Majlath

A majlath is a city that governs. Each of Peredhel’s nine provinces divides into three regions, and each region is anchored on one city that is its administrative seat, its economic seat and its ceremonial seat at once. Three regional rulers govern from it. Three such cities to a province, twenty-seven in the country, and they are the bottom of the ladder the whole nation is built on: three Tarumbar, nine Princes, twenty-seven regional centers.

The word is Peren, and it is put together out of majlis, a seated council or assembly, and thalātha, three. The council of three. It names the men who sit rather than the walls they sit inside. Its plural breaks rather than adds: several of them are majālith.

Every majlath holds a Malkor, the estate its Prince keeps there. A Prince therefore has three of them in his province, one to each regional center, and favors whichever suits him. The estate is not the city, and a city is not made a majlath by holding one; the Malkor is only where the Prince stays when he is in that part of his own province.

Above the majlath the ladder is short and it is elective. Nine Princes hold the nine provinces, one apiece, and the Princes elect three Tarumbar from among themselves, each of whom governs a cluster of three provinces for life. Everything below that is regional, and all of it is run out of these cities.

Renetslav, at the western end of Yovincia, is one of the twenty-seven, and the Malkor there is the one its Prince keeps above the other two.

What a regional ruler is called, how the three of them come by the office, and how they divide one region between them was never written down.