Deliciously Deadly: a Red Riding Hood retelling

Chapter 3

Lottie didn't know what to do.

At least Grandma had assured her that the man looked no more than thirty. But other than that? She knew nothing about his family, his past, what he did for a living, or why he'd suddenly appeared in a village like this. For all she knew, the man could be a serial murderer on the run.

At least he wanted to marry her, right?

Still, she didn't know what to do, and she had no one to speak to for advice (except for the grandmother who'd proved that she would give her granddaughter over to the first man to show up on their doorstep), so she tossed a coin for three days in a row.

Each time, she told herself that she would follow the coin's advice: heads, and she would marry the big, biiiiig stranger who looked no more than thirty.

Heads. Heads. Heads.

Marry. Marry. Marry, it urged for three days in a row.

So here she was, stepping out of the house for the first time in three days because she'd been hiding away from all the villagers who would have accosted her on the streets.

And she would've kept hiding away. If only she didn't need to attend her own wedding.

You might think that in a small village like Wilkin where everyone knows everyone, they would all attend every wedding that ever takes place. Well, I'm sorry to break it to you, but ordinary villagers simply cannot afford to put aside a whole day of their livelihood for every nuptial, so most of the time, these things are attended by a small handful of close family and friends only.

Well, today's nuptial was no ordinary nuptial.

Today, everyone in Wilkin decided that witnessing the historic event of a dimwitted foreigner tying the knot with the village spinster was worth putting aside an entire day's worth of work for.

Today, the humble village temple of the God of Earth and Soil was woefully packed, almost bursting at the seams to accommodate the smelly, sweaty bodies of almost two hundred busybodies. By the time Lottie arrived at her own wedding, there was hardly even an aisle for her to walk down with her grandmother.

Village tradition said that men must propose with flowers, and brides must nurture those flowers in the days before the wedding and walk down the aisle with them. It signified, and told the world, how she would nurture their future relationship as man and wife.

Lottie's betrothed did what he had to do when he proposed with flowers, yet Lottie did not do what she was supposed to do with them. After all, she wasn't even sure that she would be here today until the coin told her, for the third time, that she must.

So not only did she walk the aisle looking down at her own feet, letting her long hair cover as much of the scar as it could, she also clutched in her hands a bunch of wilted flowers that told the whole village how terrible of a wife she would be.

The women gasped in collective shock at her audacity. The men sighed in collective relief that it wasn't any of them who was marrying her. And with that chorus of gasps and sighs playing in the background, Lottie made her way to the front of the crowd where she could make out in her limited periphery the long robes of the village priest and... a pair of black boots.

Passing the sad flowers to her grandmother, she came to stand before those boots.

Big, biiiiiig boots.

The priest began with a few words of jibber jabber. Then soon—too soon—it came time for the owner of those big boots to speak.

"Behold my oath that I will take no one as my wife except you."