a life unkind
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Summary: Shianni and her wayward cousin, but mostly Shianni, as Bell Tabris is hopeless and doomed to be just like her mother. – Multichapter Origin Fic.-
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Bell looked absolutely ridiculous.
It might have been her expression, her shocked eyes flicking from Shianni, curled up and silent on the flagstones, and back again to Bann Vaughan. It might have been the shoddy condition of her wedding dress, copper-brown in places from bloodstains.
It might have been the slender, one-handed longsword in her right hand, its tip dragging on the flagstones.
Oh Maker, she thought, frozenly. They're going to kill her, they're going to have her, screaming, right here on this floor, and I could take it, I bore it, I didn't say a word, but she can't-
Shianni shoved her pain and her cold-blooded terror as far down as she could and tried to remain calm, tried to think.
Bell had done the stupid thing. Again. She'd broken out- somehow, but she was willing to put some of the blame on Soris, who was standing terrified behind her- and now she'd gotten it into her head that this was an enemy that she could actually fight.
By this point, Shianni knew better.
The Bann was talking. She had to force herself to concentrate, the words slipping by her ears like she was stuffed full of wool batting and broken glass. His hand was stretched out to the side- a bargaining gesture, she realized, his voice gone all soft and reasonable like when… when…
Her burning face screwed up, she tried to heave herself into a sitting position, but was stopped when one of the Bann's men planted a foot on her bare chest and pressed down
Bell's eye's narrowed.
And suddenly, she changed.
Maybe it was just because she'd been surprised when she entered the room, but then she seemed to settle down into a stance that didn't seem ridiculous, or amateurish, or anything less than the swordswoman she'd had to be to get this far.
She spent every day out behind Alarith's, playing at swords while the rest of us were trying to get by, Shianni thought. And Cyrion sighed and rubbed his forehead and I lectured her on being serious for a change, but neither of us noticed how very serious she was.
Bell's voice was the first to trickle down through the haze of pain and exhaustion surrounding Shianni. "And the other women?"
Shianni could feel the Bann smirk. "They'll be returned," he purred. "Somewhat… the worse for wear."
Images of Velora and of the other women going through what she'd been through branded themselves across Shianni's consciousness. She lurched, then, making an awful noise around a mouthful of broken teeth, trying to get free, to do something, anything-
Bell moved.
Or rather, she executed a flawless stop-thrust from a standing position, and the nearest guard, gurgling, went down clutching his spurting stomach with both hands.
"No deal," said Bell, flatly, her bloodied sword held casually before her.
The Bann roared something, and the room dissolved into a flurry of action and screaming steel. Soris hung to the back, grimly re-loading his crossbow after every shot, while Bell took on every other contender. She was fast, and she was brutal, and she knew what she was doing. She went for the knees, the eyes, any load-bearing joint she could reach, and Shianni realized that Bell wasn't the honorable death-seeker her mother had been because Bell didn't fight honorably. She was ruthlessly efficient, and it wasn't until every man in that room lay dead, Vaughan's head having thudded off and rolled under the bed only scant seconds after the first blow had been struck, that Bell turned worried, guileless eyes on Shianni.
By this point, Shianni had hauled herself away from the action until she was wedged with her back against one of the corners of the room, and when Bell stumbled over the corpses between them to reach her side, her fingers clenched white with the effort of keeping everything together.
Her cousin's hesitant touch on her knee brought her back.
Bell's eyes, unsurprisingly, were swimming with tears. "Shianni-" she blurted out, apparently gearing up for a speech. "I…. I didn't-"
Shianni knew that she should be thanking her cousin, should be breaking down and weeping and begging to be taken home because now it was finally safe to do so, and she would, she knew it, because there wasn't much else she could take for now, but-
She focused on Bell.
Focused on her beak of a nose and her messy golden hair and her earnest brown eyes. Focused on the calluses on her sword hand and the ugly bruise on her cheek from when she'd been struck down at the wedding. Focused on her big, ungainly, mule of a cousin who'd torn her way through the entire manor to reach her side.
Her voice cracking, she finally spoke.
"You ruined your dress."
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Author's Note: One more after this one, I think.