The Veiled Kingdom

Nyra, or Princess Verena, is the co-protagonist of The Veiled Kingdom. She is described as short with brown hair and blue eyes. She is fae, like the others in her kingdom, but she has no magical power: a situation that is unprecedented. Her father, King Roan, tortured her throughout her youth and adolescence in a callous attempt to unlock latent magical ability, but this method failed to find her magic. Her mother, Queen Nyra, died while trying to give birth to another heir. King Roan did not want anyone in the kingdom to find out about Nyra’s lack of magic, so he kept her locked in a tower of the royal palace for years. When rebels raided the palace, Nyra escaped and lived on the streets, stealing to survive and living in an abandoned alcove with her friend Micah. Nyra misses her mother, with whom she was close as a child, but she does not miss her life as the tortured, imprisoned princess, and she never wishes to return to the pain and torment of her father’s cruelty.

Because of her lack of magical power, Nyra struggles with her sense of identity. When she escaped the palace during the raid, she adopted her mother’s name to avoid detection, given that King Roan married again and wiped her mother’s name from the historical record.