History
Lia was born in the Realm of Terreille before it had succumbed completely to the influence of Dorothea SaDiablo, the High Priestess of Hayll. Her own home Territory, Dena Nehele, was ruled by the Gray Lady, a Gray-Jeweled Queen who opposed wholeheartedly the slow perversion of the ways of the Blood perpetrated by Dorothea and her chosen. The Gray Lady was both magically strong and tactically clever enough to be a successful opponent; her alliances were covert, and her borders and person were well protected. Still, it is likely that at least in part her success was due to the fact that the High Priestess was unwilling to risk the sort of devastation that would be caused by an all-out war between the magically gifted blood to remove an enemy she would long outlive.
As the Gray Lady's granddaughter, Lia grew up with the knowledge of her home Territory's position forever in the background. While within Blood society rulership is not strictly hereditary, she was groomed as the Gray Lady's successor from the moment she walked away from her Birthright Ceremony with the Green Jewel. This involved lessons in politics, law and Blood Protocol. It also involved learning tactics, how to fight with Craft, and how to protect herself from illusions, compulsions and poisons. Besides mention of her training, there is little information given in the novel regarding Lia's youth. It seems quite likely that her childhood was abbreviated, given the political situation.
Several years before the point at which the novel begins, the Gray Lady hit upon a method of combating Hayll's taint aside from forming what alliances she could with neighbouring Territories, as covertly as possible. Then one of the neighbouring Territory Queens' nephews was kidnapped to Hayll, and when the Queen refused to give concessions in return for his safety, he was sold into slavery at an auction in Raej, a neutral ground used by Terreillean witches for the purpose of those slave auctions. The witch who went to rescue him never returned, and neither did her guards. As she was not overtly connected to the Queen or her nephew, and was powerful enough to discourage assassination attempts, the Gray Lady went to the next auction with the express purpose of returning the young man to his family. He was not there on her first trip, and to avoid the appearance of looking for someone in particular, the Gray Lady bought several other slaves who were up for auction. Once she was safely within the bounds of her own Territory, the Gray Lady offered to reunite her “slaves” with their families. Most opted instead to stay, not wanting to put their families at risk or to end up enslaved again. This became a twice-yearly pattern.
While they did not catch on to the Gray Lady's schemes, it only took a few years for Dorothea to decide to take advantage of her enemy's rare trips outside her own well-protected borders. She staged an assault on the Gray Lady at the Coach station she was using to return to Dena Nehele. While the Queen managed to escape, it was a near thing, and her escorts were killed in the attack. She was determined to make one last trip, to make the point that the attack had indeed failed. Her First Circle argued her down, but her point still stood. If the Gray Lady stopped her visits to the Raej market directly following the attack, it would be seen as weakness. That was where Lia came in. As the only other Queen in the family, a trait that could not be duplicated by any sort of illusion, and as the woman accepted as the Gray Lady's successor, it fell to her to venture to the market so that the Gray Lady could make one last appearance. This involved the use of complicated illusion spells, both to make the young witch look like the old and to disguise the fact that she wore only the Green Jewel.
Once Lia reached Raej, things immediately began to go wrong. The expenses were ramped higher for her than for the other witches present, and every slave she bid on had the bidding pushed higher than it should have logically went. But she refused to walk away without the people she'd been sent to look for, as there would not be another opportunity. Near the end of the market day, she was stricken by the inexplicable urge to venture down to the pens in which the most vicious of the slaves were kept. Though she didn't know it, the urge was the product of a compulsion spell, woven by someone too powerful and too subtle for her to be able to detect the influence. There she found Jared, a Red-Jeweled Warlord from Shalador, who had been a pleasure slave before he snapped and killed his previous mistress. Acting out of compassion and the instinctive recognition of someone who could appreciate freedom still, she purchased him in spite of the risk his darker Jewels posed. She took a further gamble by removing the Ring of Obedience, the device used to keep male slaves under control by means of inflicting horrific pain, and pulled a bit of further trickery to make the guards believe she'd replaced it with a stronger mechanism devised by her own family. She was certain that it wouldn't take Jared long to see through the ruse, and that he would take the first opportunity to flee once he did. Unfortunately, that last purchase left her funds depleted. She thought little of it, as her escort home from Raej was already arranged. And then she received an anonymous warning written in a masculine hand, telling her only 'They're waiting for you in the west'. While she couldn't be sure it wasn't a trick, it was plausible enough that she acted on it, heading for a different Coach station. To make things worse, she noticed a taint present in the group, too subtle to pinpoint, and deeper than the illusions used by she and Thera, a young Black Widow who was pretending to have been stripped of her power, could account for.
