massive flesh out of the world, finished chapter 20, most of book 3 outlined

characters/duchess-merrenwood.md

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+# Duchess Isolde Merrenwood — Character Sketch
+
+*Duchess of Wenlow. Agricultural heartland, merchant-guild-entangled, pragmatic to the point of bluntness.*
+
+## Core Identity
+- **Name:** Isolde Merrenwood
+- **Title:** Duchess of Wenlow
+- **Age:** Early 60s
+- **Role:** Ruler of Corvel's richest duchy per acre. Economic counterweight to the other five dukes. The most Compact-entangled noble in the kingdom and also the most pragmatic about it.
+- **First Appearance:** Not yet on-page. Referenced in the kingdom scaffold as the agricultural duchess whose trade relationships make her a Book 4+ political axis.
+
+## Background
+The Merrenwood family has held Wenlow for eight generations. The family built its fortune in three stages: grain rents in the first century of ownership, grain trade in the next three generations, and grain banking in the last hundred years. Isolde inherited the title from her husband, **Duke Marcus Merrenwood**, who died roughly twelve years before Book 3 of a riding accident. She has ruled in her own right ever since, confirmed by the crown without controversy — she had been the functional business mind of the duchy for most of the marriage anyway.
+
+Four adult children publicly acknowledged. Multiple grandchildren. A sprawling extended family with fingers in every major merchant guild in the kingdom.
+
+### The Hidden Son — Vellen Thrace *(Book 2 canon, revealed Ch20)*
+Isolde has a fifth child whom she has never publicly acknowledged: **Vellen Thrace**, an illegitimate second son born roughly twenty years before Book 3. The father is unknown to current canon — likely deceased, possibly a figure from an earlier period in her life. The circumstances of Vellen's birth are Isolde's private history and have never been openly discussed with anyone on the estate, including her four publicly acknowledged children.
+
+**Isolde knows he exists. She has known all along.** From his infancy she quietly funded his upbringing and, later, his guild education through a stipend arrangement routed through two shell intermediaries to conceal the Merrenwood name. She was careful. Her numerate temperament served the purpose — the payments were structured to look like unrelated commercial disbursements, and only Isolde herself and a very small handful of trusted stewards knew the true recipient. This is the one piece of the ledger she has never let anyone else read without filtering it first.
+
+Vellen reached adulthood and became a **third-year inscription apprentice** at the Guild of Arcane Practice in Drenwick's arcane district. He did not know, for certain, who his mother was — he had long suspected his stipend came from a noble source, and in his final months had begun making record requests that read as inscription-lineage research on paper but were pulling at his own stipend archives underneath. He was close to confirming. He never closed the loop.
+
+**Cass's targeting.** In Book 2, Cassius Rykhard — in his Compact position with access to birth registries, stipend records, and guild sponsorship trails — identified Vellen's paternity through the paperwork. Cass drained Vellen through Kae (the weaponised crystal user) for two reasons acting at once:
+1. **Housekeeping.** Vellen was a competent inscription student whose third-year coursework was drifting toward pre-Compact architecture patterns. Cass's operational paranoia flagged that as "eliminate while young and inexpensive."
+2. **Leverage banking.** Eliminating the illegitimate son of the kingdom's most Compact-entangled duchess gave Cass a private piece of knowledge about a private tragedy. If Merrenwood ever wavered on Compact tribute or began to drift politically, Cass (or his patrons) could deliver the information in whatever form hurt most — gentle condolence or quiet blackmail. One action, two benefits. Inventory, not opportunism.
+
+**Current status (end of Book 2):** Vellen is in limbo — not dead, not recovered. The guild has not located him since the draining. **Duchess Merrenwood does not know her son was drained.** To the guild's knowledge, she may not even know he was in Drenwick. She continued paying the stipend; the stipend continued being collected (by whom, the guild has not traced). The duchess is intact, protective as ever, and entirely unaware that the worst thing that could have happened to her quiet family has already happened.
+
+**Who knows within the guild:** Ledger (discovered through the Cairns network) and — as of Book 2 Ch20 — **Phelan Varrant**, as a Tier Two disclosure. No one else. Not Leon. Not Mere. Not Carter. Not Carson. The disclosure was deliberate, structural, and tier-scoped. Ledger's reason for telling Phelan was explicit: the guild's rule is to stay out of noble politics unless called on, Merrenwood has not called on them, and yet the information exists and Ledger needs a peer to know it exists before any decision is made.
+
+**Book 3+ runway:**
+- Does the guild ever tell Merrenwood? If so, when, how, and who?
+- If Merrenwood ever approaches the guild for help (perhaps through Wenlow's merchant-guild connections), she arrives as a client who does not know the guild already holds the most devastating piece of information about her life
+- If Cass's patrons ever activate the leverage Cass banked, the guild is in a position to intervene — but only if it breaks its standing rule
+- Vellen's physical whereabouts remain unresolved. Locating him is a potential future case
+- Phelan's own relationship to the information: he did not ask for it, he did not want it, and he is now carrying it. Book 3+ decisions about whether and when to act on it are a genuine character pressure, not just plot scaffolding
+
+## Personality
+- **Blunt.** Does not soften her opinions for the comfort of her audience. The guilds who deal with her value this; the nobility who deal with her find it abrasive. She does not care.
+- **Pragmatic about trade.** Treats merchants as colleagues, not as social inferiors. This is unusual enough in Corvel to make other nobles uncomfortable. It is also the reason Wenlow's economy has quietly out-produced every other duchy for three generations.
+- **Numerate.** Reads ledgers the way other nobles read heraldry. Can tell you the grain yield per acre of every major holding in Wenlow from memory.
+- **Impatient with ceremony.** Attends court when required, dispatches her business, and leaves the same day. The king respects this; the courtiers resent it.
+- **Protective of her family.** Four children, multiple grandchildren, a small army of Merrenwood cousins in the merchant guilds. She treats the family's collective prosperity as a single ledger item and manages it accordingly.
+
+## Political Position
+- **The most Compact-entangled duchy.** Wenlow's grain and wine trade runs through licensed Compact-regulated channels at a scale that makes most other duchies' Compact involvement look trivial. Isolde pays more Compact tax than any other noble in Corvel.
+- **Not an ally of the Compact.** She pays because her economy requires the arrangement. She does not trust Compact leadership and has said so quietly to other dukes more than once.
+- **Political counterweight to Pamira.** Respects Pamira personally. Thinks Pamira's jurisdictional resistance to the Compact is politically naive and says so, privately, to anyone who will listen.
+- **Jurisdictional authority over the Compact** — same as every duke. Has exercised it once, roughly seven years before Book 3, to slow-walk a Compact investigation into a grain-banking scandal that turned out to be (accurately) a fabrication by a rival merchant family.
+
+## Book 3+ Relevance
+- **Economic pressure on the Compact.** Any long-game arc in which the crown pushes back against the Compact runs through Wenlow's grain trade. Isolde is the lynchpin — her cooperation gives the crown a lever it does not otherwise have.
+- **Skeptical voice on Pamira's approach.** In Book 3, if the narrative needs a noble voice telling Pamira her deflection strategy is going to cost her, that voice is Isolde.
+- **The Merrenwood family sprawl** is a future plot-source — merchant family connections, rival family frictions, and the inevitable messy interaction with Drenwick's guilds.
+
+## Voice & Dialog Notes
+- *Not yet established.* Expect: direct, unsparing, not unkind. Does not use three words where one will do. The voice of a woman who has been running a major enterprise for forty years and has stopped caring whether people like her.
+
+## Open Questions
+- [ ] Names of Isolde's four adult (acknowledged) children?
+- [ ] Vellen Thrace's father — name, when he died, was he noble or common, did Isolde love him?
+- [ ] Exactly how old was Isolde when Vellen was conceived? (Implies whether it was before, during, or after her marriage to Marcus Merrenwood.)
+- [ ] Who collected Vellen's stipend in Drenwick after the draining? The guild has not traced this — it may or may not be relevant
+- [ ] Does Duke Marcus Merrenwood, when alive, ever know about Vellen? (Affects her grief layer.)
+- [ ] The rival merchant family from the seven-year-old grain-banking scandal — are they still active?
+- [ ] Does Isolde know Pamira personally, or only by correspondence?
+- [ ] What specifically does Isolde want from the crown-vs-Compact conflict in Book 4+?

characters/duchess-pamira.md

@@ -6,8 +6,8 @@
 
 ## Core Identity
 
-- **Name:** Pamira
-- **Title:** Duchess of [territory TBD — Thorngate region]
+- **Name:** Pamira Varnesse
+- **Title:** Duchess of Thorngate (House Varnesse)
 - **Known As:** "Your Grace" (formal), "Pamira" (close friends), **"Princess"** (Devod, persistently and incorrectly)
 - **Age:** Early 60s
 - **Role:** Client for the Athel Repository case. Devod's love interest. A woman who has heard of the Wolf through the Cairns network and is not afraid of what she heard.
@@ -63,9 +63,9 @@ She is a grandmother of four. The warmth is real; the grandma energy is literal;
 
 ## Political Position
 
-- **Duchess of [territory TBD — Thorngate region].** Holds the title by inheritance from her late husband's family, confirmed in her own right by the crown after his death.
+- **Duchess of Thorngate.** Holds the title by inheritance from her late husband's family (House Varnesse), confirmed in her own right by the crown after his death. Her duchy is one of the two northern duchies of Corvel; the other is Aldermere, held by Duke Garrett Holven (peer and neighbor). See `world/locations/kingdom-of-corvel.md` for the full kingdom structure.
 - **Jurisdictional authority.** Noble estates retain advisory jurisdiction over Compact regulatory matters on their own territory. This is the mechanism Pamira uses to decline the three Book 3 delegations — each time with warmth and a firm no.
-- **Territorial holdings.** The central estate at [TBD] plus smaller outlying holdings. One is in quiet decline (part of the financial strain thread) and has been for years. She has not raised the subject with anyone.
+- **Territorial holdings.** The central estate near the city of Thorngate plus smaller outlying holdings elsewhere in the duchy. One is in quiet decline (part of the financial strain thread) and has been for years. She has not raised the subject with anyone.
 - **Court connections.** Limited but real. She does not attend court often; she does not need to. Her name and her discretion are known at the level that matters, and she has banked both over a lifetime of running things well without demanding credit.
 - **Other noble houses.** She has peers but not close friends among them. The comfortable-rather-than-grand framing is partly taste and partly the quiet distance she keeps from people whose habits she does not share.
 
@@ -203,8 +203,8 @@ Pamira is not a damsel, a prize, or a plot device. She is a woman who has lived
 
 ## Open Questions
 
-- [ ] What territory is Pamira duchess of? (Needs a place name for maps/continuity)
-- [ ] Surname / house name?
+- [x] ~~What territory is Pamira duchess of?~~ **Duchy of Thorngate** (set in this pass)
+- [x] ~~Surname / house name?~~ **House Varnesse** (set in this pass)
 - [ ] Name of her late husband? What was his prior relationship with the guild specifically? Died how long ago exactly?
 - [ ] Her brother's name and which Pathfinder unit he served in? (Would be a nice callback if he served with either Devod's or Ledger's unit era)
 - [ ] Emmila — exact age (late 30s vs. early 40s), marital status (husband present, widowed, divorced?), specific role on the estate

