pale, luminous, each one the size of a wagon wheel. They swivel toward our ship, toward the mast, toward me.

I should be screaming.

The tentacles wrap around the hull. Wood groans. Someone below deck whimpers, probably Finn, who was always more coward than I gave him credit for.

One tentacle rises higher, higher, and I watch it approach like I'm watching someone else's death. The sucker at its tip hovers inches from my face. Up close, I can see the texture: ridged, muscular, wet with brine.

It could crush me. One flex, and I'd be nothing but a stain on the mast my father loves more than his children.

Instead, it waits.

The kraken's eyes focus on me. Not the ship. Not the cowering crew. Me.

Waiting.

For the scream, probably. For the fear that feeds it. For the terror that every tribute has offered freely for as long as sailors have crossed these waters.

Salt air filled my lungs. Copper fear, my own, yes, I'm not made of stone. But beneath the fear, something else.

Rage.

Twenty-five years of being dismissed. Of being the wrong daughter, the difficult one, the one who asked too many questions and smiled too little. Twenty-five years of being told I was too much and not enough in the same breath.

And now this creature wants my fear too?

"I don't suppose," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than it has any right to be, "you'd consider a counter-offer."

The tentacle freezes.

The massive eyes blink, actually blink, like a confused cat, and the creature shifts in the water. The ship rocks. I hear something crash below deck. I don't look away.

"The tribute system seems inefficient," I continue, because if I stop talking I might start screaming after all. "You terrorize ships. Ships offer sacrifices. The sacrifices die. What does that get you? Fear? Is that sustainable? Markets crash, you know. Even fear has diminishing returns."

The tentacle pulls back slightly. The kraken is... listening?

"I'm a merchant's daughter. I know value. And I know when someone's getting a bad deal." I jerk my chin at the ropes binding me. "This? This is a bad deal. For both of us."

Something rumbles from the deep. It might be the ocean. It might be the creature.

It might be laughter.

The tentacle moves again, not toward my face this time. Toward the ropes. The tip finds the knot at my wrists and, with surgical precision, slices through it.

I fall forward, catch myself on the mast, and look up into eyes the size of wagon wheels.

"Interesting," the monster says.

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, pressure and depth and something ancient waking up. It doesn't sound like words. It sounds like the concept of words, translated through water and darkness and three hundred years of nightmares.

Then the tentacle wraps around my waist.

I have one second to suck in breath before I'm yanked off the deck, pulled over the railing, and dragged beneath the waves.

The cold hits first. Then the pressure. Then the dark.

I should drown. I feel the water close over my head, feel my lungs burn for air, feel the instinctive panic of a surface creature pulled into the depths.

And then...

I can breathe.

I don't understand it. The water is still water, cold, dark, pressing against every inch of me. But when I inhale, something reaches my lungs. Not air exactly. Magic, maybe. The monster's will, keeping me alive when physics says I should be dead.

We descend.

The light fades from dim to dark to something beyond dark. I can see nothing. Feel nothing except the tentacle wrapped around my waist and the terrible speed of our passage.

Then light appears below.

Bioluminescence. Soft blue and green, pulsing in patterns that shouldn't be natural. It outlines... structures. Spires. Towers. The broken, beautiful bones of what was once a castle, now drowned and transformed into something else.

A palace.

The kraken takes me down, down, into the heart of light. Through doors the size of harbors. Past walls inlaid with pearl, gleaming faintly. Into a hall where the ceiling vanished into darkness and the floor glowed with living patterns.

He releases me.

I stumble, find my footing on the strange stone floor, and turn to face the monster who brought me here.

He's smaller now. Not small, still massive, still nightmare-made-flesh, but the tentacles have drawn in, coiled around a central form that's beginning to look almost... humanoid.

The eyes are the same. Moon-pale. Watching.

"You asked about counter-offers," the creature says. The voice is clearer now, closer to human, though still carrying the weight of the deep. "What could a tribute possibly offer that I don't already take?"

I'm standing in an underwater palace, breathing magic, facing a monster who could crush me with a thought.

I've never felt more alive.

"Information," I say. "Perspective. Something you haven't had in... how long? How long since someone stood where I'm standing and didn't just scream?"

Silence. The bioluminescence pulses. The kraken's form shifts, tentacles flexing, something that might be a face emerging from the nightmare mass.

"Three hundred years," he says.

"Then you're overdue for a conversation." I straighten my spine, square my shoulders, and look the ancient monster in his moon-sized eyes. "I'm Tamsin. What do I call you?"

Another long pause. The creature shifts again, and I see it, just for a moment, the ghost of something human beneath the scales and suckers. A brow ridge. The suggestion of cheekbones. A narrowing of expression that belonged to a man, not a beast.

"Vael," he says. "Prince Vael of the Deep."

A prince. Of course. Because my life wasn't complicated enough.

"Well, Prince Vael." I fold my arms, ignoring the way my whole body is trembling. "Let's negotiate."