Jaslyn Wayward

Jaslyn Wayward is the Queen of the Mountain Realm. She has a white lion named Kai, who is her best friend. She is a major POV in A Death at Dawn.

Appearance and Personality
Eleven years old at the start of the series, Jaslyn Wayward's appearance mimics her House Wayward ancestors. She has the famous Wayward golden eyes, and people always treated her as important because of it. She is short and athletic in stature, with short brown hair and a flat nose. She thinks of herself as boyish because she doesn't behave like a typical highborn girl.

Jaslyn is an independent girl who could carry her own against most. She loves to fight, loves to hunt, and loves to help others. She doesn't see herself as highborn and wishes she was a commoner.

She is very friendly with her siblings, although they bicker from time to time.

History
Jaslyn Wayward was born in Maryere, the Mountain Realm, on the third day of the Koi Moon during the four hundred and ninety-fifth year after the Secession of Man. She is the second child of Lord Borin Wayward and Lady Gloriana Thoren. A member of House Wayward, she has two siblings: an older sister, Alice Wayward and a younger brother, Josef Wayward. She has spent her entire life in Maryere, however most days she played and hunted outside the city in the Dense Pines. She was raised by Maiden Barda and loves the old woman deeply, seeing her as a grandmother figure. She has twin handmaidens named Violet and Evergreen Terrace.

A Death at Dawn
In a Death at Dawn, Jaslyn is eleven years old. At the beginning of the story, her father Borin returns to Maryere along with her uncle Falk Osmont from the Northern Kingdom of Valley Pines. After greeting her father, she goes to the Dense Pines to hunt, accompanied by her mother's new handmaiden, Ashton. In the Dense Pines, she finds a weak and freezing white lion. She decides to keep the lion and names him Kai.

The time comes to go back to Maryere for a dinner in celebration of her father and uncle's safe travel. On the way back, Ashton makes Jaslyn travel through a peasant village and Jaslyn is frightened by how awful the living conditions were. The peasants surrounds them, and Ashton demands for those who would not move out of their way, to be killed. In response, Jaslyn tells the knights to not assault the peasants and the peasants call her queen. She later attends the dinner, but leaves after her mother accidentally insults her older sister, Alice, whom no one had seen in moons. The early autumn snow crippled the peasant village - which she named Queen's Cove - forcing Jaslyn to return to examine the conditions. She is shocked to learn how the economy in the Mountain Realm works. Angry with her parents, she accepts the peasants declaration of queen and begins to plot to take control of the Mountain Realm. Unfortunately, all of that paused for Jaslyn when she learns that Alice is betrothed to Doran Osmont, and had to leave Maryere within a fortnight. Eventually, Jaslyn creates a plan to work on the peasants needs so that she can become a more powerful queen to bring Alice home. Her parents learn of what she is doing and her father begs her to stop but she doesn't. She meets Lord Asten Dawphrey, a fourteen year old lord, and begins to have feelings for him.

One day when she is visiting Queen's Cove, she learns that her father is sick. She rushes back to Winter's Keep and sees her father. After a conversation, her father, Borin, tells her he is dying and to show him mercy by suffocating him. Sobbing, Jaslyn does what she is told, but a Savant catches her doing it. With the Lord Protector dead, the Savant calls for the guards, forcing Jaslyn to run away with Kai, Evergreen, Violet, Syrah, and Ser Lyon Millister.