The opportunistic nobles weren't destroyed, but 'permanently precarious' was a good way to describe their situation.
The fines and penalties that Julius, Arturo, and Selphira had imposed with the authority of the agreents that the losing side was required to accept had been calculated with the precision of soone who wanted the maximum possible paynt without drowning the payer to the point where drowning beca a reason to resist. That calculation was intentional. A destroyed faction had nothing to extract and a martyr's grievance to organize around. But faction that was intact but permanently precarious had obligations to et and no surplus to fund resistance with.
Better to have them working their entire lives in that almost slave like condition, not entirely unlike the position the Iron-rank tars of the generations before Ren had occupied in the old system, than to give them nothing left to lose.
Aldric had negotiated from the paying side of that line too, because he had understood it was the only approach that let him and his family survive. He had been a competent negotiator, not in the sense of having obtained favorable conditions for his people, but in the sense of having identified the correct threshold where cooperation was the only option that preserved anything, and having guided the opportunist nobles and the once Orion-dependent Starweaver factions toward that threshold with enough firmness that they crossed it before their alternatives ran out entirely.
You’re missing out! Purchase this chapter to uncover what
happens next.
User Comments
0 comments from readers