Something wriggled in my brain and screamed at me to leave, that my thoughts weren’t welcome here—where was here? Why was I here? Why was I thinking I’d be anywhere else but here? Hadn’t I been observing my parents doing this for weeks? Hadn’t I been listening to my mother sobbing when she thought that we were all asleep? And the other members of the village—the men and the women—hadn’t they treated me somewhat nicer or at least with more respect? And why had my sisters repeated my name to their children so often when they would hear it for their entire lives anyways?

I fidgeted in the open hall of my home, unable to stop my fingers from shaking. Why would I be anywhere else? Why was I even thinking such a thing? This was my home. This was my body. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong at all. I must’ve caught a fever or something because I was led back to a space by the fire by my sister, blocking off the actions of my parents, and giving me a place to rest.

“Janneke,” my mother said softly, coming forward. She gracefully knelt beside my bed and bent my head forward as she kissed my brow. We’d never really got on as well as me and my father had. Too different of people, too different of personalities. But I loved her. She loved me, and I could feel it in her kiss. But her eyes were watering. “My sweet girl.”

Blinking in surprise—it wasn’t often I was referred to as my birth gender—I frowned at her. “What’s wrong? Father, Mother, what’s the matter?”

Both of them were close to tears. Worry gnawed in my stomach as they looked at each other before my father sighed heavily and spoke. I stood shocked and numb as he explained the circumstances of my birth, the goblin that nearly stole me as a child, and the deal he made with said goblin to stop the village from getting slaughtered and to keep me with my family until I at least turned eighteen.

Now my eighteenth birthday was approaching and the goblin was coming to fetch me, take me “home” to the Permafrost to do … what? I wasn’t sure, but it couldn’t have been anything good.