A/N: I can't help but feel a bit sorry for Liandrin, as loathsome a character as she is. I thought I'd write a bit about her.
I think that, as a rule, the Seanchan would do their best to break a new da'covale quickly and help her settle in to her new life. But Suroth clearly enjoys making Liandrin suffer, which is why I've made her so miserable in this story.
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Chains
There's an art to running, Liandrin has discovered. You can't race, tearing along corridors, because a da'covale must be below notice at all times, and that includes anything as unthinkable as letting bare feet slap on tile. And neither can you be slow and careful – once summoned, or sent on an errand, the da'covale must obey with all speed. It isn't fair. Liandrin realised quickly that for all their claims of perfect justice, the Seanchan aren't the slightest bit fair. She tries, does Liandrin, until sometimes she feels sick from it, desperate to please, just once to do right.
(only until she's rescued, until she manages an escape, she'll pretend, act the part of a perfect da'covale, and if she starts to believe it herself some days, she's not going to think about that)
The others, oh how she hates them, darting quick and silent as cats, but they were born to it, this menial life. She'd once thought novices the epitome of malleability, but they wear white here too – when they're allowed clothing at all – and keep their eyes to the floor, and no novice was ever so quick with her curtsey as the High Lady's property are to touch forehead to floor. The novice plans ways of breaking rules; the da'covale wakes each day determined to be more perfect than yesterday.
(Liandrin didn't understand hate until Suroth. she thought she did, oh yes, but that was a pale, sickly emotion compared with the bile that chokes her now. she feeds it at her breast and waits for the day it grows teeth to rend them all)
What is the difference, she wonders? How do ordinary men and women manage to instill such respect and fear, where Aes Sedai do not? The shivers chase each other up her spine – Teprine is attending the High Lady now, the only so'jhin stricter than Alwhin. Liandrin has never failed to be sent for a beating by that goat-faced sister-kissing excuse for a woman. As fear clenches in her belly, as her palms and underarms grow damp, Liandrin tries to wonder.
(the lamps cast long, flickering shadows that dance even though there is not a breath of wind, and out of the corner of her eye, Liandrin sees clawed hands reaching, obscenely stretched faces howling their silent sharp-toothed laughter. she tries to shift away, her eyes darting. Teprine sees. her lips tighten, and the faces spasm in sick delight)
Attendance. Ironic – the same word, almost the same duty, familiar to every Accepted. Standing silent and watchful, ready to be sent on some duty or set to a task. Except that the Accepted can shift her feet and look around, and the da'covale must be carved of stone; the Accepted knows she won't be whipped raw if she sighs, while the da'covale knows fine well that she will. It isn't fair. But then, the Seanchan aren't the slightest bit fair.
But today Liandrin is as close as she ever comes to being happy. Behind her blank face, the crashing waves of fear and hate are calmed by a wound spring of excitement and wicked glee. Suroth – still only Suroth in her head, even if the honourific is demanded from her lips – has taken bold steps, leaps that make Liandrin quake with fear to consider. She doesn't understand the details of Seanchan politics, but she can recognise a conspiracy when it's tightening around her, knows the knife-edge taste of a coup when it's pressed against her throat; Suroth is gambling, playing all her cards, but Liandrin has been watching from below lowered eyes, and she's caught the strained panic Suroth thinks she hides so well. Aes Sedai see volumes in the tiniest expression. Suroth's hand is guiding this stratagem, but she isn't the author of the plan. Her strings are being pulled, pulled off a cliff, and Liandrin is laughing, cackling with glee inside. Suroth will fall, and Liandrin can barely contain her triumph.
Once, Liandrin took a risk. And she lost so badly, fell so far, that it still dizzies her. From a life where her merest glance evoked fear and respect and obedience, to being nothing, less than a servant, less than a dog – Liandrin knows what it's like to be ground so far into the dirt that she tastes it on every breath. Suroth's hand has been the iron grip on her neck, but Suroth will be joining her soon, falling from her heights to root with the other pigs in their filth.
(not that Liandrin is like the other caricatures around her. She's just pretending, waiting for her chance. And she's been in the Black all but five of the years she's worn the shawl; she knows how to pretend, to deceive. It's just a little harder here, with none of the privacy and sheltering customs to fall back on. The pretence has to go a little deeper)
A snapped order, and Liandrin is moving before she knows it. Her limbs learned obedience even while her mind stubbornly resisted and fear palsies her limbs as she glances at Teprine to see if her inattention has been noticed. It has. Her clammy hands fumble at a silk wrap (pale rose, embroidered with fantastic birds, worth twenty times more than Liandrin herself) which then fails to fall in the graceful folds it was tailored for. Teprine's expression tightens to fury and Liandrin's hands clench compulsively. The wrap crumples. So does Liandrin's composure. Even Melmu, the most tolerant of Suroth's so'jhin, would have her beaten for this. Great Lord's mercy, Suroth hasn't noticed, but it doesn't matter. Terror crawls into her throat, settles, claws. She can't stop the tears that spill down her cheeks. Teprine doesn't even has to speak. Liandrin doesn't understand much of the finger-language the Seanchan use, but that particular flick of the fingers is one she is intimately acquainted with.
Q'Zera is a tiny woman even shorter than Liandrin, with dark shiny hair and exotic eyes that had captivated Liandrin when she had first seen her. The fascination didn't last long. Q'Zera is in charge of household discipline, and it doesn't seem possible that such a tiny, delicate woman can apply a switch with such force, but Liandrin howls louder for her than she ever did for Merean Redhill. Perhaps it's because she knows Q'Zera doesn't have to stop, she can beat her bloody and leave her limping for days; perhaps it's because she knows she deserved every stripe Merean ever dealt her, while she tries her best to be perfect here.
