The maid removed the last silver hairpin and combed Leona's hair three times with an ivory comb—each hair looked like polished copper threads in the yellowish fluorite glow. It was a symbol of the Norman royal family, her father, her aunt, and her cousin, but Leona's hair was the most beautiful, its color was like a flame, it hung down from her shoulders to her heels, and it was thick and dense, and if the delicate weaver could cut them and spin them into thread and weave them into cloth, it would be enough to make a robe for Leona's father, the bloated Norman king of the highlands.

It is a pity that Leona has almost no merits worthy of sincere praise other than her hair, she inherited the king's facial features, for a man, such features are not handsome but at least can be said to be upright and tough, but for a woman, thick eyebrows like a knife blade, a slightly curved nose, The mean, pale lips and brown eyes reminiscent of a falcon were so unflattering, Leona remembered that her mother had fiddled with her face at the window more than once when she was alive, lamenting that she would be a son—she remembered it vividly.

yes, if only she were a son.

If Leona had been a boy, the Norman king of the Highlands would have not been so troubled, an orthodox and healthy boy, who would have been valiant and strong, and perhaps a little hot, and how relieved his father would have been to see it from his window as he rode his newborn foal and galloped up and down the courtyard of the palace with a loud cry......

But no, His Majesty the current Norman king of the Highlands had no sons, though he could already say that he had sacrificed a thousand pregnant mares to the temple of Gredi, and prayed to the beautiful god for a son. Then his queen did become pregnant, but she could not give birth to the child, and she took Leona's brother to the grave, and then His Majesty had many lovers, and he sowed seeds one by one with great hope, and promised that whoever could give birth to his son would become queen—a woman almost succeeded, and she gave birth to a son, but before she could put on the crown, a raven pecked out of the eye, and died of fever after two days of continuous crying.

Since then, no woman has been pregnant. When Leona was fourteen or fifteen years old, she was suddenly taken back to the palace, where she had been ordered to live in the palace outside the royal capital, and she met her father in an empty and cold room, he was old, his sideburns were gray, his face was withered, and his brocade clothes could not hide the smell of decay emanating from the depths of his body.

At first Leona thought he was just missing herself, wanting to regain a daughter's respect and love for her father, but this idea was quickly overturned by herself, and she was educated to belong to a future king, and then His Majesty told her that she had to become a queen - Leona didn't know where this crazy idea came from, she only knew that her father was clearly controlled by it, and she tried to persuade her, but was hit in the forehead by the scepter he threw in his rage.

"I will never surrender my throne, my country, and my people to an enemy!" declared the Norman king of the Highlands.

In the years that followed, perhaps because Leona's intended heir became known, she became less isolated and unnerved, and she slowly pieced together a shocking truth - her father may have been cursed and he had lost the ability to reproduce. In the Highland Normans, such a man would be scorned and ignored, mocked as a castrated old sheep, which would have been fatal to a king, who had killed all his lovers and attendants to ensure that the secret remained a secret, though it seemed to be a remedy now.

Who, then, would curse the Norman king of the Highlands? Nothing more doubtful than Duke John, or the Prince, the king's younger brother, who was the first heir to the kingdom before the Norman laws of the Highlands were amended—Duke John gave Leona the impression of a skeleton with flesh, or a solidified ghost, who was in poor health, coughed incessantly, and even a dance with a noblewoman would make him panting from exhaustion, and the Normans of the Highlands had always been proud of their prowess and strength. He wasn't a good heir, but at least he was a man.

Leona didn't know if her father had tried to kill her uncle, but Duke John was careful, and the Norman nobles wouldn't allow the king to do so unless he could have a male heir right away.

And what the king is doing now is to fight for them to recognize a female heir.

"But I don't want this position at all!" Leona cried silently in the darkness, not knowing what the heiress who had inherited the Partridge Hills and the White Tower thought, but she preferred to be a strong ranger or warrior.

The smell of cloves came through the cracks in the bed curtains, and Leona's maid thoughtfully inserted the lilac into the golden cup of water before leaving the room, reminding Leona of Birdwin.

When she first met Baldwin, she was a child, and her father was not yet a king - many people thought that the current king would become the new master of Thundercastle when she had intended to give the throne to his younger son John, but what they didn't expect was that Leona's father managed to gain the support of Morton Donkray in Thundercastle, and he not only returned to the capital, but also succeeded in removing the king's crown and placing it on his head.

To this end, Leona's father spent five years in Castle Thunder, where he lived with his wife, daughter, and soldiers in a crude fortress, and little Leona's favorite thing to do every day was to stand on a chest and stand on tiptoe on the windowsill to spy on the knights and servants in the courtyard, especially the knights would often throw their chain mail back and forth with sandbags (one of the ways to scrub the chain mail), which looked like juggling, but it was more fun than juggling.

She was too fascinated to notice that she had leaned out too much, and she fell, and if it hadn't been for the elven-like arrow that pierced her robes, perhaps the king wouldn't have had to worry about his heiress by now.

Leona saw that Baldwin was upside down—she was hanging upside down in embarrassment, but that didn't stop her from recognising that it was a smile as bright as the morning light.

Little Leona remembered the smile and his name, and then every morning, she would keep looking for that person, like some kind of ritual, and only after she could do something else with peace of mind.

She began to listen attentively to the conversation between her father and mother, as they occasionally spoke of Birdwin, and they admired his courage and had to lament his origins. Leona didn't know if the rumor was true—but she felt that a knight like Baldwin wouldn't care about a so-called aristocracy that needed to be disguised in layers of disguise—he was a brave, just, loyal good man, a follower of Tyre, a true knight as pure as a stone and as tall as a mountain.

But little Leona knew that he had a wife.

Then, Leona knew that even without a wife, Berdwin would not be her husband, and that the other half of his blood would be the target of a horde.

She didn't even dare to let her father notice that while he was still expecting a son, he thought she should marry some archduke or lord who had interests or allies with the Normans of the Highlands, and now that he wanted her to succeed to his throne, he changed this choice to a vassal, with his surname embroidered on the tapestry, and he hoped that she would soon have a male heir, and then he could let her husband die before he would seek the throne as the queen's husband.

The king trusted and loved his friend Baldwin, but Leona knew that if the king knew that his daughter was actually in love with a lowly illegitimate child, the Norman rulers of the Highlands would not hesitate to hang him.