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When Mel was six, she broke her wrist. It was no one’s fault really. During a riding lesson, her horse, a pretty brown and white spotted gelding named after a famous comet, had startled at something and a small girl yanking on the reins was not enough to keep him from bolting. She had clung to the reins and then, as the horse grew faster and she grew more scared, his mane and neck, tangling her small hands in his course chestnut hair and begging him to stop through tears.
She didn’t remember the fall, just her terrified riding instructor’s face peering down afterwards and the shooting pain in her left wrist. The instructor had been speaking quickly, panicked. Even as she tried to soothe her, she was trying to see if there was any way to hide the injury. But it was already too late. The shadow of her mother fell over them both and it did nothing to stop Mel’s tears.
“What happened?” her mother asked.
“The horse spooked and–” the instructor started.
“You were supposed to train it. It would be best if you were gone within the hour.”
The instructor went silent and pale and nodded. Mel never saw her again. She never found out what had happened to her either. Kino told her later that she was thrown into a dungeon and left to rot, but that had been when he was trying to scare her. She knew enough by then not to believe everything he said.
“Get up, Mel. Pull yourself together,” her mother said not unkindly when she finally turned to her attention on her.
Mel stood and gulped back more tears, breathing deeply until they stopped. Then her mother smiled at her and wiped at the tear tracks with her large thumb.
“That’s my girl. Remember, Medardas are not weak,” her mother continued.
“I know, mother,” Mel replied, voice still thick with tears.
“Good. What are Medardas?”
“Strong, ruthless, loyal, clever, and uncompromising,” Mel said immediately.
Her mother nodded her approval with a small smile. Mel swallowed her tears and didn’t cry again, not when the doctor set her arm and not when she was told she would not be allowed to ride that horse again. She had begged her mother not to kill him. Her mother had relented and instead had him trained as a war horse. She thought of him years later, when she was fourteen and her mother beheaded a girl not much older than she was in front of her. Medardas did not show mercy either. An unspoken sixth Medarda virtue.
Before she was four, Mel could repeat the virtues back to her mother perfectly. By the time she was nine, she could do it flawlessly in seven languages. It took her a long time to learn what it was to embody all the rules, though. Kino had understood at once, practically born repeating them. After she broke her arm, he started to teach her. At twelve, he was already becoming broad like their mother and would be taller than her soon enough, or so everyone said. He was the favorite. Mel was lithe and clever, like their father. She was not the favorite.
“Mother said you were crying when you hurt your arm,” he said, sitting on the edge of her bed while she drew, left arm tightly bound in a cast. It itched. She knew better than to scratch it.
“I didn’t mean to, but it hurt,” she replied, looking at her brother before going back to her drawing. It was of him. It was not very good, but she thought she’d gotten his nose right at least.
“Medardas–”
“Aren’t weak. I know. She said. But it hurt.”
“Yeah, I know. I broke my ankle three years ago and it hurt, but I didn’t cry.”
Mel looked at Kino, who was sitting up straighter, smiling as if proud of the memory. Mel shrunk in on herself a little more, frowning. She would never be like him, never be the favorite.
“How?” she asked.
“How what?” Kino replied.
“How didn’t you cry?”
Kino paused for a moment, thinking. Mel waited. Then he just shrugged and flopped so that he was half laying across her legs with his back against the wall. Mel let out a delicate huff. She wouldn’t be able to draw him properly now. He’d moved. If only Medardas were patient as well.
“I just didn’t. I thought of what mother would do and did that. She never cries,” he said.
Mel nodded. He was right. A few years later, when she fell during fencing class and grabbed her instructor's sword on instinct, she sliced her hand open and needed seven stitches. She didn’t cry once. Her mother didn’t remark on her lack of tears but rather on her clumsiness and how foolish it was to grab a sword’s blade to break a fall. Mel didn’t argue. It had been foolish. She was embarrassed enough. However, out of all the Medarda traits, she knew she embodied cleverness the best. It had been a temporary lapse. It wouldn’t happen again, especially when she was ten and her mother gave up on turning her into a warrior and let her focus on statecraft instead.
As Mel grew, she learned to bend herself into the shape her mother wanted. Well, a shape similar to what her mother wanted, at least. She would never be a warrior. That was for Kino. But her mother saw the worth of a clever mind and Mel knew to uphold the loyalty to the Medarda name. That part was easy. Medarda meant her meek father. Medarda meant Kino. Medarda meant her mother who she still loved despite all of it. Her mother was disappointed when she tried to beg mercy for the princess of that conquered kingdom, but it didn’t matter. Mel didn’t cry out when she watched her mother take the girl’s head from her neck. She didn’t shed a tear as she watched the light leave her eyes and the head fall. She didn’t turn her face away as the floor was stained red.
