On Faye Amitath, First Queen of Pax
Of all the strange inheritances thrown up by the end of the Thousand Year War, perhaps none is stranger than this: that Rolan Amitath—who spent seventeen years dismantling a conflict older than some nations, who outlived three Byercetian kings and quashed a rebellion in his own kingdom, who by the end commanded a room with nothing but silence—left his throne to a girl.
Faye Amitath is barely a woman at the time of this writing. She is the first queen of Pax—the first queen in Tuith—in a recorded history seventeen centuries long.
Pax is not an easy thing to inherit. The city should not exist. Red stone and desert heat, high above the ocean that borders it to the north and west. Rolan kept all of it together through sixty-seven years of careful statecraft. He knew every lord by name, every grievance by history, every agreement by the particular vanity of the man who’d signed it.
Those are not things you can leave in a will.
Faye’s uncle Mikaal administers the core infrastructure of the kingdom—water, power, commerce. He has not moved against her openly. He is too careful for that. But the eastern districts run dry and the lights in the lower city flicker, and the men responsible for repairs arrive at court with explanations that satisfy no one, least of all the queen. The people do not blame Mikaal. They blame whoever is wearing the crown.
Somewhere in the Savannahs, her other uncle Harrison sits in exile, patient as sediment. He took up arms against the peace his brother spent his life building, and lost. There are those in the Savannahs who have not forgotten that. Old loyalties in this part of the world tend to outlast the men who formed them.
Faye has the crown. Her lords’ support holds, for now. She has kept the treaty with Byercet intact and not broken publicly under two years of pressure that would have broken older rulers. What the next years bring her, I cannot say. I record what is, not what will be.
But I have watched enough courts, in enough cities, to know that the ones worth watching are rarely the ones who make it look easy.
— The Chronicler