Queen Ysmara the Patient ruled Avarath from a tower above nine months of snow and reigned, in the kingdom's polite phrase, by correspondence. She was sixty-one. She was thin in the way the long northern winters made all of Avarath's nobility thin, and she dressed in the heavy plain wool of her court without ornament, because ornament, in her country, froze. She had been queen for thirty-four years. She had left the Hold-Above-the-Snow, in that time, four.
The court called her the Patient for a reason kinder than the truth. She was patient, as the chronicler concedes; she had outwaited two of Caedrin's princes and three Sereveld doges and a Krypton chancellor before Ister, and she had done so without raising armies. But the patience was not a temperament. It was a method. She had been raised in the Avarath academy as much as on the throne, and she had come to her crown believing that a kingdom of small armies and long winters could only afford to act once it had measured.
The astronomers as foreign service
She had, accordingly, made her astronomers her envoys. The Astronomer Royal — Vesper, in this generation; the third such Royal Ysmara had appointed — corresponded with the great kingdoms not to discuss treaties but to discuss measurements. The astronomers wrote about the harvest as though it were a phase of the moon. They wrote about troop movements as though they were tides. They were polite. They were precise. They sent letters that the courts of Krypton and Caedrin and Sereveld, in fairer years, had read as eccentricities of the cold north and filed without acting on. Ysmara, for thirty-four years, had not minded the filing. She had been gathering, by the unanswered letters, a kind of ledger of who in the world was paying attention.
By the chronicle's beginning, the ledger was almost complete. The kingdoms had been, with very few exceptions, not paying attention. Ysmara had begun to make her own peace with this. The peace was running out.
Stance toward the chronicle
She received Crown Princess Aelinna at Hold-Above-the-Snow in S7 with the briefest of audiences — perhaps eleven minutes, by the steward's reckoning — and spoke to her of old measurements that are becoming new again. She did not press the princess on Krypton's politics. She did not warn her. She did not bless her. She gave her, instead, by way of Vesper, the master ledger of the hesitating stars, and let her go south with it. The gift was not generosity. It was an alarm reset to a louder bell.
The court of Avarath did not, in S7, declare. It would not declare until S17, when the chronicle had given Ysmara a measurement she could no longer ignore: that for the first time in her reign, the night sky had begun to lie. She would speak then, in plain audience, the only sentence the chronicle records her speaking aloud — that Avarath had measured a war. The kingdom, on that single sentence, would move.
She is not a believer. She is not an unbeliever. She is, in the cold particular way of her country, a counter — a queen who had spent her life waiting for the universe to be quantified, and who, when it began to be, did not look away.