Characters: Mal
Rating: C

Disclaimer: The author makes no claim to owning the rights of anything to do with Terry Pratchett or Discworld.
Notes: And: conjuction, 1. in addition to. 2. as a consequence. 3. then, afterwards.
(Gilmour, Lorna (Ed). 2004. Essential Canadian English Dictionary and Thesaurus. Harper Collins: Glasgow, Scotland. P. 30)

Consequences
by Amazon Syren

There's a freedom in surrender.
None of my people would believe it, if I told them, of course, and I'm not stupid enough, or suicidal enough, to want to let them know.
There's a freedom in letting someone else decide, letting someone else be the strong one, letting someone else make the choice.
My people don't see it that way.
Our way, as my father is so fond of telling me (over and over until my head aches), is the way of control, of strength, and we do not show mercy to the weak.
And yet, I am not weak, and that has earned his wrath.
It's almost funny, if by funny one means heartbreaking, that a strong willed son will garner no fatherly disapproval, no motherly disappointment. But I do.
There is a freedom in surrender. In letting someone else decide one's fate. How ironic that I now await the decision of my parents.
I can hear them arguing downstairs, determining my fate. The punishment for my transgression.

They won't kill me. That much I do know.
They want this to be hard on me.

The thing is, I'm not sure where my transgression truly lies.
Is it because I killed another vampire?
Maybe.
Had it been my brother, rather than I, who had challenged him and won, well, there would have been some hard feelings — if only because it wasn't ever a duel, but rather a swift scraping fight up on the battlements — but Rubius's remains would have been gathered, and one of the humans brought in to bleed for him, and that would have been it.
But it was I. A girl of eighty-seven, not a man of one hundred and twenty, who has committed the willful murder of another.
And girls don't behave like that.

Which, of course, brings up the other possibility.
My mother asked me, as soon as we returned to the estate outside the capital. Shaking me by the shoulders, a mix of fury and hysteria in her voice, she asked me why I'd done it.
And, eventually, she found out.
I killed him for Carmine.
For my friend whom he destroyed.
For more than my friend.

Oh, there is a crime beyond all measure.

It is one thing, I can hear my father down below, saying just that. It is one thing to use that behaviour as a trap. Humans are stupid, as we all know, stupid enough to think that two women would obviously enjoy the company of a man.
Stupid enough to take the bait and end up dead because of it.
But it is quite another to mean it. To actually prefer the company of women over that of men. To seek it out. To take a woman into your embrace, and into your bed.
And this I did.
I admit it.
How can I lie about that?
Now? Why be hanged for a bat when you can be hanged for a butcher?

The snow is falling fast and thick outside my window, sealed and barred from outside to keep me from leaving.
But where would I go?
And so I wait.
There are footsteps in the hallway. The soft tread that I recognize as my mother's.
She does not knock before she comes in. I have lost what ever privileges of privacy I once had.
"Maladicta," she says. Her eyes are red-rimmed, but her face is calm.
‘Maladicta', I notice, not ‘Mashka'. But that is no surprise either.
I turn from the window to hear my fate, and I know it before the word falls from her lips.

Exile.

Ten years alone, at the castle outside of Munz. Confined to my chambers when the family is there but free, at least, when it is empty.
Ten years.

It could have been worse.

It could have been for ever.

I nod my head, accepting what I can not change.

Wordless, my mother turns her back on me. I hear the key in the lock on my door.

Alone, alone.

Well that is nothing new.

I return to the window and watch the falling snow, accustoming myself to its silent company.