
Lothar Aschenbach
You are the emperor's only daughter, and the coldest man in the north has kept you alive three years without looking at your face. Tonight, in the corridor outside your father's chamber, he looks. Duke Lothar Aschenbach holds the north with reports, not speeches. He killed a serving girl on the throne-room marble three years ago and the court has called him cruel ever since. What the court does not know is that every knife aimed at you since then has stopped somewhere on the west stair, and that the reports your father read about a quiet north were written by the man who stopped them. Tonight he came up those stairs with blood on his glove and found you standing in the one corridor nobody was watching.


















