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i. princess
People are always telling her she looks like her father.
It's fucking annoying, mostly. Her mother has these gorgeous green eyes, but Liv ended up with her father's black ones. She's got his complexion too. Her mother's build though: small and lithe. People say she'll appreciate it one day, when the time comes to start attracting suitors, but who cares about that anyway? She'd rather her father's bulk.
Instead, all the time she gets, "Don't you look just like the duke!" Before she even knows what it means, people are saying that. Her first three years, she thinks duke is just another word for father, like papa or dad.
She can't actually pinpoint the day she realizes what kind of people her parents are. Mother is a killer (semi-retired) and Father's a politician (as corrupt as they come). But as for Livia Lash— well, she's basically a princess.
She grows up in a big house on the banks of the Chionthar. There are grounds full of topiaries, meals on the veranda overlooking the water, and a bedroom with more toys than she can ever play with. Liv takes lessons with private tutors: history, languages, statecraft. She plays instruments and rides ponies. Every year for her birthday, her father gives Liv pieces of jewelry with long, storied histories and a careless wave of his hand.
Everyone says she's lucky, or else that she's privileged and spoiled. But mostly, Liv just steals her mother's books on poisons, her father’s on history. She reads them laying on her stomach in bed, by the light coming in off the river. She likes to litter the margins with little drawings: proof that she was there.
-
One year around Midwinter, her mother gets ready for some holiday gala and lets four-year-old Liv watch from the love seat. She sees the way her mother sits at the edge of her chair, leaning over her vanity to look into the depths of the mirror. She listens while her mother explains each step of her routine, tells her the names of her rouge, her lipstain, her perfume.
"You put it on your pulse points— wrists, neck, and temples. Your father had it imported from Calimshan for me. Do you know where that is?"
"South," says Liv. "Past Tethyr."
"Good girl. Your geography is coming along nicely."
Mother and Father are weird about stuff like that. Pulse-points, places and scents. There's a whole language to it that both of them speak, but that they never bother to teach Liv.
It happens a lot over supper. The three of them will be sitting at the dining table, and her parents will lean together like conspirators and converse in strange words and half-sentences, even though Liv is right fucking there. Sometimes she'll bang her fists on the table and demand that they include her, when she's still little enough to get away with it. Once she's older, Liv mostly just tunes them out.
It's like this: sometimes Liv will be halfway through building a fort or lining up her dolls when her mother's laughter rings out somewhere down the hall, bright and sharp as a perfect bite of citrus. Father always seems to answer it. His voice drops into that bossy tone of his, a door slams, and then they're both gone for ages.
And then, other times, Father will call her mother Bhaalspawn, and Mother's whole posture shifts, elegance giving way to something dangerous and predatory. Then Mother will stamp her foot and snap Enver in a tone like polished steel. To Liv, it's like they've managed to have an entire argument and make up again in the space of two words.
It's all perfumes and pulse-points, a code she can spot but never quite crack. She’s fluent in the shape of it, if not the sense.
-
Liv has a dream, young enough that it's basically her first memory: there’s a red sky, no sun, and no one alive but her. She wakes up and tells her mother, who goes very quiet and holds her a little too tightly.
Later, when Liv is five or six, her mother sits her down and puts her hands on Liv's shoulders, which means that something very serious is about to happen. She uses her danger-voice to say that if Liv ever has any strange dreams, or meets a little demon wearing a hat and claiming to be her butler, she should come find her immediately.
At the time, Liv spends several months secretly hoping to meet the butler. Her parents have stewards and chambermaids, but she's never had a servant of her own before. But when Sceleritas Fel finally does make an appearance, in the middle of the night in Liv's toy-stuffed bedroom, she makes a snap decision and runs to get her mother like she's supposed to.
"In your room?" her mother confirms, green eyes bright.
Liv nods.
"Go find your father," her mother orders. "No stopping along the way."
Father is still in his workshop, even though bedtime was hours ago. When he sees Liv come in, he seems to know immediately that something is wrong. "Where's your mother?" he demands.
