Lady Elianor Vale was minister of provinces in the last years of the Veinwright kingdom, and the highest officer of that court who was not of its blood. Her family had governed the southern riverlands long before the dead kings took Iskandar. She remained at court because the king trusted her judgment, and much of the old nobility never stopped treating that as a temporary arrangement.
She was the first at the council table to say the war was avoidable. When the western tax road fell and the generals asked for two companies to reopen it, she told them two companies would turn a protest into a massacre, and that the provinces had a claim to the grain they stood accused of stealing. She was overruled. Everything she predicted then happened, which did nothing for her standing afterwards.
When the raisings began she was the one who asked how many, and she would not accept the answer that survival justifies whatever survival requires. She refused a plan to seal three provinces away in order to hold the capital, on the grounds that a kingdom cannot be preserved by sealing away its parts. She also saw earliest how the war looked from outside it — that the realm was being shown the Veinwright dead and very little else, and that someone was arranging the view.
When the Justicar’s Legion came through the eastern passes, 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 regardless, past the point where either side had much use for her.
She was standing below the throne when Varyon set his seal to the seizure of his own granaries and estates. She stayed after that as well. She helped establish the provincial councils that took over from the throne, and negotiated the release of families named in the purges on no evidence, and watched Gilded 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.