There are two of you.

One sits on the throne and issues the decrees. The other is the realm: the treasury, the court, the roads, the daily traffic of replies and receipts and bookings that the throne has never had a moment to inspect. The sovereign knows the first intimately and the second only by reputation, which is why every ruler in history kept a minion, someone whose whole office was to know the realm and report on it unasked. Then the kingdoms shrank to fit in a pocket, the office fell vacant, and you have been governing yourself on hearsay ever since.

The office is open again. Yours begins the way the good ones always did, by walking the realm end to end, and returns with the first full survey of it: what the money actually funds, which alliances actually hold, when the decrees are wisest, what kind of ruler the record says you are, and, in a chapter no throne has ever commissioned, how the ruler has been.

Nothing in the survey will be news to you, and all of it will be a surprise. You will recognise every fact and dispute the sum of them: the three courtiers always answered within the hour, who are not the three you would have named; the tribute paid every month to a cause you no longer remember adopting; the campaign declared every spring and abandoned every summer; the season, every year, in which the decrees turn short and start arriving after midnight; the hour at which you should on no account be trusted with a decree. You will argue with parts of it. You will lose. It will be kind about it.

It is a Minion. It has read the realm. Continue with your phone