Edric Ardent

Edric Ardent, Lord Regent of Varrow since 297 AS, is dying. The fact is no longer denied in Caldmere, though it is spoken of carefully and in doorways. For fifteen years he has governed the Sundered Empire's remains under the old formula — until the Crown returns — and he has governed it chiefly by deciding as little as possible. Whether that has been the realm's salvation or its slow strangulation is the question on which his reputation now divides, and the archive offers both accounts.

Early life

He was born about 241 AS, the second son of a house that was old, land-poor and punctilious. The Ardents had been marshals of the north road under three emperors and had kept, at ruinous expense, a stretch of it passable long after the imperial tolls stopped paying for the work. Edric was sent to the capital as a boy-clerk in the Exchequer, rose through the salt accounts and the barge tolls, and was in his middle years the man to whom other men brought disputes they wished settled quietly. He was never handsome company and never poor company; what he had was a memory for names and a patience that wore out every argument but his own.

When Corvan IV died without an heir in 297 AS, the seven houses met in Caldmere and, after a week of shouting, chose Ardent as regent precisely because no house feared him. He was fifty-six, childless, without a faction, and expected to die within a few years. He has outlived four of the men who voted for him.

The Regency

His first winter came near to being his last. In 298 AS, with grain prices trebled and the coronation question raw, Caldmere's west quarter rose in the riot that nearly became a sack; Ardent himself stood at the Amber Gate with the house guard through one night of it, an old man in mail he had not worn for thirty years, and the gate held. He never spoke of it afterwards, and he never wore mail again.

Thereafter his method was always the same: no succession settled, no border lord punished past the point of complaint, no house allowed to fall wholly out of the room. The pensions, the quiet marriages, the toll-exemptions given in exchange for votes never called — what council-men took to calling the Quiet Compact — kept the seven houses circling one another rather than drawing swords. It was expensive, and it was paid for in coin Varrow did not have. The Regency borrowed from Saverra's charter-houses year on year, and Ardent signed the instruments himself, in a hand the clerks could always read.

He gave the Lantern-Wardens the standing contract for the northern marches in 305 AS, over the objections of three houses who wanted the work given to border lords; the risings during the Long Winter were the proof he had been right, and he spent the proof on nothing. He refused, twice, the Pale Choir's demand that the Glassmere be declared holy ground under its governance, on grounds he put in writing and made public: the waste lies in Varrow, and Varrow does not give away its dead. When Archcantor Ilyth the Seventh offered this past year to intercede with the League on the realm's debts in exchange for that same governance, the Lord Regent is said to have had the letter read to him twice and then declined to answer it at all.

The illness

He took to his bed in the autumn of 311 AS and has not risen from it. The physicians call it a wasting; the physicians were sent away in Mistmonth, and what is said now in Caldmere comes through servants and is worth what servants' talk is worth. He will take no ashcraft at his bedside — he refused a licensed Ash-Cleric offered by the Choir with the words, recorded by his sister, "I have spent one realm already" — and he will not name a successor, though every house has asked him to, some of them hourly. No lawful mechanism exists for choosing the next Lord Regent, which is a defect of the settlement of 297 that he could have had amended any year he chose, and did not.

Since the winter his seal has been carried and his letters read aloud by his sister Maud Ardent, a woman of sixty-odd whom the council-men have learned, one by one, not to mistake for a clerk. The Regency Council has not met in full since the autumn of 311 AS. The crisis that waits upon his death is recorded elsewhere in this archive; here it is enough to say that he has seen it coming for a decade and has left it, deliberately or helplessly, untouched.

Let them want the chair after I am in it. A man who wants it now wants only my death, and I have not the strength to gratify him.

Reputation

His friends say he held Varrow together for fifteen years with string and courtesy when there was nothing else to hold it with. His enemies — and he has made them slowly, which is to say thoroughly — say he spent the realm's last credit to purchase fifteen years of nothing, and that the nothing is now due. The almoners of Caldmere, whose riot Brant Halloway's men put down last year because the watch would not, have their own word for him, and it is not "saviour". What is plain is that he wanted, above every settlement, that the realm should not break in his hands; and that the flaw in him was that he could never decide which settlement was worth the breaking. The cost is arriving in the post-houses now, in Saverrine ink.

Unanswered questions

Whether he has, in fact, left instructions for the succession — sealed, entrusted, or simply unwritten — is the question that keeps Caldmere's counting-houses open past dark. His refusal of the Choir's intercession has been read as stubbornness, as piety of the old sort, and, by some, as a knowledge of the Glassmere he never chose to share. The archive has no record of any such knowledge. It records only that when he dies, the Realm of Varrow will have, for the first time in three hundred and twelve years, no emperor, no regent, and no agreed way to make either.