Headmistress of Solmere, and the oldest living connection between Acts 12 to 14 and the first half of the saga.
Given name from the author's notes. Ch. 286 gives only "Headmistress Wysteria".
What ch. 286 shows
Her presence commands "immediate, respectful quiet from the assembled crowd, the particular authority she carried without ever needing to raise her voice to claim it".
And one physical detail, which is the whole of what the chapter says about her nature:
the faint iridescent shimmer along her collarbone catching the morning light as she turned to address different sections of the gathered students.
That matches the author's notes exactly. She is a butterfly-monster hybrid with "faint wing-pattern markings across her collarbone and shoulders visible only in certain light".
It also matches Mira Doyle, who has "a faint iridescent sheen along her cheekbones". The notes have them from different tribes.
The opening address
Ch. 286. It is the saga's thesis, said from a platform to several hundred students.
WYS: This festival exists for a purpose beyond simple competition [...] It exists to remind each of you that strength takes many shapes. Some of you will compete today using the gifts your souls granted you at birth. Others will compete using skills built through years of deliberate, patient effort. Both are worth celebrating equally. Neither is worth more than the other.
Arthur is certain, "though he could not have said precisely why", that her attention settled on him while she said it.
WYS: today is not simply about who wins. It is about what each of you discovers, in the effort of trying, about the shape of your own particular strength. [...] the person standing across from you deserves your full respect, regardless of what today's outcome ultimately reveals.
She is the third teacher in Acts 12 to 14 to look directly at Arthur while saying something about exceptions, after Vance in ch. 257 and Pratt in ch. 263 and ch. 267.
She recognises it
Ch. 294, alone at the notice board after everyone has gone.
She stood alone in the gathering dark [...] and paused, for considerably longer than the other entries warranted, at the separate section printed beneath the heading marking the new academy record. Twenty-seven circuits. No ability. No Alchemy. She read the name beside it twice.
Sutton finds her there.
WYS: I watched the final nine circuits from the north tower. I did not intend to. I found I couldn't quite stop watching, once I'd started. SUT: Neither could anyone else, as it happened.
Then she establishes the baseline before saying the thing:
WYS: In all your years teaching here, how many students have you watched push genuinely past their own physical limit? Not their comfortable limit. Their actual one. SUT: A handful. Perhaps five or six, across two decades. WYS: And how many of those did it without an ability supplementing them? SUT: None. Not one.
And then:
WYS: I have seen someone do that before. Once. A very long time ago now. SUT: Who?
She did not answer immediately.
WYS: Someone who mattered a great deal. To a great many people. Long before this academy existed.
She does not name Nilah, and what she is not saying is under the fold at the foot of this entry.
WYS: Keep an eye on that boy, Kade. Not because he requires supervision. Because I suspect we are all going to want to remember, eventually, exactly what we witnessed today.
Sutton is left "entirely uncertain what he had actually watched that afternoon".
From the author's notes chapters nobody has read yet
Marked as planning rather than text.
- Ancient by human standards, old enough to have witnessed Nilah's fight against Vazroth firsthand, centuries ago. That is ch. 147 to ch. 148, four hundred and seventeen years before Arthur is born, so she is at least that old.
- She has no conventional surname. "of Wysteria" is a lineage or place title rather than a family name.
- She will recognise something of Nilah's spirit in Arthur during the Finger of Calamity battle at the climax of the volume.
- She formally recognises Arthur as one of the academy's most distinguished students, "a full-circle moment against Hobbes's letter and Kade's early skepticism".
See The Timeline.
Ch. 334: what she will not tell him
She calls Arthur to her study on the last morning of term, which no one else in his year receives, and does not sit behind the desk.
WYS: You are aware that I watched the semifinal. ART: I've been told. WYS: I have been the head of this academy for a long time. I have watched, at a conservative estimate, four thousand students fight in that arena, and I want to say to you that I do not know what I saw and that this is a genuinely unusual sentence for me to say out loud to a first year. ART: I don't know either. WYS: No. I'm aware. That is very nearly the whole of what makes it interesting.
She withholds deliberately and says she is withholding, which is the part the archive keeps:
WYS: I am not going to tell you a story about it. You would carry it round for two months and it would grow, and whatever it grew into would almost certainly be wrong, and I would rather you spent the summer being fifteen.
The thing she does say
WYS: There was a person, once, a considerable time ago, who could not be stopped by any means available to the people who tried. Not because she was strong. She was not particularly. Because stopping her was the wrong shape of problem and nobody worked that out until it was far too late to be useful to them. ART: What happened to her? WYS: She died. As everybody does.
She says the last of it "without any weight at all, which Arthur found more unsettling than weight would have been".
Four thousand students is her own figure and the only measure the archive has of how long she has held the post.
And the request
WYS: If anything happens over the summer that you cannot explain, I would like you to write to me about it rather than to anyone else. Not because you are in any difficulty. Because I would like to be the person who hears it first.