Ghy ruled the Winter Elves so long ago that the line of kings between him and Istor XXVI is mostly names, and many of those names are guesses. What the records agree on is the manner of his ending. He was murdered on the banks of the creek that runs below Svedlind, and the killing was bad enough, or old enough, that the water took its character from it. By the time Istor's war began, the elves had been calling it Murder Creek for as long as anyone could account for. Ghy is the reason it had the name to begin with. His is the old stratum the new killing was poured on top of.
He matters now less as a king than as a presence. Klevnaf's soldiers do not pray to their gods before a battle they expect to lose. They go down to the creek and drink. The water shows them killings, Ghy's among them, from angles no living witness ever held, and they come back up from it saying they have sought Ghy's guidance. What they have actually taken counsel from is the residue of every violent death the river holds, which is not a god and answers no questions, but which a frightened elf with a spear can read as the oldest murdered king leaning close. Whether anything of Ghy is genuinely in that water, or whether the soldiers are interrogating their own dread, is a thing Klevnaf does not examine too hard. The guidance is real to the ones who take it. That has been enough to send men over the Suftos Hills.
I drank at the Listening Grove before the falls and again at the creek before the push east. The grove gives you the ancestors soft. The creek gives you Ghy, and Ghy gives you nothing soft at all. He showed me how a king dies. Then he showed me I would not. I went up the hill on that. — a Klevnaf spearman, related to a priest after the second winter