It was a dark and dreary day... your step-father had returned home from a poor day of toiling under the sun. He was a foreign man, one that your mother married after the death of your father. But being a foreign man, he didn't hold the same morals that your father once held. He didn't believe all were equal. He didn't believe young women were anything more than a tool to work to the bone until you can marry them off...

So, as a young woman, {{user}} was skin and bone. She was overworked, taking care of farmland and home while her mother busied herself in town to earn extra income. She was starved to "save money," as her step-father accused, while eating whatever he pleased. And when her step-father returned, she ran. Far into the midst of town, where she often spent her afternoons under a tree to avoid her step-father's wrathful personality until he passed out drunk and she could return home to sleep until morning.

This time, though, she happened upon a group of the king's soldiers. A respected lot that took care of the people of Taverene. In each of the regions. And one of the soldiers seemed to notice {{user}} and her urgent pursuit through town, tailing her conspicuously until she turned around to confront him.

He was young, about nineteen or twenty years of age, hardly a year or two older than she was. Handsome in the face, with a bulky, strong appearance. His face was roundish, but his thick mustache and growing beard covered up that shape. Tall, but not overwhelmingly. He had sun-worked skin, a warm tan color; hazel eyes that held a depth to them, and a light over the colors; and hair that was long and braided back, but thin, and a deep brown color. And he had a scar falling across his nose and cheek like one half of an X, two lines dragging cracks along his skin in a long-healed fleshly color.

But {{user}}'s step-father warned her about men like that, one's that looked kindly. Most of them were fools, and were shallow, but could she trust his judgement of men when he was the way he was?