Disclaimer: The world and characters of Tortall belong to Tamora Pierce, not to me. Written for the Summer Challenge at the Tamora Pierce Experiment: Writing Challenges.
This fic focuses on the Cooper/Trebond family (Beka to Alinna) and will jump forward and backward in time and characters.
This starts with Rispah, and the theme 'freedom'.
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Rispah grew up dreaming.
Not like the other girls, of handsome princes (Prince Roger and later, Jonathan) or bags of money, but of choices, of decisions, of her own path.
Rispah was broken of those dreams quickly.
It was natural, healthy, normal even, for a girl like her. Girls from the Cesspool became flower sellers, became women of the night. Rispah accepted this.
Goddess knew she accepted it.
She had been working for a few years when her cousin showed up, young but already hardened with a sharp, sarcastic edge and plenty of knives. She watched and worried, reassuring herself that there was still time, he could still be saved, there was still time…
There was no time.
He got the crown at sixteen. Rispah could not stop shaking her head, but a sad smile spread across her face. He may have been stuck in the Lower City, but he'd clawed his way to the top. He had the power. He had choices.
He had freedom, and she didn't.
George approached her within the year. She was working the tables at the Court, weary, worthless, a fake smile plastered on her red red lips.
"Rispah," he said. She looked up from scrubbing, eyes tired, and wiped her curls out of her face.
"Yes, Majesty?" she said.
"Ye don't need to call me that, Rispah," he said. "I 'ave an offer for ye- from tradition, yeh see, there's a Queen of the Rogue. I think ye'd be a grand one."
She took a deep breath.
"I'd be 'onored," she said.
She met Coram years later.
She grew a new type of freedom, a new type of dream- something just for her.
There was time left.