Alveron is ruled by King Aldwin, who holds supreme authority over royal law, coin, war, appointments, and high justice throughout the kingdom, and governs the Crownlands and their capital directly. By custom the crown passes to the eldest living son. Every royal decree, charter, and sentence is issued in the King's name, but his illness has confined him largely to his private chambers in the White Keep, and he now appears in public only for the gravest occasions.
While the King is ill, the work of the Crown passes through Lord Matyas Vencel, High Steward of the Realm. The Steward runs the royal household, manages the Crown's finances, hears petitions brought before royal authority, and sits in judgment in the royal court. He does not hold the crown's power by law, only by the King's trust and the King's absence. That makes him the most important official in the capital and the most watched, since every decision he makes is measured by the Great Houses against the question of who will rule after Aldwin.
The Chancellor keeps the royal seal and directs the chancery in the White Keep. His clerks draft every decree, charter, appointment, and letter that leaves the fortress, maintain the Crown's records, and handle correspondence with the Great Houses, the Church, the Grey Tower, and foreign courts. Nothing carries royal authority until the chancery has written it and the seal has been pressed into the wax.
The Marshal of the Realm commands the Crown's forces in war. Alveron keeps no large standing army, so the Marshal's office maintains the muster rolls of knights owing service, the levies owed by chartered towns, and the obligations of the great fiefs. In peace the office is quiet. In war it decides who marches, who pays, and who stays home.
The Royal Mage advises the King on arcane matters and is always a Magister of the Grey Tower, chosen by lottery from its Conclave. The post is presently held by Magister Othmar Sevran, who works from the Astronomer's Tower in the White Keep. He gives counsel but holds no command, and the Grey Tower guards its independence from the court as fiercely as it serves the Crown.
The Royal Guard is the King's household force, commanded by Ser Radomir Valek, Captain of the Royal Guard. It holds the White Keep, controls access to its halls and chambers, protects the royal family, guards the dungeon beneath the keep, and escorts royal officials on Crown business. Its soldiers are professionals paid from the royal treasury and answer to the Captain, who answers to the King.
The Royal Guard does not patrol the city. Its authority ends at the gates of the White Keep except when escorting the King's officers or acting on the King's direct order. Street patrols, gate duty, and the arrest of ordinary offenders belong to the city watch, and the two forces keep that division carefully because neither wishes to answer for the other's mistakes.
Alveron is a royal city governed under a charter granted by the Crown. The charter gives the city the right to govern its own streets, markets, walls, and ordinances, so long as its dues reach the royal treasury and its laws do not defy the Crown. The charter can in principle be amended by the King, but no monarch has done so in living memory, because the city's guilds and merchants are a pillar of royal revenue.
Under the charter, the masters of the city's guilds elect the Council, which meets in the Rathaus in High Town. The Council chooses one of its members as Burgomaster to preside over it for a term. It governs markets, weights and measures, guild disputes, the walls and gates, fire watch, street repair, sanitation, city dues, and the city's lesser courts. