Duke Aureling

Warden of the Nine Roads, which makes him responsible for every caravan of nectar, seed, and pollen moving into the capital, and for the non-Faerie labor that moves it. He is charming, well-liked, and has never once been asked why the ledgers list that labor as equipment.

In Person

Handsome in the way the Ring cultivates, informal in the way only the very secure can afford, and better company than anyone expects a duke to be. He rides the roads himself several times a year, knows the posting-station keepers by name, and drinks in Ninebridge's yards with teamsters who like him for it.

The unsettling thing about Aureling is that none of this is performance. He is not a hypocrite and he is not cynical. He is a decent man administering an atrocity, and he has simply never had occasion to look at the column headings.

History

Third son of a middling Ring house, given the Wardency forty years ago as a sinecure that nobody expected him to work at, and he worked at it. He rebuilt the drum-shelters, standardized the caravan schedules, put down the road-thieving that had made the Fifth Road impassable, and doubled the tonnage reaching the capital inside a decade. The Heartland genuinely run better than they did.

Every one of those improvements was achieved by getting more out of crews the ledgers do not count. He would be baffled to hear it put that way and would not have an answer, and the absence of an answer is the most useful thing about him to anyone trying to change the Kingdom.

Method

Administration, generosity, and presence. He is visible, he settles disputes on the spot, and he underwrites shortfalls out of his own house's money often enough that the Wardency is genuinely popular in a province where the Crown is not. His authority costs him a fortune annually and he considers this the job.

He does not read the ledgers. He reads the summaries of the ledgers, which are prepared by clerks, and which balance.

Household

The Chief Clerk of Manifests. Prepares the summaries. Has been doing so for nineteen years, knows exactly why the numbers balance, and has never been asked a question they would have had to answer honestly.

The Road-Wardens. Eight hundred armed Faeries, the largest force outside the capital's guard, popular with the caravans and about a third of them related by marriage to Drovers' Concord families.

The Model Farm. His demonstration estate, where the Kingdom's agriculture is shown to visiting nobles being done correctly. Somebody there has been quietly covering an eleven-year shortfall in the feeding accounts out of their own pocket, and it is not Aureling, and he has not noticed.

Relations

Warm with everyone, which is a policy. He is on excellent terms with the Queen, who is fond of him; with Old Tibbault, from whom he buys traffic information at a price he believes to be a bargain; and with the Drovers' Concord, whose speakers he receives personally and has never once regarded as a threat.

He has never met a Low-Brood crew chief in a formal capacity, though he has drunk with several without registering the distinction, and one of them has been on his own manifests for twenty years.

Reputation

The best-liked nobleman in the Kingdom, and the standing counter-example every apologist reaches for: the system cannot be as bad as you say, look at Aureling. Radicals find him harder to hate than the Chancery and much harder to argue against, and the Ledgerless have concluded — correctly — that the most dangerous thing they could do to him is show him the second set of books.

Hooks

• The second ledger from the Model Farm has gone missing, along with the clerk who kept it. Aureling wants it recovered, has not been told what is in it, and is offering an escort's wage and his personal thanks.
• The Drovers' Concord requests a formal meeting. They have never done this. Aureling accepts happily, and every experienced person in the province has gone quiet.
• A caravan crew names him personally in a petition to the assizes of the Great Hunt, which no Kingdom court would hear and which the Wilds will.
• Someone shows him the column headings. The party is in the room.

"I told him what the word in the last column meant. He read it twice. Then he asked me to say it again, as though I had misspoken."