The knight got a point, but it's something best left unspoken.
First : He is a royal knight, so he answer to the knights order. If there is complaint about his action, then it should be escalated to his boss who will make judgment and give proper punishment. Although... knight are also supposed to act properly, including showing respect to people especially those with high status.
Second : He is sent to escort Rosemary by the prince. Heinrich would lose face if people think he is too afraid to stand up when his subordinate is insulted. So normally, people would think twice before picking a fight.
But as Serena said, it's up to the prince to decide if he feels insulted or not. That's not what Rosemary or the knight to decide. What they could do is just to file a complaint, and if Heinrich gives order to discipline Serena for it, only then that knight would have his justification and backing.
I know it’s supposed to be the story of the series, but I still don’t get what reward by the first prince would be enough for our MC to stick around and play the political game when she can just run away to a different country/continent and be done with it.
She has no attachment to her family and has skills to survive and make it somewhere.
I wish the story had given our MC clear and strong motivation for sticking with all this silly drama.
She can survive on her own, but it doesn't mean she would happily welcome back life of scraping for trash and drinking gutter water.
We see when she gets into trouble, but most of the time, thanks to Rosemary, her mother and servants ignored her. She can just do her own business. Annoyed, but nothing she can't swallow.
Evan's offer means the imminent risk of her family getting caught in political conflict is under control. This way, she is no longer in a hurry to abandon ship.
Honestly.. all of this feels like it would go away or turn on its head when it's revealed that she is essentially the frist prince's fiance and Mary what ever would just lose it mentally and maybe reval that she's actual was reincarnated from our would or something
Serena is not Evan's fiance. If she is, they would have to announce it already.
What they did is just to fuel the speculation about both being close, be it romantically or politically, but they never commit on anything.
The important thing is to show public the Violets are still not all in for the second prince's faction.
I don't think they're in it for the money. They want to disrupt the balance of power in the factions by getting a ducal family in their side and since the mom is stupid she fell for it that's why the dad is so pissed off at her for agreeing with the engagement without his permission.
It's the money they want. Violets might not have that high of social standing among the nobles, but they're probably the richest family in the country thanks to their active participation in tradings. Serena's dad is always away because he's going everywhere for international business dealing.
The second prince's side does have a card to play. Rosemary is still legally Violet's daughter, but she's also a burden because of her status as commoner born. Alto and Serena pointed it out before (ch6.1 p11), the prince could treat "taking the unwanted child" as a favour to the Violets to help funding them in the faction war.
Of course, that prince has no intention of keeping Rosemary. The nobles still put importance in bloodline purity.
In addition, they can only marry women of high ranking family so her family can help with lobbying. Marrying a commoner will have negative effect because it just gives pretext to their political enemies.