For more than six hundred years, travelers through the Balkans have learned to fear the forests after dark. The Brotherhood of the Wolf has faced Crusader battle wagons, Byzantine subterfuge, and rival Turkic shamans in a dozen campaigns across the growing empire. Their arsenal includes alchemical poisons, iron masks forged in in fighting pits, and enough battle-hardened cynicism to survive another decade of religious war.
None of it applies here.
In 1444, Tahsin (a Janissary more interested in survival than glory) is ordered into the Serbian countryside to collect the Sultan’s blood tax: boys for the army. The villages are empty. Something has already taken the children. His companions include Koja, a seven-foot masked giant who speaks in grunts, and Cem, a cavalry officer convinced this assignment is beneath him. They are equipped to crush rebellions, not to interpret bruises that look like infant teeth or tracks that belong to barefoot children moving in packs.
By Chapter 6 of False Light, the widow Jelena describes what killed her brother: dozens of bites, too small for wolves, arranged in rings. Her son had been “mouthed” for weeks before he disappeared: nibbled at, tested, prepared. The thing in the forest is rather particular about its food.
Chapter 6 of False Light is where Tahsin realizes what he’s been sent to collect from: https://talesofkhayr.com/blood-tax/