Chancellor Merovan

Merovan was Lord Chancellor of Iskandar under Varyon Veinwright, and the door the Gilded Coven came through after the king refused to open one.

He was a narrow-faced man who dressed in layers of ash-grey silk, and his problem was arithmetic rather than ambition. The treasury stood years behind its obligations, the provinces remitted less with every season, and his king would not trade a port for a loan. When a Gilded emissary offered money and asked in return for nothing a chancellor could name — no land, no titles, no harbours, only influence — Merovan took the terms and told himself he had prevented a collapse.

He had. It arrived anyway.

What influence cost was paid in instalments: a trade exemption, an adjustment to mining rights, permission for Gilded agents to deal directly with the provincial guilds. Then weapons hidden beneath the grain in the crown’s own tax wagons, which were meant to be discovered and to justify the arrests that followed. The rebels reached them first and spent a year shooting at the crown with them. By then he had lost the ability to describe his own signature as something that had happened to him.

At court he was the hardest voice in the room. He called the men on the western road bandits, warned his king that negotiation grants legitimacy, and argued against the assembly he was afterwards ordered to convene. He prepared it with shaking hands. It never met.

He was accused in open session before a council that did not defend him. What followed was smoke, a guard who killed another guard, and a chancellor who was no longer in the chamber. He remembered almost none of it. Two weeks later he stood in the west beside Darien Rusk and confessed to hidden grain, to rites beneath the palace, and to a king who had approved the raising of civilians — which that king had forbidden, in a room Merovan had been standing in. Some of the testimony was true. Some was distorted. Some had been written for him before he was taken.

He was rewarded with a seat on the Transitional Council, a restored palace, guards at his door, and no authority of any kind. Every speech was reviewed before he gave it. He had asked once whether he would be protected, and been told that something would be arranged.

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