Archcantor Ilyth the Seventh

Ilyth the Seventh, born Ilyth Verane, is the reigning Archcantor of the Pale Choir and, by that office, sovereign of the Pale See from the cathedral-city of Ostrovane. She has held the white crozier since 296 AS, the seventh of her name, chosen — as the Choir chooses all its heads — by the closed conclave of the Seventh Circle. In the present year she is the most consequent churchman alive, and the only ruler in the Reach whose faith is also a policy: that the Wound above the world is a god's opening eye, and that every memory burned in ashcraft is an offering laid before it.

Early life and ascent

The archive's record of her early life is thin, and thin in a way that suggests editing. The Choir's own rolls give her birthplace as Verane Hollow, a tithe-village in the foothills above Ostrovane, and her entry into the lay singers at the age of nine. A fragmentary roll of the cantors' school names her a student of measures under Cantor Anselm Vey before Vey's fall in 289 AS, though her name does not appear among his mourners. What is certain is that she rose through the rank of Cantor unusually young, served as keeper of the pale tithe in two hill dioceses, and was received into the Seventh Circle in 291 AS. When her predecessor, Archcantor Oriel the Second, died in 296, the conclave sat for only three days before naming her — a swiftness that older cantors still remark upon, since Oriel's body was said to have been found cold before any summons was sent.

Policy and deeds

Ilyth's reign has been one of patient, outward pressure. Three claims define it. First, the renewal of the Choir's old demand that the Glassmere be declared holy ground under Choir governance. Where her predecessors petitioned, she bargains: in 310 AS she first offered the Lord Regent the Choir's intercession with the banking houses of the Tidebound League over Varrow's debts, in exchange for the mere. Ardent refused her, as he refused her offer of an Ash-Cleric for his own sickbed. With the Regent now dying and the succession unsettled, her envoys have been seen in Caldmere again, and the offer stands.

Second, the licensing and multiplication of Ash-Clerics. Under Ilyth the Choir has sworn more Hollowed to its service than in any previous reign, sending them with its missions into Varrow, the League ports, and the border marches, each carrying the Choir's teaching that a memory burned is a memory given. Choir missions have been turned back at the fjord-moots of the Hask, where ashcraft is answered with exile; Ilyth has not pressed the point, and her patience in this is characteristic.

Third, the measures. The Choir has kept nightly readings of the Wound's brightness from the towers of Ostrovane since Mother Seraphe's day, and it was Ilyth who, as a young cantor, is said to have drawn the Seventh Circle's attention to Anselm Vey's private ledgers — the books the Circle seized in 289 AS. Since her accession the Choir's measures have been closed even to its own cantors outside the Circle. What the readings show, the archive cannot say; but in the winter of 311 AS the Choir ordered its midnight offices lengthened, and its preachers have begun to say openly that the eye opens wider year by year.

Reputation and character

Those who have dealt with her describe patience as her whole instrument. She does not threaten and does not hurry; her envoys are instructed to be refused, courteously, as many times as is required. Her one observable want, beyond the Glassmere, is legitimacy: she wishes the Choir received as a temporal power among the powers of the Reach, seated and answered, and not treated as a sect of the eastern hills. Her flaw, in the judgement of the archive's correspondents, is certainty. She governs a faith whose central claim — that the offerings rise, and are received — cannot be tested, and she has arranged her church so that no one beneath the Seventh Circle may test it. The cost of her reign falls elsewhere: on the Ash-Clerics, who are forbidden remembrance-books and grow hollow in her service with nothing to tell them who they were.

She asked me what I had burned that winter, and when I told her — a sister's laugh, the taste of apples — she smiled as a miser smiles at coin well banked. It is not loss to her. That is what frightens me.

Unanswered questions

• What the Choir's closed measures of the Wound actually record, and why Ilyth ended Vey's independent count only to continue it in secret.
• Whether her offer over Varrow's debts is made in concert with any house of the Regency Council, or against all of them.
• Why the conclave of 296 AS chose her with such speed, and on whose nomination.