Serena Ironstag

The old King's seventh daughter, just past twenty. She was not on the list of succession to the throne, and most in the palace regarded her as an insignificant, peripheral princess. Yet she understood politics better than anyone in this palace.

Her maternal line descended from a collateral branch of House Crowfeather of the Mutewall—a fact whose weight even she herself had not yet fully reckoned.

Her royal father had passed away, and in the autopsy room she watched with her own eyes as the coroner pried that glowing black shard from her father's breastbone, and turned up the glyph that had grown upon his tongue.

She said one thing to the coroner: the next words you speak will cost you your work, or cost you your life. Then she ordered him to prepare two copies.

She wore her hair in the old Mutewall style, a single-strand braid, the right braid tied with a grey tail—which broke the rules of the Iron Capital's court. The Queen Mother had scolded her, and the next day she wore it just the same.

In the rear courtyard of her princess's manor, beneath a stone slab by the edge of a well, lay a secret passage—handed down through her maternal line for 3 generations, unknown to anyone officially; the Iron Capital envoys of House Crowfeather of the Mutewall traveled by this very passage. She carried a single message for the men holding the wall: protect a new recruit named Kael.

Unable to enter the line of succession, she laid her own path between three sides: using the Sandgold Alliance's silver to cushion the minting-rights crisis, trading intelligence from the Mutewall garrison for House Crowfeather's seat on the council, and accepting the Church's rite in exchange for a single written endorsement of succession.

At the Emergency Sacred Council, the Sandgold banker gave her the faintest of nods. She remembered the Church's old ledger: in four hundred years of Emergency Sacred Councils, on 9 occasions the Church had, in the end, appointed the new monarch itself.

Her old governess came from House Yintang, one of the Three Royal-Tomb Ritual Houses. The old woman told her a secret she had borne her whole life: that third house, vanished from the records, had not been wiped out—its surname had been changed; and the one who changed their surname still lives in the palace.

The only clue was a single line: the surname is wrong, but the eyes are right. The old woman drew that person's eyes for her—beneath the corner of the left eye, a very faint line.

Following that line at the corner of the eye, in the forgotten old guardroom on the western side of the palace, she found an eighty-year-old retainer who had served the old King his whole life. Beneath the corner of his left eye was that very line.

From his mouth she heard the ancient law no one in the palace dared mention—the Throne calls a person's name, calls it thrice; for the first two calls, family may answer in his stead, 'He is not here'; on the third call, he must answer himself. And the one who answers is not necessarily the one who is taken.

Her residence is the furthest court on the eastern side of the palace, old, and draughty in winter. What quarters a princess off the succession is given—the palace has an understanding about it.

She has not asked to be moved. Out-of-the-way has its uses: few callers, comings and goings not easily logged, and no one troubling to look twice at what lies beneath the flagstone by the well in the back court.

The household is 4 servants, all chosen by her, and the standard was not competence. It was a closed mouth, and no relations inside the palace.

She attends every banquet without exception. She sits at the low end, says little, and listens closely. Most of what she knows was picked up at those tables.

Iron Capital court custom is a double braid or a coiled knot; the single strand is an old Mutewall style. She wears the single, with a length of grey cord at the end of the right braid.

Her mother the Queen scolded her for it. She wore it the same way the next day, and nobody raised it again.

This is not rebellion. Everyone in the palace who sees that braid is reminded that her mother's line came out of the Mute Realm, and a man who has been reminded of that takes one more turn before he speaks. The turn is what she is after.

The grey cord is replaced from time to time. She keeps the old ones, in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, and has not thrown away a single length.