The air in the room went suddenly taut as the summer sky before a storm. Kaden shifted his eyes from one face to the next, watching the reactions, memorizing them—the twitch of an eyelid here, a jaw clenched, a fingernail picking nervously at a fleshy knuckle. Tevis’s lips were drawn back in a half snarl, a cornered animal uncertain whether to attack or flee. Kegellen twisted a golden bangle absently around her wrist again and again, the motion as simple and repetitive as the moving meditations of the Shin.

“Then what?” Vennet asked finally. “No more empire? Back to the good old days when we all ran our own kingdoms?”

“We did not all have kings, Vennet,” Gabril said.

Vennet smiled a broad, contemptuous smile. “Of course. You desert dwellers will be overjoyed to return to your savage customs.”

“I’m sorry to hear that you consider his customs savage,” Kaden said, taking a small step to put himself between Gabril and the bearded man, “as I have drawn heavily upon them in my remaking of the empire.”

For several heartbeats no one said anything. Wind gusted through cracks in the warehouse walls, tugging at the lantern flames.

“Making it into what?” Vennet asked finally.

“A republic,” Kaden replied. “A government of shared responsibility.”

Tevis threw his hands in the air. “ ’Shael save us, a republic? Meaning every filthy, dirt-grubbing peasant has a say and a stake?”

“It would be inefficient,” Kaden said quietly, “to bring every filthy, dirt-grubbing peasant to the capital for the sake of governance. I propose something more limited.”

Kegellen narrowed her eyes. “A council,” she said, tapping a finger against her fleshy lips. “You want to have a council.”

Kaden nodded.

“A council?” Tevis spat, lips drawn back in a sneer. “Of whom?”

“You,” Kaden replied. “You will provide the spine. Plus representatives from those atrepies who are not here in the city.” He gestured over his shoulder to Kiel, who slipped the rolled parchment into his hand. Kaden held the scroll up to the light, but made no move to unfurl it.

Vennet snorted. “What is that?”

“A document,” Kaden replied, “setting out the new laws, prerogatives, and responsibilities. A constitution.”

Kaden could never have come up with the thing on his own. After eight years in the Bone Mountains, he knew maybe one Annurian law in a hundred, and had almost no sense of the governing structures of foreign states and nations. He remembered from his childhood that Freeport and the cities north of the Romsdals formed a federation, that the Manjari had an empire like the Annurians, but with an empress instead of an emperor, and that the Blood Cities all insisted on their own independence, alternately fighting and trading with the others. It was an absurdly small base of knowledge for the drafting of a constitution that would govern a polity the size of Annur.