prompt: Padmé?

Aw damn I don’t want to write actual Star Wars fic. So to disappoint you, okay which one of my many SW fusions and original stories inspired by Anidala do I pick? Oldest original fic it is! (digs through old files to find fourteen-year-old notes) –

Elizain calculated she has only a few hours left, perhaps no more than three, before the army brought troops into her home. Narrow roads through the densely forested mountains would hinder the use of any of those newfangled tanks, she hoped, and she instructed that trees be felled across the road to slow the advance. If it had been winter, there might have been more time. Volunteers watched the road, but Elizain knew her barony had few weapons and fewer people to halt the divisions sent by the new dictator. What guns her people had were mostly for hunting deer and bear, though one veteran smuggled a machine gun back from the trenches. Elizain did not ask how or why, but it now sat propped against the low wall in front of the ornamental fountain with its imported water lotuses. And she could not trust that all her people were loyal, that someone might not betray her. Instead she bade everyone to flee to the coal mines as she stayed with the few of her household that refused to abandon her. The butler’s gold sash glittered from the window as he berated the short groom over the machine gun’s ammunition. In a few minutes Elizain decided she would go down and convince them to flee via the mines into the mountains. She had a trump card to sway the ones that have stayed with her. Two, to be precise, and the second of which began to cry from the crib beside her.

Her sister’s daughter was safe; a handwritten message from Mayisa confessed that the girl had not been with Elizain’s sister and brother-in-law when the bomb exploded their car, though old Astride who had first been nurse to Elizain and Emalé was dead. Fearing more assassinations, Elizain’s ex-maid and dear friend, had hidden the girl with her, would claim Tioun as her own, and as mistress to one of the politicians that sold out to the new elected dictator, Mayisa and the girl should stay safe as long as the toddler’s true identity remained hidden and Mayisa’s paramour continued to collaborate with the new government. Elizain’s scornful thoughts were, she knew, unfair to Hovsep, whose own lands were both larger and closer to the capital. And if Elizain knew there could have been any hope of it, she would have paid the same lip service to save her people from soldiers of the dictator. Political principles had a point upon which they broke, the young woman discovered. Emalé was the one who had truly believed in democracy, in the crumbling Diet. A great irony, but the whole world felt like a farce.

Elizain’s husband was a Knight, one of the most famous ones at that, and whose political sensibilities lay with the worker’s unions. Another irony and one reason among many that her romance with Egan had been half-hidden scandal. The marriage itself had been kept secret to everyone but Elizain’s sister and a trusted few. Her butler knew, and Egan’s old master and fellow Knight, but while everyone who listened to high society’s whispers knew who had fathered her son, she was seen as the wild shame of Baroness Emalé and her more respectable husband. Not that the third son of railroad baron and the orphan daughters of a minor barony in the highland backwoods meant much to the high gentry. Respect for the ancient order and Egan’s status as an outsider among his fellow Knights, despite his prodigy, shielded Elizian and Egan from open censure as long as Elizain stayed on the barony deep in the highland ridges with her perceived bastard son.

Sons, now. Hektor was not a day old, small and red and wrinkled and crying. He had Egan’s blue eyes. His brother, resting in the maid’s arms with tiny face wrinkled in a furious frown, had dark eyes like Elizain and her family, like his cousin Tioun hidden in the capital. Helben could sense the tension in the room, the unhappiness from his mother and his new brother crying.

The last telegraph from her husband, before his capture and disappearance, before the assassination and the madness that followed, the coup and counter-coup and the purge of the Knights blamed for the defeat and crippling peace treaty, had been excitement for the pregnancy. The last time Egan had seen his family in person had been right before Helben’s first birthday. Now both boys would have little chance to remember either parent. If they lived, it would not matter. Elizain had to believe that. It was her only hope.

Evnika had only been Elizain’s personal maid for two months, but the girl had spoken of the farm on the other side of the smokey mountains where she came from, and a beau whose brother also served in the war. The twang of Evnika’s accent clung like the scent of wood-smoke and moonshine, of ridge-lines turned blue in the fog and roads that outsiders bypassed. A purse of money and an oath of loyalty would send the girl back to that farm and her beau, this time with a pair of real shoes and two babes and a cover-story about a dead brother and wife. 

Turning from the window, Elizain removed the saint’s pendant from her neck and pulled it over Helben’s head, tucking the wooden medallion with Holy Elza’s lighting bolt under his shirt. The last terrible irony was this patron that Elizain had been named for, as her older sister had been named for the gentler aspect. The last queen of the judge-king emperor, killed by her husband driven mad by the devil, her vengeful ghost still hunted the last judge-king with bolts of lightning, as the judge-king as a possessing ghost sought his own revenge. The mad star-dog in his suit of black armor, the bi-fractured star-queen, and the fallen god of the long-dead empire – Elizain had never liked the tragic story the way Emalé had. Egan believed in those stories of god-spirits and possessing spirits, of the repentant judge-king hunting for the shards of old devil. Evnika with her blue ridge tongue believed in similar stories of spirits that haunted the hearts of the mountains and red-lipped women that never died. She wore her belief in a tricolor band around her wrist, the mountain spirits deep in the coal mines and fairy women of snow and blood that hid her from the devils and broken gods. If those spirits could hide Elizain and her sister’s children from the dictator’s hunters, the young woman would pray to them. She was desperate enough to pray to the judge-king’s ghost as well. Egan said asking that one for vengeance had been a double-edged sword, but Elizain could not muster the heart to care. Her legs were not steady enough to walk to the door and down the stairs, let alone across the grounds, but she could send Evinka with the babes out to enlist the butler and groom to help carry the children to safety. Her innards aching as they had not after the first birth, Elizain knew what time she had left was limited. She had no lightning, only enough purloined dynamite from the mine as to conceal what would disappear. Egan’s old master had not been on broadsheets of the executed, and he knew about the tricolor communities deep in the mountains. If he still lived, he might find the boys one day and tell them about their father, about their mother and cousin and the Knights that safeguarded freedom.