The Tithe
July 2026, Stitch 5.
“Every year, the dragons of Sadabahar collect a tithe of 500 chickens from each human town. This year, a little boy stole one from the tithe-cart. Now the dragons want the boy himself as payment. No human has entered Sadabahar in a hundred years…”
The dragons sent no messenger. They had no need of one. The demand arrived the way winter does, not announced, but suddenly, undeniably present. One morning the tithe-cart stood empty in the square, and on it, scratched into the wood in letters no human hand had made: “the boy called Moses, or the cold comes early and stays.
His mother read it three times. Then she went home and packed a bag.
The tithe had always been paid without complaint. Five hundred chickens, every autumn, loaded onto the cart before dawn so no one had to watch them go. That was the arrangement. That was how it had always been.
So when the cart came back empty with words carved into the wood, the square went very quiet. Elder Thomas read it aloud once. Then again, as though the second time might change it. “It’s only one boy,” said someone at the back. No one turned to see who. Nessa was standing at the edge of the crowd. She listened and then turned and walked home.
Moses was at the window when she came through the door. “I heard,” he said. “I know,” she replied
She left before the birds. The village was still dark, still sleeping, and she told herself that was why she didn’t look back.
The road to Sadabahar was not marked on any map she had ever seen, but her feet seemed to know it anyway, the way feet sometimes do when the body understands something the mind refuses to.
The trees changed after the first mile. She noticed but didn’t stop. After the second mile the birdsong fell away entirely. After the third, the light came, but wrong somehow, thinner than it should have been, as though the sun here was further away than the sun she knew.
She walked. Behind her, footsteps. Small ones. Steady. She didn’t turn. She didn’t speak. She reached back. His hand found hers. They walked on.
The arch was two trees grown into one another so long ago the join had healed completely. Beyond it the light was pale and directionless, as though it came from the air itself rather than any sky.
The space beyond the arch was not what she had imagined. No cave. No fire. No bones. Instead, paths, worn smooth by something heavier than human feet, winding between structures she could not quite name. Stone that had grown, or wood that had hardened. Walls that were also roots.
“It’s beautiful,” Moses said, very quietly, as though he understood instinctively that volume was wrong here. Nessa said nothing, but she thought. Yes, and that frightened her more than anything else.
Something moved at the end of the longest path. Large, but unhurried. It had been waiting. It moved like weather moves, not quickly, but with the certainty of something that has never needed to hurry. Its scales were the colour of old wood, of deep water, of the sky just before the light goes. It stopped at the end of the path and regarded them.
Nessa stepped in front of Moses. The dragon looked at her for a long moment. Then, without moving, without opening its mouth in any way she could later explain, she heard: “You came.” “I came for my son,” Nessa said. Her voice was steady. She was proud of that.
“We have been waiting for a hundred years for someone to come. In the beginning, your people were cold, not uncomfortable. Cold in the way that ends things. We made an agreement with your first elders, we would breathe warmth into the deep places, keep the frost from the roots, spare the wells. In return, your people would send five hundred chickens each autumn. Not as payment, but as acknowledgement, as a way of saying we remember and we are grateful.”
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“And we forgot,” Nessa said. “Yes, generation by generation. The winters grew mild and you thanked your gods and told yourselves it had always been this way. The chickens became habit. Then tradition and a tax whose origin no one questioned.”
“But you kept your side,” Moses said. “We keep our promises,” it said simply. Nessa’s throat tightened. “Then why?” she stopped and started again. “Why Moses? Why not just stop? Let the cold come back? Show us what we’d forgotten?”
“Because we do not punish,” the dragon said. “We do not deal in suffering to make a point. But the cart came back broken for the first time in two hundred years and the boy who broke it,” its amber gaze moved to Moses, steady and ancient and impossibly gentle.
Moses looked at the dragon and felt that something was wrong, even without knowing what, even without understanding. He felt it, but he didn’t feel afraid.
“We do not need tribute,” the dragon said. “We need someone who will remember. Someone young enough that the remembering will last.” Nessa stared at the dragon, “You want him to stay,” she said quietly. “We want him to learn,” the dragon said. “There is a difference.” Moses stepped out from behind his mother. “Learn what?” he asked.
The dragon’s expression shifted. If a creature that ancient could look like something close to hope, it looked like that now. “Everything you have forgotten,” it said. “And how to carry it back.”
Nessa looked at her son. He was still Moses. Still the boy who left muddy boots by the door and fell asleep at the table over his supper. “How long?” she asked the dragon. “A season,” it said. “Perhaps two. Until he knows enough to carry it.” “And then he comes home.” said Nessa. The dragon nodded.
“I don’t trust you,” she said. “I know,” it said. “You were taught not to. That is part of what was lost.”
Nessa crouched down in front of Moses. Took his face in both hands the way she had when he was very small, when the world frightened him and she needed him to hear her clearly.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “We can go home. Both of us. Right now.” Moses looked at her, then he looked at Sadabahar, “Someone has to remember, Mum,” he said. His voice was very steady for a boy his age. Nessa closed her eyes. When she opened them she kissed his forehead.
“If he is not home by the first frost,” she said, “I will come back. And I will not come alone.” “A promise,” the dragon said, “is exactly the right thing to bring to Sadabahar.”
She walked back down the long path without turning around. Through the arch of the two trees grown into one. Back into the the ordinary light and then the road home. She did not let herself cry until the village was in sight.
The village did not believe her. Of course it didn’t. She had come back without the boy and with a story about dragons who kept promises and warmth breathed into the roots of the world. Elder Thomas shook his head. Her neighbours looked at their hands.
Nessa went home. She left Moses’s boots by the door.
That winter was mild. Milder than anyone could remember. The wells didn’t freeze. The ground stayed workable three weeks longer than it should have. Old people who usually didn’t survive December sat by their fires in January and remarked on it, puzzled, faintly unsettled.
No one said why. No one remembered to ask. On the first morning of first frost, Nessa opened her door and found Moses sitting on the step. He was the same. Mostly. His eyes were amber in a certain light now, which they hadn’t been before. He didn’t mention it and neither did she. He came inside. She fed him. He left his boots by the door.
Later, when the village gathered for the autumn tithe, Moses helped load the cart. He counted each chicken carefully. All five hundred. When the cart rolled away toward Sadabahar in the early dark, he watched it go with an expression Nessa had never seen on him before.
Not sorrow or fear, but gratitude. She stood beside him and did not ask what he was thinking. Some things, she had learned, are carried quietly.
That is how they last.
