Book the fourth — who may command a thing to happen — and what it costs to choose.
The game is named for this book. A Council is not a throne — it is a table, where authority is shared, choices are witnessed, and the cost of command is that everyone remembers what you decided.
A Council is a body of shared command with a single seat that holds the final say. Its virtue is not efficiency — it is the record. Every vote and every dissent is entered and remembered; a voice overruled is not silenced but minuted.
A king may be wrong in private. A chair may only be wrong in front of the table. Whether that seat stays with one hand or passes among many — its holder then said to hold the Fasces — is the table's to settle at the first sitting.
Council does not decree who holds a seat; the table sets that dial when it seats its own Council:
Council seats a narrow table by default, and widens only when a table decides the intrigue of a true vote is worth the pace it costs.
A deputy may hold a Work at its present watch, but may not advance it. To move a Work forward wants a Work Order or a Directive from the seat of command. A Work left unheld does not merely wait: it slips back one watch for each watch it goes without its hand. A deputy's hold stays the slip; a Directive keeps the hand at the task, so it neither slips nor pauses.
An emergency that names a head pulls them off their Work automatically. The card freezes until released, or a deputy steps in to hold it — keeping it from slipping back.
Only the seat of final say may keep a pulled head at their task regardless, by issuing a Directive — a truth committed aloud, on the record.
When a head is beyond all word — away, lost, or silent — the table cannot wait on their insight; the need is met by whoever stands present. The answer still comes, but rough: concrete and specific, shaped by the wrong hands, never the clean sealed clue the absent expert would have drawn. Mark such Works — when the head returns, they may find the labour done crooked, and worth the doing again.