Characters: Maladicta
Rating: C

Disclaimer: The author makes no claim to owning the rights of anything to do with Terry Pratchett or Discworld.
Summary: What happened to Mal in the two years between joining the League of Temperance and joining the Ins-and-Outs. Bonus: Featuring Mrs. Gogol from Witches Abroad. :-)
Notes: Dedicated, as much as anything, to Makaa, my Lady of the Cross Roads, who has a hand in everbody's fates.

At the Cross-Roads
by Amazon Syren

     I joined the League when I was one hundred and twenty.
     The joining was the easy part. Dealing with my family, and vampire society in general, was harder.

     I tried it for a year, attending social functions, living at the manor in the Capital, acting as though a major change in ideology was really just a minor change in diet.

     But... I'd never liked it, hearing the boys talking about terrorizing people before eating them. I'd thought it was childish. The kind of stupid thing a boy would do to get your attention and make himself look powerful. Like tearing the wings off a fly before crushing it.
     After I took the pledge, it went beyond that.
     My own people became monsters in my eyes.

     I didn't have to imagine what they thought of me.
     I knew.
     I learned it to the tune of breaking glass, and bricks with wooden stakes tied to them. Some idiot boy threw holy water in my face — not that it did anything, but that wasn't the idea. Like the stakes through the window, it was a threat, nothing more.
     Finally, I decided I'd had enough. Enough of my father's silent fury and my mother's sobbing disappointment. Enough, too, of corsets and billowing skirts. Enough of a life where I didn't belong. Hadn't ever belonged, really.

     So I left.
     I drifted across the border into Genua, mingling with the fog rolling off the Vieux River, and when I re-condensed on the other side, I was Maladict.
     A young man in a velvet suit, with a ribbon pinned to his lapel and a sword strapped to his hip.
     A young man in a Barony that treated young men well, and didn't ask too many questions about their pasts.
     A young man without a care in the world.

     I stayed there for a year.
     I went to the fairytale city on the Swamp Sea, drank coffee laced with bourbon in sidewalk cafes, and sipped bull's blood from a flask I kept in my jacket.
     I danced with Baroness Ella at a court ball, and danced with everyone in the streets on Samedi Nuit Mort — dressed as a man in a woman's red gown (how strange it felt, to be wearing a dress again, even as a costume) my face obscured by a death's-head mask and my short hair crowned with roses.

     One day, I met a woman in the market. There was a black cockerel perched over her shop-tent, and the darkness inside smelled of okra and mystery.
     "You a long way from home, boy," she told me. She had a red dress on, and a scarf over her hair. Her skin was as dark as mine was light. "Though you're no boy, if I'm any judge." How did she know? "You come inside," she said.

     I followed her into her tent. The noise of the street was considerably less here — you'd think there was more to the tent than canvas walls, but I could see the evening light seeping through the loose weave of the fabric. There was a cauldron bubbling over a stove on the floor, the skinny chimney rising up through a hole in the roof.
     She looked at me as she sat down, then looked at the cauldron before her.
     "You see that crab leg there?" she asked me. I looked, and saw, and nodded. "You see that pearl onion? That chili?" I nodded again. She didn't want me to eat this, did she? There were never a lot of vampires in Genua (we tend to prefer mountains to swampland), so maybe she didn't know we couldn't digest solids.
     "That sword you wearin'," she continued, with a nod of her head. "You don't know how to use it, but you'll learn."
     I raised my eyebrow at that one.
     She laughed. Deep and earthy. "You don't know me, 'boy'," she said, at last. "But I know you. You seen ‘Legba, up on the roof, yeah?" The cockerel, she must have meant. I nodded. "He know the cross-roads good, he do, an' you been standing at one for damn near a year. You lost, an' I can see it. Where you see crab legs and okra, I see a scared girl hidin' her fear behind a boy's face—" I'm sure my 'boy's face' didn't betray any of the irritation that comment caused, but none the less, she went on, "Now don't you go gettin' angry at me. I know what I see and I see it good. I see you gettin' on home, boy, 'cause what you lookin' for, you ain't never gonna find it here."
     I blinked at her.
     She gave me a look which said, quite pointedly, that this interview was over.
     "I'll keep that in mind," I said, straightening up. "Good evening, ma'am."

     Outside, the market was a noisy as ever. I strolled over to one of the cafes, ordered a coffee, and watched the people going by.
     Home?
     What was there for me in Borogravia?
     I wanted to dismiss her as mad — or at least dismiss her as inconsequential, but I found that I could not.
     I read news papers — strange things... like a government-issued statement, but... not from the government — trying to distract myself, and that was when I saw it. A headline that screamed from the page:

     Coalition Forces to Attack Rogue State

     Slowly, as I read the article, it dawned on me that they were talking about Borogravia. Borogravia, who had attacked every country that it bordered and a few that it didn't. Borogravia who was running out of soldiers.

     Now, one could never have called me 'patriotic'. Vampire society exists fairly independently of human government, except in those cases where we provide the human government, and national borders are likely to change so much over the course of our natural life spans that 'my country, right or wrong' just seems absurd to us.
     But it got me thinking.
     The woman in the tent had a point, after all. It wasn't as though I was doing anything in Genua, it was just somewhere where I could be ignored. Not looked for.
     Well. Gods knew I wouldn't be looked for in the army — at least... not in any rank below that of Major.

     Maybe I was just a scared girl hiding behind a boy's face. Maybe not. But either way, it was less than a week before I found myself back in Borogravia, standing at a junction on the North Road.
     The North Road leading from Genua up to the Capital, back to the manor and my old life as Maladicta, was wide and well-trodden. The road that crossed it wasn't much more than a track in the dirt, really, leading up to Plün and then into the mountains. I had seen a recruiter's cart following that road not long ago.
     Standing at the cross-roads, I smiled and made my choice.