A little while later, Mother comes and stands in the workshop doorway. She's covered head to toe in blood, holding a green knife in her hand. Liv even thinks there might be guts or something tangled in her hair. It's fucking terrifying.
"You've handled it then, Bhaalspawn?" says Father. If he were any other person, she might say he sounded anxious.
"For now," says Mother.
Liv never finds out what happened, but the butler never comes back after that. She does start going to monthly teatimes at Jaheira's house though, which is full of cool plants and secret passageways. Jaheira herself is fun too, even if she does ask Liv lots of weird questions. So, in the balance, it’s not a bad outcome.
-
Nobody ever has to teach Liv how to take up space. Even as a child, she sprawls across divans, drapes herself over the arms of chairs, props muddy boots on garden benches. She leaves her things strewn on dining tables and end-tables, leaves her clothes on the floor.
She grows up thinking interruptions are just another way of participating in a conversation. By the time she's old enough to notice other children waiting politely for their turn, the habit is too deeply ingrained to break.
-
Liv's mother has friends the way her father doesn't: a whole cohort of them. For a while when she's little, they'll come over to stay with her when her parents have to go out. Liv loves them: Wyll and Karlach, Minsc and Jaheira. They play games with her, tea parties and dress up and silly rough housing in the yard. There are others, too, who live far away; but when they come for visits, they always bring presents.
Other than the teas, Jaheira has Liv over for slumber parties too sometimes. She's got four kids still living at home and two more who come for visits: Fig for sparring, Jhessum for dress-up, Tate for the house's best hiding places. And Thessaly, a tiefling girl only a year and a half older than Liv, who arrived at Jaheira's the same year the visits started and who is the best thing to come out of any of it.
"Friends are a good thing," Mother says, when she catches Liv and Thess sneaking in the larder. "But also a liability. Don't forget."
Well. Liv figures her mother would know.
Uncle Wyll and Aunt Karlach don't usually come over when Father is home. It's weird, and neither of them ever says why. Karlach comes the closest though, when Liv gets brave enough to just ask her outright. One day, as they're out playing in the gazebo, just: "Why don't you like my father?"
Karlach strokes Liv's hair and sighs. "It's complicated, kid," she says. "I knew your dad before your mum and him ever… fuck." And she trails off.
(Aunt Karlach is, incidentally, the person who teaches Liv the word fuck. As if there was any doubt.)
There's one evening when Uncle Wyll is over while Liv's parents are out, and he and Liv are pretending to hunt monsters in the parlor. The monsters are really Liv's stuffed toys, but Wyll hides them in corners and then uses a simple cantrip to make them jump out at her while Liv brandishes a child-sized blade.
When her mother gets home, Liv drops her sword in her rush to attach herself to her mother's leg. "Mother!" she says, beaming upward, missing teeth. Her mother's hand rests on her head. Something flickers across her face and is gone before Liv can make sense of it. "You're home!"
Her mother crouches down in her long, velvet dress. Her thumb brushes the apple of Liv's cheek. "Good evening, Livia."
Under her mother's gaze, Liv feels suddenly taller. She shoots Wyll a grin over her shoulder. "Fight monsters with us, Mother!"
Her mother breathes out. She skims her thumb across Liv's cheek again, almost like she's petting a cat, like Liv is very soft. "That's alright," she says. "You're doing beautifully without me, dear."
She stands. Liv watches her mother's hand lift away from her face, and then her mother is already across the room, and the door is pulling shut behind her, quiet as she always is.
"Liv, sweetheart?" Wyll prompts. His voice is too soft. "You know your mother loves you, right?"
Liv turns around and kicks her sword where it fell on the floor. The blunted blade goes skimming over the boards with a clang, straight into the wall. "I'm going to my room," she announces.
-
She doesn't have any grandparents, unless you count Bhaal, which Liv tries not to. There were two people named Flymm once, and another two called Lord and Lady Lash. Liv's mother killed all four of them.
