Lady Sarethe Vey had served the Mercantile Assembly longer than many of its members had been alive, and during the Gilded Coven’s long campaign against the Supreme Ruler she was the senior voice that kept saying what nobody in the room wanted said.
She was no dissenter by temperament. She had wanted the Gilded Expansion and thought the decree that ended it went too far. What she would not do was pretend the Coven had behaved well: from the first night she said plainly that they had pushed too far into Sylvan land, moving boundary markers and sending crews where they had already been forbidden to go. She had a tired, economical manner that passed for patience, and answered Odran Pell’s shouting in as few words as would do.
Her case against the campaign was never moral. It was arithmetic, the only language that chamber respected: every crisis the Coven manufactured, the Supreme Ruler solved, and every solution made him look stronger and them weaker. When she finally told them to stop all of it and decide what they were actually trying to achieve, nobody listened, and she stopped attending. It was in her absence that the Coven’s most dangerous members began asking whether the ruler could be removed.
So she was the last senior member of the Coven to learn that her colleagues had been trying to have him killed. She pieced it together herself from a collapsed palace balcony and the deaths that followed it, and kept confronting Lord Cassovar Merent, the Coven’s leader and her colleague of many years, until he admitted that he had hired the Shadow Weavers and kept it from her because she would have opposed it. Somewhere in that conversation her anger gave way to something worse for him, which was disappointment.
She had no part in the plot. She had only seen where it was going, said so, and been left out.
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.