The Regency Crisis

The Regency Crisis is the name the archive gives to the slow unravelling of Varrow's government that has followed the death of the Emperor Corvan IV without an heir in 297 AS, and which has sharpened year by year since. For fifteen years the Regency Council of seven houses — Vane, Ardent, Corrow, Mallory, Sethe, Dunmore and Halloway — has ruled from Caldmere under the formula until the Crown returns, though the Sundered Crown has lain in pieces since the Sundering Night and no soul alive can say how a crown might return, or whose head it would fit. What was at first an inconvenience is become a rot in the whole frame of the realm, and in this year of 312 AS, with the Lord Regent Edric Ardent dying in his chambers above the river Sull, every creditor, church and border lord with a claim upon Varrow has begun to press it at once.

The succession question

The imperial succession was never settled in law, for the old emperors simply were, and their laws presumed a next emperor. Corvan IV left neither child nor acknowledged kin nearer than cousins in the female line, and the Council that convened at his death found it could agree on nothing save that none of its seven houses would permit another to take the throne. Three positions have since hardened among them. Houses Vane and Corrow hold that the Council is itself the crown now, and speak of a standing regency made permanent. Houses Mallory and Sethe look for a marriage-candidate among their own blood, and keep genealogists busy over charters of dubious age. And the party men call the Crown-men — strongest in House Ardent's older retainers and among the country gentry — insist that no succession is lawful until the lost shards of the Crown are found, a position that conveniently defers the question for ever.

Edric Ardent has held the regency these fifteen years chiefly because he offends all houses equally and loves none of them. He has outlived three attempts to replace him, one of them armed. His death, expected before midwinter, will leave no agreed mechanism for choosing a successor to the office, and the archive has no record of any such mechanism ever having existed.

What each party wants

• The great houses want, above all, that no other house should have the throne; their second wants diverge accordingly.
• Brant Halloway, head of his house, keeps a private muster of near two thousand men in the west marches and is widely believed to want a regency of one. Accounts differ on whether he means to take Caldmere or merely to be asked to save it.
• The Tidebound League wants its money. Saverra's charter-houses, Lucan Morel foremost among them, hold Varrow's paper to the sum, the archivists are told, of eleven years' revenue, and in 312 AS have called the loans, refusing to roll them further. A League factor now sits in Caldmere's council hall uninvited, counting.
• The Pale Choir wants the Glassmere. Archcantor Ilyth the Seventh has renewed the old demand that the waste be declared holy ground under Choir governance, and couples it now with an offer to intercede with the League on Varrow's debts — a kindness that would make Caldmere answerable to Ostrovane.
• The border lords of the north and west marches want to be left alone. Having kept their own courts, tolls and gallows through the Long Winter, they see little reason to resume asking permission.
• The Lantern-Wardens, neutral by oath, want only that someone continue to pay their contracts; the unpaid risings of 309–311 AS in Varrow's north remain on their books as debts owed by a council that cannot agree whose purse they should come from.

The present posture

Within the last year the strain has become visible in small things, which is how the archive prefers to measure it. The river gate at Caldmere stands shut on most days, and grain barges on the Sull pay toll to three different authorities within a morning's pull. The Almoners' Riot of Frostmonth last, in which Caldmere's poor broke the Council's grain stores at the almonry stairs, was put down by Halloway's men rather than the city watch, and the city noticed who fed it afterwards. House Vane has moved its younger sons and its silver out of the capital. The Council has not met in full since autumn; three houses send clerks instead of lords.

Abroad, the young Khagan Oraq Sayle has made no move against the marches, but the border lords say the steppe is quiet the way a bowstring is quiet. The Hask clans, quarrelling over grazing since the Long Winter, are no one's enemy yet and everyone's worry. Meanwhile the Council's road-mending has ceased entirely beyond the second milestone from Caldmere, and the Wardens write that Unquiet risings in the north go longer unanswered each season.

What could tip it

The archivists set down, without favour, the straws most often named. First, the hour of Edric Ardent's death itself: if it comes before the Council has named a procedure, Caldmere may have two regents proclaimed in a single day. Second, the League's patience: should Saverra move from calling loans to seizing customs, one of the seven houses must either pay or fight, and neither is affordable. Third, the Pale Choir's offer, which if accepted would give Ostrovane a foot in the realm and a claim upon the Glassmere that Caldmere has refused for decades. Fourth, Brant Halloway's muster, which grows by the month. The archive notes, as it is bound to note, that every house believes the others will blink first, and that this is the customary preface to civil war.

Let it be recorded that the Council is agreed in all matters, save those of any consequence.