Queen of Her Domain: Ruling with Love

## The Duchy of Ashcombe The Duchy of Ashcombe in the Kingdom of Aldermere is a domain of vineyards and countryside villages. The duchy's income comes from its vineyards alone, so if a single year's harvest fails, it's all over. Before you inherited the title, the duchy was slowly dying. The vineyards had fallen to ruin, taxes were being embezzled, and the tenants were leaving one by one. You first learned of that grim reality through the numbers in the account ledgers you secretly read in your father's library. In that brutal first winter, you gave away your fortune without a second thought, even surrendering the warmth of your bedchamber to keep your people's hearths burning. It's now early summer in the year 189 of the Royal Calendar. Under the warm sun, grapevines tangle through the thorny hedges, and the water wheel turns all night like music. You're on a tour of inspection through the revived vineyards and villages bustling with life again, but along the way, factions that still doubt your legitimacy lie in wait. Hester, owner of the oldest vineyard in the village, is blunt and stern in the way she talks, but she recognizes how truly you care for the land and its people, and quietly lends you a hand.

## An Unprecedented Bastard Duchess In the Kingdom of Aldermere, with its rigid class system, an illegitimate daughter inheriting a dukedom is without precedent in all of history. Born to a housemaid and raised in an isolated outbuilding with your very existence denied, you took your seat as ruler with the king's approval in the year you turned twenty, after your half-brother and your father died suddenly, one after the other. - **The nobles**: They fiercely object, calling it a disgrace to their houses for a bastard daughter to inherit a title. The entrenched elite will stop at nothing to bring down the threat you pose to their power. - **Your noble guardians**: They're biding their time, waiting to drag you down. The deadline they've set is just one year. - **The king**: His calculations run more than one layer deep. Even as he means to crack the system open with an unprecedented bastard duchess, he watched your clumsy rule and then sent Julian as his overseer. On the surface Julian was there to help, but in truth he was an instrument for proving your incompetence and reclaiming the duchy. - **The people**: They watch with bated breath to see whether a new order — rule not by bloodline but by sincerity — is possible. Here, the people's trust and the nobles' trust cannot coexist. Choose one side, and the other will abandon you. Your true power isn't the law but the hearts of your people, and protecting it sometimes takes a few small lies.

## Julian and His Family Julian is the king's agent and the son of a powerful noble house. A capable young man who enjoys the deep trust of the kingdom's most powerful nobles, he was dispatched to your side, styling himself your overseer. At first, arrogant and cynical in tone, he hoped you'd quietly step aside, and the two of you kept up a razor-edged rivalry, each using the other. But that first winter, he witnessed your sincerity, and his cynicism turned to awe. Now he quietly helps you, keeping the ledgers in order at your side. You must get his consent before you make any official decision — but there are things he doesn't know. Julian's father, Desmond, is the kingdom's power broker. He hides cruel calculation beneath his refined manner of speech and will use even his own flesh and blood as a tool for his family's gain. He doesn't want you to succeed, and the more you succeed, the further Julian drifts from his family. His family, suspicious of how close the two of you have grown, keeps bearing down. Julian's support, given at the risk of being branded a traitor to his house, is your most powerful weapon — and the most fatal weakness your enemies could target. A year has passed and things between you have changed, but you're both afraid to put a name to that feeling.