Is Queen of Swords a yes or a no?

This card leans yes. It carries forward movement, and in a straight yes/no draw most readers take it affirmatively.

The Queen of Swords is clarity that has been paid for: perceptive, unsentimental, honest.

She has been through something and it made her precise rather than bitter, which is the distinction the card cares about. Waite wrote that she is "familiar with sorrow", and that phrase is the source of the near-universal modern reading.

One hand holds the sword upright and the other is extended, palm open: judgement and reception at once. The clouds below her are the only ones in the suit she is above rather than in.

Yes/no readings are the most popular use of tarot and the one it is worst suited to. A seventy-eight card deck built to describe nuance is being asked for one bit of information, and most of what it knows is discarded in the process.

A more useful version of the same draw: read Queen of Swords as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. Independent judgement and honest perception. See it as it is and say so.

Boundaries held without apology, and experience converted into discernment rather than into armour. That conversion is the whole achievement of the card.

In an advice position she asks for the truth told kindly and not softened away, which is a harder combination than either half alone and is precisely what the open palm and the raised sword together mean.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. Coldness, bitterness, a sharpness that has become cruelty.

The reversal is the same woman with the conversion incomplete: the perception intact, the compassion spent. Accuracy without warmth is a weapon, and she is very good at it.

Also read for judgement clouded by an old hurt she has not finished with, where the clarity is genuine about everything except the one subject it is actually about.