Sarethe Vey had served the Mercantile Assembly longer than most of the people arguing across it had been alive, and she spent the whole of the Coven’s campaign against the Supreme Ruler saying the thing nobody in the room wanted said.
She was not a dissenter by temperament. She had wanted the expansion. She had wanted the decree overturned and the eastern sectors reopened, and she said more than once that stopping every project at once had been too much. What she would not do was pretend the Coven had behaved properly. On the first night, with the losses still being added and Odran Pell shouting about drilling crawlers stranded in mud, she put it plainly: they had kept moving the boundary markers, they had sent crews into places the Sylvans had already forbidden, and they had told themselves the objections would eventually stop. Asked whether she thought the decree was justified, she said she thought they had pushed too far. It ended the conversation for the evening and it changed nothing.
She was tired in a way that read as patience and was not. She rubbed at one temple when Odran started; she answered him in four words when four would do. Outside the palace after the first delegation, when Cassovar Merent said the ruler could still be persuaded, she told him the ruler had heard them perfectly well and simply disagreed, and warned him not to make it personal. He answered that it already was. That exchange was the whole of what followed, a year early.
Her argument against the campaign was never moral. It was arithmetic, which was the only language that chamber respected. Every crisis they manufactured, the Supreme Ruler solved; every solved crisis made him look like a man who solves things. They were spending money and influence to demonstrate that they were weaker than they had believed. When she finally said so outright — stop, all of it, the pressure and the contracts and the newspapers — Odran asked whether her answer was surrender, and she said her answer was that they should decide what they were trying to achieve, because some of what they were now doing had nothing to do with the decree.
After that she stopped attending. Odran called her a problem in a room she had left, and Cassovar warned him to be careful, and the word stayed in the room anyway. She was not invited to the meeting where a Gilded magistrate was asked whether there was a lawful way to remove a Supreme Ruler, which is how she came to be the last senior member of the Coven to learn what her colleagues had done.
She assembled it herself, from the balcony and the vanished mason and a man dead in military custody, and went to Cassovar’s house uninvited when he would not grant her a meeting. He told her not to ask questions she did not want answered. She told him she had wanted the expansion resumed and pressure on the throne and had agreed to none of this, and that he no longer knew what “this” was either. On her last visit she made him admit that he had hired the Shadow Weavers, that he had kept it from her because she would have opposed it, and that her opposition had mattered but not enough. She stopped being angry somewhere in that conversation. What replaced it was worse for him.
They went on seeing each other at formal gatherings, and speaking when business required it, for the rest of their lives. What ended was the ease.