Doge Rilarion of Sereveld was, by the chronicle's beginning, in the third term of an office that had not been served three terms by any of his predecessors in living memory. He was sixty-seven. He was heavy-set in the soft southern way of merchant princes who had stopped walking the docks themselves a decade ago, and clean-shaven, and dressed in the dark cloth of Marrowport's trading nobility because to dress otherwise in his city was to dress wrong. The Counted Houses had elected him three times because he was, in their judgment, predictable — the kind of doge who would not interfere with a ledger that balanced.
The judgment had been correct for the first two terms. The third had begun, by the chronicle's beginning, to reveal an error.
The merchant-prince who had begun to count
He had been a merchant before he was a doge. He had built a fleet of fourteen ships, three of which still bore his family's mark, before the Counted Houses had drawn him into the office in his late forties. He understood, accordingly, what a merchant ledger was supposed to do — how it was supposed to balance, how it was supposed to fail to balance in the small honest ways every honest ledger failed to balance, how it was supposed to look. And he had begun, in the year before the chronicle, to find ledgers in his own city that did not look right.
It had begun with a single ship that arrived every three weeks for two years and had never paid a harbour fee, although the harbour ledger said it had. He had noticed it, the way a man who had spent decades reading harbour ledgers noticed things, by the wrong rhythm of the entries. He had not raised the alarm. A doge who had been elected by twelve trading dynasties did not raise an alarm against any of them on the strength of a single anomalous fee. He had, instead, in the discipline of his old profession, begun quietly to count.
By the chronicle's ninth season he had identified, with one clerk he trusted absolutely, four of the seven compromised Counted Houses. He did not know they were seven. He had not yet found the others. He had not, until then, understood that they were not unrelated.
Interior
He was not a brave man. He was not, particularly, a faithful one — Sereveld's chapels had been mercantile for three centuries, and he had attended them the way he attended weddings, with appropriate gravity and no inner participation. But he had, in his late maturity, developed an old man's stubbornness about numbers. The numbers were what his father had taught him, and his father's father, and the Houses had been built on the numbers, and a House that lied about its numbers had broken not a faith but a covenant. He took the breaking personally.
He was afraid. The chronicler does not soften this. A man who has identified that four of his city's twelve ruling families are running a second set of books is a man who has, in the same audit, identified four families with the resources and the motive to have him quietly killed. He kept the audit in his own desk and his own hand. He told no one until the chronicle's third year of his third term forced him.
Stance toward the chronicle
He wrote, in S9, a careful private letter to Crown Princess Aelinna of Krypton — by way of Caedrin's spymaster, because no Sereveld courier could be trusted with it. The letter did not name the Houses. It named, instead, an arithmetic. Aelinna, by the chronicle's account, read the letter and understood it; Kira Morrow read it before forwarding and understood it more fully.
By S17 the doge would publicly disown two of the named Houses on the activation of the Veilbreaker Sigil, and Sereveld would, for the first time in fifty years, formally take a side in a matter that was not commercial. He would do so, the chronicler implies, not out of new courage but because, at last, the count had become unmistakable. Numbers, Rilarion had spent his life believing, eventually told the truth. He had not expected the truth to require, of his city, a war.