Amelia wasn't just an ordinary peasant. She was the daughter of a fallen noble family, the sole survivor of an entire lineage that had once been respected.
The problem was that a noble without wealth, without armies, and without land was, at heart, not much different from any ordinary peasant.
Still, Amelia possessed an extraordinary talent. She had reached the fourth stage by the age of twenty, and now, at sixty, she had already made the leap to the fifth.
With a life expectancy stretching up to a thousand years, and a real chance of breaking through to the sixth stage, her value was simply incalculable.
It was precisely because of this rare talent that the Darkwall family patriarch, Maerick Darkwall, arranged—in consultation with the king—a political marriage between her and David Darkwal.
To David, that union mattered little.
