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Did I just screw up big time?
Reflecting back on the exchange I’d just had, I was starting to feel a little nervous. Specifically, over how I’d accidentally started chatting about this country’s political system. Thinking about it, that definitely wasn’t something the typical commoner would talk about. Though the city’s inhabitants would have a rough understanding of its political system, the majority of them would only understand that some important local ruler and a council worked together to manage the city. It’d be a different story for merchants and pro association leaders, since they had the qualifications to participate as council members. Regular, unaffiliated citizens wouldn’t know the intricate details. They wouldn’t have much interest in politics in the first place.
In my case, I was familiar with the system here because I’d been taught about the political systems and structures of other countries in comparison with my own. My prior knowledge had just slipped off my tongue. I genuinely thought it was interesting too. After all, the political system of the Urizen Federation was fairly complex.
Maybe it was just that my homeland of Oraculum was a conventional monarchy and therefore easy to comprehend. A federal system was made up of multiple member governments and would naturally be more elaborate. They’d originally been separate nations, and even now the people tended to think of the states they lived in as their own countries.
For example, the state of Altair used to be the Altair Kingdom. People in this state still thought of themselves as citizens of Altair, but not so much as citizens of the Urizen Federation. Of course, they had basic awareness of the fact, but it just didn’t register with them.
There was a reason for this: the politics and systems of each state government varied greatly. There was federal law which applied to all regions and served as the basis for the united Urizen Federation, but the miscellaneous details were often decided by the individual state governments. One such example was the presence or absence of nobility. Not all of the Urizen Federation’s member states were former monarchies; some of them had been countries which never had nobility in the first place. Altair had originally been a monarchy, but that was no longer viable once it joined the Federation.
However, it’s not a simple affair to govern countries and regions. At the time, Altair hadn’t had any ongoing internal disputes, but it had felt threatened by outside forces—the Kingdom of Oraculum, among others—and decided to join the larger aegis of the Federation. Thus the spirit of revolution never took root in its citizens and the nobility had been preserved without issue.
However, in order to send state representatives to the parliament of the federal government, it was required that the citizenry participate in government. Therefore, while the nobility remained in place, the system was reworked so that a council which citizens could become members of was established in each city.
Of course, not all inhabitants were eligible. It was limited to people like representatives of pro associations or merchants who made above a certain income. But officially, citizens could participate in government, and the political gap between nobility and the general public had narrowed.
Regardless, the nobles still had possession of their land and special privileges. Their armed might hadn’t changed much either, so there was still a large difference in power. Even so, being able to participate in the federal parliament granted tremendous power to any state representative, even if they were a commoner. Hence, nobles were not always dominant.
That was why Katarina, despite being the daughter of the Marquess of Trahn, didn’t hold absolute power in the city of Midrogue. The Marquess himself might’ve been a different story, but his daughter had just become a city councilmember by appointment of her father. In other words, she had about the same status as the other council members.
If I were in Katarina’s position, I would consider exploiting my father’s authority to put pressure on the other council members and seize power for myself, but as far as I was hearing, Katarina hadn’t gone that far. Rather, she’d been instructed by her father to not do that.
As the old proverb goes, dragons throw their young into monster territory. The Marquess of Trahn probably had something similar in mind. He wanted her to govern this tiny locale of Midrogue by her own independent power. Of course, though she’d be “independent,” one could tell that he hadn’t left Katarina entirely on her own by the fact that Greg, the steward of House Trahn’s main branch, was with her.
Whether he’d done this because he expected her to be met with opposition or even assassination was a mystery. Even if she wasn’t in a position to get much support from the main branch, most people would think it risky to sabotage her. So he had probably felt like nobody would go that far and it would be safe to send her off on her own. That was all assumption on my part, though.
Well, Greg will probably report to the main branch about this incident, so it’s not something I need to worry about. What I really need right now is...
“Is this arrangement satisfactory, Mr. Noah?”
Greg’s prompt made me perk my head up. We were at the dinner table. Of course, Greg wasn’t eating with us—he was just standing to the side—but we’d been talking over some things until just now, since Katarina had wanted more details.
The topic of our discussion was proof of identification for myself and the kobolds. Yes, that was what mattered to me.