The White Leaf

They chose him because he was no one.

When the Emperor Aurex is murdered by his own sister, the Custodians who guard the throne of the Mithrian Empire need a successor they can manage. They settle on a sixty-one-year-old jurist from the provinces. No house. No heirs. No wealth. No wants. A man who has spent forty years writing legal commentaries that nobody reads.

On his first day, he asks to see the accounts.

Vibian Rullo is a slave, and the emperor's day-book is his office. He writes down every hour of the eighty-seven days that follow and understands almost none of it, until forty years later, when he steals the book out of an imperial archive and sits down to set the record straight.

The empire has an official version of how the throne came to the house that holds it. That version is true. It is not the whole of it.