Deliciously Deadly: a Red Riding Hood retelling

Chapter 6

As the wise ones say, trouble comes in threes.

One year into their marriage, word came of a Demon War, which took place to the south of the kingdom's capital of Lyons. There could be a whole other book written about the war (and maybe one has been), but for the villagers of Wilkin, it was merely another piece of interesting gossip about how the mighty King Dane led great armies into a fearsome war against monstrous creatures from the bellies of hell.

As a little village tucked away in Central Asis, with rolling hills on one side and dense woods on another, it was too far from the action, too small to house any refugees escaping the war, and too poor for any bandits to bother raiding. In other words, life went on in Wilkin, as unchanging as life had always been in Wilkin.

See? Being ordinary wasn't so bad.

A year later, the war came to an abrupt end. But as anyone who knew their two coppers' worth of history would know, the effects of war never ended with the war itself.

On top of the grieving of lost families and rebuilding of destroyed homes, the kingdom's economy came to a standstill. For an entire year, the country had diverted all of its resources towards the war efforts; food went to feed the soldiers, leathers and iron went to produce weapons and armour, textiles went to craft bandages and war tents, and so on and so forth.

To make matters worse, many of the working men in the Southern Lands—farmers, fishmongers, millers, blacksmiths—either threw themselves into the war or died protecting their homes.

Even at the end of the war, with so many cities and towns flattened to rubble, the survivors couldn't simply return to their life before the war. A farmer who no longer had his farm couldn't simply turn to fishmongering, just as a miller who no longer had his mill couldn't simply turn to blacksmithing.

A war, confined to one part of the kingdom, had far-reaching consequences for the entire kingdom and beyond.

Soon, the famine hit.

For years, Cain had sold his vegetables in the nearby town of Torith for a copper per pound, then buy a bolt of linen for five coppers. As the war dragged on, five coppers could no longer pay for a scrap of cloth. So like all the other farmers, Cain had to start selling his carrots and yams at fifty coppers each. Even lettuce, which was mostly water and wholly unfilling, would sell for twenty coppers per head.

There came the day when that wasn't enough, either. By the time people went from offering five silvers for each carrot one day, to ten silvers the next day, Cain stopped heading into town.

Whatever Lottie and Cain could pickle and preserve of their own produce, they did. The rest, they traded for goods within the village and donated to families in the village with the young and elderly.

Couldn't they have stockpiled the food, you ask? Well, not even the royals sitting in the palace had magical boxes that could deep freeze the meats and vegetables and preserve them for weeks and months.

Guarding the home became one of Cain's priorities, though he never explicitly said so. Each morning, he rose with the sun to tend to the farm and livestock. But after that, he chopped the trees, built a taller fence around the perimeter of their land and added traps intended not for wild animals but two-legged intruders.

"Is this really necessary?" Lottie asked one day. "I can't think of anyone here who would steal or hurt us."

"They will," Cain said without a shred of doubt, "when they're hungry enough."

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Not two moons went by before Cain's prediction came true.

While the pair had tried their best to share their produce, it was not enough to feed the mouths of a whole village. Especially not when winter came and they hardly had enough to feed their own livestock.