Chancellor Merovan

Merovan was Lord Chancellor of Iskandar under King Varyon Veinwright, and the man through whom the Gilded Coven bought its way into the kingdom.

He was a narrow-faced man in layers of ash-grey silk, who had spent thirty years drafting instruments in which nothing was promised. His failing was not ambition but arithmetic, and a lifelong inability to turn understanding into refusal. The treasury stood years behind its obligations, and his king would not trade a port for a loan. When the Coven’s emissary, Master Corven, offered money in exchange for nothing more than influence, Merovan took it and told himself he had prevented a collapse.

The influence was collected in instalments: trade exemptions, mining rights, Gilded agents dealing directly with the provincial guilds, and at last weapons hidden under the grain in the crown’s own tax wagons, meant to be discovered and to justify arrests. The rebels found them first and turned them on the crown. All the while Merovan was the hardest voice on the royal council, calling the western rebels bandits and warning that negotiation granted them legitimacy.

When General Tharos exposed him before the council, he vanished from the palace in smoke and confusion, taken by the Shadow Weavers rather than escaping by his own wit, and reappeared in the west beside the rebel commander Darien Rusk. There he denounced his king for crimes that included approving the raising of the dead, which Varyon had forbidden in a room where Merovan had been standing. Some of the confession was true, some distorted, and some written for him in advance.

His reward was a seat on the Transitional Council, where the Coven presented him as the bridge between the old monarchy and the new order: a restored palace, guards at his door, every speech reviewed, and no authority of his own. Late in the day it was Merovan who asked Corven what would happen when the Shadow Weavers no longer needed the Coven, and saw in the silence that he had not been the only one used.

He spent what remained of his life being called a statesman by people who had only ever read the version prepared for him.