A Note On the Preservation of Political Power...

 When a man from a Faerie court, and thus 'man' in name only, came to power, it did come as a shock. Not coming to power. If men aren't coming to power, they're leaving power, and if their not leaving power, their being executed. Thus is the way of men. Even in Faerie. 

    No, the surprising thing about all that power was the particular other thing that came with it. Not the privileges - those were anticipated favorably - nor the pomp - an expectation devoutly to be wished. And it was not the meetings, as such. Surely he must have known, he told himself over breakfast and again after teatime, that there would be meetings. It couldn't all be waging wars and making profound statements designed to appear clever at first glance before the second thoughts of the public, those intelligent little moments that, like bindweed, could not be eradicated. But surely there didn't have to be so many meetings. There were the regular meetings to make decisions, the meetings to form committees when the first meetings had no consensus, and then the committee meetings, and then the committee meetings to form new committees. He thought his schedule wouldn't allow for anymore kinds of meetings when the committee to form laws on flight formed three separate committees assigned to define flight, law and committee.

    The sheer boredom of it.

    It made him twitchy. 

    Others before him, in fact every single one, now that he thought it through, had gone mad. It was largely assumed it was mad with power. But it was committee meetings. He knew that now.

    As the meetings raged around him, the members with their subtle digs and polite political stabbings, his twitches grew. Until he remembered a solace he had enjoyed as a child.

    At first the books were hidden under the table. As no one noticed, the books popped on the table, glanced at, but brushed aside in both eloquence and mad ravings and the desire of committee members to hear themselves speak, yell, patronize, irritate, goad, and ramble. But the more he read, novels, poetry, history of land wars, the greater his success as a calm man of reason who gave in to no taunt. A mad leader who read under the table, but a leader like none other. His decisions were sound. The more he read, the more sound his decisions became. As to getting caught in squabbles, he was unaware that there were any, and thus he took no sides. The only thing on which his opinion was firm came from books. And that, as it happened, lasted him a very long time.

    The Faerie court took nearly two centuries to expel him.

    Naturally, it was done by committee.

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