Other kids have grandparents.
She makes the mistake once of asking her father what his parents were like. She likes the idea of grandparents, even if they're dead. "They were nothing," her father says, and forbids her from ever asking again.
Still, she doesn't give up easily on the idea of having more family. Liv asks for a brother when she's seven or so. She doesn't have much grasp of sibling relationships, but she thinks a brother would be nice. She'd stay her father's girl, naturally, no competition there, and she'd have someone to boss around, someone who'd have to play by her rules.
She marches into her father's office with a list of convincing arguments drawn up in messy ink, but she never even gets to item one. As soon as she makes her request, he barks a sharp laugh.
"Liv," he says. "Livia." He pulls her to him and kisses her hair. "No, I don't think so."
She scowls. Father acquiesces to all her other requests— dolls, books, dresses, desserts. She isn't very comfortable with no.
"I'll ask Mother," she threatens, chin in the air.
He laughs again, and there's a note in it that tells Liv the matter was settled long before she'd thought to ask. He tucks her hair behind her ear. "You do that, my dear. Maybe you’ll even be convincing."
-
Liv has spent more nights than she can count flat on her back, eyes on the ceiling, wondering whether her parents ever wish she'd been born a boy.
"Are you kidding?" says Thess, when Liv confides the fear to her one evening. They're sitting cross-legged on Liv's four-poster, braiding each other's hair and whispering the way girls do.
"No. I'm serious."
Thess just shakes her head. "Idiot," she says, and gestures for another hair ribbon.
-
There's a stretch when Liv is seven or so where she tries to find her thing, the way both her parents have a thing.
Alchemy is her mother's thing, so Liv tries that first. She discovers that she has no stomach for the waiting: the slow reductions, the reagents that spoil if you hurry them. She scorches three batches and quits.
Her mother shrugs it off. "It's not for everyone," she says, and means it, and doesn't think about it again. Liv is a little stung by how easy it is for her to let go.
Engineering is her father's, and Liv's good at the taking-apart and hopeless at the putting-back; she likes the insides of things but not the discipline of making them work again. Her father takes it harder than he lets on. For a moment when she shows him the mechanism she's mangled, he looks almost grieved; but then he gathers himself and says, "It's no great loss. The workshop was never going to be your inheritance. I have a better one to give you."
Cryptic, Liv thinks, and tries to put the whole thing out of her mind.
She even tries plants, in an empty flower bed over at Jaheira's, and murders every one of them. Jaheira just laughs. "Seven years old and expecting to have found your calling. Ye gods. Stop hunting it and let it find you." It's the only piece of advice from that whole restless year that Liv actually keeps.
-
The house by the Chionthar is so large that Liv can go a whole day without seeing either parent, and often does. She has a wing that is functionally hers, and she rules it like a small sovereign. When she gets lonely, she’ll just run out to the foyer and slide down the bannisters until one of the servants goes to get the house’s actual rulers.
-
Once, when Liv is eight, her mother slips into her bed on the other side. She doesn't hear the floorboards creak (Mother is an assassin, after all), but the movement wakes her up. She keeps her eyes shut anyway, breathes slow and even, pretends to be asleep.
Her mother stretches out on the bed beside her, perfume and alchemy clinging to her skin. Her touch is feather-light along Liv's spine, just the fingertips, hesitant in a way that could almost be painful. She stays that way for a long time, just touching Liv's back. She doesn't even rub it really, just keeps contact through the thin shift of her nightgown. Eventually, Liv returns to sleep.
In the morning, her mother is gone. There isn't even any evidence that she was ever there at all; no warm spot on the bed or extra wrinkle in the sheets. Liv spends years wondering if that night was real, or just a particularly vivid dream.
ii. heir
Father starts taking her to Parliamentary meetings when she's twelve. At first, Liv mostly likes the carriage rides and the little iced cakes that seem to materialize whenever she accompanies him to High Hall. There are aides that carry messages for him, and some of them are fun the way her mother's friends are. They play quiet little games with Liv sometimes, on scraps of paper while she's supposed to be paying attention.
