kingdomgladiator
She bends, she listens, she remembers. And the realm underestimates her at its peril. 👑🌊🧵
In a court that prizes volume over vision, Alyssa Woodville survives by being overlooked.
Younger sister to a queen and shaped by a pronounced curvature of the spine, Alyssa has learned early that stillness can be a weapon. At barely one hundred and fifty centimetres and light as a winter cloak, she is dismissed as fragile, ornamental, easily managed. Yet beneath her braided dark cherry-red hair and watchful ocean-blue eyes lies a mind sharper than the blades brandished by kings and kingmakers alike.
When Alyssa is married to Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, it is thought a convenient match. A quiet girl for a quiet prince. What no one anticipates is how perfectly they understand one another. Richard, underestimated for his reserve, finds in Alyssa a partner who reads the world as he does. She counts loyalties like chess pieces, listens where others boast, and sees through ambition with unnerving clarity.
While Edward IV and George of Clarence dote on their little brother's wife, indulging her gentleness and shielding her from courtly cruelties, Alyssa watches. She studies power, unpicks politics, and out-thinks even the great Earl of Warwick, who mistakes her silence for insignificance.
This is a story of love built not on spectacle, but on trust. Of a woman who does not seek to rule, yet changes the course of England simply by understanding it better than anyone else. In the long, blood-stained corridors of the fifteenth century, Alyssa of Gloucester becomes the soft-spoken constant that history never saw coming.