Chapter 1: Setting The Scene
((A/N: The first chapter is just a bit of history leading up to the meat of the story, and shouldn't be taken to represent the tone of the entire work. Think of it as a glimpse of background. I've taken some liberties with the lore and timeline, using headcannon, reason, and Regency era inspiration to fill in some gaps left by the writers.))
Duncan had been hired to tutor on occasion, and for some time, Mayble was no different than most of the middle class children he had worked with in the past. Their parents wanted better for them than they had, and tended to lean on some of the lords to try and get a leg up. Arranged marriages were common enough, and Pratchett Parker was no new specimen. He wanted his daughter to marry well, and who better, he reasoned, to show a young lady what a nobleman might expect from a proper wife than a nobleman?
The problem had quickly become, however, that he was having more fun teaching her to hunt and shoot than he was having coaching her behavior. She was, pardon the pun, a pistol. She was fun and funny, fiery and opinionated. Her instinct for the hunt was keen, her hand steady with a rifle, and her zeal for what he showed her was unparalleled. She utterly devoured everything he taught her, from gun cleaning and maintenance to field dressing her kills. What had begun as little more than a fun hobby for them to share had rapidly consumed their time and efforts, until he had all but made her apprenticeship official. Keeping this all from her father was tricky, and so he had tried to keep up with her other lessons in the meantime, but it was just as likely they would wind up crouched behind some tree or other while Duncan explained a funny plant and how it might be used, or the migration patterns of certain game. She was feeding her little family better than her father had by the time she was thirteen under Duncan's careful and passionate tutelage.
They had started work on bows, which allowed them a good deal more time for Duncan to coach her more regarding the things he was hired to coach her about. Posture and bearing were easy enough when coupled with aim and muscle control. Most things, she picked up on quite well. Her manners and etiquette were impeccable, she was an excellent and engaging conversationalist, and she had at least one useful skill. He thought he might even begin music lessons for her soon, violin, perhaps. Something small and portable. In essence, she would make some snotty son of a lord an excellent wife someday... if he could teach her to keep her mouth in check. He was always enchanted and amused when she would lapse back into familiar vulgarity in moments of stress and anger, or when she would stand up to some opinion or other he presented to her and tear it to bits, even when she was wrong. It made him laugh, it made him proud... but he couldn't imagine some spoiled, entitled, far less experienced young man accustomed to traditional ways finding it as amusing. He couldn't bring himself to care. He had come, over the past year or so, to cherish their time together. He spent more time and effort on the little thing than her own father had done. He had been suffering the loss of his wife for over a decade, and Duncan suspected he might have blamed Mayble in some not-insignificant way. Now that she was bringing in much of their revenue, even starting her own small fur trade, he had given up, taken to drink, and sequestered himself in their cottage. Had she not been so self-reliant, Duncan would have adopted her outright. Instead, he went to city hall and reported an official apprenticeship, securing her status within their society, relieving her of the looming threat of arranged marriage, and still allowing her the freedom to operate however she liked. She had taken to sneaking horses and showing up at his door in the middle of the night, something that, under increasing Scourge threat, he found too dangerous to allow. Rather than banish her to her lonely cottage and drunken father, he had set her up a small room in the back of his home, and invited her to stay whenever she liked. She only went home to ensure her father ate and cleaned himself.
All in all, it was a calm time, and the time they both recalled most fondly. Things had been quiet, despite the rising tensions between their irritable King and Lordaeron's Alliance. It wasn't until Greymane decided to erect a massive wall, cutting their people off from the rest of the world, that things began to turn sour.
By this time the eastern lords had begun to rumble and groan under the threat of the rising wall, despite the turmoil slowly engulfing the rest of the world; that was the *rest* of the world, after all, and their King had made it clear in no uncertain terms that his priority was Gilneas and her people. Surely enough, by year's end, the wall had been completed, and must of the eastern lands were cut off from Gilneas entirely. The lords had been angry, and that righteous spark of fearful anger was fanned by Darius Crowley.