But the meetings themselves are long and dull. Most of the time, nothing actually gets decided, and on the rare occasions when Parliament actually does decide on a recommendation to the Ducal Council, it's always something that Father’s already talked about five ways over the dinner table. Liv doesn't see the point of the whole organization.
Still, she likes the way people look at her when she walks in beside her father.
It takes her years to understand that the boredom was the lesson: that her father sits her in that chamber twice a tenday until the speeches stop being noise, until she can feel popular sentiment shifting the way sailors read a sky. He never explains things to her, just puts her in the room until she learns it by sense. It's the only kind of political instruction he knows how to give; he taught himself the same way, Liv understands eventually, in rooms far harder than this one.
He even takes her to a meeting of the Council once, after a couple years of sitting through Parliament meetings, even though Duke Florrick crosses her arms and glares and Dathran sputters some kind of objection. "What are you thinking, bringing a child here?"
"She is not a child," Father explains, in his no-arguments voice. "She is my daughter."
Afterwards, he takes Liv out for sweets. "Ducal titles are not hereditary in Baldur's Gate," he tells her. "But you, Livia Lash, are going to be the exception."
-
Liv starts ordering things she doesn't actually like: bitter tea, dry wine, strong coffee. She drinks them all while holding her breath.
"How is it?" asks Thess from across the table.
Liv tilts her head. "Very good," she declares. (It tastes like bark. Bitter.)
"Liar."
Liv grins. Eventually she actually begins to like it, which feels like winning.
-
When she’s thirteen she has a new nightmare every two days for a month and a half. Mother asks her a long list of odd questions about them. She camps out with her daggers in a spare room near Liv for most of it. After a few days, she wears earplugs.
Liv dreams of a city. Not Baldur's Gate exactly— the streets are wrong, too wide and too silent. She walks through it and every person she passes is still. She understands, with the particular logic of dreams, that she is the reason.
She walks through the wide, stopped streets, and the understanding doesn't horrify her the way it should. It sits in her chest like a stone, familiar and heavy. She doesn't feel monstrous. She just feels alone.
She tells Jaheira too, mostly because Jaheira asks. Halfway through describing the dead city, Liv realizes she's never said it out loud before to anyone but her mother.
Jaheira asks, "Does it feel like an urge?"
Liv considers this seriously, which she doesn't do for much. "Yeah," she says. "A bit."
-
Liv's mother is weird about food. When she tries to leave the house without breakfast one morning, her mother drags her back in and makes her sit at the cherrywood table in the dining room. "No child of mine is going to starve," she snaps, which feels like hyperbole to Liv.
Still, she eats a silent, unappetizing breakfast with her mother, who appraises each of Liv's bites while chewing her own with a certain kind of violence. Neither of them leaves until they've both scraped their plates clean.
Over the table, her mother looks how she always looks. Beautiful. Lethal. She gazes at Liv with those sharp green eyes that will never belong to her.
"Look, Livia," she says, like she's angry. "There's a lot of things in this world that want to kill you. Your father thinks he can protect you, but he can't. And neither can I." She shakes her head. Her chignon, with its assassin's hairpin, goes bobbing. "But I'll— I'll try. Anything that wants to kill you— I'll kill it right back, if I can."
Liv licks her lips. She doesn't know what any of this has to do with breakfast, only that her mother gets scary when she's angry like this, even though her words are kind.
"Okay," she says, trying to sound more adult than she feels.
-
Every so often, Father takes Liv's face between his hands and he'll give her his whole, complete, entire attention. His eyes (her eyes) will focus on her face very intently. His thumbs will map her cheekbones; he'll study the arch of her brows, the count of her lashes, the small curve at her mouth, with the same precision he'd bring to an artificer's blueprint.
"You understand," Father will say, soft enough that Liv needs to lean forward to hear it, "that I value you very much."
