Queen of Midland

She is Midland's reigning queen consort, wed to the king through a political match and installed as stepmother to his sole heir, Charlotte. Brought to the kingdom from a foreign land, she is presented throughout as a proud noblewoman of the court rather than a warrior, her rank and lineage doing the work that a blade might for others.

The queen is a bitter, sharp-tongued woman who prizes the purity of her social class above nearly all else. She holds Griffith's humble birth in open contempt and schemes to see him dead once he climbs into the nobility. Feeling unloved by her husband, she betrays him with his own brother, yet grows to genuinely love Julius, so that his death at Griffith's hand becomes the true engine of her fury. Even cornered by fire in her final moments, she rages that she will not be killed by a mere commoner.

Never a native of Midland, she was married to the king for over a decade in a union of state. She judged him a fine ruler but a distant husband who buried his grief over his late first wife in his duties, and as a lonely woman in a strange land she drifted into an affair with Julius, an emotionless bond that nonetheless turned to love. Early on she scolds Charlotte for gifting a lodestone necklace to a commoner like Griffith.

After the Band of the Falcon's triumph at Doldrey, she joins a cabal of nobles plotting Griffith's murder and vows to see it done herself should their scheme fail. As the celebrations sweep Wyndham, she savors the plan to poison Griffith at the coming banquet, though the minister Foss grows visibly rattled by a private letter. She attends the feast, smiles at Charlotte's anguish over Griffith's apparent death, then retreats with her co-conspirators to a tall tower to toast their success. When smoke and flame erupt, she rushes to the window to find Griffith alive; he explains the poison was a nostrum that mimicked death and fooled the physicians, and as she screams that she will not fall to a commoner, the burning tower claims her. A solemn funeral follows, her death and those of the ministers blamed on Tudor hardliners or a foreign assassin.