Count Maeris moved within seventy-two hours of the hearing's conclusion.
Not toward the hearing directly. He was too careful for that. He did not issue a statement or file a counter-petition or make any of the visible moves that a less experienced political actor would have made in the immediate aftermath of a significant defeat. What he did was quiet, structural, and visible only if you knew where to look and had built the capacity to look there.
Eli found the first indication in the archive. A formal correspondence between the Church's regional administrative office and the duchy's household registration bureau, requesting a review of the documentation filed at the time of the Blackwood estate's most recent marriage registration. The correspondence was dated four days before the hearing, which meant it had been initiated before Harren's public exposure and had simply not yet reached the estate's attention.
