Lord Emmeran Vos sat at the far end of the table through the Gilded Coven’s long campaign against the Supreme Ruler and said almost nothing, and nearly every irreversible step the Coven took began with something he had said.
He was quiet, unremarkable to look at, and careful in a way his colleagues mistook for mildness. His gift was the sentence that could not be quoted against him. When the Coven’s effort to turn the realm against the ruler was visibly failing, it was Emmeran who observed that they were spending a fortune trying to change one man’s mind, and that perhaps this was the wrong expense. He proposed nothing and nobody voted, but after that evening the idea of killing the Supreme Ruler existed in the room regardless. When the law offered no way to remove him, Emmeran suggested they stop asking the law.
He was also the Coven’s link to the realm’s underside. He knew contractors, which is how a palace balcony came to be marked for repair and never repaired, and the first staged accident passed through so many hands below his that when someone later had the workman involved beaten half to death, Emmeran honestly did not know who. It was he who found the Shadow Weavers and went alone to hire them. They answered by leaving a black coin inside his locked study, with no door forced, so that he would understand what locks were worth.
Every attempt failed. When the Coven gave up, Emmeran did the tidying, dissolving the companies the money had moved through and receiving the Weavers’ last terse messages. Lord Cassovar Merent, the Coven’s leader, told him more than once that he kept crossing the same line, and never stopped inviting him back.
He was never accused of anything, by the throne or by his own guild, and there is no document in any archive in Ashkar on which his name appears beside the word he spent four years declining to use.