Red Queen Fan Fiction - Red Huntress

Chapter 1

Diana Farley had always known how to wield a knife.

It was nothing unusual for her, the daughter of hunters and butchers; it was what she was expected to learn. Her mother's hands had taught her, hands pink, callused and sun-tanned, with nails forever stained red-brown by her trades.

Stains from the wrong kind of blood, Diana noticed as she held her mother's hand. Both of them were standing on the edge of a large expanse of brown fields, in lines and rows with the rest of their village, assembled to await the arrival of the Silvers.

Her other hand didn't clench a knife, but a sickle. It would be Diana's first time to serve in the greeny corvee that took place in her village, Sieverling, every three years.

In preparation of it, the peasants had left the fields before them, a full third of the whole lands belonging to Sieverling, lying fallow for months, for when a handful of Silvers storms, nymphs, and greenfingers came to their petty northern village. Several times, the Silvers were to water the soil, summon blazing sunlight, spread the high-yield custom seeds they brought and make the plants grow in mere hours. And then they'd tell the local Red serfs to reap the crops and perform the other manual farm work, or whatever tasks the Silvers couldn't be bothered with and claimed the Reds were better suited for anyway.

Diana squeezed her mother's hand at the thought. She knew it looked childish when she was already eleven and not some infant, deemed old enough to do her share in the corvee. She didn't care what it looked like, though she appreciated the concerned gaze Mama gave her, a reassurance when she was uncertain what to expect besides the obvious, ordinary drudgery.

No one seemed excited about the greeny corvee and everyone was tense, standing firmer than usual under the glaring midday sun. She admired how her mother kept her face straight while the June heat burned her skin even pinker but lit her braided hair to wheat-yellow. It was already eleven o'clock, late to start any kind of farm work. As Diana tamed her blond, shoulder-length curls in something between a ponytail and a bun, she heard some neighbours grumble at the waste of time, a waste she felt as well. She and the other children could be in school (if their two teachers weren't among the waiting farm hands today), or doing a few of the endless tasks at home, or she could just, for once, if there was really nothing better to do than kicking her heels, play with her friends. For example with Giselle, the beautiful girl who'd been transferred with her family to Sieverling only a few months ago, a girl that fascinated Diana so much she neither knew to how talk to, nor how to avert her eyes from her.

Even now, she caught herself searching for Giselle among the few hundred people around, and the teeny glimpse of Giselle's dark brown hair made her heart beat faster for a minute. Diana bit her lip to subdue her ill-fitting smile. But what should happen? There was no Silver lord here yet to scold his Red serfs for daring to feel amusement.

Not even their Silver lord. Isère, the lord of Sieverling and several surrounding villages, who owned the lands and whom the Red serfs owed their tithe and service, rarely showed himself unless there was something for him to take. And he got no share in the greeny corvee either. However the greenies and their companions calculated their numbers, Diana didn't know, but there was nothing for the local lords. The greeny corvee was a "service" from the High Houses of the Lakelands to the Red peasants, granted by the crown. And the High Houses and the crown had, decades ago, assessed some lists that claimed how much each village was to produce during the corvee. The greenies didn't care that Diana was a child, like many others expected to work today, that villagers had been conscripted for the war, or how many inhabitants had died in or joined a settlement lately. There was a quota to meet and crops to be delivered to the Silver citadels. And the quota demanded that Diana replaced the labour of her father, who was far away in the south, to fight for the Lakelands in the war against Norta.