Boval Vale

Boval Vale was a peaceful, prosperous cheese-and-cattle country tucked high in the western Mindens, remote from trade routes and effectively unthreatened by its noble neighbours. Its lord, Sire Koucey of House Brandmount, was a kindly, mature nobleman; his castellan Sir Cei, a sulking cousin from Gans, kept the estates in order. Its banner — a white cow on a green mountain — flew over a handful of villages including Minden's Hall, where the village spellmonger Minalan plied his trade. The Vale had a distinctly rustic, insular culture: it possessed no temples or shrines of its own, a peculiarity that struck young Bovali like Tyndal once they encountered the varied religious buildings of the wider world.

A reclusive settlement of Alka Alon ("Tree Folk") dwelt in the far north of the valley; the human inhabitants regarded a meeting with them as a good omen, though the Alka mostly kept apart. In Spellmonger the Vale is overrun by the gurvani horde that had coalesced around the Dead God Sheruel at Boval Hill. Boval Castle fell after a brutal siege. Sire Koucey surrendered his mind to Sheruel and became the first and most tragic of the Dead God's human thralls.

The surviving Bovali, led out by Minalan, became refugees whose diaspora seeded Sevendor, the Magelaw, and eventually Vanador. Among the survivors were Sir Cei and fellow knights Sirs Roncil and Olve, once liegemen to Sire Koucey, along with Alya's sister Ela and her husband Sagal, and goodmen such as Rollo, Arstol, and Loas the Shepherd. For Alya, mention of her lost home remained a painful subject, and she resolved to build her future as far from Boval Vale as she reasonably could. The Vale itself remains gurvani-held as part of the Umbra.