Urla

Urla Lavender is the granddaughter of Luther Lavender the Sixth, head of the margravial House Lavender, which has stood for generations as the shield on the kingdom's eastern border against the Empire of Geisel. Each head of the house inherits the title "the Defeated" so as never to forget their hatred of the Empire, which has cost the line countless lives. Urla has neither parents nor siblings: her father vanished after slipping into the Empire as a spy, and her mother abandoned her and fled. With no one to restrain him, her grandfather raised Urla from earliest childhood as an instrument of revenge, smothering her emotions and her will until she was little more than a living doll, a weapon for the war to come.

Everything changed when Urla, obeying her grandfather's order to gather intelligence on the opening of the demon realm, turned her Fairy Eye upon a crystal ball — a gift inherited from her diviner mother that lets her perceive the unseen and the far-off. Among all the important figures, only one held her gaze: the young Earl Rest Clover, whose bottomless wellspring of magic shook her to the core. For the first time in her life she felt something, and it swept her away: from a doll built for vengeance she became an obsessed devotee who would stare into the ball for hours, murmuring "I love him." Using her grandfather's mission as a pretext, she had herself sent with the frontier expedition — in truth only to be near Rest.

Outwardly Urla is a quiet, expressionless girl with lilac hair who speaks in clipped, sparse phrases as if reluctantly; around Rest, though, she flushes to the ears and more than once bleeds from the nose at the rush of feeling. Beneath that meekness lies a formidable will: by the House Lavender arc it emerges that real power in the family has long been hers, and the "grandfather" she presents to Rest is a disguised retainer of the house's covert corps. Urla quietly wove an entire scheme to maneuver Rest into a political marriage and so bind House Lavender to the moderate faction. She is also a deadly archer — loosing arrows silently and with terrifying speed, like a hunter or an assassin — and she is convinced her Fairy Eye foresees a coming storm around Rest, for which he is fated to become the center upon which the whole kingdom must rally.