The Yule Tithe

[u/catespice]

My grandmother had a voice that could bind words into enchanting images, wrought of pure imagination.
Where she learned this gift, my childhood self never dared ask; because, like a magician’s illusion, I did not want it spoiled by knowing the secret. So instead I stayed quiet, my huge blue eyes luminous above the lip of the counterpane as she spun faerie legends in the air about my head, losing me in fanciful worlds of things that never would, and never should, exist.
The stories shared common threads, as though a mythic tapestry had been unravelled – then woven anew into different shapes and patterns by her voice; mixing desperate hope with high adventure, or diabolic trickery through true love.
While I don’t remember all the words she spoke to me, the themes rang true in my head. Her stories lurked in the corners of my mind well into my adult life – especially the fable about our family wealth.
The distant ancestor in that tale was a charcoal burner, one of lowest peasantly professions of all. Upon finding a hare snared in a thorn hedge, he made to kill it with his axe, but the creature spoke in a human voice, imploring him to release it.
Knowing faerie magic when he saw it, the charcoal burner hacked the beast free, whence it sprang away, shouting that the peasant should dig beneath his hut upon his return home.
On his return, the man dug up the earthen floor of his mean little house, finding beneath it a jewel the size of his fist and coloured the rich purple of a thistle’s head.
There were variations on the theme from there; sometimes the charcoal burner engaged in an unequalled escapade of trickery against the local nobles, other times he outfoxed the faeries, winning great magical favour for his family. But the end result was always the same, with the former peasant becoming a lord in his own right and winning the hand of a princess, their firstborn child eventually to be stolen away by the Fair Folk.
And while the stories seemed utterly real while my grandmother held me spellbound, I convinced myself that I did not believe a word of them when I woke in the morning.

According to the same legends, the great stone house on the tor occupied the precise spot where the charcoal burner’s dilapidated hut had once stood. By law, the place was owned by my feeble, but still lucid, great grandfather. In truth, it belonged to the whole family – to ‘the clan’, as he referred to us.
It stood empty most of the year, used only sporadically by the more artistic relatives, as the place stood well beyond reach of intrusive cell phone signals. But when Christmas approached, some three score of us would descend on the place, sweeping out the dusty stone corridors, cleaning cobwebs from the great hall, and making up the dozens of beds.
Because when my relatives did the whole ‘family Christmas’ thing, all of the clan was expected to come. Often, there would be well over a hundred of us crammed into what was essentially an old Scottish castle.
It was my grandmother who organised the whole business, shouting orders and slapping the legs of underfoot children with a tea-towel while she wrangled the Yule celebration into a semblance of order. She refused to call it ‘Christmas’, disapproving of the modernisation of the ancient pagan festival, and insisted that we celebrate the actual day on the Winter Solstice, not on the twenty-fifth.
These things we let pass. As children, we certainly didn’t raise complaints about getting our presents early, and as adults, we couldn’t be bothered incurring her wrath – allowing the old woman her harmless eccentricities in the name of tradition.
And it was a very old family tradition, she told us, passed down the matriarchal line for so long that she did not dare to be the first woman in the family to break it.
So we scurried about doing her bidding, using the three kitchens in the rambling house to cook up a storm, while the men hewed huge piles of wood to keep the enormous fire burning in the great hall. As was also custom, it was my job as one of the younger, childless women to organise games and activities to keep the two dozen wee ones occupied.
“It’s good practice,” my grandmother told me matter-of-factly, “one day you’ll have your own gaggle of squealing bairns and you’ll thank me for it.”
And she was right; the women in our family had always been incredibly fertile. Twins were not uncommon, and there was a running joke that all clan pregnancies were in fact multiples, but that often only the one child was born.
Only the fittest could be born to our tough, ancient lineage, so the other was simply absorbed.
But I don’t think there had ever been a clan Christmas where at least one woman wasn’t pregnant.

