by Juliet Kemp
Selene wrapped herself in her crisp linen robe, and sat at the table by the window to address herself to her breakfast. Rolls, goat-butter, and the Teren mountain mint infusion that she allowed herself as a concession to being away from home. At home, she had cow-butter from one of the few, expensive, herds that grazed the flatlands around Ameten; here it seemed it was an article of Marek pride to rely on the goats on the far side of Marekhill. She couldn’t, however, bring herself to replace mint infusion with rosemary, Salinas lemon (cheaper here than in Teren), or green-leaf the way Marekers preferred. One had to allow oneself some comforts.
Not that the Guesthouse Emilia was without comforts. Her room looked out over the river, which the proprietor evidently expected to please her. Today the river was dull under an overcast sky, with no sign of the sun. It was a nice enough view, but it reminded her, every time, of the Houses built on the two streets that rose up the hill above her. Of course the Lord Lieutenant could not show preference by staying at one of the Houses. Of course the Guesthouse Emilia was the only option, the most prestigious guesthouse in the city, and very nice it was too. And yet it felt uncomfortably symbolic. Marek was supposed to be part of Teren. A subordinate part. She should not be a guest here; she should be a ruler. She was the Lord Lieutenant of Marek; she held authority here. And yet, she did not. The Houses ran Marek, and the Houses saw Teren as a distant connection. No Lord Lieutenant had exercised real power, real influence, over any Marek decision for a good couple of centuries.
Selene, and Teren, had had enough of that.
Increasing Teren influence was not an easy task. She had spoken gently to Heads about the sad withering of the links with Teren. With some of the weaker, poorer, Houses, she had mentioned the advantages of their lands in Teren, and how making stronger links with Teren might empower them in Marek. There were one or two who, she thought, had been interested by that.
And then there were the younger House members. The ones who were bored, or dissatisfied, or both. Gently, she was planting seeds in their minds. If Marek couldn’t be brought wholly into line, perhaps bringing some of the members of its governing families back to Teren would boost those links. Perhaps that would pay off more further along the line, if Teren found the need to be more… forceful.
She buttered a piece of roll, and chewed it thoughtfully.
The Council opening was only a couple of days hence; and she was expected to leave shortly afterwards. She was seeing results, but she would be in a far better position back in Ameten if she had something more solid. Perhaps it was time to push a little harder, when she had the opportunity. Perhaps.
There was another knock on the door and Selene turned, frowning. “Yes?”
“Message for you, Lord Lieutenant.”
Her heart sank when she saw, underneath the scrawled charcoal mark of a Marek messenger, the Teren Archion’s seal. The seal didn’t mean it came directly from the Archion; but anything from Ameten was unlikely to be good news.
It wasn’t a long message. She read it, glowering.
Apparently, they still hadn’t found that wretched sorcerer, the one who’d summoned a demon, lost their nerve and banished it without doing what they were supposed to, and fled. The last Selene had heard, a week or so after coming to Marek, another sorcerer had retrieved the demon, done the job, and then set it to tracking the runaway, Tait. Selene had assumed it would be quick enough. Retrieve Tait or eat it; either would do to instil the requisite dread in the other Academy sorcerers.
But no. Tait hadn’t been found; and now the sorcerer tracking them – Hira, and the Archion’s office giving the name was an annoying indication that Selene should expect to hear from him – had reason to believe that this Tait was heading for Marek.
“Reason to believe,” Selene muttered under her breath. She could wish that the Archion’s office had shared more detail with her; she wasn’t sure how far to trust the assessment.
She came to the kick in the tail of the message, and swore. She’d assumed that all they wanted was for her to assist this Hira, if necessary; after all, she wasn’t a sorcerer. But no. They wanted her to seek support from Marek’s magic. From the… cityangel. Marek’s cityangel.
