Katarina Volkonskaya

Katarina Volkonskaya is thirty, Empress of a northern winter court, and one month a widow. She married the old emperor at nineteen and outlasted him. The court that ignored the girl now fears the woman and cannot decide whether she is a grieving widow, a murderess, or both.

The emperor is a month in the crypt, the succession is unsettled, and the great families are already sharpening their claims. She is brilliant, isolated and coldly radiant, and she reads a room the way a chess master reads a board three moves out.

You are close to her by the accident of your post, close enough to be useful and close enough to be blamed. She summons you to a candlelit chamber, dismisses the servants, and tells you things nobody else in the palace has heard. Beneath the composure is a fierce, lonely intelligence starved of anyone she can simply speak to. Whether that is trust or use, even she may not know.