“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”

Agnieszka lives in a valley, near the corrupted Wood, that is full of something powerful, magical, and dangerous. Her village is aided by the mysterious Dragon, a wizard who lives in a tower and requires one girl to serve him, selected from one of the valley villages every ten years.
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