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“She won’t make trouble for us,” Mel says, forcing confidence into her voice that she doesn’t quite feel. Her mother will not heed weakness. “Strip her of her possessions and send her to the far colonies.”
“She’s the symbol of the old regime. Kill her now and only one must die. Let her live and you may need to kill thousands.”
“Or she may be a puppet ruler who placates her people and encourages their loyalty to Noxus,” Mel counters. She tilts her chin up and knows the girl’s life rests on her tongue tip. “I don’t need a throne, mother. I would rather be the power behind it.”
Ambessa studies the pale girl, the eyes so like Mel’s own, and sees the flash of fire that mirrors her own. This girl is more Noxian than her daughter. If Ambessa kills her, she will never be able to look at Mel again without seeing this death in her eyes.
Mel’s plan will fail, Ambessa knows, but all children fall as they learn to run.
“Then we will try it your way,” Ambessa says and wrenches the girl’s face down so she is facing the floor. “Kneel, child. Thank my daughter for your life.”
The soldiers force her shoulders down; slim thing that she is, it takes very little to force her to her knees. In halting Noxian, eyes still on the floor, the girl says “thank you”.
It even sounds as if she means it.
*~*~*~*
It works.
At first, it works.
The people, though angry at the death of their rulers, are swift to adapt. Mel makes sure that the transition is as smooth as possible, respecting local customs wherever possible, keeping the soldiers in strict line. No pillaging, no rapine, no swaggering around abusing the terrified locals.
She needs to prevent unrest from rising. A revolution is easier to kill in its infancy and anyone who waits until the writing is showing on the walls is a fool.
There are whispers, of course. People say that the girl is too young to rule, that she is only a figurehead for the Noxian who has been left behind. It’s nothing that Mel didn’t expect. It’s nothing she can’t deal with.
Then the whispers grow uglier.
“I don’t understand,” Mel says, pacing over the expanse of the gold-drenched throne room’s floor. The skirts of her black dress, trimmed heavily with gold, swirl around her in languid ripples of pure night. “How can you think they betrayed your family to us? My people tell me that yours whisper that you let us into the city so we would kill your parents and give the throne to you.”
It was an almost Noxian level of ambition, that. Impossible for the quiet, cowed girl whose rule Mel has spent near a full three years propping up.
“They are dead and I live. They are dead and Noxus rules through me.” Her gaze lifts and meets Mel, and Mel stops her pacing, caught in the mirror of her own eyes. “How can they reconcile that? They would rather I died than serve their conquerers.”
“We have been merciful,” Mel says, smoothing down the skirts of her dress rather than balling her hands into fists. “We have made their lives better. We have sent grain—”
“They they needed only because your armies trampled their fields and ruined their harvests—”
“We have sent teachers—”
“Who guide our children to speak the tongue of their conquerors and teach them that Noxus is the center of the world—”
“We have sent
gold
—”
“Can it return the dead to us?”
The chandeliers send sparks of color over Mel and her erstwhile queen, dots of dappled light that move even as the two teenagers are wholly still.
“You
thanked
me,” Mel says and turns finally to face the girl who lives only because of her. “Would you have preferred to die?”
“Not then,” the girl says, meeting Mel’s gaze steadily. “But I didn’t know, then, what would happen if I lived. My parents would be ashamed if they knew what I am now.”
My mother isn’t proud of me either, Mel doesn’t say, and resumes her pacing.
Three years. Three years of doing her best to reconcile the people to their new status. Three years of trying to play peacemaker between disgruntled soldiers and angry civilians. Three years of knowing her mother was waiting for her to fail.
If she calls for her mother, Amebssa will come and bring the armies of Noxus with her.
If she calls for her brother, Kino will come and bring his clever tongue with him.
If she calls for either of them, it will be an admission she is not strong enough in her own right.
“At least,” the queen offers, as if following the train of Mel’s thoughts, “your mother was wrong. The revolution isn’t rising around me.”
“No,” Mel agrees, raking her hands into the thick puffs of her hair, bound about her head like a crown and glimmering with as much gold as the queen’s own headpiece. “No, it isn’t. But it is rising.”
“It is rising,” the girl agrees, and Mel pretends she can’t hear the open satisfaction in her tone.
She should’ve known by the end of the first week that it wouldn’t work, Mel reprimands herself. If she couldn’t even win over a girl whose life she saved, how could she have hoped to win over the country?
They’d been uneasy allies, working together to lessen the edges of Noxian brutality, to protect the civilians, but it had never developed into the friendship that Mel had hoped for. The best she could get was gratitude and even that had been grudging and quickly spent.
Still, Mel will not give up. She will not admit to her mother that she’d been wrong. She will not fail to live up to Medarda standards.
Time, that’s all she needs. Time enough for the citizenry to grow accustomed to Noxian rule. Time enough for reluctant cooperation to turn into trust.
Mel just needs more time.
*~*~*
“Your sister’s gone.”
“What happened?”
“She trusted the wrong woman.”
