Or perhaps it was … perhaps a prince needed to secure his companions when he was young. Perhaps Aaden would be better off than she, with the pack of ambitious fools she had to contend with. So thinking, she was reminded of the day’s meeting. She bade the boys safe hunting and left them again enlivened and shouting excitement to each other.

The Queen’s Council was just one of the many panels of advisers she consulted. Unlike the others—who humbly brought her hard facts on the various subjects important to her rule—the members of the Queen’s Council tended to inflate their own import. She had accepted that she needed them, but she did not trust them. If they had not been necessary in order to keep up the appearance that she honored traditions, she would have dismissed them and bought advice, entirely with coin, from agents of her choosing.

Early in her rule she had selected some of the ten councillors herself in an effort to create a truly guiding body. She had handpicked Jason, her former tutor. It had not taken her long, however, to realize that most of her choices were just as self-interested as those thrust upon her by tradition. She had stopped trying to make them friends long ago. With the Council members, her guard was up and senses as alert as they would have been at a meeting of declared enemies. None of this, however, showed on the surface.

“Good councillors,” she declared as she entered the chamber that had once been her father’s, “do me the service of your knowledge that I may govern with wisdom.” It was one of the traditional greetings. She said it with every appearance of sincerity.

As she seated herself, the councillors answered her just as warmly. They could not say enough about the great things they had heard about her trip to Talay. “A triumph!” Sigh Saden declared in his nasally, aristocratic Acacian.

“A voyage of miracles!” Balneaves of the Sharratt family pronounced. In his subdued way, even Sire Dagon seemed impressed. He should be, Corinn thought, impressed and enriched because of it, and more than a little discomfited, too. On the surface they were all praise; beneath, they had to be wondering how she had managed these miracles. They must be stewing over what other powers she might have, a reaction she had intended all along.

Deciding to let them worry a little longer, she indicated that Rhrenna could call the meeting to order.

She did so by invoking the first five Akaran kings, calling on their spirits to infuse the gathering with wisdom. After that grandiose opening, Rhrenna directed their conversation to mundane matters, as Corinn had instructed. Records and accounts, mining production estimates, and even an assessment of the Vumu Archipelago’s potential as a source of timber: on such things they passed a long, boring hour.