Post by devilinthedetails on Jan 6, 2019 15:40:38 GMT 10
Title: Two Roads Diverging
Rating: PG-13 for references to violence and hints of rough language.
Prompt: The Road Not Taken
Summary: Aly chooses a different road than her mother.
Author's Note: This piece is an AU (my first ever) that explores another road Aly could have taken. My ultimate goal was to try to capture some of that complicated dynamic between Aly and Alanna that I loved so much early on in Trickster's Choice and to remain true to Aly's character even as I explore a path she didn't go down. I sincerely hope that my readers enjoy this story as much as I did writing it.
Two Roads Diverging
Aly was five when she began to understand how different her mother was from other noble ladies. When she was little, all she saw was other noble children watched over by nursemaids as she and her brothers were by Maude, and the other noble children talked of their absent mother with the same longing she, Alan, and Thom did for theirs. It was a shock to her to learn that these absent mothers lived with their children—they weren’t always fighting like Ma was—but chose to visit their children in their nurseries. She loved solving puzzles but she couldn’t figure out why any mother —her own or anyone else’s—would choose to be apart from their children.
When Ma finally returned from bringing raiders to justice, Aly took advantage of Thom being buried in books and Alan being busy learning to hunt with the family huntsman to say to Ma, “Other ma’s don’t fight. They live at home with their children.”
“I have to fight.” A frown appeared in Ma’s forehead, and Aly wondered what she had said wrong. She wasn’t trying to be rude. She was just being curious, but her curiosity never failed to make her mother prickly as a pine cone. “It’s my duty to the realm.”
Aly didn’t know what a duty to the realm was, but she didn’t like explanations that involved long words or anything that separated her from her mother, so she pouted, jutting out her lips and chin to their fullest, most petulant extent. “I don’t like it.”
Ma’s violet eyes blazed as if she were about to snap at Aly. Her chest heaved and her face flushed red as her hair, but in the end she only placed her hands on her hips and demanded, “Do you like being safe?”
“Yes.” Not spotting the trap, Aly nodded, strawberry-blonde hair bouncing off her back, and continued to pout.
“I have to fight to keep you and the rest of the country’s children safe.” Ma tapped Aly’s chin, and reluctantly Aly dropped the pout. “That’s what it means to be King’s Champion.”
“Yes, Ma,” Aly answered because Maude would have told her she had to, not because she agreed or even understood.
“Maybe one day you’ll fight alongside me as a knight or a Queen’s Rider.” Ma cracked a half-moon smile. “Would you like that?”
“I never want to do that.” Aly scowled until Ma’s smile sank into a sigh.
Aly didn’t want to be a knight or a Queen’s Rider. For years, she wanted to be a spy. Secrets and lies were candy to her. Eavesdropping and exploring were her bread and butter. Noticing things nobody else did and decoding messages were her meat and vegetables. Every night as she fell asleep, she dreamed of being a spy in strange lands whose names conjured mysteries in her mind: Carthak, Scanra, the Copper Isles…A litany of places she could only travel in her dreams.
These dreams became nightmares when she was twelve. After she accompanied Da to a meeting with a spy that ended with knives drawn, she often woke with the shivering certainty that a cold blade was being held to her throat after her identity had been betrayed in a strange land. Spies were alone in the world. They could trust no one. The disaster with Da had taught her that, but since she didn’t want Da doubting her courage, she pretended to be angry when Da tried to urge her away from active fieldwork. It was too late for that, she often thought bitterly. He had already dragged her into a situation where she could have been killed. It was too late for either of them to develop cold feet, but Da’s feet had gone ice-cold.
“Your ma will have my nose”—Da tweaked the tip of Aly’s nose as if her near-death was a joke—“if she learns I risked your life on a spy mission. Promise me you won’t tell her about the meeting that went wrong wrong.”
“Secrets are my candy,” Aly assured him with a grin even as she thought that Ma would be proud of how she had fought. Still this secret tasted like blood on her tongue when she kept it from her mother.
To atone for not telling her mother the only secret that mattered, she revealed to her one that didn’t.
“Roald has grown up to be quite handsome, hasn’t he?” Aly giggled to her mother when they were alone in their family’s tent as the royal progress wound through the kingdom like an extremely large and slow serpent. At last night’s ball, Prince Roald, who also had a knack for seeing what others missed, had noticed her hovering on the edge of the dance floor, watching the couples whirl by and listening to the trails of their conversation as they spun their schemes and spilled their secrets. He had invited her to dance, and she had agreed. When her hands rested on his shoulder, she felt their new broadness and found herself drowning in the blue oceans of his eyes in a way she had never believed possible. What sank her the most was the look in his gaze that informed her he would never regard her as anything more than a girl with whom he had shared some fond childhood memories. The five-year-gap between them was a chasm too impossibly wide for her to cross.
“You’re too young to find Conte princes handsome.” Ma’s expression twisted into the same sour lemon one with which she greeted all of Aly’s confidences these days.
“I can’t be much younger than you were when you started kissing a Conte prince,” snapped Aly, vindication surging through her veins when raspberries swelled in her mother’s cheeks.
“The Conte prince I kissed wasn’t betrothed at the time. Your prince is betrothed, Alianne.” Ma stalked out of the canvas tent, no doubt determined as ever to ensure that she had the last word in this argument with Aly.
“I know that. The entire realm knows that.” Aly glared at the flap as it swung shut behind her always disappearing mother. “That’s the whole point of this progress as everyone whose breathing knows.”
Aly understood that her prince was unattainable but that didn’t stop her from hoping that if she could undergo a transformation to make herself more glamorous—transfiguring herself from childhood caterpillar to beautiful butterfly—would at least look at her as if she held some allure beyond youthful nostalgia to him. To tempt and tantalize him as he unwittingly had her would be enough to satisfy her she thought as she visited Lady Cythera to beg for her first makeup lesson. Ma would never agree to teach her how to wear makeup even if Ma had been a woman who put on makeup more than a handful of times a year.
“Your eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen. They remind me of a sky on a clear, cloudless day.” Aly opened her begging with flattery as she watched Lady Cythera line her eyelids with powder. Why Lady Cythera bothered gazing into a mirror when her eyes were closed was a mystery she would have to ask Lady Cythera to explain once she had convinced Lady Cythera to introduce her to the transformative powers of makeup. “That shadow on your lids emphasizes that.”
“Thank you.” Lady Cythera smiled with lips that had already been painted ruby red before a transfixed Aly. “That’s what I wear the powder for—to bring out my eyes.”
“Do you wear it to be beautiful for Uncle Gary?” asked Aly, wondering if Lady Cythera felt the same confusing emotions she did for Roald.
“No.” Lady Cythera’s eyes sparkled as she finished applying the shadow. “I wear it to be beautiful for everyone except my husband, dear Aly. My husband is blind enough to believe that I’m beautiful no matter what I’m wearing, and I love him for that.”
Aly was going to point out that Lady Cythera truly was beautiful no matter what she was wearing—the entire court said so; Aly knew that after much eavesdropping—but before she could get out the words, Lady Cythera went on, merry as a spring songbird, “I could show you how to put on powder that would make the green in your eyes pop.”
“I’d love that.” Aly bubbled inside with delight at being offered makeup tips without being subjected to the indignity of begging for them, and for a horrible moment she wished her mother was the sweet Lady Cythera, not the famed and feared Alanna the Lioness.
“Wonderful.” Lady Cythera began to search through her makeup for a powder to spread over Aly’s eyelids. “Perhaps you would like some lipstick on your lips as well? Not as bright a red as I am wearing, but a soft pink would complement your color nicely, I think.”
“That would be perfect.” Aly was glowing inside, and Lady Cythera hadn’t even begun applying the makeup. Makeup was truly more magical than any mage’s charm. She would have to tell that to Thom just to see him snarl like a provoked dog.
It tickled when Lady Cythera rubbed her fingers over Aly’s eyelids, and Aly had to fight not to squirm from the brush along her lips, but Aly thought the emeralds she saw shining in her eyes and the pink rose that bloomed where her mouth had been made her endurance worth it when she next glanced in Lady Cythera’s mirror. Before she could leave the tent, Lady Cythera forced the lipstick and eyeshadow upon her, insisting that she would never use them, though Aly suspected that was a lie, since Lady Cythera must use them if they were part of her makeup collection.
Aly’s makeup earned her many admiring glances from young men—sadly, not Roald, who didn’t see her before Ma did—but a glare and a rough washing with a damp towel from her mother.
“I won’t have my twelve-year-old daughter wearing makeup.” Ma’s voice was as abrasive as the towel she scraped across Aly’s closed eyes. “You’re a little girl. You shouldn’t be wearing makeup.”
“I’m not a little girl.” Aly felt stung and not just from the harsh washing she was most unjustly being subjected to by her out-of-touch-with-all-things-feminine mother. “Most girls my age have worn makeup.”
“Most girls your age are locked in a convent by their parents.” Finished abusing Aly’s face, Ma hurled the towel into the iron wash basin with a clang. “Would you like that, Alianne?”
“Perhaps I would.” Aly wasn’t about to admit that she didn’t want to go to the convent as much as she wanted to wear makeup. All she wanted was to be allowed to wear makeup, but as ever her mother was unyielding in her intention to thwart Aly’s deepest desires.
“Maybe your da and I should arrange a marriage for you too.” Ma obviously couldn’t resist raising the stakes.
“As Roald’s parents did for him?” Aly arched an eyebrow because she was in too deep to blink.
“As Roald’s parents did for him.” Ma plainly wasn’t about to blink either. “Maybe you should copy Roald’s good example and do as your parents tell you for once.”
“Roald isn’t marrying Princess Shinkokami because his parents told him to.” Aly was weary to the bone of having Roald held up as an example of proper behavior for her to emulate. “He’s marrying her because she’s exotic. I bet he loves exotic. Exotic probably makes him feel he’s finally going on the adventure he craves.”
Tossing and turning in her blankets hours later, it occurred to Aly that it wasn’t Roald who craved adventure and the exotic. It was her. She set her mind to figuring out how to go on an adventure that didn’t involve fighting as a knight or a Queen’s Rider or being stabbed in the back as a spy. It was almost dawn before she found one and permitted herself a few uneasy hours of sleep before approaching Uncle Gary, who would always provide an honest assessment of any plan she outlined to him.
“You look like you’ve been scheming.” Uncle Gary’s keen eyes fixed on her when she sought him out. “What about?”
“All the king’s diplomats are men.” Aly dodged the question deftly as she could even if she suspected she hadn’t fooled Uncle Gary. He was too clever for her, and that was why she appreciated his advice on her schemes. “Could a women become a diplomat for the king?”
“I don’t see why not.” Uncle Gary stroked his mustache musingly. “In my experience, most women are more diplomatic than men.”
“Have you met my mother?” Aly snorted, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “Diplomatic is the last word anyone would use to describe her.”
“I said most women. Most women doesn’t include your mother.” Uncle Gary chuckled then added warningly, “Don’t tell your mother I said that. She’d cut me into a million pieces with her sword.”
“My mother isn’t so diplomatic as Lady Cythera, is she?” Aly saw a way to refocus the conversation on her major interest. “Lady Cythera is very diplomatic, wouldn’t you say?”
“Of course I would.” Uncle Gary grinned. “Lady Cythera taught me everything I know about diplomacy.”
Aly had heard often enough that Lady Cythera was the honey to Uncle Gary’s vinegar—the sweetness to offset his sarcasm—that she didn’t contest this. Instead she asked with an innocence that she hoped belied how her heart thudded in her chest, “If I trained under Lady Cythera, social secretary to the queen, for a sufficient number of years, could I be deemed a suitable diplomat to treat with foreign powers in the king’s name?”
“Yes, if you did that, I think the king and I could find use for you as a diplomat.” Uncle Gary’s nod sent Aly flying into his arms. He returned her wild embrace for a moment before posing the question Aly had dreaded since the outset of the conversation, “Did you speak with your mother about this plan of yours?”
“No.” Aly shook her head. “I know she’ll be furious, though.”
“You could talk to your father first,” suggested Uncle Gary, ruffling her hair.
“It wouldn’t make a difference.” Aly shook her head even more miserably. “Ma loves Da but not as much as he loves her. That means Da gives into Ma about anything important. I’ll have to talk to Ma myself.”
When Aly did as she had resigned herself to do—explaining to her mother on a long walk that not only would she not be a warrior, she wanted to become the sort of lady Ma most disliked and distrusted—Ma stared at her as if she had sprouted two extra heads. “Are my ears clogged? I can’t have heard you say that you want to become a stupid, useless court lady after I’ll the work I’ve done to prove that women can have a meaning—a purpose—beyond our looks and wombs.”
“I have a meaning and purpose even if it isn’t within your narrow ideas of meaning and purpose.” Aly was so frustrated with her mother’s determination to perceive everything Aly did as a repudiation of her life’s work that her words sounded more like a rejection than she wanted. “Diplomats aren’t stupid and useless. They prevent warriors like yourself from getting carved to pieces on the battlefield.”
“Being a diplomat for a woman means being a lady.” Ma’s nose wrinkled. “Being a lady means wearing dresses, curtseying all the time, dancing endlessly, and flattering and flirting with anything on two legs. I’d prefer a clean death on the battlefield to that slow torture.”
“You might.” Aly tried to contort her lips into a diplomatic smile that made her teeth hurt. Lady Cythera would have to teach her a better way to smile when she felt like screaming. “Not all court ladies would agree with you, but then all court ladies are stupid and useless, aren’t they? Perhaps I should tell the queen you consider her social secretary useless? I think she would enjoy hearing that as much as the Prime Minister would appreciate hearing that his wife is stupid.”
“You don’t need to threaten me with Thayet and Gary’s involvement.” Ma pinched the bridge of her nose. “You may study under Lady Cythera if that is truly what you want. Never let it be said that I came between any girl and her dreams.”
“Thank you, Ma.” Aly gasped in astounded gratitude at her mother’s sudden concession. Perhaps she was more gifted in diplomacy than she realized.
“Don’t thank me until you learn diplomacy is more boring and difficult than you could possibly imagine.” Ma’s tone was grim, but in the end her dire warning proved unwarranted.
Diplomacy proved a challenge—a new language for Aly’s cunning mind to decode—and she wasn’t as gifted as she believed before she began learning from Lady Cythera, but she was never bored, even when she had to memorize obscure titles in foreign tongues. Everything was a taste of the exotic that prepared her for the adventure she encountered at eighteen when she stepped off the boat to serve as the king’s diplomat at Queen Dovasary’s court in the Copper Isles. Queen Dovasary, whose older sister had died in the raka’s rebellion against the luarin, was new to the throne just as this mission was Aly’s first as a diplomat. She hoped that would provide some common ground and understanding between them as she embarked on this adventure she prayed would make her mother proud.
Rating: PG-13 for references to violence and hints of rough language.
Prompt: The Road Not Taken
Summary: Aly chooses a different road than her mother.
Author's Note: This piece is an AU (my first ever) that explores another road Aly could have taken. My ultimate goal was to try to capture some of that complicated dynamic between Aly and Alanna that I loved so much early on in Trickster's Choice and to remain true to Aly's character even as I explore a path she didn't go down. I sincerely hope that my readers enjoy this story as much as I did writing it.
Two Roads Diverging
Aly was five when she began to understand how different her mother was from other noble ladies. When she was little, all she saw was other noble children watched over by nursemaids as she and her brothers were by Maude, and the other noble children talked of their absent mother with the same longing she, Alan, and Thom did for theirs. It was a shock to her to learn that these absent mothers lived with their children—they weren’t always fighting like Ma was—but chose to visit their children in their nurseries. She loved solving puzzles but she couldn’t figure out why any mother —her own or anyone else’s—would choose to be apart from their children.
When Ma finally returned from bringing raiders to justice, Aly took advantage of Thom being buried in books and Alan being busy learning to hunt with the family huntsman to say to Ma, “Other ma’s don’t fight. They live at home with their children.”
“I have to fight.” A frown appeared in Ma’s forehead, and Aly wondered what she had said wrong. She wasn’t trying to be rude. She was just being curious, but her curiosity never failed to make her mother prickly as a pine cone. “It’s my duty to the realm.”
Aly didn’t know what a duty to the realm was, but she didn’t like explanations that involved long words or anything that separated her from her mother, so she pouted, jutting out her lips and chin to their fullest, most petulant extent. “I don’t like it.”
Ma’s violet eyes blazed as if she were about to snap at Aly. Her chest heaved and her face flushed red as her hair, but in the end she only placed her hands on her hips and demanded, “Do you like being safe?”
“Yes.” Not spotting the trap, Aly nodded, strawberry-blonde hair bouncing off her back, and continued to pout.
“I have to fight to keep you and the rest of the country’s children safe.” Ma tapped Aly’s chin, and reluctantly Aly dropped the pout. “That’s what it means to be King’s Champion.”
“Yes, Ma,” Aly answered because Maude would have told her she had to, not because she agreed or even understood.
“Maybe one day you’ll fight alongside me as a knight or a Queen’s Rider.” Ma cracked a half-moon smile. “Would you like that?”
“I never want to do that.” Aly scowled until Ma’s smile sank into a sigh.
Aly didn’t want to be a knight or a Queen’s Rider. For years, she wanted to be a spy. Secrets and lies were candy to her. Eavesdropping and exploring were her bread and butter. Noticing things nobody else did and decoding messages were her meat and vegetables. Every night as she fell asleep, she dreamed of being a spy in strange lands whose names conjured mysteries in her mind: Carthak, Scanra, the Copper Isles…A litany of places she could only travel in her dreams.
These dreams became nightmares when she was twelve. After she accompanied Da to a meeting with a spy that ended with knives drawn, she often woke with the shivering certainty that a cold blade was being held to her throat after her identity had been betrayed in a strange land. Spies were alone in the world. They could trust no one. The disaster with Da had taught her that, but since she didn’t want Da doubting her courage, she pretended to be angry when Da tried to urge her away from active fieldwork. It was too late for that, she often thought bitterly. He had already dragged her into a situation where she could have been killed. It was too late for either of them to develop cold feet, but Da’s feet had gone ice-cold.
“Your ma will have my nose”—Da tweaked the tip of Aly’s nose as if her near-death was a joke—“if she learns I risked your life on a spy mission. Promise me you won’t tell her about the meeting that went wrong wrong.”
“Secrets are my candy,” Aly assured him with a grin even as she thought that Ma would be proud of how she had fought. Still this secret tasted like blood on her tongue when she kept it from her mother.
To atone for not telling her mother the only secret that mattered, she revealed to her one that didn’t.
“Roald has grown up to be quite handsome, hasn’t he?” Aly giggled to her mother when they were alone in their family’s tent as the royal progress wound through the kingdom like an extremely large and slow serpent. At last night’s ball, Prince Roald, who also had a knack for seeing what others missed, had noticed her hovering on the edge of the dance floor, watching the couples whirl by and listening to the trails of their conversation as they spun their schemes and spilled their secrets. He had invited her to dance, and she had agreed. When her hands rested on his shoulder, she felt their new broadness and found herself drowning in the blue oceans of his eyes in a way she had never believed possible. What sank her the most was the look in his gaze that informed her he would never regard her as anything more than a girl with whom he had shared some fond childhood memories. The five-year-gap between them was a chasm too impossibly wide for her to cross.
“You’re too young to find Conte princes handsome.” Ma’s expression twisted into the same sour lemon one with which she greeted all of Aly’s confidences these days.
“I can’t be much younger than you were when you started kissing a Conte prince,” snapped Aly, vindication surging through her veins when raspberries swelled in her mother’s cheeks.
“The Conte prince I kissed wasn’t betrothed at the time. Your prince is betrothed, Alianne.” Ma stalked out of the canvas tent, no doubt determined as ever to ensure that she had the last word in this argument with Aly.
“I know that. The entire realm knows that.” Aly glared at the flap as it swung shut behind her always disappearing mother. “That’s the whole point of this progress as everyone whose breathing knows.”
Aly understood that her prince was unattainable but that didn’t stop her from hoping that if she could undergo a transformation to make herself more glamorous—transfiguring herself from childhood caterpillar to beautiful butterfly—would at least look at her as if she held some allure beyond youthful nostalgia to him. To tempt and tantalize him as he unwittingly had her would be enough to satisfy her she thought as she visited Lady Cythera to beg for her first makeup lesson. Ma would never agree to teach her how to wear makeup even if Ma had been a woman who put on makeup more than a handful of times a year.
“Your eyes are the bluest I’ve ever seen. They remind me of a sky on a clear, cloudless day.” Aly opened her begging with flattery as she watched Lady Cythera line her eyelids with powder. Why Lady Cythera bothered gazing into a mirror when her eyes were closed was a mystery she would have to ask Lady Cythera to explain once she had convinced Lady Cythera to introduce her to the transformative powers of makeup. “That shadow on your lids emphasizes that.”
“Thank you.” Lady Cythera smiled with lips that had already been painted ruby red before a transfixed Aly. “That’s what I wear the powder for—to bring out my eyes.”
“Do you wear it to be beautiful for Uncle Gary?” asked Aly, wondering if Lady Cythera felt the same confusing emotions she did for Roald.
“No.” Lady Cythera’s eyes sparkled as she finished applying the shadow. “I wear it to be beautiful for everyone except my husband, dear Aly. My husband is blind enough to believe that I’m beautiful no matter what I’m wearing, and I love him for that.”
Aly was going to point out that Lady Cythera truly was beautiful no matter what she was wearing—the entire court said so; Aly knew that after much eavesdropping—but before she could get out the words, Lady Cythera went on, merry as a spring songbird, “I could show you how to put on powder that would make the green in your eyes pop.”
“I’d love that.” Aly bubbled inside with delight at being offered makeup tips without being subjected to the indignity of begging for them, and for a horrible moment she wished her mother was the sweet Lady Cythera, not the famed and feared Alanna the Lioness.
“Wonderful.” Lady Cythera began to search through her makeup for a powder to spread over Aly’s eyelids. “Perhaps you would like some lipstick on your lips as well? Not as bright a red as I am wearing, but a soft pink would complement your color nicely, I think.”
“That would be perfect.” Aly was glowing inside, and Lady Cythera hadn’t even begun applying the makeup. Makeup was truly more magical than any mage’s charm. She would have to tell that to Thom just to see him snarl like a provoked dog.
It tickled when Lady Cythera rubbed her fingers over Aly’s eyelids, and Aly had to fight not to squirm from the brush along her lips, but Aly thought the emeralds she saw shining in her eyes and the pink rose that bloomed where her mouth had been made her endurance worth it when she next glanced in Lady Cythera’s mirror. Before she could leave the tent, Lady Cythera forced the lipstick and eyeshadow upon her, insisting that she would never use them, though Aly suspected that was a lie, since Lady Cythera must use them if they were part of her makeup collection.
Aly’s makeup earned her many admiring glances from young men—sadly, not Roald, who didn’t see her before Ma did—but a glare and a rough washing with a damp towel from her mother.
“I won’t have my twelve-year-old daughter wearing makeup.” Ma’s voice was as abrasive as the towel she scraped across Aly’s closed eyes. “You’re a little girl. You shouldn’t be wearing makeup.”
“I’m not a little girl.” Aly felt stung and not just from the harsh washing she was most unjustly being subjected to by her out-of-touch-with-all-things-feminine mother. “Most girls my age have worn makeup.”
“Most girls your age are locked in a convent by their parents.” Finished abusing Aly’s face, Ma hurled the towel into the iron wash basin with a clang. “Would you like that, Alianne?”
“Perhaps I would.” Aly wasn’t about to admit that she didn’t want to go to the convent as much as she wanted to wear makeup. All she wanted was to be allowed to wear makeup, but as ever her mother was unyielding in her intention to thwart Aly’s deepest desires.
“Maybe your da and I should arrange a marriage for you too.” Ma obviously couldn’t resist raising the stakes.
“As Roald’s parents did for him?” Aly arched an eyebrow because she was in too deep to blink.
“As Roald’s parents did for him.” Ma plainly wasn’t about to blink either. “Maybe you should copy Roald’s good example and do as your parents tell you for once.”
“Roald isn’t marrying Princess Shinkokami because his parents told him to.” Aly was weary to the bone of having Roald held up as an example of proper behavior for her to emulate. “He’s marrying her because she’s exotic. I bet he loves exotic. Exotic probably makes him feel he’s finally going on the adventure he craves.”
Tossing and turning in her blankets hours later, it occurred to Aly that it wasn’t Roald who craved adventure and the exotic. It was her. She set her mind to figuring out how to go on an adventure that didn’t involve fighting as a knight or a Queen’s Rider or being stabbed in the back as a spy. It was almost dawn before she found one and permitted herself a few uneasy hours of sleep before approaching Uncle Gary, who would always provide an honest assessment of any plan she outlined to him.
“You look like you’ve been scheming.” Uncle Gary’s keen eyes fixed on her when she sought him out. “What about?”
“All the king’s diplomats are men.” Aly dodged the question deftly as she could even if she suspected she hadn’t fooled Uncle Gary. He was too clever for her, and that was why she appreciated his advice on her schemes. “Could a women become a diplomat for the king?”
