Master Corven

Master Corven was the Gilded Coven’s emissary in Iskandar, and the man who established what a kingdom costs when its king will not sell it.

He arrived with a contract and had it sent back sealed, by a king who wished him to understand that the offer was beneath consideration. His response was not to improve the terms. It was to conclude that a kingdom and a king are separable, and that the second is expensive only because everyone insists on buying him first.

He was broad-shouldered, plainly dressed and easy to walk past. A brown coat. Unadorned gloves, kept immaculate. In an embassy built to display wealth he displayed none of it, having decided early that a man who shows what he holds invites others to price it. Visitors took him for a prosperous clerk, and he encouraged them.

His method was patience with other people’s arithmetic. He lent to a chancellor whose treasury stood years behind its obligations and asked for no land, no ports and no titles — only influence — and then collected the influence in instalments, until the man could no longer describe his own signature as something that had happened to him. He paid for printers, kitchens, advocates and couriers on behalf of grievances that were entirely real, on the principle that real grievances cost less than invented ones and are far harder to disprove. When seven commercial houses declined to join him, he frightened them, and then showed them a list of estates that would change hands if reform succeeded. Fear brought them to the table. Profit made them sign.

He did not want a war. He wanted what a war made possible, and he said so in the tone other men reserve for freight. Told that men were dead, he answered that men were always going to die. Told at the end that he had destroyed a kingdom, he answered that the kingdom had destroyed itself and the Coven had merely recognised the opportunity.

He received what he came for: the mines, the estates bought at a fraction of their worth, the contracts, the reconstruction. He also acquired a partner he had engaged for a season and could not afterwards discharge.

Asked what would happen when the Shadow Weavers no longer needed him, he had no answer. It is the only occasion on which anyone recorded him as uncertain.