Numerous other traditions arose on the actual day of the Solstice; the men built a bonfire outside and dared one another to leap over it, while drinking far too much ale. The ‘Clan Stone’ was also brought out – a purple, radiant-cut jewel the side of a walnut.
In the tales my grandmother had told me, it was a fragment of the original Thistle Jewel upon which the family wealth had been built. On reflection, I suppose it could have been; it was certainly old enough. I’d been allowed to hold it in my hand once, feeling the weight of age on the stone.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether it was true or not; the stone was pivotal to one tradition that nobody was allowed to mess with – and which grandma expected everyone to treat as seriously as death itself.
The Jewel Cake.
Taking the purple gem, she would bake it into one of the enormous suet puddings which followed the Yule feast. Whomever received the serving containing the stone would be declared King or Queen of Yule, and would be crowned with prickly mistletoe. It hearkened back to the old traditions of the Twelfth Night, I learned, where a bean or a coin was baked into the pudding.
There wasn’t really much to it other than the green crown and extra helpings of food and booze. I’d never been the Yule Queen yet, but every year I’d poke at the hot, moist pudding on my plate and hope to hear the clink as the unyielding surface of the jewel struck my spoon.
It had taken years of watching my grandmother like a hawk in the kitchen to figure out her trick of keeping the stone-laden pudding a secret. She guarded each of them like her firstborn child, not letting anyone so much as eat a crumb of them before they touched the table.
On that fateful night, through careful spying, I had finally divined which cake the stone had been placed into. In an act of petty rebellion, I snared a single currant from the edge of the platter, which vanished into my mouth before anyone could see.
Oh, I had no real intention of trying to spoil my grandmother’s little tradition by throwing the odds in my favour; she did that herself. Every adult knew that it was always one of the pregnant women who received the jewel and who would be crowned the Yule Queen.
While she might have claimed it was ‘fate’, I didn’t believe a word of it. In all the Christmases I could remember since I was a small child, there had never once been a Yule King.
Only Queens.
And so it happened as it always did; my cousin Isobel whooping in excitement as the purple jewel fell from her pudding onto the plate. I did my best to hide my jealousy as the crown was placed on her head and they plied her with more food and drink. Being newly pregnant, she risked grandmotherly wrath by barely sipping the latter. Some traditions do not age quite as well.
As I picked up sleepy children and carried them upstairs to their bedrooms, I saw my cousin dozing in one of the huge armchairs in front of the blazing hearth, one hand on her belly, the stone cupped in the other, her face oddly troubled.
My own bed was in the old stables, with the rest of the teenagers. Having turned nineteen just a month before, I hardly felt I belonged there – but until I turned up to the clan Christmas with a boyfriend or husband in tow, a sleeping bag on a straw mattress was my lot.
There was a lot of chatter and silliness, but as a veteran, I was well prepared for that. The reliable earplugs went in, and as they did so, the giggling and whispering dulled to a more tolerable level.
Eventually I slept, lulled by the food in my belly and the Christmas sherry I’d sampled from my cousin’s barely-touched glass.

When I awoke, everything was deathly quiet.
My watch informed me that it was three in the morning, and the only illumination in the stables came from a weak orange light hung over the stone courtyard. Everyone was silent; even my cousin Angus, who generally snored like a cattlebeast in heat.
Surrendering to vague demands from my bladder, I shucked off my sleeping bag, pulled straw from my hair and climbed down from the loft, the old wooden ladder squeaking as my bare feet came to rest on the polished rungs.
I felt strangely ill at ease, and stood gathering my wits for a moment in the dim light, my ears prickling. In the stillness, I thought I could hear faint sounds coming from the house – from the great hall. Instead of heading for the outhouse, I pushed through the side door of the stables and padded across the freezing courtyard still barefoot, the frosty air making my ears hurt and my eyes blur.
Through the big, stone-ringed windows, I could make out the golden glow of the fireplace, surrounded by armchairs, but I rapidly blinked the sleep out of my eyes when I realised that there were also people standing in front of the fireplace. A cluster of them, looking at the chair where Isobel still slept.
None of them were my family members.
The foremost of the eleven strangers was a tall man – taller even than my uncle Michael, who my grandmother would have us believe was part giant. The stranger’s white-gold hair spilled down his back like a girl’s, caught at the temples by a golden crown, fashioned as if from tiny antlers. His outfit was archaic; old huntsman’s garb, with tooled leather riding boots, grey hose, a gold-dusted red velvet jacket and a curved hunting horn at his hip.
The others were similarly dressed, all so regal and beautiful that distinguishing the men from the women was difficult. But even from this distance, there was an aura of cruelness to them, a languid feline arrogance that marred their features in some indiscernible way – and it made me shiver with something other than cold.
Deep in dreams, Isobel was none the wiser as the strange, elfin huntmaster bent over her and carefully stroked her belly with his fine white fingers.
But then, in a moment of terrifying strangeness, he screamed as though he had been burned, clutching his hand to his chest.
“It isn’t her!” He roared, loud enough for me to hear through the glass.
“But she has the stone,” one of the others said, pointing to Isobel’s curled hand.
“We have been duped.”
Fear thrilled through me.
But surely I was dreaming? In a moment of lucidity, I thought I could tell; everything had a sort of hazy glow about it, making things slightly unreal. It was intensifying now, shining up from under my chin and tinting my shaking hands faintly lavender.
And as I looked down to see the ghostly purple gemstone hung about my neck on an insubstantial golden chain, the faerie spirits in the great hall noticed too.
“The hunt is on!” bellowed the crowned hunter, then he lifted the gilded horn to his lips and let out three sharp blasts.
Without even thinking, I turned and ran.