Selene strongly preferred to keep her distance from magic, especially of the sort practised in Teren. But Marek’s magic was different, wasn’t it? In some way? The Houses disliked magic to the point of ignoring its existence, and Selene had comfortably chosen to ignore it too. She pressed her lips together. She had less than no desire to find out more about magic, Marek’s or any other, but an order was an order. She wasn’t about to deal directly with a spirit, though. That was the job of a sorcerer.
Perhaps the sorcerers of Marek could be convinced that it was in their interest, or in the interest of this cityangel, to interfere… with what, though? They wouldn’t interfere with something they saw as a Teren matter. A sorcerer who’d run away from the Academy; why would that be their problem?
Selene took another sip of mint infusion, her mind working. This Tait had banished the demon before they ran away. But what if they hadn’t? What if… they’d run and left it unbound? What if a rampaging demon were chasing Tait to Marek. And, indeed, the demon was chasing Tait to Marek. Selene didn’t need to tell the Marek sorcerers that it was under someone else’s control now. A rogue uncontrolled demon, and a sorcerer running from their responsibilities; that story might buy her some cooperation.
Selene tapped the table thoughtfully. House Fereno was her afternoon appointment. House Fereno had a link with a sorcerer, as she recalled. A child of the House, disowned for their magic. Rarely spoken of – it had been a while, hadn’t it? And of course Fereno-Head wouldn’t wish to speak of it, or of magic at all. But Selene could pretend not to know that, could ask from an innocent curiosity. She might get something useful. And she might, as well, get useful information from how Fereno-Head reacted to her inappropriate question: whether she was treated as an impertinent underling, an equal to be tolerated, or someone to be placated.
She glanced over at the clock. Time to prepare for this meeting; and more carefully than she might otherwise have done.
k k
Marcia looked at the pile of papers on her desk and sighed. She liked her new office, now she had more House responsibility. It was next to the library, and had a window that looked out over the mouth of the river. But however nice the view, the downside of having a desk was the tendency of work to pile up on it.
She had a nasty suspicion that Madeleine was deliberately offloading the more tedious aspects of House management onto her. To put her off? Or, more charitably, to make sure she understood the reality of what she would, eventually, be taking on, at whatever point Madeleine finally chose to fully hand over.
She wasn’t in a particularly charitable mood today. Grimly, she started in on the pile of bills, authorisations, and bills-of-lading marked with queries for her attention, matching them against the House’s account books.
She wrote a note to the agent telling them to compensate the captain of the Dolphin for the cargo they hadn’t been able to load, and to bill the Broderers Guild for the failure to supply said cargo, put her pen down, and rubbed at her forehead.
Bills and discrepancies might be tedious, and occasionally involve some quite irritable disputes, but they were fundamentally tractable. There was a truth to track down, or a decision to make if it couldn’t be tracked down.
Changing the basis of Marek’s political system was rather less so.
The problem with ‘winning’ that showdown with Daril was that, while Daril’s plan had been terrible, she’d been forced to realise that the problems he wanted to fix were real. The Guilds were treated badly. The younger offshoots of the Houses weren’t dealt with well. The Heads were, all of them, hanging onto their power in a way that (as Gavin and Madeleine had demonstrated) allowed their thinking to stultify and made them vulnerable.
Some of that she could have, should have, seen sooner. Some of it she had seen.
She’d known the Guilds were being badly treated, that they didn’t have in practice the power that they had in theory. They were outvoted by the Houses, and the Houses stuck together. Not only that, but over recent years the House-only Small Council had been used more often. Notionally it was only for matters which affected only and exclusively the Houses; but that scope had been creeping wider.
She’d seen that. She just hadn’t done anything about it.
She couldn’t keep ignoring it now. But she’d allowed the business of the last couple of months to let her… defer it. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been busy. Around six weeks ago, Madeleine had taken her to their agent, Celeste, and told Celeste which parts of the House business Marcia would now be responsible for. Celeste had half-raised an eyebrow, then spent the rest of the morning with Marcia inducting her into the relevant detail. Before that, Marcia would have said that she had a reasonably good grasp on the House business. She’d left Celeste’s office somewhat chastened.
