Lady Elianor Vale

Lady Elianor Vale was minister of provinces in the last years of the Veinwright kingdom of Iskandar, and the highest officer at that court who was not of the royal blood. Her family had governed the southern riverlands long before the Veinwrights conquered Iskandar. She held her seat because King Varyon trusted her judgment, and the old nobility never stopped treating that as a temporary arrangement.

She was the court’s voice for the provinces and for negotiation, and almost always the voice that lost. When the western provinces rose against the winter levy she argued that their grievances were real and that force would turn a protest into a massacre. She was overruled, and the massacre came. Through the civil war that followed she rode out under banners of truce, carried the rebels’ petitions to the throne, and warned that the common people did not distinguish between sacred Veinwright tradition and necromancy. She would not accept that survival justifies whatever survival requires, and she refused every plan to save the capital by sacrificing the provinces around it. She was also among the first to suspect that someone outside the war was arranging how the rest of the realm saw it.

To Varyon she was the nearest thing he had to honest counsel. She urged him toward peace when the rebels offered terms, and watched him refuse them. When the Justicar’s Legion arrived, the court called them allies; she called them arbiters, and asked what a king was meant to negotiate with once an army held his capital. She went on negotiating with them anyway, long after neither side much trusted her.

She stayed when the throne had been reduced to a seal. She helped establish the provincial councils that replaced royal rule, won the release of families falsely accused in the purges, and watched Gilded Coven officials take possession of everything those councils could not afford to keep.

Some called her the last honest figure at that court. Others called her remaining there the betrayal.