Callister Draeven never threatened. Threats were the tools of people who had already lost — who had nothing left to offer except the promise of consequences. Callister offered. He offered so generously, so consistently, with such patient abundance, that by the time you realized the offer was a cage, you'd been living inside it for years.
The offer today was grain.
The Kingdom's grain supply ran on a system that the Ministry of Coin regulated and House Draeven dominated. The system was simple: agricultural provinces produced grain, the Ministry set prices, House Draeven's trading network distributed the grain to population centers through a logistics infrastructure that no other house had the capacity to replicate. The Ministry controlled the price. House Draeven controlled the *supply chain*. And the difference between controlling a price and controlling a supply chain was the difference between owning a river and owning the bridges across it.