And furious with Madeleine. She, Marcia, had believed that she was already involved in what the House was doing, that she understood what her role as Head would be. Instead? It was clear that Madeleine had been keeping a great deal from her. She might be glad now to be more included, but it had stung that what she’d been given thus far hadn’t been what she’d thought it was.
Worse than that, it made her political aims seem even less achievable. And she’d let that put her off. The Council didn’t convene for six weeks after Mid-Year, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have been talking to people more privately.
She cleared the last of the pile, and glanced at the desk clock that the Horologists’ Guild had just delivered for her. It was a beautiful thing, the result of the Horologists’ latest breakthrough in reducing the size of their mechanisms. Once the Salinas ships were back in dock, she had a contract to ship a couple of crates of them across to the Crescent, and expected to turn a tidy profit.
Right now, what it told her was that there was half-a-chime until she was due to meet the Teren Lord Lieutenant. She unlocked the drawer of the desk, and pulled out her own small pile of papers, bound together with twine. The ones that held her political notes.
She and Cato, as children, had worked out a written code. It was years since they’d used it between them, but Marcia still used it for her own private notes, when she particularly valued secrecy.
There were two main problems that she needed to tackle, and she hadn’t got very far on either. The first was the Guilds. The obvious way to fix the problem would be to limit the powers of Small Council, and to increase the seats of the Guilds in full Council. But the nature of the problem made it hard to fix, because the Houses voting as a block defeated the Guilds. To make any change, Marcia had to convince at least two Houses to change their votes; and, realistically, she needed at least one or two beyond that, not to cause more problems than she solved. Currently, she wasn’t even sure she’d have her own House vote; she hadn’t begun to broach this with Madeleine.
She’d been talking – a little, and very cautiously, not wanting to be responsible herself for unsettling anything – to the Guilds about their experience of being in the Council, and she was starting to come to some alarming conclusions. It wasn’t just that balancing the power better between Guilds and Houses was the right thing to do. Given the rising discontent between Guilds and Houses, and the increased tension both in Council and in private trading negotiations, the Guilds were eventually going to rebel. Custom and Marek’s trading rules prevented the Guilds from doing their own deals with Salinas captains. But if the Guilds, unilaterally, decided to break the rules, could the Houses really enforce them? Without the Guilds, the Houses had nothing to trade. The Houses made good trades, certainly, and there were practical advantages to the Houses arranging shared shipments. But if it came right down to it… the Houses needed the Guilds more than vice versa, and Marcia had a suspicion that the Guilds were beginning to realise that. Unlike, it seemed, the Thirteen Houses.
She wanted to believe that she’d be able to talk them round just by pointing all of this out to them, but she knew the Heads well enough to know better. She’d begun to raise the matter, casually, at dinners and events over the last weeks, just to see where the wind lay. It hadn’t been at all promising. She’d expected resistance to any idea of more Guild involvement in Council; but the Heads and Heirs that she’d brought it up with had been more scathing than she’d expected.
Four Houses to convince. Well. Apparently she would need to think of something better than just pointing out the injustice, or even the future risk.
The other problem was the flagrant waste of talent among the Houses themselves. Marcia was in a better position than most of the other Heirs; anyone further down the rankings had very little to do at all. Which suited some of them perfectly well, but others were chafing at the restrictions. More so since the Guilds, who were supposed to have agreed to take House members as apprentices or journeymen, were not, in fact, doing so, as part of their more subtle resistance to the Houses refusing the Guilds powers in Council. Solving the Council problem might solve that, but what of those younger House members who didn’t have a Guild-suitable interest? How could Marcia convince other Houses to give their younger members more responsibility when even most Heirs didn’t have any?
And then there were the sorcerers. There was a strict ruling that the Council, and the Thirteen Houses, were not allowed to have anything to do with magic. But since meeting the cityangel Beckett, Marcia had begun to wonder how appropriate that ban was.
