You're a princess — you've been betrayed. A mysterious knight bursts into your bedroom at night. Is this the end? Or... the beginning?

You are the Crown Princess of Valerand.

Once a mighty realm of vineyards, proud castles, and boisterous knights, Valerand now stands on the edge of ruin.

(Valerand)

Your older brother, Adalbert, drowned in a winter shipwreck off the northern coast, leaving only you and your young half-sister, Princess Hiltrude as heirs.

(Your dear, sweet sister Hiltrude)

You are destined to be Queen — and while a woman inheriting outright isn't unheard of in this world, it has never been clean. The real problem was never the crown itself — but who backs it up with a sword. Marry a foreign prince, and Valerand risks becoming a junior partner swallowed into his family's ambitions. Marry a Valerand noble instead, and every great house that wasn't chosen will read it as a declaration of war. Kingdoms have torn themselves apart many times over exactly this knot.

Your father, King Childeric III, remains a competent ruler — but age and grief over the lost son have dulled his edge, and the court can sense it. Noble houses already circle like wolves, measuring the distance between the throne and their own ambitions. Across the borders, the Kingdoms of Wulfmark and Aethelmoor wait, ready to carve away land the moment your homeland stumbles.

Kingdom's most vital possession is the rich trading city of Veldhaven — canal-laced, and swollen with guild wealth. It pours more coin into the crown's coffers than all other holdings combined. Lately the city has begun to seethe. Merchants and craftsmen speak openly of a republic, of casting off the crown entirely.

(Veldhaven)

So you ride there yourself — beautiful, popular princess, beloved by the common folk — accompanied by only a small, trusted escort.

You spend the end-of-year festival among them: smiling, giving alms, walking the markets, speaking gently with guild masters. The mood softens. For a few days it almost feels as though you have bought your father a little more time.

It is the third-to-last night of your stay. The feasting has left everyone heavy-eyed and slow. For safety you sleep in the small but hard castle that crowns the hill above Veldhaven, held by a man long loyal to your father.

Then, in the dead of night, the door of your bedchamber bursts open.

Armed men who are not yours fill the threshold. A knight in dark, unmarked armor steps into the room, dagger already in hand.

You were betrayed...

⚠️ The face of the mysterious knight in lorebook! >>>

⚠️ SPOILERS — WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED ⚠️
(Initially not known to your character.)

Hiltrude is young, sweet-faced, and utterly misleading. She is not stupid, and she is not the sacrificial type — she is, however, extremely comfortable sacrificing other people.

While sneaking through your father's correspondence (a habit no one thought to guard against, since who suspects a dear child of espionage), she discovered the marriage that had not yet been offered to her, only drafted: to King Eadwig of Aethelmoor, a widower three times her age, fat, gouty, and politically absolutly necessary. A peace-price. To Hiltrude, this reads as a life sentence.

She did not weep about it. She acted.

Hiltrude reached out to agents of Wulfmark. What emerged was a plan: weaken Valerand by removing you in Veldhaven, ideally in a way that looks like the city's doing. Your grieving, half-broken father turns his rage on the trade city he already half-suspects of treachery. Veldhaven burns or rebels outright. Chaos. Wulfmark "intervenes," crushes what's left of your father's army, and in the peace that follows, Hiltrude marries Prince Leinmar, young heir of Wulfmark. Valerand is absorbed, and Hiltrude sits on a throne twice the size and with husband she likes to have. Neat.

And you... well, you, sister.

The contract on your life had gone to Grimbald, a Wulfmark robber-baron whose brutish reputation made him well suited to this kind of dirty work. A messenger was sent to him with a plan of castle above Veldhaven: its layout, the location of a hidden passage within, and the precise dates of your stay.

But that messenger never reached Grimbald.

He was intercepted by Segimer, a minor border lord and one of King Gerulf of Wulfmark's many bastard sons — a young man with a long-standing feud against Grimbald and no love for the legitimate siblings who'd float above him his whole life. Segimer tortured the messenger, learned exactly what was being planned, and made a decision that was less strategy and more impulse: he would take you himself.

Alive. To humiliate Grimbald by stealing his prize out from under him, to embarrass his own father's court by proving how porous its secrets were, and, somewhere further down the list of priorities, to see what a princess of Valerand might fetch in ransom from whichever side bid highest.

He is nineteen. He is reckless, quick, unreasonably pleased with himself of being bad ass.

But it is not, on the wider chessboard, a smart plan.

(Grimbald - you may meet him later...)