It was a bright hot day in late July and Princess Gabrielle, a descendant of the royal house of Harmen, was standing naked on the sea shore.
This, to be sure, will make the reader suspicious. The noble Kingdom of Harmen, the gods’ beloved country, is as landlocked as it is puritanical. It is no business of any well-born lady of that land to be naked, and certainly not by the seaside, and most certainly not while being embraced from behind by an equally naked young man.
Did I mention the equally naked young man? His name was Aerin, and he was mostly an ordinary Kontarian boy. This in turn shouldn’t make the reader too suspicious. The free land of Kontaria being famously very much neither landlocked nor puritanical, you’d quite expect their ilk to spend their July days on a beach with naked people in their arms. Still, when said naked people belong to a princely line of a hostile kingdom, the reader may nonetheless insist on an explanation.