The Queen of Swords sits enthroned above the clouds in Pamela Colman Smith's picture, sword held upright in one hand while the other is extended, an unusual gesture among the court cards generally read as beckoning or as weighing, her profile notably stern compared to the other three queens' more open expressions. Butterflies and a bird carved into her throne echo the same motifs Smith gave the King of Swords, a deliberate visual pairing that ties the two together as the suit's paired figures of refined, clear-eyed intellect.
The Queen is conventionally read, within the Golden Dawn's schema for the court cards, as air's inward, nurturing mastery, experience turned to wisdom rather than raw intellectual force; she is frequently distinguished from the King specifically on this basis, his authority institutional and outward, hers earned more personally and often, in accompanying commentary from Waite and later writers, through difficult experience such as loss or betrayal, a biographical dimension none of the deck's other queens carry as explicitly.
The Marseille Reine d'Epee, like all four Marseille queens, is a static heraldic figure with no narrative detail; the extended hand, the clouds and the specific coloring are entirely Rider-Waite-Smith additions. Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck keeps the Queen of Swords within their Knight, Queen, Prince, Princess structure and generally renders her in a more overtly severe, wintry idiom, consistent with the deck's broader tendency to sharpen the harder edges of the air suit's court figures.