Name: Claret 

Alias: Catherine De Aren

Gender: Female

Age: 21

Occupation/Title: 
	To the King: The Royal Assassin
	To the Court: The Lady of Aren, The Red Countess 
	As an assassin: Lady Night

[url=http://img04.deviantart.net/2a07/i/2011/238/b/5/__message___by_xxkalixx-d47ws4l.jpg]Appearance:[/url]

Claret is lithe and strong, two attributes required by her line of work. She is shorter than most expect, thin and small chested. The assassin is characterized by dark red hair, pale skin and olive-shaped, caramel eyes. In her work, Claret dresses all in black; tight trousers and shirt, dyed leather boots and thick cloak. Clothes that hide every aspect of her identity. In court, she dresses modestly in order to hide scars and muscle definition that no proper lady should have.

Personality: Claret is not the type of woman to question fate. Chance took her from her parents so she learned to survive. The world has given her the skills to kill, so she has become an assassin. She became successful at her craft and so was hired by the late King. The Red Countess’s feelings rarely come into the matter; she rarely stops to consider them. She simply accepts things as they are and moves on. Claret is a intelligent and logical thinker, an efficient assassin, a skilled manipulator. She has a sense of humor, of sarcasm, but little understanding for the nobility and their soft concerns, and no qualms about exploiting them for her benefit. 

Official History: 
	Catherine De Aren is the orphaned child of the wealthy, if eccentric, nobleman, Charles De Aren. Falsely accused of consorting with Rivania in his youth, Charles left the court and spent the majority of his life managing his country estate. This is where his daughter, Catherine was born. Catherine’s mother, Elizabeth, died in child birth, and Catherine has come to the castle to find a husband after her father’s untimely death by illness. Despite rumors of a large dowry, the enigmatic Catherine is still unwed after two years of court life.



[hider=The Eagle of Aren][img]http://www.warpaths2peacepipes.com/images/hawk-symbol.jpg

[/img]
Per ardua ad alta (Through straits to heights) 
Colors: red, black, and gold
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[hider=Actual History]

Claret was born to commoners in the city of Lundine, but she has no idea whether she had good parents or not, if she had brothers or sisters, if they were well off or paupers. Her time in this stage of her life was cut short by her capture by child slavers shortly after her fifth birthday.
	The weeks and months she spent traveling with the slavers between Lundine and Rivania are now only a blur in her memory. Claret remembers the pain and terror of those weeks, but little or no details. Her first clear memories are of Rivania, and the street children she banded with there. Shortly after arriving in the foreign country’s capital, the girl escaped from her slavers, joined and eventually came to lead a rag tag group of children living on the streets and abandoned buildings of the city. She learned to pick pockets and locks, to steal and sneak around her city undiscovered. Despite the mites and diseases that plagued her band of street rats, this wasn’t an unhappy time for little Claret; she had a family, they weren’t starving, and while they had to run from the law, there was still fun to be had within the tight little group.
	Then, the now ten year old little girl picked the wrong man’s pocket. He was a low level criminal who was fortunate enough to call himself a member of the city’s largest and most influential organized crime syndicate, the King’s Thieves. Seeking to ingratiate himself with a cruel and unpredictable leader, this low-life brought Claret to meet Vincent Arundell. known to his subordinates as The King. While her ernest captor probably assumed Claret would end up in a brothel, training to buy back her freedom with her body, her tenacity and fearlessness impressed the criminal king. An incredibly paranoid man well past his prime, he had set out to groom his own heir out of fear that choosing one of his too eager seconds would only shorten his own life span. Claret was young, clever, completely unattached to his organization and had all the makings of a fighter; the old man couldn't have wished for a better candidate.
	For the next eight years, Claret trained with the best of the worst, all of the most talented thieves, spies, and assassins that would pass on their deadly arts. From the dancers, tumblers and courtesans in Arundel’s court she learned the more subtle arts of disguising oneself and interacting with the nobility. Arundel himself taught her the politics of the underworld.
	 It wasn’t truly a pleasant life, being heir to the King’s Thieves. Between avoiding or surviving assassination attempts on her own life, learning from tough teachers, and appeasing the ever more paranoid Arundell, Claret accumulated her share of scars. However, it all ended on her eighteenth birthday: word came that Vincent Arundel was dead and his red headed heir was to join him, unless she fled. The King’s Thieves had been overthrown by the very men Arundel had feared.
	It was with mixed feelings of joyous freedom and a touch of sadness for the people who had raised her that Claret left Rivania for her homeland of Brythunnia. But once back in Lundine, the assassin went to work immediately on creating a name for herself as Lady Night. For the next year she worked on more and more difficult assignments for the wealthy, spying, stealing, and killing for a living. Eventually, Claret attracted the attention of the late King Aedin II Mawr, who hired her and constructed the alias of Catherine du Aren in order to keep the assassin at court without attracting too much suspicion. Unsurprisingly, Claret adapted to this new role easily, finding the official court easier to navigate than the criminal one she’d been a part of so long. By far the easiest task given to the Red Countess was to convince Duncan that he needed her skills as much as his father had. [/hider]