The Meridia Council took almost three minutes to answer.
Kael did not interrupt.
He also did not try to explain anything else, even though he could see from the expressions of the seven councilors that at least a dozen questions were forming at once.
Some were obvious: why a republican city needed to resolve a military contract belonging to a dead kingdom, how exactly seventeen thousand soldiers had remained bound for nearly two centuries, and, above all, why that problem had appeared on the very night a king no one knew existed had stopped ruling them.
Still, none of those questions mattered more than the choice in front of them, and Kael refused to turn urgency into pressure.
After the Voiceless Choir and the Hollow Throne, he had learned that consent obtained because someone believed they had no alternative was still a very convenient way to falsify will.
The gray-haired woman was the first to speak.
