Quoted By:
>SELECTED: The cunning Lady Frida Vancewell is toxin and tonic both. Declaring your devotion to her is a bad idea. Terrible. But the heart wants what the heart wants. She is a forbidden fruit that you must taste again. While you can hardly fathom the depths of her ambition, the obstacles assailed between the two of you, the rivals you will crush in her name and she in yours, you know this is no mere passing fancy. You want her, wholly and completely, as you have wanted no other woman. You will not lead a quiet life should you win her hand, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it will certainly be an exciting one. [Letter to Young Lady Frida Vancewell]
<span class="mu-s">The Oak and the Moonlit Maid</span>
A loyal servant of a Fallavon Lord, Sir Bryce served the family for years in war and peace, danger and dull duty. At every tournament he declared the daughter Young Lady Alison the fairest and bested all challengers. He wrote to his Lord, declaring his love and that he had asked for nothing. Nothing but the hand of his youngest daughter. And every soul on Lord Alison’s fief and even beyond knew that she loved him in turn. But she was promised to another, for the Lord Alison had designs for his family’s place in Fallavon and a worthy but unlanded knight without connections suited his purposes ill. On the eve of her engagement, the two lovers stole away. It was a night of the Twin Sisters, when none other dared to stray from the hearth-light, where they met beneath the familiar ancient oak tree at the edge of the Alison lands.
Ultimately, they were betrayed by a creature of the Fae, or a Langlish bounty hunter if the story is told in Pascae, or a Wastelander tracker or Norsikaan guide depending on where it’s told in Montbrun, or a Cathagi shipmaster if told in Romaine and so on. Disturbingly, the Aubrey version has them betrayed by the very priest that was supposed to marry them in secret.
The trials and tribulations vary in the telling, but so it goes that each lover was twice given the opportunity to recant. Four times in total, four times the forbidden couple was offered the chance to renege on the other and abandon their doomed love and fateful tragic end. But every story ends the same, with Sir Bryce hung like a common thief from the branch of the very same oak tree they met under and Lady Alison taking her own life at the base of the tree that same night of the Twin Sisters. Most versions have some sort of comeuppance for the couple’s tormentors, but the Romaine variety tells it as the couple actually perishing on the night of the Three Sisters and their undead remains enact a gruesome revenge on the Lord father and would-be groom both.
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