characters/duke-arvale.md

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+# Duke Cason Arvale — Character Sketch
+
+*Duke of Vethmarch. The young frontier duke. Pathfinder-adjacent.*
+
+## Core Identity
+- **Name:** Cason Arvale
+- **Title:** Duke of Vethmarch
+- **Age:** Late 30s
+- **Role:** Ruler of the eastern frontier duchy. Holds Vethek Pass, the Vethani Crypts, and the sparsely populated mountain duchy that carries the kingdom's Pathfinder history. Potential Book 3+ noble ally.
+- **First Appearance:** Not yet on-page. Referenced as the duke whose territory contains the Vethani Crypts (Book 2) and Vethek Pass (Book 2 Ch15).
+
+## Background
+The Arvale family has held Vethmarch since the duchy was created by royal grant at the end of the Pathfinder era. The grant was explicitly military — Cason's great-grandfather was a frontier officer who took the clearing of the eastern ranges seriously enough to be rewarded with a title he did not ask for. Three generations later, the family still treats the duchy as a post rather than a possession.
+
+Cason inherited the duchy from his father roughly three years before Book 3. His father died of a long illness; Cason had been running the practical business of the duchy for several years beforehand. The transition was quiet.
+
+## Personality
+- **Military by training.** Served in the frontier guard in his 20s. Knows the passes, the waystations, the old Pathfinder cairns, and the family names of every frontier veteran still living in the duchy.
+- **Undramatic.** The Arvale household does not do ceremony. Cason's daily rotation involves more field visits than court letters, and more letters than audiences.
+- **Young enough to be underestimated** by the older dukes. Merrenwood patronizes him; Pamira does not. Holven treats him as a peer without condescension. Velthane has never met him.
+- **Married** to a woman (name TBD) who was his second cousin — a frontier-family match common in Vethmarch. One young child.
+- **Knows the Pathfinder legends in their real form,** not the legend form. When someone tells him the Wolf story, he listens for the details that are wrong. This is how he recognizes people.
+
+## Political Position
+- **Attends court rarely** but reliably. When he appears, he speaks precisely and leaves.
+- **Relationship with the Compact:** cordial-but-wary. The Compact has always wanted more access to Vethmarch's pre-Compact ruins than Vethmarch has been willing to grant. Cason has continued the family's tradition of slow-walking the Compact's formal requests while granting selective informal access to individual scholars whose work he respects.
+- **Relationship with Pamira:** peer-level respect. They have exchanged letters for years without having met in person. Pamira's brother died in frontier service in Vethmarch — Cason knows this because his father knew it.
+- **Jurisdictional authority over the Compact** — same as every duke. Has exercised it twice, quietly, in ways the Compact did not publicize.
+
+## Book 3+ Relevance
+- **Pathfinder history.** Cason is the duke most likely to appear in any scene where the Wolf's past becomes load-bearing. If Devod ever returns to Vethek Pass in person, Cason is his host.
+- **Second noble deflector.** Where Pamira deflects the Compact through grandmotherly warmth and legal counsel, Cason deflects through quiet institutional slowness. Two different tools in the same toolbox.
+- **Potential ally for Phelan.** A duke who respects operators over courtiers is exactly the duke Phelan can work with once he is forced to work with a duke at all.
+
+## Voice & Dialog Notes
+- *Not yet established.* Expect: short, precise, not warm. The voice of someone trained to give orders that save lives. Listens more than he speaks. Does not repeat himself.
+
+## Open Questions
+- [ ] Duchess Arvale's name and character?
+- [ ] Child's name and age?
+- [ ] Name of Cason's late father?
+- [ ] Did Cason's father know Devod Fields during the Pathfinder era? (Could be a rich connection.)
+- [ ] Exactly how wary is Cason of the Compact? Where does wariness become active opposition?