Beckett’s ban on political involvement was absolute, part of the contract that they had made with the founders of Marek. And it certainly made sense to ban magic in the Council itself, to make sure there was no risk of tampering. But should the sorcerers be kept out of the running of the city? Weren’t they important to Marek?
She had to talk to Reb about it; and she wished she didn’t feel quite so nervous about that. She and Reb had been slowly, gently, pursuing their incipient relationship, and it was going well – but they largely avoided politics. Reb tended to be scathing about the Council. Marcia wasn’t at all sure that her lover would appreciate the idea of being represented on it; especially since Reb would have to be the representation. The only alternative was Marcia’s brother Cato, which would be… provocative, to say the least. And Marcia wanted to make the offer to Reb, wanted to show Reb that Marcia was thinking about the whole of the city, not just her own limited part of it. It felt, sometimes, like Reb saw Marcia as out of touch with Marek, shut in a Marekhill bubble. Marcia wanted to demonstrate that that was untrue.
If Reb said yes, though… well, Marcia suspected that it would almost be easy to sell increased Guild representation to the Houses compared to persuading them to include the sorcerers. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be the right thing to do.
First things first, though; the Guilds, and the younger House members. Like Marcia’s friend Nisha. Nisha was of House Kilzan, and high enough in it to make it difficult for her to do anything else with herself. But at the same time Nisha wasn’t in line for Heir, nor likely to be, and was frustrated by the lack of meaningful work available to her, although Marcia had only recently seen past the facade Nisha presented to the world. Nisha was the sort of person who might have ideas about this stuff. Nisha was the sort of person who Marcia should be getting on board.
She shoved her notes back into the desk drawer and locked it, then scrawled a note to Nisha, inviting her to the baths later that afternoon, and sealed it. One of the servants would hand it off to a messenger. But if she was going to get changed and be on time to the meeting with the Teren Lord Lieutenant, she needed to be done now.
Thinking of Teren reminded her of the expedition which she’d sent off to see what profit could be made now that there was once again a foot-route across to Exuria, albeit one too small and narrow for carts or large baggage. Marcia had expected Captain Anna and her troop back at the start of the week. There wa
s no reason to worry just yet, but she would be pleased to see them back. She’d longed to be able to go with them. She’d done the deal with the Jewellers’ Guild, she’d overseen the outfitting of the expedition, she’d pored over the maps with Captain Anna – but it just hadn’t been possible for her to take off for four weeks, out of Marek, right now. Or, very probably, ever. And there was a frustrating thought to take with her to this damn ceremonial meeting.
k k
Marcia took the second staircase up to her room, to check herself over in the mirror. She wore her House Fereno tunic and trousers, and her hair was tidy. Her mother would doubtless think she should paint her face, but Marcia hated doing that other than for formal occasions. This was, explicitly, an informal afternoon tea, for the Teren Lord Lieutenant of Marek to have an equally informal chat with House Fereno. They’d already had a formal entertainment on her behalf, an informal morning meeting, and a formal meeting, and in none of them had anything of import been said. Doubtless today would be more of the same. Selene, the Lieutenant, would be returning to the Teren capital Ameten shortly after the forthcoming Council Opening and, in Marcia’s considered opinion, it was about time.
And if she wasn’t down there on time, Madeleine would have her guts. Their relationship hadn’t really recovered (yet? would it ever?) from Mid-Year; it didn’t make sense to antagonise her mother further.
Madeleine was already sitting on one of the couches in the reception room when Marcia entered. Fabric from Teren, embroidered here in Marek; dark wood from Exuria, turned in Marek. Trade and manufacture, the engines of Marek’s prosperity.
“Ah, Marcia,” Madeleine said, looking up. She smiled, then frowned very slightly as she saw the absence of face paint. Madeleine herself had subtle loops around the sides of her forehead, extending onto her cheek, delicate against her brown skin and highlighting the blue of her eyes. Not the full formal paint of evening, but something suitable for afternoon tea. Marcia braced herself for comment, but Madeleine just tutted under her breath and looked away.