Chapter 96-

The committee reports on the Friday and the Assembly convenes on the sixth of April, and Veira is not there.

She watches it from the farmhouse on a link Sunnsdottir arranges through a procedural clause nobody has used since 1974, and Sebastien sits beside her for eleven hours and does not once say anything unless she asks him something.

Croft opposes the conduit holding the seat. He does it in seven minutes and it is the best speech anybody makes all day and he loses the vote nine to four.

Then Veira's written submission is read into the record by the convener, and Solvieg reads all of it, including the last paragraph, which several Elders have plainly not been shown in advance.

I decline the seat. I ask the Assembly to create it and leave it vacant until a member of the restored bloodline is of age and willing to hold it. If that takes fifteen years, the vacancy is the accurate record of what was done, and I would ask the Assembly to look at it.

There is a silence of about four seconds.

Then Vassenheim says, "I move that the seat be created as described and left vacant," and it is carried eleven to two before anyone from the Ascendancy bloc has organised a response, and it is over so quickly that Veira has to ask Sebastien to confirm that it happened.

"It happened," he says.

She looks at the screen. Thirteen places at the table. The thirteenth empty, at the head, above the four.

"They'll fill it in five years," she says. "The moment somebody at Braehead turns eighteen and can be persuaded."

"Probably."

"That's fine. That's the point. I just wanted it to be somebody who chose it."

She closes the laptop.

Afterwards there is a thing she does not expect, which is that Solvieg telephones her.

"I have to say something to you and it will be brief because I am not good at this," the convener says. "The 1889 instruction has been formally repudiated by the Kin Assembly as of two o'clock this afternoon."

"I saw."

"You did not see what it cost, and I am not going to tell you, because that is my business." A pause. "I chaired this Assembly for eleven years under a directive I did not know existed, forbidding me from permitting the one correction my predecessor was destroyed for attempting. I have gone back through every ruling I have made and I have found four where it operated on me. Four rulings in eleven years where I closed a line of argument and could not afterwards explain why."

Veira does not say anything.

"I have submitted them to the review committee," Solvieg says. "All four. With my resignation, effective at the end of the review, which they will refuse and I will insist upon."

"Convener"

"Ms Ashcroft. In February you came to my Assembly and told twelve people that the difference between a system that works and one that does not is whether the person at its centre was asked." Solvieg's voice does not change. "Nobody asked Ingibjörg Halldórsdóttir. Nobody asked Wibke Terpstra. Nobody asked Morna Croft. And nobody asked me, and I have been chairing this body for eleven years believing my judgment was my own."

The line is quiet.

"I wanted you to know that the empty chair is not the only vacancy," she says, and hangs up.