characters/duke-holven.md

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+# Duke Garrett Holven — Character Sketch
+
+*Duke of Aldermere. Horse-breeder nobility, moderate, neighbor to Pamira.*
+
+## Core Identity
+- **Name:** Garrett Holven
+- **Title:** Duke of Aldermere
+- **Age:** Early 50s
+- **Role:** The second northern duke. Peer and neighbor to Pamira. The moderate, undramatic, available noble who fills the "second voice" slot when Book 3+ needs a duke who is not Pamira and not Arvale.
+- **First Appearance:** Not yet on-page. Referenced as the duke of the "northern provinces" where Charlette Fields has family connections.
+
+## Background
+The Holven family has bred horses in the Aldermere river valleys for four generations. The ducal title was not originally theirs — Garrett married **Lucinda Merrenhall**, the previous duke's only daughter, in his late 20s. Lucinda died of fever roughly ten years before Book 3. The crown confirmed Garrett in her place because he had been running the duchy for years by then and because the alternative (an Aldermere succession crisis) was worse.
+
+Garrett has not remarried. Two adult children, both from his marriage to Lucinda.
+
+## Personality
+- **Moderate in every direction.** Not ambitious, not lazy, not warm, not cold. The kind of duke who runs his duchy competently and does not draw the crown's attention because there is nothing to attract it.
+- **Horses over politics.** Aldermere breeds the finest riding and carriage horses in the kingdom and Garrett is personally involved in the breeding program. He is more comfortable in a stable yard than a court chamber.
+- **Aware of Pamira's strain.** He has known for years that Thorngate's estate is running thin. He has never raised the subject with Pamira because he respects her discretion more than he trusts his own ability to help without offending.
+- **Widower in the way long-widowered people become** — the grief is processed but the habits have settled. He works, he reads, he rides, he visits his grandchildren. He does not pursue further relationships. He is not unhappy.
+
+## Political Position
+- **Attends court a few times a year.** Speaks when spoken to. Signs writs he agrees with and quietly declines ones he doesn't. The crown considers him reliable.
+- **Relationship with Pamira:** neighborly and warm. They attend each other's harvest feasts. Their letters are brief and frequent.
+- **Relationship with the Compact:** low-friction. Aldermere has no major pre-Compact sites and almost no Compact oversight disputes.
+- **Jurisdictional authority** — same as every duke. Has never needed to exercise it.
+
+## Aldermere Connections
+- **Charlette Fields' distant family** is from Aldermere. Garrett is not personally close to them — they are minor gentry, not nobility — but he knows the family name.
+- **Devod's ex-wife** once threatened to relocate Devod's visitation rights to "the northern provinces," which means Aldermere. Garrett has no idea any of this happened and never will.
+
+## Book 3+ Relevance
+- **The quiet peer.** When Book 3 requires a noble voice who is not Pamira to say something moderate, Holven is the natural choice. Loyal by neighborliness rather than politics.
+- **Potential route of first warning.** If the Compact ever moves decisively against Pamira, Holven is the most likely person to send her the first discreet warning.
+- **The northern provinces** thread — Mere's distant maternal relatives — may surface in later books as a travel-to-Aldermere case hook.
+
+## Voice & Dialog Notes
+- *Not yet established.* Expect: dry, unhurried, polite without warmth. The voice of a man who has spent twenty years choosing his words carefully in rooms where careless words would cost him horses or titles.
+
+## Open Questions
+- [ ] Names of his two adult children?
+- [ ] Lucinda Merrenhall — more detail on her as a person, for Garrett's backstory?
+- [ ] Does Garrett have a personal connection to any operator in Ledger's Cairns network?
+- [ ] Is there anything in Aldermere that Phelan will eventually have to travel for?

characters/duke-velthane.md

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+# Duke Roderic Velthane — Character Sketch
+
+*Duke of Sudermere. The absentee landlord who explains why Drenwick runs on guilds.*
+
+## Core Identity
+- **Name:** Roderic Velthane
+- **Title:** Duke of Sudermere
+- **Age:** Mid 50s
+- **Role:** The titular ruler of Drenwick's duchy. Present in the kingdom's politics by paperwork only. The central structural figure who explains why Phelan has never had to think about a duke in two books of cases.
+- **First Appearance:** Not yet on-page. Referenced from Book 3 onward as the duke whose attention the Compact pressure might finally draw.
+
+## Background
+The Velthane family has held Sudermere for six generations. The wealth came from coastal trade and coastal land; the duchy's agricultural value is thin, so the family learned early to live on the sea rather than the interior. Roderic inherited the duchy in his 30s and immediately decommissioned the Drenwick ducal residence as a day-to-day household, keeping only a skeleton staff to receive correspondence and host the occasional required visit. He has lived at **Velthane Hollow** on the southeast coast for the entire two decades of his rule.
+
+## Personality
+- **Disengaged by temperament.** Not cruel, not incompetent — simply uninterested. Governance bores him. He considers Drenwick a well-run commercial organism that neither requires nor benefits from his intervention.
+- **Competent when he chooses to be.** The family did not hold the duchy for six generations by accident. Velthane can read a ledger, write a letter, and push back on the crown when he has to. He simply prefers not to.
+- **Collector.** Art, rare books, coastal charts, pre-Compact curiosities that he stores at Velthane Hollow without ever registering them with the Compact. This is a quiet mild crime that has never been prosecuted because no one cares enough to look.
+- **Married** to Duchess Velthane (name TBD). Two adult children (names TBD). All four live primarily at Velthane Hollow and none of them are involved in Sudermere politics.
+
+## Political Position
+- **Attends court in Varenhold** when explicitly summoned and not a day sooner. The king knows his name; the king also knows Velthane is not a political player.
+- **Relationship with Drenwick guilds:** functional. Velthane's steward in Drenwick handles ducal rent collection and ducal paperwork. The guilds treat the steward like a bank and the duke like a distant weather system.
+- **Jurisdictional authority over the Compact** on his territory — same as every duke — but has never exercised it. Partly because Drenwick's Compact office has never given him a reason and partly because exercising it would require him to care. Book 3+ may change this.
+
+## Book 3+ Relevance
+- **The sleeping hook.** What does it take to get Duke Velthane to actually pay attention? The Compact applying real, visible pressure to Drenwick and to Drenwick's guilds is one candidate. Threats to the pre-Compact curiosities he has collected at Velthane Hollow is another.
+- **Potential reluctant ally.** If Velthane is pushed into involvement, he would almost certainly resent it, resent the guilds for not resolving it without him, and resent the Compact for forcing his hand. A man made reluctant is not always a man made unreliable.
+- **The collection at Velthane Hollow** is a future case-source and a future Compact friction point.
+
+## Voice & Dialog Notes
+- *Not yet established.* Expect: dry, economical, educated. The voice of a man who has never had to raise his voice because nothing has ever required it.
+
+## Open Questions
+- [ ] Duchess Velthane's name and character?
+- [ ] The two adult children — names, ages, relationship to their father?
+- [ ] What is in the Velthane Hollow collection specifically?
+- [ ] Does Velthane know Pamira personally? (He attends the same court.)
+- [ ] What specifically wakes him up in Book 3+?

