Martina

Martina (マルティナ, Marutina) is Detlinde's apprentice attendant and Aurelia's younger sister.

According to Lamprecht, she is smart and cheerful, making her the favored child in the family.

Due to being the daughter of a woman from Frenbeltag Martina and her sister were exposed to much hostility and mistrust by many of Ahrensbach's citizens, which naturally hit her older sister first. Seeing how Aurelia's timid nature and intimidating appearance worsened her situation made Martina adopt overly cheery and bubbly behaviour, which succeeded in overcoming the stigma of her lineage and made her a very well likes person, not just in her own family, but the duchy as a whole and more importantly Georgine and Detlinde.

After his demotion from archduke candidate to archnoble by Ahrensbach tradition after his brother's ascention to Aub, Martina's father made sure to spread his children among the different factions vying for dominance in the duchy. Due to her Frenbeltag mother Martina would have had a very difficult time to join the faction of Aub Ahrensbach's first wife, who was from a duchy on the winning side of the civil war, so she was told to join Georgine's faction instead, which had already absorbed the former second wife's faction after her execution in the purges and was steadily gaining power. Also the family believed that both Martina and Georgine having ties to Frenbeltag - the former through her mother and the latter through her sister who had married the new Aub Frenbeltag]] - would help the girl to get into the faction. Finally due to being of a fitting age, Martina's father had hopes that his daughter might be able to become Wolfram's second wife or Detlinde's retainer.

Once she joined the faction upon her baptism Martina's diligence and hard-working attitute quickly caught the eye of Georgine, who is quite fond of strong-willed and hard-working individuals. Despite originally planning to become a scholar and serve Lord Wolfram upon entering the royal academy, when Georgine offered to make Martina an attendant of her daughter Detlinde, Martina accepted and dedicated herself to this new role. In this position her likable facade quickly gained her the favour of her new lady as well and made her one of Detlinde's favourites.

Her father initially was very pleased with how quickly his daughter had managed to put down such deep roots, but this quickly changed when he realized that this was a ploy by Georgine to control the flow of information and he barely received any intel from his daughter. In his irritation her father bemoaned that his daughter was only serving the "lowly" Detlinde - at the time the mostly neglegted youngest daughter of a third wife - and decryed Georgine as “Ehrenfest’s chamavarein.”.

Rather than primarily being concerned with fulfilling her lady's wishes like most attendants, Martina and her fellow retainers appear mostly busy with damage control for Detlinde's constant social blunders and attempting to prevent even further blunders from taking place, which rarely succeeds. Due to the grading system for attendants at the royal academy, this unfortunate circumstances also have a noticable negative impact on her grades in class. This makes Martina quite glad that with her being one year younger than her lady, she will have one year free of those antics before graduation, of which her older, fellow attendant Fatiehe is rather envious. Martina in turn envies Fatiehe for being engaged to a noble from another duchy and about to marry in the coming spring, thus escaping both Ahrensbach and Detlinde's service. While being one of Detlinde's favourites does have some perks for Martina, it also means that her lady is that much less likely to ever let her marry outside of Ahrensbach, greatly limiting Martina's marriage prospects and future plans.

When Ferdinand first arrived in Ahrensbach, Martina was entirely fooled by his outward facade of loving affection for Detlinde and tuly believed that she beheld an actual romance. However when Detlinde brazenly demands Ferdinand give her his name, she finally sees past his gentle and sweet smile and notices the utter coldness in his eyes.