Perhaps it's because, beneath the merciless switch, all the illusions Liandrin uses to keep herself sane crack and fall away, their edges sharp and glittering like glass, and she's pleading and begging for mercy she knows she won't receive, promising to be a perfect da'covale and meaning it, meaning it in every beat of her heart and drop of her blood, meaning it as much as she meant her Oaths - the real ones, the second ones.
The irony is that it only earns her more punishment. Da'covale cannot give an oath; their actions and lives are not their own to swear.
When Q'Zera deems her suitably chastised, she dries Liandrin's tears with a soft cloth, and her hands are gentleness itself. Another Seanchan custom, that mad land where servants run to their own punishment. Q'Zera had been surprised and offended not to be thanked, that first time, though she had become used to it in the many times since. After offering correction, she will offer comfort, the one as important as the other, and both given in the same spirit. Liandrin hates Q'Zera, hates her like fire, like acid. At night, alone on her mat, she has feverish dreams that run with blood, flash with vicious hooks and ugly knives, and Q'Zera will be there, one day, her limbs snapped and twisted and her pretty face inhuman with agony. Kind hands rub her shoulders, above the stinging welts, and Liandrin can't help but lean into the only compassionate touch she ever feels now.
(Q'Zera is soft and welcoming and Liandrin burrows into her embrace, desperate need meeting boiling hate in a blaze that leaves her trembling. one day, she tells herself, she will kill Q'Zera with her own switch. and she'll stroke that dark hair and sing soothing lullabies while she does it)
Liandrin survives her days by waiting for night, those few hours when she's alone and unbothered, when she can let the knot of tension that she's bent into uncoil. It's a sleeping-mat, not a bed, but after a day of labour fit for a runaway novice, of hours of constant dread that weighs down her body like chains, Liandrin could sleep in a wet ditch and never stir. It might be better if she could; she doesn't always remember, but other lighter sleepers in the great attic-dorms have told her that her nightmares are frequent and terrible. When she's lucky enough to wake up and break the dream, it's always the same one – standing in a bare white hall, trying to hide under a rug that keeps getting smaller, and Suroth is coming, or Alwhin, or Gor with his cruel hands and cold eyes over that sadistic smirk. They're coming, and there's no escape.
If she wakes, she doesn't sleep again, even if her limbs ache with tiredness. She stares at the rough weave of her mat and soothes herself with dreams of the future. Of seeing Suroth brought low, lying in the dirt before her, or even beside her, welts and bruises decorating her skin, her arrogance torn away and thrown to the wind. Alwhin with a knife in her heart. No, her belly, so the death is long and agonising, and her eyes nothing but wet red sockets in her head, trying to scream around a mouthful of blood from her tongue, severed, torn out by the root. There isn't a word for the torment Alwhin will die in, someday. Liandrin has every snapped bone and wet gurgle planned out in flawless, exacting detail. In the dark, with no one to see, the thought makes her smile.
But those are the good nights. It's far more common for Liandrin to wake with hot, desperate tears pooling in her eyes, and then all she can dream about is escape, of being back in the Tower with the Red shawl secure on her shoulders, with mice like Allian and Greeta leaping when she looks at them, because she'll be free again someday, this Light-cursed shield will have unravelled, or splintered. She'll be strong, and she'll channel her luxurious bedclothes away each morning and stir honey into her afternoon tea with Air just because she can.
(she can't help but reach for the source, then, with the same success as every other time she has tried, all those hundreds of times. And she hits the shield and no matter how she beats her mental fists against it or tries to wriggle around it, it stays as implacable as it was the moment Moghedian wove it and sometimes she screams, waking everyone, screams and screams until her throat is raw or the other da'covale have gagged her, furious and terrified. dares to hope that she can scream herself awake to find it's all only a nightmare.)
Sometimes she wonders if she's insane, if she snapped under Temaile's torture and this is all the delusion of her agonised mind.
(sometimes she hopes she is)
Sometimes she wakes up with the grey light of dawn just touching the horizon and thinks another day and o great lord, that is the worst, the very worst, that she'll be ground down by this life until it becomes normal, expected, and she'll forget that there was ever another way, forget that she was someone before she was property, forget how to channel, forget the face of her father, forget herself. A corpse in white robes.
Are the others like that, she wonders? Has every spark been snuffed out of them until they only move around out of habit, until they know nothing but what they're told? Liandrin doesn't know. She doesn't talk to them. But she looks, now. Looks at their eyes. And has to look away, close to retching, from the peace and contentment she sees there. No. Not that. Never that. O Great Lord, not that.
Run. Run, she tells herself. Run to the harbour and stow away on a ship. Lose herself in the warren of streets, hide in a basement or an attic, attack a guard, a Deathwatch guard, and find freedom herself in the oblivion of death.
And as always, the compulsion rises and chokes her, her limbs walk her towards the stairs to the main house, and she knows, knows, that she will live her full years like this. As her mind bends beneath the horror of the thought, and the hate at her core cools into cold, perfect stone, Liandrin knows.
Somewhere, amongst the ruins, Liandrin can hear a voice.
And it's laughing.
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I thought about writing a sequel about Galina, but Therava scares the pants off me. Hope you enjoyed this :)
alkin