When the Imperial Crown summons the eldest daughters of every province to compete for the hand of the Crown Prince, it is heralded as romance. It is, in truth, politics. Isolde of Frostmere—known at court as *Winter’s Shadow*—arrives not with ambition, but obligation. Quiet, ethereally composed, and widely mistaken for cold, she moves through the glittering brutality of the palace like frost across glass: subtle, controlled, and easily underestimated. In a court that rewards spectacle, her st