Odran Pell was the youngest man of consequence in the Mercantile Assembly during the Gilded Coven’s campaign against the Supreme Ruler, and the only one who tried to have the ruler killed without being told to.
He was broad-shouldered, expensively dressed and entirely unable to hide what he felt, which in that chamber was closer to a disability than a flaw. He was furious from the night the ruler’s decree ended the Gilded Expansion into Sylvan territory, and did not believe the Sylvan groves were sacred. He was not stupid, though. He was often the first to see where the Coven’s pressure was failing, and Lord Cassovar Merent, who led the campaign, found him irritating chiefly because he was so often right.
What Odran wanted most was to be heard. He addressed crowds of merchants without the Assembly’s leave, blaming the crown for the price of timber and housing, and for a while he was the most popular man in the Coven among young merchants and city labourers. Lady Sarethe Vey told him he enjoyed the cheering too much. He took it to mean that people were listening.
When the first staged accident failed and Cassovar forbade any more, Odran went around him, gathering disaffected nobles and indebted merchants outside the Assembly until a deadly mishap on a royal hunting party took shape without anyone ever giving an order. It failed too, and the one man caught was poisoned in custody before he could name anyone. Odran never quite grasped why that was worse than failure, or why it should matter that bystanders might have died alongside the ruler.
He argued to the end that stopping was more dangerous than going on, and stopped only when Cassovar threatened to give his name to the throne — a bluff, as he probably knew. Told to go back to being a merchant, he asked whether that was all.
He was told that the Supreme Ruler was not the only thing in Ashkar. Cassovar had once behaved as though he were, and Odran was the only person in the room who had never pretended otherwise.