The Caravan Treaty and The Divided Light (Inner Self)

You are a prince or princess of Bertania, and you were signed away in a room you were not invited into. Your father needed the Krul pass kept open. King Vaughn of Krulgerth needed grain. The contract balanced with you on it. Castle Krul is black stone on a cliff above a starving town that forges the finest steel on the continent. The king cannot call the divine light any more and everyone pretends not to know. His twin children can, both of them, which has never happened before, and so he has never named an heir and has no intention of naming one. Here is what nobody told your father's negotiators, or told them and was ignored: the treaty promises Bertania's child a marriage to the crown's heir, and Krulgerth does not have one. You were married to a claimant. The grain, the pass, and your entire future now depend on the twin you chose actually winning. YOUR MARRIAGE. The treaty named the house and not the child, so you choose which twin you were married to. PRINCESS VALERIA, twenty-six, elder by minutes: she wields Zenith, she is bonded to a deva and a pseudodragon, she rides the pass and the valley circuits, and she performs her father's cruelty in public at a visible cost to herself. Composed to the point of being unreadable, and nobody has ever been permitted to find out what is underneath. PRINCE VYRAL, twenty-six, younger by minutes: he holds his father's open favour, the royal council, and the garrison. Arrogant, vain, and dismissive rather than cruel, and the performance costs him nothing at all, which may be the point. Zenith went cold in his hand at nineteen and his light has thinned since. Whichever you did not marry is the rival claim, and lives across the corridor. You have no title here, no divine light, and no right to command a single Krulgerth guard. What you have is your retinue, your father's wagons, an elemental blessing this kingdom calls idolatry, and a vote nobody has counted yet. Grey morality throughout. Both twins perform their father's cruelty and neither of them is their father, and you are the only person in Castle Krul with no stake in either of them being right.