The Bunny in the Fox's Palm novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Keeping
Hazel is set in the fox lord's palm in front of the Council, bites him to the bone, and demands a door of her own; her grandmother says the tithe is paid.
The last thing I felt as a rabbit was his thumb on my spine.
It was warm and heavier than I expected.
He held me in one open palm, high in front of two hundred people.
My heart was going so fast I could feel it in my ears.
"The Keeping is witnessed," the Council speaker called out.
He was Linden MacMahon, the fox lord's uncle, and he smiled at the room.
"A year in the lord's hand, as the old custom says. Fed at his table. Housed at his pleasure."
Somewhere behind me a woman started to cry.
I knew that cry.
Every Midwinter the Hollow sent one young rabbit up the hill, and every Midwinter one of our mothers cried.
This year the rabbit was me.
I looked up the length of his arm.
Soren MacMahon had red hair and a pale scar through one eyebrow.
His amber eyes were fixed on a point above the crowd.
He did not look at me even once.
His thumb moved a little.
My foot hit his wrist before I thought about it.
I was a rabbit.
I was twenty-four years old and I had baked bread at four every morning since I was sixteen.
I was not a thing.
I turned my head and bit him.
I bit down through the skin of the thumb until I felt bone.
He hissed.
The whole hall gasped at once.
I dropped.
Falling is the one thing a rabbit does well.
I hit the marble on all four feet and the shift came up through me.
Fur went to skin.
Bone went long.
Someone had tucked a grey wool shawl in the ribbon at my neck, and I caught it and wrapped it around me on the way up.
I stood on the dais with my hair in my face and his blood in my mouth.
"I am not his pet," I said.
My voice shook, so I said it louder.
"I am not anyone's pet."
Nobody breathed.
A cousin of his in the front row had already half risen, with his lip peeling back from his teeth.
Linden held up a hand and the cousin sat.
"Miss Birch," Linden said, soft as a priest. "The Keeping is not a question. It was settled."
"Then settle it with me."
I turned to the fox lord.
Soren was holding his bitten hand against his chest with blood running to the cuff of his dark coat.
He still had not shouted.
He had not moved either.
His amber eyes had finally come down off the ceiling and landed on me.
They were very bright.
For one second I thought, he's going to kill me here.
Then I thought, no, he's frightened.
It made no sense, so I let it go.
"Old custom," I said to the room, and I was proud that my voice held. "A kept one may speak once, in her own form, and name a term. That's the law. Isn't it?"
The oldest elder on the Council bench leaned forward on his cane.
"It is," he said slowly. "No kept one has used it in forty years."
"Then I'm using it."
I made myself look at Soren and not the crowd.
"I'll go up your hill," I said. "I'll sleep under your roof. But I get a door."
Someone laughed in the back, high and cruel.
"A door that locks," I said. "From the inside. And nobody opens it, not you, not your uncle, not your dogs."
Soren looked at me for a long moment.
Blood dripped off his fingers onto the marble.
"Granted," he said.
His voice was low and rough.
It was the first thing he had said all night.
The hall made a noise.
Linden's smile did not move at all.
"How charming," he said. "A door."
He turned to the pews, and I followed his gaze without wanting to.
My grandmother sat in the third row in her good black shawl.
Agnes Birch was sixty-three, with a white braid and hands knotted from sixty years of kneading.
She had walked me up the hill herself that morning, holding my arm.
She did not look at me now.
"Agnes," Linden called warmly. "Would you tell your granddaughter the news?"
My grandmother stood.
She kept her eyes on the floor.
"The tithe is cleared, Hazel," she said, so quietly that I almost lost it. "The Hollow owes nothing this year or the next."
Linden drew a folded paper from inside his coat and held it up for the room.
I saw the signature at the bottom.
It was in my grandmother's hand.
"Signed three weeks ago," Linden said. "Before the lottery."
There had been no lottery.
There had never been one.
I hadn't been picked.
I had been sold.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend