triangularity | Hadand | runaway AU where her betrothal is dissolved

She remained silent as he glared down at her with those angry green eyes she’d braced herself all her life to endure. To deflect. He had never struck her, but he’d beaten Evred and Barend frequently enough that his presence in the schoolroom had felt akin to impending thunder all the days of their childhood.

“I will marry Joret, and you’ll get an honorable treaty,” he said, having planned that much, and practiced it over and over to get it out in one piece, with no tremor.

She gasped. "What?”

“Marry. Joret. You and I. Go to Father together. You marry a p-p-prince. Trade. Alliance. All with honor.” He got that out with utter conviction—there was no going back, not now. He’d promised Joret.

"Have you, uh, seen her?” Hadand groped wildly for the real world, which seemed to have slipped sideways, leaving her in a terrible dream.

--

The week or two that follow are like a bad dream continued. None of it is real, somehow, until she sees Joret at Aldren's side in front of the whole city. Joret is as unwilling to take Hadand's place as hlinlaef, the heir's betrothed, as Hadand was to give it up. It was her duty. And her home, of course. And her honor, she supposes. She was going to outrank every woman in the kingdom, and she's trained all her life for it. If Hadand has to leave her responsibilities to anyone else, someone she loves and trusts like a sister is obviously best, but...

But trouble seeks out Joret, lured in by her beauty. Hadand thinks she'd be hard-put to find a single man in the kingdom, at least among those whose interests run toward women, who isn't attracted to Joret.

None of that is left to her, and she's seen what Queen Wisthia's life was like every day for the past twenty years. No Marlovan, Hadand included, ever gave the queen much in the way of respect or consideration. They conducted the business of the kingdom around her, as if she were furniture. Hadand can't bring herself to be put in that situation. Deposited in another kingdom whose customs she doesn't understand, ruler in name but never in fact, always an outsider.

Hadand knows she won't refuse, if the king asks it of her. She doesn't think he'd ever order it, but he'll ask, along with other options that won't benefit the kingdom nearly as much. Staying in Iasca Leror won't be included in her list of options. Hadand left here would be a rallying point for strife and bickering among all the Jarls, a carefully planned royal betrothal made decades ago set aside in favor of the heir's obsession with a pretty face. Her sense of duty is too strong to say no, so she has to be out of the palace before the question is posed.

She loves the palace and Choread Hesea, raised in the royal nursery after being fostered into her betrothed's family at age two. It was never just duty. Aldren has taken her home from her along with the position she's worked for all her life. He won't take the rest of her choices from her.

Hadand writes a letter to her mother first of all, in code and handed to Tesar for personal delivery. She packs very little, hides as many weapons on her person as she can manage, and, in equal measures desperation and cold deliberation, seizes the first opportunity for escape she comes across.

Her younger brother was smuggled out of the kingdom on a ship over six years ago, and it seems to be Hadand's turn for the same. She lets a wave of guilt and regret at the thought of her mother, now childless, wash over her. Then she sets it aside for another day. Right now, she has to figure out what comes next.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The city of Darujhistan is a port city on the landlocked Lake Azur which people travel to and from every day. The main thoroughfares are lined with gas lamps lit every night. The last free city on Genabackis, its climate is similar to the region near the Caspian or Dead Seas. It was summer and the Festival was approaching. The streets were filled with the news of Pale's fall to the Malazan Empire and people were celebrating like the sky might fall at any moment.

Captain Ganoes Paran was trying to find the dive his squad was holed up in all over again. There was a pain in his gut that shortened his pace as he wove through the noisy crowd. He paused to get his breath, watching people milling in a cross street.

(Fantasy geography is hard.)

Edited 2016-05-24 20:30 (UTC)

Hadand had to pay for her first passage, because she was too old to talk anyone into taking her as an untrained ship rat. She's starting to run low on options. Talking someone into taking her as a fighter may be the best she can hope for. In the meantime, she's causing a very quiet commotion nearby, the crowd shifting to give her a wide berth.

A boy's wrist is caught in one of her small hands, a knife drawn with the other, and her feet in an easy, practiced stance that would work well if she felt like using that knife. She considers the ragged boy for a second, then lets him go. Her accent and phrasing, when she addresses him, is quaint, a generation or three out of date. "I have little enough without you trying to take it. Go."

Paran pulled himself together to go see the commotion. He was very wary about the reaction a foreigner might get pushing around locals, especially so close to the Fete.

By the time he was close enough to see what was happening, he figured the woman had things well in hand. She could have been Gadrobi with her height and figure but her skin was paler than theirs. The accent was unfamiliar. Paran wasn't going to escalate the situation or make himself unwelcome in the city by pressing his help where it wasn't necessary but he made an effort to meet her eye and express his interest in talking to her when she was done scolding the pickpocket.

Hadand was observant enough to note the stranger trying to get her attention, and she nodded almost imperceptibly. She stayed where she was a moment first, sheathing the knife at her waist and straightening. Hadand summoned up a small smile for the next few locals who gave her looks, placating and almost apologetic. She knew how quickly things could devolve into violence, and how easy it was for either a criminal or an outsider to become a target.

Only once she was sure there wasn't going to be negative fallout did she approach Paran. She gave him a small smile too, but this one wasn't apologetic at all. He might notice the tops of hilts in her boots as well as the dagger at her waist. Hadand had more knives up her sleeves, but those were strapped flat enough that they weren't visible at all in the drape of the fabric. When she spoke, her voice was soft, carefully pitched just high enough to be heard over the crowd. The precision of that balance implied practice. "Hello. What can I do for you?"

"I'm new and in need of personnel." There were so few Bridgeburners left. And no one was going to rely on Sorry. "I can't pay you up front but I can give you a job offer." He was looking at her knife hilts as he said that.

"You seem like you can handle yourself." Nearly half of Dujek's army were women and it wasn't uncommon for women to be mercenaries. He wouldn't trust her necessarily but he didn't fully trust his squad either. HE could deal with this.

Hadand considered for no more than a second. She'd made it so far from home that the chances of her ever having to fight against Iasca Leror if she took a job as a mercenary were slim. It wouldn't do any harm to at the very least hear more detail. Fighting was her most marketable skill set, and she had assumed she'd need to look for exactly this sort of offer.

She caught his eyes on her boot knives and had her steady gaze ready to meet his when he raised it. "I can handle myself. Tell me a little more about yourself and the job. Room and board are included, I assume?" She could do without pay awhile, as long as her rapidly dwindling savings didn't deteriorate further in the meantime. Hadand had never needed much past basic necessities. Even as a future queen, she'd lived simply.

Paran nodded firmly. "Right now we're staying in a dive called the Phoenix Inn. When this job's over we'll be going elsewhere. Maybe back to Pale, maybe further south." He watched to see if that meant anything to her or if she had any objections.

He was assuming a fighting woman wouldn't have strong objections to sleeping in the same room as men. Even men as occasionally hygienically unpleasant as Hedge sometimes got.

Hadand is silent for a moment, then decides on the two conditions that matter most. Iasca Leror has seen a lot of worry and violence in recent years, and then there's her own family legacy of it to consider.

"I can fight, but I won't make killing or burning and looting raids on civilians, and I won't fight against my homeland. The latter shouldn't be an issue unless you range very far afield. I've come a long way." As might be obvious by the fact that Hadand's accent is nothing like that of anyone else in the city, and probably not one he's ever encountered. Marlovans are an insular people.

"We're not here to loot." Paran said after a moment of heavy thought. "We aren't here to raid." They were there to make Darujhistan surrender. That plan did involve some civilian casualties and some explosions.

"We may eventually expand to your homeland's boundaries but we can deal with that when we get there. It's unlikely to be soon."

Was that good enough?

" 'Unlikely to be soon,' isn't entirely reassuring, nor 'expand.' Are you empire-building?"

Because she wasn't sure she wanted to sign on for anything like what her own kingdom already faced on another front. Or, for that matter, what they'd done themselves. She could make those decisions for her kingdom. She wouldn't, for money.

"You really aren't from around here. Yes. The Malazan Empire plans to extend its borders." Paran said it plainly because any amount of prevarication would quickly be exposed by listening to practically anyone. "As we've been doing since Empress Laseen took the throne."

She hadn't been in town long enough to pick up on all the local politics.

Hadand considered her options, or rather, her stunning lack of them, then asked, "How bound is someone to your company once they join? May they leave freely? Presumably not during battle itself, of course, but other times."

"Officially? You're a traitor and a deserter and we will hunt you to the ends of the earth. Unofficially, so long as you don't make it too obvious or take too much with you, no one will follow you. A new name, a new city." Paran shrugged. "Who's to know?"

Hadand | runaway AU where her betrothal is dissolved | Open to assorted cross-canon AUs!

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