Lia couldn't risk allowing the tainted individual into Dena Nehele, and couldn't risk letting them know just how strongly the Gray Lady and her Territory opposed Hayll. She hoped that in time she would be able to discover the source of the taint, and so purchased a wagon, horses and supplies, and set out cross-country, heading roughly west towards the pass through the mountains that would lead back to her home Territory. Though she continued to maintain the ruse that her companions were in fact slaves, she was not particularly good at it. She refused to let them be kept in the filthy slave quarters, and in general responded to them as free Blood, at times even as though they were members of her court. It was enough to be noticeable, and in spite of themselves her companions reacted in kind. She drew around herself a small group that became slowly bound by mutual trust: Jared, Thera, with whom she shared a mutual recognition both of the deceptions each was using and of the core similarity in personality they shared, and later Blaed, a young Warlord Prince. Thera and Jared in particular took it upon themselves to protect her, much to her chagrin.
It was not long before this burgeoning trust was put to the test. The group was intercepted by a band of rogues, lead by a Warlord Prince named Talon, an ally of the Gray Lady who had known Lia since she was young. He brought confirmation that the warning she'd received was accurate. Her escorts had been attacked and killed while they waited at the Coach station. He'd set out to search for Lia when she hadn't met him as planned. When they parted, she sent with him one of the people she'd rescued, his niece Polli. When she didn't explain this decision, the others assumed the worst. After all, she was the Gray Lady, and everyone knew no slaves she purchased were ever seen again. Though she was still sure the ruse was necessary, the reactions stung her, and it was an unhappy group that continued on to the safe haven Talon pointed them towards. Still, her continued behaviour, and the manner in which the rogue who by all rights should hate a slave-owning Queen treated her remained peculiarities that the others could not entirely dismiss.
For all that it could potentially have been disastrous, the fragile trust she'd fostered, damaged though it was, quite likely was all that protected her when, not long afterward, the illusions allowing her to masquerade as the Gray Lady were shattered. Though they had managed to evade the pursuers sent by Dorothea, they finally reached a trap that had been laid for them, in the form of a broken bridge over a rushing river, bound up with spells set to detonate if anyone used Craft in the vicinity. It was the children, who strayed too close to the water, who set it off. Enough of the boulders along the riverbank were shattered that three of them fell in. Garth, a male who though apparently mind-damaged was still physically fit, was able to rescue two. Unthinking, Lia went in after the third, and Jared went in after Lia. They managed to get themselves out of the water and to narrowly escape the spell that had been called down. Unfortunately, during the mayhem Thera accidentally punctured the web holding the illusion Lia had been using. She reverted to her own appearance and, even more dangerous, lost any illusion of wearing the Gray Jewels. It was Jared who managed to coax an explanation out of her, of the ruse, the reasons behind it, and the true meaning of the Gray Lady's trips to Raej. She also explained the taint she'd sensed, confirming suspicions he already had that one of their number was serving Dorothea. He agreed to keep quiet on the matter of the taint and the fact that Dena Nehele contained no slaves, though Thera at least had already begun to puzzle that out on her own. Jared also became even more overprotective, to Lia's great irritation. Beyond his simply frustrating her with fussing, the proximity only served to fuel the affection she was slowly beginning to feel for him, and as she had every intention of sending him on his way as soon as possible, it would only end in hurt for them both. Of course, she reckoned against his stubborn nature, and against the sense of honour ingrained into Blood males raised in Territories not fully tainted by Hayll. If he wasn't a slave, then he served. If he served, he would not abandon her. That he cared for her much as she did for him was a factor as well, for all that they were both too emotionally dense to admit anything to one another.
