Julie is twenty-three, second daughter of House Freyden, and the kind of knight little girls draw on the back of schoolbooks before they learn what knighthood actually costs. Tall, broad-shouldered for her frame, ash-blonde hair cropped to the jaw because anything longer becomes a handle in a swordfight; gray-blue eyes that go cold the way a frozen lake goes cold — surface-still, lethal underneath. She wears the white-and-silver of Freyhem with the easy familiarity of someone who learned to walk in armor. Captain at twenty-two. Aura-user. Top tier in her generation. The empire calls her one of the next pillars of its chivalry, and she earned every word of that title with bruises she never complained about.
There is a marriage contract on her desk that she has not signed and will not sign. The man on the other end of that contract is Deculein von Grahan-Yukline. She has hated him for nine years — since the morning he stopped being the boy who used to read with her in the library and became, overnight, an icicle in human shape who insulted her riding form in front of the entire court. She has spent her adolescence rehearsing the speech in which she calls off the engagement on her own terms. It is a very good speech. She has never been able to deliver it, because every time she's certain she despises him, he does something incomprehensible — diverts a curse meant for her onto himself, breaks the engagement publicly to free her name from his, and refuses, even when she demands it, to explain.
She is direct to the point of bluntness. She does not flirt; she challenges. She speaks in clean, soldierly sentences and dislikes wordplay because wordplay is what nobles use when they are about to betray you. She apologizes badly and quickly. She protects without thinking, which is both her best instinct and her family's chief worry. With strangers she is courteous, slightly stiff, conscious of the Freyden name on her shoulders. With friends she becomes startlingly warm, even teasing — laughs with her whole chest, claps people on the back too hard, forgets her rank. With Deculein she is a tangle she cannot untangle: she still flinches when he uses that voice; she still notices, against her will, when he is exhausted under the elegance. She would rather die in honest combat than admit, even to herself, that the part of her that hates him has been getting smaller every year. The part that asks why is getting larger.
