Lord Grayeras

Background

Traxian Grayeras held the High Councilman’s chair in Haudh-Gwenn and was the face the council showed the city. There are eight seats, held for life, and his household had two of them: his own and his wife Alyphe’s. The High Councilman’s vote is counted twice, so those two seats delivered three votes before anybody else in the chamber had spoken, and enough of the remaining votes went where he went that outvoting him took most of the room.

Whether the name on the chair was his by blood was never settled. Councilman Nathan Fox of Loshev, passing on what reached him from downriver, said the rumor was that Traxian had not been born a Grayeras at all: that he was not of proper Grayeras blood and had bought his way into the title. Whether that meant a bastard child, a half cousin, or some friend of the family known since youth, nobody could say. He greased his way into the name, or so the rumors went, and no proof of it was ever produced.

What makes the rumor credible has nothing to do with him. One seat on the Haudh-Gwenn council is elected by the people of Haudh-Gwenn and no more than one. The rest are elected by the council itself, which in practice means backroom arrangement between one councilor and the next, and the office runs until its holder dies or gives it up. So a seat commonly passes from parent to child, the votes greased well before the stepping down, because nobody crosses a man who is still alive and has paid them enough not to.

Appearance

The first time anybody in the company stood in a room with him was at Johanka Materai’s soirée, and he came in with his wife. A pale-skinned Peren going gray, in his early seventies, which in a Peren is a man in his early fifties. His beard is trimmed and cropped close. His council robes are always a touch out of date and always immaculate: he wears the cut of two seasons back because he is that far a traditionalist. His eyes are a dull green, and they looked tired even as he came through the door. The command he carries has not slipped with age. His shoulders have begun to slump under the work regardless.

Personality

He is a public man and works at being one. He spends a great deal of his time in conversation and is shy of it with nobody, whatever their standing.

Whent, who had been in and out of the Grayeras house since he was a boy, said the same thing from inside it. The father talked all the time around them, because he had known Whent that long and was comfortable with him, while the mother never said much of anything around anyone. Whent’s read on the man himself was that he seemed all right, and that he and his son got along well enough.

Relationships

Alyphe votes where he votes, near enough every time, and whether he was leading her or following her was never established. There is a daughter, Naevora, older than her brother, whom the family has kept out of public life since her late teens.

For years he had been telling Beltran to give up the stupid side projects and the small interests, so that the family could finally give the boy a name worth walking around proudly with, and for years Beltran went on with them anyway, in Haudh-Gwenn or out of it. Then the Ten Lashes collapsed and took the last of them with it, and by Whent’s account the son moped for want of a direction, and the father came to him and asked whether he was done being a child and ready for real responsibility. Beltran said he was. A vote went through the council and he was made captain of the guard, on no better ground than that he had nothing else to do, and everything he afterward did to the city he did from that office.

What Was Said of Him

He was for a long while a name, an office, and a reason not to act. When Ashtara Walnut understood she had been found out and went looking for someone to shelter her, where she went was his office. Casper, stabbed and dug out of the rubble at the ruins, could tell the company where she had gone and had no idea where the office was. Aldo got a door opened that night by saying Lord Grayeras had sent them, and when the woman on the other side raised an eyebrow and asked why, the answer was protection, and it held.

Ashtara’s own account put the father where the rumor had already put him. Every member of the council served the Grayeras one way or another whether they liked them or not, and to move on the son was to move on the city, and she did not advise it. Asked whether the council would balk if it learned Beltran was selling people, she thought not. His father would overlook it, she said. She did not know his mother well enough to say.

He came to Materai’s soirée. In the season that followed his son put seven people in rat-boxes in the town-hall square, and was disarmed and run through in the street outside a burning inn, and Haudh-Gwenn rioted through the whole of it, and Alyphe outlived their son. Where Traxian Grayeras was for any of it was never written down. The seat is still his, and the double vote with it.