Underneath Knyaz Brencis, the valley is run by three vampire boyars — Ambrus, Bakir, and Xanthe. Each one controls a different piece of the vrakhiri regime, each one is a named boss with a level range, and each one has a chain of court quests you can work against before the boss fight. The court is the game’s middle act: it is what you fight through between the prologue and the finale, and how you resolve it shapes what the endgame looks like.
The three boyars
| Boyar | Role in the court | Boss level | Base region |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ambrus | The youngest vrakhir; runs the collection, storage and distribution of blood. Once a mercenary in Skender’s service. | 16–20 | Maragir Wealds |
| Bakir | The warmonger; a former steppe horseman whose Lunar Tournaments lure humans into deadly games. | 20–24 | Svartrau |
| Xanthe | The oldest; a priestess who manipulates minds and turns soldiers into blood guards through an irreversible ritual. | 24–28 | Svartrau |
The level range is deliberate: the court is structured as an ascending ladder, so working through the three arcs in level order (Ambrus → Bakir → Xanthe) is also the safest difficulty curve. The vampire vassals order guide covers the trade-offs of the order, and each boss has its own dedicated fight guide (Ambrus, Bakir, Xanthe).
The court quest arcs
Each boyar runs a family of court quests across the valley. These are the interrupt-and-attack missions that make up the “work against the court” half of the middle act:
- Ambrus — Cellars, Collectors, Dungeons, Prisoners, Transports (blood and prisoners moving across his fiefdom)
- Bakir — Distilleries, Headhunters, Pillories, Transports (cheap booze, rebel hunts, public humiliation)
- Xanthe — Blood Guards, Excavations, Recruiters, Transports (the blood-guard factory and the mind manipulation that feeds it)
You can find every one of them on the world map under the Quests filter, and the full list with regions and introductions is in the quests database. Interrupting these operations is how you chip at a boyar’s reach before you ever meet the boss — and how you build the Infamy that the finale requires.
How it feeds the finale
The court is the bridge between the early game and the endgame:
- Resolving each vassal well builds your Infamy. Clean resolutions are the main way to reach the maximum Infamy that Brencis needs to summon you to the final quest.
- They cost days. The arcs run on the same 30-day budget as everything else, so how you pace them is a real planning decision — the time ledger is the place to work out the split.
- They set up the ally routes. Which options and ally-route offers are on the table in the finale depend on how you resolved the court.
- But they do not pick the ending. The ending is decided by the dialogue in A Deal with the Devil. The key choice timeline and the all endings guide cover how the final conversation resolves.