Emperor Quinn Slatemark received me in his private study. The last time we had discussed my future, it had been over lunch, with his whole family watching.
It was a quiet room. Dark shelves, a fire already lit, a window over the palace gardens where the first spring flowers were coming up through the frost. Quinn sat behind his desk with a glass of something amber he hadn't touched, and watched me come in with the same expression he'd worn then: interested, wary, and very, very calm.
"Sit," he said.
I sat.
"You'll want your operating rights," he said. "International. Every border, every market, every guild treaty in the Empire and beyond it." He turned the glass slowly on the desk. "I promised them to you, if your guild ever sat on the Empty Throne. I didn't think you would. Nobody ever has."
"I remember."
"So do I." He slid a document across the desk. It was already signed. "Granted. In full. My Treasury people are very unhappy about it."