“I don’t see why not.” Uncle Gary stroked his mustache musingly. “In my experience, most women are more diplomatic than men.”
“Have you met my mother?” Aly snorted, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. “Diplomatic is the last word anyone would use to describe her.”
“I said most women. Most women doesn’t include your mother.” Uncle Gary chuckled then added warningly, “Don’t tell your mother I said that. She’d cut me into a million pieces with her sword.”
“My mother isn’t so diplomatic as Lady Cythera, is she?” Aly saw a way to refocus the conversation on her major interest. “Lady Cythera is very diplomatic, wouldn’t you say?”
“Of course I would.” Uncle Gary grinned. “Lady Cythera taught me everything I know about diplomacy.”
Aly had heard often enough that Lady Cythera was the honey to Uncle Gary’s vinegar—the sweetness to offset his sarcasm—that she didn’t contest this. Instead she asked with an innocence that she hoped belied how her heart thudded in her chest, “If I trained under Lady Cythera, social secretary to the queen, for a sufficient number of years, could I be deemed a suitable diplomat to treat with foreign powers in the king’s name?”
“Yes, if you did that, I think the king and I could find use for you as a diplomat.” Uncle Gary’s nod sent Aly flying into his arms. He returned her wild embrace for a moment before posing the question Aly had dreaded since the outset of the conversation, “Did you speak with your mother about this plan of yours?”
“No.” Aly shook her head. “I know she’ll be furious, though.”
“You could talk to your father first,” suggested Uncle Gary, ruffling her hair.
“It wouldn’t make a difference.” Aly shook her head even more miserably. “Ma loves Da but not as much as he loves her. That means Da gives into Ma about anything important. I’ll have to talk to Ma myself.”
When Aly did as she had resigned herself to do—explaining to her mother on a long walk that not only would she not be a warrior, she wanted to become the sort of lady Ma most disliked and distrusted—Ma stared at her as if she had sprouted two extra heads. “Are my ears clogged? I can’t have heard you say that you want to become a stupid, useless court lady after I’ll the work I’ve done to prove that women can have a meaning—a purpose—beyond our looks and wombs.”
“I have a meaning and purpose even if it isn’t within your narrow ideas of meaning and purpose.” Aly was so frustrated with her mother’s determination to perceive everything Aly did as a repudiation of her life’s work that her words sounded more like a rejection than she wanted. “Diplomats aren’t stupid and useless. They prevent warriors like yourself from getting carved to pieces on the battlefield.”
“Being a diplomat for a woman means being a lady.” Ma’s nose wrinkled. “Being a lady means wearing dresses, curtseying all the time, dancing endlessly, and flattering and flirting with anything on two legs. I’d prefer a clean death on the battlefield to that slow torture.”
“You might.” Aly tried to contort her lips into a diplomatic smile that made her teeth hurt. Lady Cythera would have to teach her a better way to smile when she felt like screaming. “Not all court ladies would agree with you, but then all court ladies are stupid and useless, aren’t they? Perhaps I should tell the queen you consider her social secretary useless? I think she would enjoy hearing that as much as the Prime Minister would appreciate hearing that his wife is stupid.”
“You don’t need to threaten me with Thayet and Gary’s involvement.” Ma pinched the bridge of her nose. “You may study under Lady Cythera if that is truly what you want. Never let it be said that I came between any girl and her dreams.”
“Thank you, Ma.” Aly gasped in astounded gratitude at her mother’s sudden concession. Perhaps she was more gifted in diplomacy than she realized.
“Don’t thank me until you learn diplomacy is more boring and difficult than you could possibly imagine.” Ma’s tone was grim, but in the end her dire warning proved unwarranted.
Diplomacy proved a challenge—a new language for Aly’s cunning mind to decode—and she wasn’t as gifted as she believed before she began learning from Lady Cythera, but she was never bored, even when she had to memorize obscure titles in foreign tongues. Everything was a taste of the exotic that prepared her for the adventure she encountered at eighteen when she stepped off the boat to serve as the king’s diplomat at Queen Dovasary’s court in the Copper Isles. Queen Dovasary, whose older sister had died in the raka’s rebellion against the luarin, was new to the throne just as this mission was Aly’s first as a diplomat. She hoped that would provide some common ground and understanding between them as she embarked on this adventure she prayed would make her mother proud.
Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!