Queen Hesper

Role Queen of Quillet Status alive Age 22

Hesper was crowned in the spring, at twenty-two, after her mother’s long illness, and inherited a treasury with more promissory notes in it than coin. She has her ancestor’s chin, as every portrait in the Keep will tell you, and her own habit of asking the most junior person in the room what they think.

Who she is

Hesper reads. She was the only person at court who had read the Founder’s letters before the dragon came, and the only one who was not surprised that a lease existed at all. She was surprised that the Crown had lost its copy, and she has not stopped being angry about it.

She is young enough that her councillors talk over her, and she has started letting them, because it tells her who they are. Her mother’s Chancellor, Wystan Pye, has advised her to refuse the rent, raise a levy and hire dragon-slayers. She has thanked him and not done it.

What she wants

To pay the rent honourably, in full, on time, with the vale watching. She would also like to know how the Crown came to owe Marrable and Daughters so much money in her mother’s last two years, and nobody at court has given her a straight answer.

Dealings with the Wardens

On the evening of the fair she heard Beatrix Holloway and the Chancellor argue in front of the whole Marigold Court, then named Beatrix and the three people standing next to her Wardens of the Lease, with a commission to find the lease and learn the rent. She has since given them the run of the Keep’s muniment room, the money to hire a boat, and very little else.