Work Text:
Every noble house has SOME kind of scandal. This is very well known, and all proper nobles try to keep up the fiction that "oh yes, eight generations ago, one of my grandfathers was a cut-throat business man, but that was eight generations ago, we're very refined now..."
Because of course, if anyone alive met the scandalous ancestor - or worse, remembers the scandal as it happened - they're doomed. Ruined. Will never make a proper marriage, will be shunned from society, et cetera, et cetera.
Well. Two generations ago, a very fine noblewoman, recently married, became very lonely while her husband was away and took a lover. And became pregnant.
Had the child taken after her, or even had her lover vaguely resembled her husband, this would have been fine. Unfortunately, her lover was an incubus, and the baby girl took after her father in...quite obvious ways.
In the same generation, a young lord was seduced - so he claimed - by an elven lady who desired his power and money. (The elves claim that they merely wished a place to settle in peace, and the lord required a young maid service him, but who listens to elves?)
In time, the lord's lover bore him a son, and as his wife proved barren, the child was adopted.
When the half-succubus daughter and the half-eleven son grew up, both were shunned by most of polite society, and so in frustration and despair, their parents wed them to each other.
In the fullness of time, the young half elf inherited his father's title - and the county of Lettenhove - and his wife bore him a son of his own.
When young Julian ran away from Oxenfurt to become a bard and follow a witcher, the nobility decided in unison that "strange blood will out" and cloistered their children further.