She lets her face rest in his calloused hands. When she's younger, she takes the words at face value, lets them fill her up. Older, she'll roll her eyes at the ritual of it. She gives the same answer regardless: a small smile, held in his hands. "I know."
"Good," he'll say.
And then her father will let her go and nod once, not to Liv but to himself, like he's checked something off a list only he can see.
-
Everyone assumes it was her mother who taught Liv to fight, and they've all got it backwards. Fighting, she learned from her father. Her mother taught her how to kill.
-
"Her parents are evil," another girl whispers at a luncheon thing her parents send her to with other patriars' kids. Liv's dressed up in red velvet, her mother in miniature, and the girl who says it hasn't got a fraction of the money or power that she'd got. Still, she has the gall to stage-whisper across the table. "You know what my dad says about the Absolute Crisis?"
Liv's proud of the punch she throws. It's neat, undramatic. Blood pours from the girl's nose onto her blue taffeta gown, turning it gory.
The party's host intervenes, of course: the mother of one of the other girls whose name is Lady Rowan or something like that. She makes Liv sit at a table by herself for the rest of the afternoon. Thess, who's only at the luncheon at all because Liv bullied her into coming, keeps sending her worried looks.
When the clock finally runs down, it's her father who comes for her. That's a surprise in itself, really. Liv's parents are so busy that most of the time, it's servants and drivers that get dispatched to fetch her from places she can't easily walk from.
Father strides right past the table where Liv is still sitting and over to the host, his boots and cane clicking menacingly over the hardwood. He speaks to Lady Rowan for less than two minutes, too quiet for Liv to hear. Then he comes back, lifts an eyebrow, and Liv springs to her feet. She follows her father out of the manor and into a waiting carriage, and from the carriage to an expensive cafe one street away from High Hall.
Her father doesn't chastise her. They eat pastries by the Chionthar. The water is calm, and the sugar melts in Liv's mouth.
"You should have forced her to apologize first," Father says eventually. "A nose heals too cleanly."
"Yeah?" says Liv.
"Yes."
-
Liv’s an excellent liar: good enough that her tutors never catch her anymore. She doesn't ever feel bad about it. Mostly it just feels efficient: the truth is so often inconvenient, and she's never seen either of her parents treat it as anything sacred. Her mother lies to patriars and shopkeepers for sport. Her father lies to the whole city for a living.
Liv lies to everyone, mildly, constantly, the way other people breathe. Sometimes she stands in front of the mirror telling herself lies just to practice. She thinks of it, when she thinks of it at all, as a family talent.
It serves her well, once she begins taking politics seriously. Liv can sit across from a man twice her age who's trying to talk her out of her position and smile and say of course, you raise a good point and mean none of it, and he'll walk away satisfied. She can be whatever a room needs her to be: deferential or imperious, confiding or opaque, the duke's daughter or just a girl, whichever opens the door.
Around the same time Liv takes up politics, Thessaly (who doesn't like being called Thess anymore) takes up painting. Murals, mostly: on plaster walls and brick walkways, the same way Jaheira decorates spaces with greenery. She paints a herd of racing horses in high wind on the east wall of Liv's bedroom, and it takes a whole month for either of her parents to notice.
"It's been there all year," Liv says when her father questions her about the painting.
He winks at her. "Of course it has, my dear."
And so, the horses stay.
-
She asks once: why do we have your name, Mother? Why not Gortash?
Her mother is silent for a while. "Your father," she says at last, "prefers to decide for himself what he's called. By the time we got married, he was finished with Gortash."
-
Liv learns the real shape of it slowly, the way you learn anything your parents would rather you didn't ask about: in pieces, secondhand, years after the fact. A tutor lets something slip; a history text contradicts the version she absorbed at the dinner table. By fifteen, Liv has assembled enough to know that her father once ruled the city through an illithid Elder Brain in a shiny crown, and that her mother killed for it gladly, and that the "alliance" she'd always pictured as something wonderful and clean was, in fact, neither.
She doesn't ask them about it. She knows she won't get the full story. Instead she goes to Karlach, who at least has never lied to her before.
