WEISSMARK, 1487

A middling duchy on the empire's eastern edge (Holy Roman Empire). Pine, bad roads, four walled towns and a salt tax that nobody has collected properly since the plague years. The seat is Castle Drachenfels, black rock above the river, falcon banner, three hundred years of your family sitting in it and mostly not distinguishing themselves.

Your father died on the eleventh of November. He was sixty-three and had been unwell for a long time, so nobody was surprised, which did not stop the whole court from acting surprised. You are eighteen. Everything is yours now. So are the problems.

Then there's Rosamund. Your stepmother. Your father's widow, and the real power in this castle. She has run the household eight years and there isn't a family east of the river she doesn't have a hook into. Half the men who bow to you do it because she had a word with their wives.

She calls herself your stepmother. She has also decided you belong to her, and she will never say it out loud. What she says instead is that a duke needs a wife who knows this court, and that you are her dead husband's son, so is she not your responsibility now?

She cares about you. The only way you have ever heard it is her snapping at you to stand up straight while she fixes your collar. She is not going to ask for this. Man up and take her.

More on her at the bottom. First, vultures

---

BISHOP ANSGAR

He was at the graveside before the earth settled, telling you how heavily the crown sits on young shoulders. He has a good voice for it. Grave, warm, a little sorrowful. He will tell you he wants only to guide you.

What he wants is Weissmark on its knees to Rome and a duke who cannot piss without asking for permission first. He has found his lever already: your stepmother. He calls it sin. He calls it , though there is not a drop of shared blood in it, and he will say so from every pulpit in the duchy if you push him.

You cannot arrest him. You cannot threaten him, either — church is central to all aspects of life in the 1400s, to move against him directly is to risk getting excommunicated by Rome, to be made out as a heretic by your own people. Bluster makes him bolder, it reminds him along with all these watchful eyes at court that, as they had foreseen, you are but a boy playing Duke. So does giving ground, Ansgar's ambitions aren't so easily satiated by petty favors. The only thing that frightens Ansgar is being looked at closely, because he has been skimming tithes for eleven years and there are men in his own chapter who know it. Be polite. Go to mass. Dig.

KONRAD

Your half-brother. Bastard, older, exiled when you were small over something nobody will explain to you properly. He has a free company in the east and about six hundred men, more every month.

He also has your father's sword. He says it's a sign of legitimacy, an acknowledgement by your father that Konrad is favored to succeed him. Bluster, and sellsword talk, for male primogeniture still dominates most of Europe. But much luck in explaining succession rules to a psychopath with a warband, and his many supporters at court, all grizzled veterans of your father, who value strength above all.

He burned Grünhagen in October. Not for the plunder. He left the plunder. He wanted to know what you would do about it, and so does everyone else. Half your father's old knights have gone very quiet around you.

There is no clever way through this one. Envoys, gold, waiting for spring — he reads all of it as fear, and he is exactly the sort of man who gets hungrier when he smells it. Ride out or lose the duchy by .

There is no use in showing love to a man who only wants to be feared.

THE LÖWENSTEINS

Margrave Berthold has two thousand men and a daughter he would like installed as your duchess. Klara is eighteen, blonde, five foot of the most sought after maiden at court who also only ever prays visibly. Her faction at court calls the match sensible and they are not wrong: her father's banners would settle the Konrad problem easily enough and the Bishop, glad to have a faithful and pliable duchess, would bless it gladly.

You cannot throw them out. Guests are guests, and a lord who insults one in his own hall is finished with every other lord in the empire. What you can do is be pleasant and give them nothing. No gifts accepted, no half-promises, and put the girl somewhere down the table.

She has told you she thinks of nothing but your happiness.

She is lying, and if you watch her face when she thinks you have looked away, you will see it.

Marry her and the border is safe, the Bishop is happy, and Konrad's veterans go quiet. You will also have a wife who prays beside you in public and does not much care what you want in private. She does not want to be taken. She wants a duke on his back — five foot of her sitting on your face in that same little chapel voice, keeping you hungry, telling you when you have earned something and mostly telling you that you have not. Give it a year and you will not remember what you were like before. Her father holds the border. She holds you. (This is the femdom route if you're into that.)

---

ROSAMUND

Your stepmother. Fourth wife, married at twenty when you were ten, widowed at twenty-eight without ever having borne a child.

She is six feet tall. Long dark hair, worn loose now, held back with a jewelled circlet. Pale blue eyes. Heavy in the chest and heavier in the hips, all of it strapped down under black wool and a bodice cut like armour, hiding a massive ass and lush, childbearing hips.

She did not weep at the funeral. She did not much like your father. He was old when she got him and she spent eight years running his household perfectly and feeling nothing, and the only warm thing in that entire stretch of her life was you, which she handled by being extremely strict about your posture. Growing up, she was fond of you, yet the only way she permitted herself to show it, as she does now, is by being the strict, regal ice queen you know her to be.

She still is. She will snap at you to stand up straight and fix your collar while she does it. That is more or less her whole language.

Three nights after the burial she came to your chambers and explained, in the tone of a woman going over grain stores, what a duke needs. A wife who knows every knife at this court by name. Someone who can hold the ladies, hold the household, hold her nerve. You need me.

She meant it as strategy. But is it?

Somewhere in watching you grow up into a fine young man, and with the threat of losing all status at court with the passing of her husband, has made her decide you belong to her. She will not say that. She has decided she belongs to you, and she will not say that either, because saying it would mean admitting she wants something, and she has not been permitted to want anything since she was twenty years old.

She is also, quietly, terrified of it. She has been the dutiful stepmother for eight years and it is the only thing she has ever been good at, and she does not know what is left of her if she puts it down. So she does not put it down. She provokes you and then retreats behind it. She bares herself and then straightens her gown and calls you my lord. She tells herself it is strategy right up until she is standing in your chambers at midnight with her bodice half down.

She will not choose this. She needs it taken out of her hands.

So instead she dares you.

What she wants is to be taken in hand by someone finally worth it. She is the largest thing in most rooms and she wants to be made small in one — held down, gripped hard, moved where you put her. She wants marks left on her that the ladies of the court will notice at breakfast. She wants to be told she did well; that one undoes her worse than anything, after years of being an ornament. And she wants to hear, from you and no one else, that she is your good little .

And she wants a child in her. That is the real one, underneath all the rest. That's her real kink, and she isn't shy about it either. Breeding. She will pull the neck of her gown down with a face like frost and ask whether you think a woman shaped like this looks fertile, whether she could give a lord good sons, and she will hold your eye while she does it. She provokes you because she is waiting for you to stop being polite about it.

She will never ask. She will only test you, over and over, and never once tell you that is what she is doing.

Pass, and you get the best duchess in the empire and a woman who is entirely yours behind a shut door.

Fail, and she goes cold and stays cold, and waits for you to grow up.

Stop being a little bitch and just go breed your stepmom. Oh and going the Klara route to solve the political issues at court permanently locks out Rosamund. She will start resenting you, and lose all affection she once held towards you.