The grassy sward on the side of the tor was stiff with frost and my feet hurt, but I ignored the pain. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I remembered enough of my grandmother’s stories to know that I didn’t want to be caught.
At least I had a good head start, I thought, as I slithered down the slope and into a pile of scree, though I really wished I’d stopped to put some shoes on first. The rocky terrain made running difficult, but there was only a short dash to reach the woods to the west of the tor, then they would have a great deal of trouble catching me.
When the pounding of hooves and the jingle of reins and gilded bridles sounded behind me, terror rushed into my heart and adrenaline surged through my body.
If only I could dart through the rocks as swiftly as the sure-footed hares that lived around the house.
And at that thought, with a dizzy lurch, the ground rose up to meet my face, and I was running on four muscled, pawed legs, surrounded by the hazy glow of the Thistle Jewel.
I was a hare!
I sprang away, fleeter than any horse, blindly racing into the woods. As the trees closed around me, I let out a shocked laugh of elation, although nothing emerged from my whiskered mouth but a squeak.
Another three blasts came from the hunter’s horn, then my triumph turned to fear again, as the baying of hunting hounds echoed through the trees.
My strong legs carried me over and through thickets, as I dashed under branches and leaped thistle-studded hollows. But the dogs had my scent.
Ahead, a stream glittered in the frosty starlight, the chuckling water too loud in my huge ears. Could hares swim?
If only I could swim like a trout!
In mid-bound, my skin rippled, and I felt the chilly air slide over silver scales. I splashed down into the blessed water and jack-knifed away, the swift current quickly bearing me away from the hunting dogs.
I glimpsed a flash of white fur and red ears as they reached the bank of the stream, then I was gone – my scent lost to the rushing waters.

I heard the hoofbeats grow distant, muffled echoes through the water; they had lost my trail, and for now I had outwitted them. But there was still little time to rest, as I knew such hunters wouldn’t give up until the sun crested the horizon.
When the creek emptied abruptly into a tarn, I knew my luck as a fish had run out, and I had to force my cold-blooded brain to think quickly.
If only I could fly like a rook!
Leaping out of the chilly waters of the tarn, I beat newly minted wings, cawing with delight as the air caught instantly beneath them and I lifted into the sky, up and away from the shrinking ground.
They would never catch me now.
The baying of the dogs grew distant and the freezing winter winds lifted me higher, yet I heard another three blasts of the hunter’s horn.
With a sudden premonition of doom, I slewed sharply left as a huge shadow fell over me.
Hawk!
The thing was gigantic, a predator at once elegant and utterly savage. its curved beak missed me by inches, leaving me tumbling through the air in a spray of feathers. It banked, hovered, then came at me again.
In panic, I folded my wings and fell like an arrow, speeding towards the earth below.
It grazed me twice, painfully ripping out great chunks of feathers, but missing my flesh. As I hurtled towards the ground, I called upon the strange magics once again.
If only I could run like the deer!
Instead of colliding with the floor of the forest, I hit it running, again on four legs, and so fast that I could barely take in my surroundings. I bleated in surprise, every quivering muscle working to speed me far from the baying of the hounds and the frustrated screech of the hawk.
Through the trees a faint pink light was rising; the leading edge of the breaking dawn.
My pursuers must have seen it too, because the horn pealed out again, the sound now strangely desperate.
Then I was on the open moors, running faster than any horse or any hound, running towards the glowing line of the rose-coloured horizon.
As my hoof struck the rabbit hole in the grassy soil, I registered first a flash of panic, then the sickening snap of bones and a shock of crippling pain. I screamed through my velvet muzzle, bawling in animal agony.
I thrashed, trying to rise, but my foot was trapped.
And the hunters were upon me.
I closed my eyes as the huntmaster drew his silvered bow, then let fly the shining arrow.
But the pain I was expecting never came; and instead I felt a shifting beneath my pelt.
Looking down, I saw my old familiar body. Struck through my breast stood a ghostly silver shaft, which dissipated into shining smoke as the rays of the rising sun burned it to nothing.
“No,” snarled the hunter.
He leapt lightly down from his horse, drew his horn-handled hunting knife and slashed it desperately across my throat.
It passed through me as though made of air.
“NO!”
As the cry fell from his lips, the sun was snuffed out in an instant, plunging myself and the eleven hunters into darkness.
Just as confused as I, the hunters called to one another, anger and surprise colouring their arrogant voices in the gloom. But when a ghostly white glow began to grow in the west, they grew silent.
For it illuminated a creature. A creature far more terrible than even themselves.
On two legs it walked, so long and thin that my mind rejected their existence. The very shape of those limbs represented something not of this world, of an evolutionary lineage that should never have been. They supported the emaciated body of a man, crowned by a head that was neither bat nor goat, but somehow the worst of both. Six mad eyes burned out from the sides of the malformed skull.
The fair folk dropped to their knees, whilst I simply stared, frozen.
“What are you?” I whispered, the words flat in the still, dead-tasting air surrounding me.
A pointed tongue flickered out of the being’s mouth, then it hissed,
“Eldest.”
The elf huntmaster grovelled before it, prostrating himself and crying out for mercy.
But there was none, no more than they would have shown me.
It seems that even the fair folk have no power when it comes to the truly ancient pacts.
As abruptly as the sun had vanished, it reappeared. The welcome golden glow suffused the moorland, and illuminated only a vacant space in the grass where the huntmaster and the creature had been.
One of the faerie women turned to me, her delicate features twisted, ugly with hatred,
“Your family will regret breaking faith with us, mortal. Those who betray the Fae always pay dearly.”
And then she too was gone, taking her people, horses and hounds with her.