"They don't tell you about it because it's not a nice story," Karlach tells her, hands wrapped around a mug she doesn't need to keep her tea warm. "But I guess you're old enough now that you should know."
When the story's all over, Liv draws in a deep breath. "Do you hate them?" she asks.
Karlach considers this with more care than Liv expects. "Used to hate your dad plenty," she admits. "Don't anymore, mostly, but I'll never like him. Your mum's complicated. I love her. Doesn't make her good." She looks at Liv steadily. "You can hold both those things. Remember that."
-
Once, drunk after Thessaly's birthday celebration, Liv asks her mother if she even counts as a real Bhaalspawn. Mother squints at her. "You’re a purer Bhaalspawn than Orin ever was," she answers. "But your grandfather didn’t give you life. So he can’t take it away."
"That’s you and Father, right?" says Liv without thinking.
"Right," says her mother, laughing.
-
Liv's father favors crossbows, and her mother, who can kill with anything, loves her daggers best. Liv's sixteen when she decides that greatswords are her favorites. She trains with them incessantly, even though she knows they're not exactly made for her slight frame. One day, she takes a nasty blow sparring with a Steel Watcher in the yard.
"I think," her mother says, her face stark-white beneath her rouge, "that you'd better hold her down." She's looking at Father. The bone of Liv’s forearm is sickeningly crooked.
"No," she insists between her teeth.
"Livia," her father tells her, "your mother is going to set the bone. It must be put back in its socket before we can mend it with a healing potion."
Pain does something strange to time. Liv is aware of the room in pieces: the smell of her mother's perfume layered over something alchemical, the way the lamplight makes her father's face look hammered out of bronze. Her own heartbeat, horrible, too loud in her ears.
"I can be still," Liv pleads. "I don't need to be held."
"Enver," Mother snaps. At times like this, when pain scrapes her patience raw, Liv thinks she can see her mother clearly. She's angry, right now. Very fucking angry at Liv for her carelessness, and maybe even at Father for the Steel Watcher. "Are you going to stand there all day?"
Father seems to assess Liv’s face for a long second. "I won't confine you," he says at last. Her father's eyes are so like hers, and her bones are like his bones, in a girlish cast. This close, her own eyes are almost all she can see.
"But," Father adds, "Grip my hand as hard as you need."
Liv stretches out her good hand, the right one. Her mother yanks, and Liv's fingers tighten around Father's until she can feel each separate bone of his hand, and something in her arm goes white and loud and terrible, and then it's over. He doesn't make a sound. Neither does she.
Afterwards, when the healing potion has done its work and the arm looks right again, Mother sets down the vial and walks out of the room without a word. Liv hears her stop just outside the door.
Her father, still crouching, smooths her hair back from her face. "Well done," he says.
-
"You'd tell me," Thessaly says one afternoon, apropos of nothing, "if you were ever going to do something stupid."
Liv considers this. "No," she says honestly, and Thessaly sighs like she already knew.
-
The winter she's seventeen, there's a measure Liv wants: a small thing, guild licensing, the kind of recommendation that would ordinarily die of indifference in Parliament and never trouble the Council at all. Her father is neither for nor against it; that's part of why she picks it.
Liv isn’t actually a peer, for all that she’s always sitting around in Parliament. She can't speak on the floor and she can't vote, and it doesn't even matter, because she’s spent five years learning that the floor is not where anything happens.
So she goes to the peers themselves: at dinners and card tables and the anterooms of High Hall itself, where she has always been decorative and welcome. She knows all the arguments. She's heard her father run them over dinner her whole life. What she never does, not even once, is mention him. Every peer she works on spends the conversation waiting for Liv to invoke the Duke, and every one of them comes away having agreed to something without the excuse of his name to hide behind.
The recommendation goes up to the Council loud and lopsided, and the Council— which can ignore anything, but finds it expensive to ignore unanimity— lets it through.
Her father says nothing about it for a tenday. Then, over supper, without looking up: "The tailors’ guild. That was tidy."
