The Unreturned

The case is simple, it has never been refuted, and it has never once carried. Aurel feeds the system, the system pays the market rate, and the market rate is what food costs in a good year. Every other moon prices its necessity as necessity. Aurel prices its own as produce. The Unreturned have been saying so for eleven centuries and are right.

What they want is a single demonstration. Not a famine and not a blockade, merely one season in which the reserve does not open on the usual terms for one power that has been conspicuously ungrateful, after which the terms would improve everywhere for a generation without a shot fired. They can name the power. They can usually name three.

They rise in poor years and go quiet in good ones, which is held against them by people who have not thought it through, a poor year being exactly when the argument is easiest to hear and hardest to act on. The faction’s real trouble is that it has never answered the Trust. Spend the reserve once and it stops being a reserve. The Unreturned concede the logic and reply that a thing nobody will ever use is not being kept out of prudence but out of nerve, and that Aurel has confused the two for so long it can no longer tell them apart.

They sit in the Estates, take their seats, lose the division, and are excluded from nothing. Solenna worked out a long while ago that a party permanently in opposition is a good deal cheaper than the same people out of doors.