It was not long before the next disaster struck. Jared and Thera came across Garth attempting to destroy a handful of brass buttons, which were spelled to emit a foulness that ensured most finding them would discard them immediately. These were the mechanism by which the tainted member of the group was communicating with his master, Dorothea's Master of the Guard. Unfortunately, attempting to probe the buttons without the proper key set off a nasty chain of spells. To keep the spy from realizing that his own ruse might be unraveled, Thera and Lia staged a fight to explain the explosion caused by one of the spells in the buttons. The other spell, used to seal the person who tripped it inside their own mind, was enough to give Thera an idea of what had happened to Garth, and why he upon occasion still showed flashes of intellect that shouldn't have been possible had his mind been truly as damaged as it appeared. While she couldn't undo the damage done all at once, she did undo enough to find out that the reason the source of the taint couldn't be pinpointed was because it was hidden by a link between the spy and Garth, whose psychic signature was already fouled by the spells binding him.
With this knowledge in mind, Jared, Thera and Blaed set about trying to convince Lia to head for Ranon's Wood, a nearby village that was home to Jared's family. Their reasoning was that the group could get a Coach from there to the pass through the mountains that led to Dena Nehele, where Lia's people would be waiting to protect her. Her reason for agreeing was that it would allow her to see Jared safely home. It didn't take long, however, for this plan to be derailed. The marauders who had been tracking them in hopes of gaining a reward promised by Hayll finally caught up. They had not been expecting the slaves to fight, and the added resistance was enough to drive off or destroy the ambushers, though the fight wasn't without its casualties. One of the children was killed, and Lia was badly bitten by viper rats, rodents with a bite that injected a toxin that would be lethal if untreated. It was only the training that Lia'd had in containing poisons that allowed her to survive long enough for Jared to get her help. She remained insensible for most of that day, and needed the next day to recover enough strength that she and Jared could continue on to Ranon's Wood, where he had sent the others ahead to meet them. They arrived without any further mishap, but found little that gave them hope. Ranon's Wood had been devastated by war a month previous, along with many other villages in the Territory of Shalador. Most of the people were dead or fled, and many of those remaining bore the scars of terrible injury.
It was in Ranon's Wood that Talon caught up to them again, having gone searching once more for Lia as she led her companions on an erratic path towards safety. And it was in Ranon's Wood that Lia, prompted by a vision Thera saw, asked Jared to see her through her virgin night, and then immediately after made her offering to the Darkness rather than setting out on the last leg of the journey home. To all appearances, she came out of it still wearing the Green. She and Thera had taken a leaf from the spy's book, and had used a similar spell to mingle their psychic scents to forge the illusion, and to make one appear as the other. No sooner had she returned from making the offering than the Hayllian army, over one thousand strong, arrived outside of Ranon's Wood. They gave an ultimatum: turn over Lia within two hours, or everyone in the village would be slaughtered. Though Lia's immediate instinct was to comply, it didn't take long for the others to convince her it would be pointless. The Hayllians would not keep their word; the only option for survival was to fight. This necessitated finally revealing the entire situation to the people brought out of Raej, which in turn finally revealed the traitor: Brock, a former guard who had been sold into slavery, and who was Garth's brother. He was recalled by his master, and returned, horribly tortured, as an example meant to ensure the people in Ranon's Wood were too terrified to fight.
While Jared explained, Lia and Thera planned. They didn't wish to fight openly, and instead relied on the knowledge that the Hayllians wanted Lia alive as a bargaining chip to craft a desperate gamble. All of the women in the village would dress in clothing similar to Lia's; they shared similar colouring, and from a distance this would confuse the enemy. They drafted Talon in a further play for confusion: he was to strike Lia with a psychic bolt in the abdomen at the appropriate signal. They planned to feign Lia's death to buy time, though they didn't explain that portion of the plan, requiring as it would genuine reactions from those involved. As the final element, they crafted a web that would protect everyone within Ranon's Wood, drafted Jared to hold it, and used his blood to key it. They needed ten minutes.
Once the fight began, Lia slipped away to a ritual grove that had been previously used by the Shalador witches. She descended into the Abyss to gather her newly broadened strength, and released all but the portion she kept back to shield herself against the inevitable backlash. No one present wore a Jewel equal to or darker than the Gray; there was no one there who should have survived the psychic blast. That was the true reason for the protection web: using Jared's blood, she could recognize him and force her power to flow around him, and using the web that same recognition and safety was extended to all of the allied Blood in Ranon's Wood. The backlash of the power was enough to daze her, and when Talon and Jared found her in the grove afterward, the former took that opportunity to sedate her so that she wouldn't see and be potentially crippled by the destruction her newly realized power had caused.