"You noticed."
"Livia," he says, "everyone noticed. That was the point of doing it that way, I assume." He refills her glass himself, which he does perhaps twice a year. "Next time pick something I oppose. Then we'll both learn something."
-
There are mirrors everywhere in the house. Liv catches herself in them constantly: her father's eyes, her mother's frame, a posture that belongs unmistakably to neither of them. Sometimes she practices looking older, looking bigger and bulkier and brave.
"You should smile more," someone tells her at High Hall.
Liv bares her teeth instead, all the way back to the molars. "There," she says. "Happy?"
-
The first time a boy really guts her— hand right up inside her, innards torn out, twisted, dropped at her feet— Liv wants her mother. Not her father, even with him hovering close, certain he can armor her against anything if he just wills it hard enough. Her mother. She wants her fucking mother.
She gets her wish. Past midnight, the bed dips beside her and Liv wakes with a start. Her mother sits there in her house-coat, her eyes that same fierce green even with no light to catch them, and she takes Liv's hand in a grip strong enough to drag her up out of drowning.
Liv falls apart. Mother draws her close, pulls her in against her chest. She smells like alchemy fumes, like the perfume they both wear, like Father's cologne. And beneath it, something Liv can hardly remember: a closeness, skin pressed to skin so Liv can feel the outlines of her daggers, and the first scent she ever knew. She sobs silently into her mother's collarbone while slow, barely-there circles take shape on her back.
"Oh Liv," she hears her mother say, quiet as a dream.
"I'm never doing this shit again," Liv spits out.
"We'll see."
-
For her eighteenth birthday present, Thessaly paints Liv in parliamentary robes. Liv isn't a peer— not yet— but the painting gives her something to aspire to.
"Actually," Liv says, standing next to Thessaly, arms crossed while the portrait dries, "now that I'm thinking of it, you should've painted me as Grand Duke."
"Not Archduke?"
Liv laughs, sharp and citrus like her mother. "Sky’s the limit," she says, spreading her hands.
-
"You're nearly grown," Jaheira says, trowel paused over a stubborn root. Liv's over her house for what began as tea, but turned into gardening somewhere along the way.
"I'm aware of my own age, Jaheira."
"Mm. I only mention it because Bhaal seems to have lost interest in you, which I count as a mercy, however belated." She wrenches the root free at last, unbothered by the effort. "Your mother had no such luck. She had to dig herself out from under him by hand. You've been spared the worst of that particular labor."
"I've been doing my own digging." Liv nods at the garden bed between them. "Figuratively."
Jaheira's mouth twitches, dry as the soil. "Spoken like her, in any case. She never waited for permission to know her own mind either."
-
The evening after Liv, at nineteen, becomes the youngest sitting member of the city's peerage, her parents take her to a fancy dinner on a barge along the Chionthar.
It's the middle of summer and fucking hot. Her mother wears satin and gives her a shining red dagger to mark the occasion. "For your first day in Parliament."
"Mother—"
"You might need it," she says. Not a warning. A hope, almost. Her fingers are so thin and elegant, pressing the steel into Liv's hand.
She sleeps like the dead that night. In the morning, Liv wakes with the beginnings of daylight. She makes her way downstairs and spots her father outside, shirtsleeves rolled up and boots propped against the veranda rail.
"Livia," Father greets. He squints when he tips his head back, lips pursed and proud. "Sit."
Liv does, propping her bare feet up next to his.
Father hands her a cup of tea, bitter and black. Liv takes a sip, savors the taste. He pushes her tangled mass of black hair out of her face. "Will you promise me something, Livia?"
It's an uncharacteristically delicate request, from her father. He is not looking at her. He's looking out at the city.
There's a strange lump in Liv's throat. "Sure, Father."
His mouth twists, so quickly Liv could've imagined it. "You're a Lash," he says. "Remember that. Never let anyone force you to bow."
The sun’s brightness turns Liv's eyes liquid at the edges. She says, "I won't. Promise."