That night, she cried herself to sleep and felt foolish and embarrassed for it. She didn’t know the girl. There was no reason to be so upset. Besides which, her mother was right. She would be a symbol for the inevitable rebels to flock around and cling to as if she alone could bring back the former glory of their kingdom, now a Noxian colony with all the wealth that entailed.
She had been fourteen then. At seventeen, when she was maybe the girl’s age, she finally failed her mother. There was relief in the failing. It felt like she had let go of a rope attached to some heavy object she’d been holding for years. It felt like the end of the day after a long ceremony when her hair was taken out of its pins to coil around her face in loose dreads. It felt like ash in her mouth.
Really, it had been coming since she had asked her mother to spare that girl. Or earlier, when she had begged her mother to spare the horse that threw her. Little mercies on top of little mercies built and built and built until her mother could only see her as a weak, disappointing thing. At seventeen, she was sent away after daring to suggest a softer approach to some enemy on some foreign shore her mother was preparing to flatten. To be fair, it had been a heated argument. To be fairer, it had been in front of her mother’s advisors and several Noxian nobles Mel knew to have the same or a higher status than the great Medardas. She did regret it, too. The experience taught her to hold her tongue and her temper. She resolved to do both as she boarded a ship bound for Piltover, a little backwater city state that was wealthy enough, but barely more than a trading outpost with hardly an ounce of history.
She built her empire there for sixteen years and let it shatter in an instant. In some ways, she blamed Jayce. He made her weak, just as she apparently made her mother. Love was not part of the Medarda virtues, but it had snuck in all the same. It had been there for a long time, but she only realized it when Jayce lay his head on her lap and told her his best friend was dying. She didn’t know why. She just knew that the twin feelings, the sudden bloom of love for Jayce and sorrow for Viktor meant that she was not a Medarda, not really. Medardas didn’t love naive idealistic men who were embarrassingly easy to twist to their will (something she now felt nothing but guilt for). Medardas didn’t mourn the death of a thorn in their side, even they’d known said thorn for years and despite all that still held a great respect for him.
Jayce came to her bed again that night, after he told her about Viktor. She welcomed him. She wished her mother would just go so she could live her life as she wanted, a new and startling thought she didn’t know what to make of.
“Don’t you want to stay with Viktor? If he’s…if there isn’t much time left?” Mel asked while Jayce stood slightly awkward and still mourning in her foyer.
“He’s working. And he’d probably kill me if I spent every waking moment with him. We had some close calls in the early days,” Jayce joked. “Besides, I want to see you.”
Mel let him kiss her then. No one had wanted just to see in years if they ever had at all. She dreamed of the dead princess that night. It had been years since she had last dreamt of her face, seen the way it fell from her shoulders. When she woke, Jayce was snoring softly beside her. Her heart was racing, but it was nice to lay next to him and pull herself flush against his warm back. It didn’t make it go away. But it did make it feel a little better. Medardas weren’t soft. Except maybe she was.
Later, at the council meeting, when she saw Viktor looking like death had already claimed him but with a fire still in his eyes, when she saw Jayce unsure yet steady propose a revolution, when she saw the colleagues she’d spent years manipulating to do exactly what she wanted scream at each other like children on a playground, she felt like laughing. Medardas were strong, but here she was letting the fear of war guide her hand. Medardas were clever, but she would back Jayce’s half-baked plan that was too hastily conceived and too easy to unravel. Medardas were ruthless, but there was mercy in her for the people below, who died young, who had nothing, who still had to face a trencher’s death even when they’d clawed their way above. Medardas were uncompromising but this was nothing but a compromise she would gain nothing from. Medardas were loyal and she was slipping the ring off of her finger and going against her mother.
Mel wondered what it was to lack a last name, as Viktor did, as so many in the Undercity did as she raised a delicate hand in the air and voiced her support for Zaun’s independence. Perhaps it was easier.
When she looked at Jayce in the aftermath of the vote, when the world had been changed not through some violent campaign that would stain the streets with blood but two solid hours of arguing, his face seemed to glow with a radiance she didn’t know the source of. Jayce was smiling at her and, for once, Viktor was too. She smiled back and then frowned. There was something wrong with the light in the room. It was too bright, too blue.
She turned around.