Lord Cassovar Merent led the Gilded Coven in the years after the Supreme Ruler’s decree ended the Gilded Expansion into Sylvan territory, from the first polite delegation to the palace to the night the last of its correspondence was burned.
He was lean, grey at the temples and unhurried in rooms full of people who were not, a man who had spent his career being the one who spoke last. He did not waste anger when numbers could express injury more precisely. For the first year everything he did was recognisably commerce. He asked the throne to reopen the disputed sectors, was refused, accepted a compromise he considered an insult, and then set out to buy the argument instead: pamphlets, friendly newspapers, merchants and officials repeating that the ruler was hesitant and out of touch. It cost a fortune and moved almost nothing, because the ruler kept answering each crisis the Coven made, and answering it in public.
He was not the man who first said the ruler should die. He was the man who did not stop the conversation. When Lord Emmeran Vos arranged the first staged accident, Cassovar insisted only that it happen once, cleanly, with no loose ends — which his treasurer Velisse Arquen told him was the same thing as deciding. It failed, people beneath it were hurt, and he discovered that he could forbid things without stopping them. He had built the plot the way he built a trading house, through intermediaries and divided knowledge, and now there were people in the chain he could not see: someone silencing witnesses, and the young Odran Pell organising attempts of his own. At last he paid the Shadow Weavers to finish it. They took his money and stopped answering him.
The Supreme Ruler survived everything, and the inquiry led by his adviser Balif never found an order with Cassovar’s name on it. Cassovar ended the campaign by threatening Odran with exposure, burning the old correspondence and dissolving the companies the money had moved through, then watched the crown quietly shift seats and contracts away from the Coven without a word of accusation. Lady Sarethe Vey, who had warned him and been shut out for it, learned what he had done without her, and what had been easy between them never was again. Asked whether he regretted it, he said he regretted believing they could control what happened after they started.
He was the only person in the Coven who could have said when it stopped being about twenty-eight million crowns. Asked directly, by Sarethe Vey, the one colleague still willing to ask him anything, he answered that he did not know — and that was the part that frightened her.