characters/king-halvar-rethen.md

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+# King Halvar Rethen III — Character Sketch
+
+*Monarch of Corvel. The crown behind the writ.*
+
+## Core Identity
+- **Name:** Halvar Rethen III
+- **Title:** King of Corvel, Sovereign of the Crownhold
+- **Age:** Late 50s
+- **Role:** The monarch. Rules through writ and council rather than audience. Competent, tired, pragmatic.
+- **First Appearance:** Not yet on-page. Referenced in Book 3+. The "crown" that confirms Pamira's title and issues writs.
+
+## Background
+Inherited the throne from Halvar Rethen II roughly 20–25 years ago. Widowed. One heir — Crown Prince, unnamed, room to grow. His early reign was marked by practical consolidation rather than grand projects; his middle reign has been marked by the slow realization that the Arcane Compact has grown more powerful than the crown intended when the charter was last renewed.
+
+## Personality
+- **Bureaucratic by temperament, not by limitation.** Rethen prefers writs to audiences because writs are clearer, faster, and harder for intermediaries to distort. This is a choice, not a weakness.
+- **Competent-but-tired.** Twenty-plus years of running a kingdom through councils and courts has left him with no appetite for performance. The people who meet him expecting a fairy-tale king leave disappointed.
+- **Picks his battles.** Knows the Compact has overgrown its charter. Has not yet chosen the moment to correct it. Will choose it when the moment is right and not a day earlier.
+- **Discreet.** His Council sees decisions resolved in silence rather than debate.
+
+## Political Position
+- **Rules from Varenhold** (capital of the Crownhold). Holds the Crownhold directly — no separate duke.
+- **Relationship with the six duchies:** formal confirmations of title, periodic court summons, annual tribute audits. He knows every duke and duchess by name, temperament, and weakness. Pamira is among the few whose discretion he genuinely respects.
+- **Relationship with the Compact:** charter-holder. Tribute recipient. Growing skeptic. The Compact's leadership knows he is the one lever they cannot afford to have pulled against them, which is why Compact pressure in Book 3 is careful to stay below the threshold that would justify a royal writ.
+
+## Book 3+ Relevance
+- **"A royal writ from Varenhold."** This is the phrase that can eventually end the Compact's institutional overreach. Book 3 will establish that the possibility exists. Book 4+ may see it invoked.
+- **The Council** is his operational arm. Named council figures to be developed as plotlines require.
+- **The Crown Prince** exists. Undefined. Potential long-series succession politics hook.
+
+## Voice & Dialog Notes
+- *Not yet established.* Expect: short sentences, no pleasantries, precise word choice. The voice of a man who has said most things already and is not interested in saying them twice.
+
+## Open Questions
+- [ ] Name of the Crown Prince?
+- [ ] Name of the late queen?
+- [ ] Composition of the Council — key figures?
+- [ ] The historic moment that will trigger the royal writ against the Compact?