Aelrein keeps the forge-temple of Ystaeria at Tuur, which makes her the senior voice of the cold-glass patron in the eastern kingdom and, by the same standing, the most dangerous critic Queen Lamenrae has at home. She is devout in the exact way that makes her a problem. No one can call her greedy or disloyal, because she wants nothing for herself and has never once questioned the queen's right to the throne.
What she questions is the timber. Ystaeria's Traditionalists hold that sacred work belongs with those who know how to keep it, and Aelrein has carried that doctrine out of the forge and into the Winterwood. The ancestors wait in that wood between their lives, she teaches, and its timber is their flesh while they wait. Lamenrae's export of it down the coast, to lowlanders who will burn it for a winter's heat, is the scattering of the dead to pay for a war that keeps making more of them. She is careful never to name the queen faithless, and careful to grant that the Industrialists who back the trade read the same scripture in good conscience. That restraint is what gives her weight. A zealot the court could dismiss. Aelrein it has to answer, because she has handed it nothing to dismiss her for.
They ask me whether I would sooner the kingdom fell than the wood be sold. I tell them the wood is the kingdom. Everything else is only the people it is keeping. — Aelrein, to the queen's council at Tuur