Master Corven

Master Corven was the Gilded Coven’s emissary in Iskandar, the merchant guild’s man who paid for the rebellion that brought down the Veinwright throne.

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, 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. He was patient, exact and unsentimental, and he spoke of dead men in the tone other men reserve for freight.

His war began with a contract King Varyon sent back sealed and unread. Corven did not improve the terms. He concluded instead that a kingdom and its king are separable, and set about buying the first without the second. He lent to the king’s chancellor, Merovan, asking for nothing but influence. He paid for the printers, kitchens and couriers of the western provinces’ grievances, on the principle that real grievances cost less than invented ones and are far harder to disprove. He did not want a war. He wanted what a war made possible.

For the work money could not do he engaged the Shadow Weavers, the realm’s guild of spies, and their agent Sythren Vaal. They forged orders, shaped the evidence and drew the Justicar’s Legion into Iskandar exactly as planned — and took their payment not in gold but in the Supreme Ruler’s trust, through doors Corven had opened for them himself.

The Coven won. It took the mines, the confiscated Veinwright estates at a fraction of their worth, the river gates and the contracts to rebuild everything the war had burned, and Corven went before the Grand Inquest only as an expert witness. What he could never recover were the records Sythren kept of how it had all been done. He was in no danger, Sythren assured him, for exactly as long as he lived like a man who knew it.

One of the farms his own lending schedule took had belonged to the family of Mara Venn, a witness he had once used. He ordered a payment made to her that no one could deliver, and kept it on the books as an unmatched liability, and answered the auditors about it once a year for the rest of his life.