Queen-Regent Ysara was King Varyon’s aunt and the oldest living member of the Veinwright line, the dynasty of dead kings that had ruled Iskandar for three hundred years. Through the civil war that ended that rule she sat beside the throne rather than on it, and spoke for the old Veinwright houses that gathered around her as the kingdom came apart.
Age had reduced her body and not her presence. She wore a mantle of black feathers and the dark eye-markings of the kingdom’s highest occult priests, and she was the hardest voice at her nephew’s court. Where Varyon wanted to understand the revolt, she wanted it crushed: rebels executed the day they were taken, provincial demands for autonomy treated as treason under a softer name, the dead kept in the throne’s service because the dead, she said, do not rebel. She despised Lady Elianor Vale, the king’s reforming minister, and believed it was Elianor who had taught him to doubt his right to rule.
She was cruel, and she was also, more often than anyone liked, right about what was coming. She warned that the separatists wanted the Veinwrights gone rather than reformed, that the Supreme Ruler’s Justicar’s Legion had come to take Iskandar rather than save it, and that admitting guilt would buy her nephew no mercy. He overruled her and opened the gates of the capital to the Legion, and each of her warnings came true in turn.
When the Legion’s inspections hardened into purges of the Veinwright houses, she withdrew with the old nobility into the northern crypt districts and then vanished into them. She was charged with conspiracy and obstruction and never tried, because the north refused to give her up. She ended the war among the refugees on the mountain roads to the frozen lands of the Crystalline Conclave, with no feathers and no jewels.
She had spent the war insisting that the kingdom would not survive its own mercy. She left it in a plain cart, beside children whose parents had gone into Justicar prisons.