Persephone Kapros

Backstory

She was found tied to a tree by Baron Cedric Stigfrith and a hunting party as a toddler. Cedric was guilted into adopting the assumed bastard child by the party, and finally did so — to the great displeasure of his wife, Her Ladyship Aldreda Stigfrith. She was christened a name her adoptive mother thought befitting of her ancestry yet still ladylike enough to pass in society, and thus became Lady Persephone Stigfrith.

As the good publicity died down and it was discovered that she would not "grow into her looks", her parents frankly stopped caring whether she lived or died. Persephone's childhood was spent being shunted to the side, scapegoated, or hidden during social functions. She quickly grew taller and stronger than her playmates, who saw her sharp canines and square jaw rather than her wit, personality, or heart. Before long she found it was easier to tussle with the kids training to become her family's guardsmen — they thought she was the only cool noble, mostly since she could beat them in a fight (and the training yard was someplace her parents rarely ventured).

It didn't take much for the training master to see that the best way to keep everyone on task would be to train "Percy" alongside her compatriots, and she swiftly developed a taste for swordplay. Evading her mother's questions worked for a few years, but eventually her muscles started to show. She claimed it was for self defense purposes, just in case, and was allowed to continue for a few more years; every time a dress needed to be refitted or someone commented on how broad her shoulders were at a dinner, she knew to expect a sharp lecture on how her "little dalliance with this brutish pastime" was going to end or be ended.

On her eighteenth birthday, Percy finally broke. She begged her parents to send her away to an officer's school, somewhere far south where they wouldn't need to think of her. She showed them the money she'd saved, explained how she planned to buy a horse and take a ferry and had already sent in an application and —
The strike her mother dealt her left a scar on her face, evidence of the heavy jewelry Aldreda had always favored. The far bigger strike, however, came when the Stigfriths jointly announced they had disowned her and banished her from Stigfrith lands. Her mother's final curse was the surname Burden, because "that's the most you'll ever amount to, isn't it?"