The Queen

Immortal, beautiful, powerful, and perfect in every way, by the account of everyone permitted to give one. She rules absolutely, and has since she banished her brother and consolidated what had been a shared throne. She is effectively worshipped, and she is not divine — there are genuine divine beings and energies in this world, and they intended its splendor to be shared by everyone. Whether she is a High Sidhe herself or something above that tier reserved for her alone is the one theological question the court permits to remain open.

In Person

Indistinguishable from a human woman, which in this world is the definition of perfection, and which no one who meets her can look at for very long. She is not cold. That is the first thing that undoes people. She is warm, curious, funny, and startlingly attentive — she will remember a courier's name, the name of the courier's mother, and what was wrong with the mother's leg, and she will ask after it three years later.

She never argues. When contradicted she becomes interested, and the contradiction is examined, and somewhere in the examination it stops being a contradiction, and the person who raised it leaves feeling they have been agreed with. Nobody has ever satisfactorily reconstructed how this is done. It may not be a working at all.

History

The official history is short and has not changed in four hundred years: there was a shared throne, the brother grew jealous, there was a war, the brother lost, the Kingdom has flourished since. It is taught in that form and it is not elaborated.

What is missing from it is everything before. The Queen's reign is dated from the banishment, and the Chancery's records begin from the same year, and the question of what she was queen of before there was a banishment to date things from is not one the court has ever needed to ask. She does not discuss it. She has never claimed to be eternal; she has simply never given a date, and four centuries of courtiers have filled in the rest on her behalf.

The one anomaly in the record is geographic. The Kingdom's boundary stones in the Hollow Marches name nine holdings and one seat, in the Chancery's own hand, and the Kingdom has twelve provinces and one seat. Nobody has put this to her. Three heralds have proposed to, and all three were promoted.

Method

She does not govern. The Chancery governs — registries, assessors, and caste law, running on procedure that outlasts every fashion at court — and she reigns above it, unimplicated in anything it does. No unpopular decree has ever carried her name. Every popular one has.

Her actual instrument is attention. A house she notices rises; a house she stops noticing is finished within a generation, without a word said. The whole apparatus of the Ring — the gardens, the imported soil, the ruinous competition in beauty — exists to be looked at by one person, and she has never had to ask for any of it.

Household

The Chancellor of Forms. Runs the Chancery, has held the office thirty-one years, and has never been received in the spires. He does not appear to resent this. The arrangement is that the Queen does not know the details, and he is the reason she does not have to.

The Wing-Marshal. Commands the spire guard and the only body of troops the capital keeps under arms. Ceremonial, magnificent, and never once deployed, which is the point being made.

Ilvane, of the Ring. The house currently most in favor: the perfect garden, the closed gates, the children who have never seen the meadow their landscape imitates. Favor is not permanent and everyone in the Ring knows exactly how long Ilvane has had it.

Relations

Her brother is not mentioned. Not forbidden — not mentioned, which is more thorough. She has never spoken of the Goblin King in public in four hundred years, and the court has correctly read this as instruction.

She wants blessings from Hakumei and has taken three, each of which reads on close inspection as a warning, and she has had all three read aloud at ceremony anyway — which is either a failure to read carefully or the most confident thing anyone in the Kingdom has ever done.

She is fond of Duke Aureling, indulgent toward Foreman-Ascendant Coilbrass, and has never met Old Tibbault, Grismer, or anyone from below the Kingdom's line of personhood.

Reputation

Adored, uncomplicatedly, by nearly six million people. Even the Kingdom's sharpest critics tend to arrive at "she cannot know what is done in her name," which is the most useful belief in the entire system and costs her nothing to maintain.

Outside the marches the reading is colder. The Wilds' position is that a monarch who has never seen a ledger has arranged not to see one.

Hooks

• A herald is offered promotion. Accepting means the question they were about to ask goes unasked, and they know it, and they have come to the party for a reason they cannot state in writing.
• The Queen asks for the party by name. She wants a report on a province, delivered personally, unwritten, and she is very clear that she wants it as they saw it — which no one has been able to decide is a trap or the first honest request she has made in a century.
• Ilvane's favor ends. The house has one season, a great deal of money, and a proposal that requires outsiders.
• Something in the Chancery Stacks predates the reign and names her. It is a land grant, it is in her hand, and the seat it grants from is not the Eternal City.

"She asked after my mother's leg. It had been three years. I would have died for her in the doorway."