Introduction: To play the game of politics, one must be brave or foolish, but better to appear both and be neither. Countess Julia Augstadt lost her mother in childbirth, her father to an accident ten years ago, living in the shadow of the Royal Palace by a betrothal to the Crown Prince, only for that to be annulled with her eighteenth birthday approaching. There is no justice but that which can be administered with one’s own hands, no power but for that which one personally yields, and there is no evil which cannot be justified with greatness. It is a shame, then, that she has decided there is no greatness left in the land she calls home....