Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

No one warns you about peace, either.

Three weeks after the vote, the drowned city did the strangest thing it had done in the whole year I'd been breaking and remaking it: nothing in particular. The granary families argued about grain quotas. Two rings feuded over a shared pump and settled it themselves, badly, with a compromise nobody liked, which is what a working peace actually sounds like. Sable's people and mine fought about the ledgers exactly as she'd promised we would — long, tedious, furious fights about who owed what and who decided and how you write a rule in a city that had burned a Cathedral to have no rulers, and I sat through them going quietly out of my mind with boredom, and understood that the boredom was the whole prize. A city arguing about pump schedules is a city no one is dying to save.

The trouble was me.