Chapter 8: The First Vote and What It Cost

The assembly met in the open air because every building large enough had been condemned, converted, or claimed by people who needed four walls more than governance did.

Aldric had chosen the flat stretch of ground between the second and third district boundaries — neither space's territory, which was either diplomatically neutral or a statement about his indifference to district politics that he had not fully thought through. Pia had arranged forty-three stools salvaged from three different buildings and set them in a rough arc facing a single standing position marked by nothing more than a cleared patch of earth. There was no dais. There was no chair of authority. He had told her not to build one and she had looked at him with the particular expression she reserved for decisions she thought were wrong but had stopped arguing against.

Forty-three seats. Eleven of them occupied by district representatives whose authority derived entirely from the fact that they had been standing in the right place when people needed someone to stand in front of. Six by what Pia called the trades bloc — food handlers, construction workers, the remnants of a tanners' guild that had reorganized itself around leather salvage. Four by Osric's merchant coalition, whose legitimacy was the most legible of any faction present because it derived from something everyone understood: they controlled access to things people needed.