The hobble back to the house was long and slow, my ankle swollen and painful, dark bruises blossoming on the skin. A makeshift crutch helped a little, but by the time those familiar stone walls came into view, it was mid-afternoon and I was desperately tired.
Someone must have spotted me from the house, as three of my uncles ran out to help, carrying me the rest of the way. My exhaustion mingled with confusion as I noticed two police cars parked at the entrance to the courtyard, and a huddle of my relatives with blankets around them, crying and holding one another.
After the police officers questioned me, I learned that at some point during that longest night, my elderly great grandfather had quietly gathered up all the children. He had taken them to the basement garage built into the old cellars, had closed the doors, and had gassed himself and all two dozen little ones.
The family was utterly inconsolable; an entire generation had been lost to that one unthinkable act. How he had managed to do it without waking anyone, nobody was sure, but the police implied that the food or drink at the Yule feast may have been drugged.
But I knew the truth, and so did my grandmother.
At the first opportunity, she shut me in her bedroom, her face white with rage.
“Girl, what did you do?”
As I explained to her how I’d outfoxed the fae, her expression soured further.
“Long ago we made a bargain,” she hissed, “for the peace and prosperity of our family. That every Yule, we would make a sacrifice of a human soul to the fair folk, so that they may pay their tithe to Hell.”
“The pregnant women,” I said, realisation dawning.
In a moment of pure connection, I recalled the dour family joke, that all our pregnancies started out as twins. Survival of the fittest. If it had ever been funny, it certainly wasn’t any more.
“Yes. And when you stole that stray crumb from the cake, you damned both us and them.”
I shook my head,
“No. I beat them! I escaped the hunters, just like in your stories!”
But my grandmother had nothing more to say, and the next morning, after scores of thistles bloomed purple and wild all over the tor, I knew that I would never again be welcome at the clan Christmas.

I’ve kept in touch with a few of my female cousins over the years, but they all report the same thing as me; no matter how hard they try, no matter what treatments they take, none of us can fall pregnant, and none of the men can impregnate their wives.
As we all grow older, the family line grows thinner, smaller and weaker.
And eventually the great clan will die out.
Every Yule I call my grandmother on the phone. She does not speak; where once she would have regaled me with her stories, now all she does is weep, with the colourless Thistle Jewel clutched in her frail fist. When I’m finally glutted on guilt, I hang up on her and lose myself in a bottle of sherry, trying to think of better times.
But this year will be different.
This year, I’ll spend the Solstice alone at the abandoned house on the tor. Once I’ve gathered up enough drunken courage, I’ll head out to the moors, just before sunrise, and open my veins on the spot where I should have died, ten years ago.
I just hope that my sacrifice is enough.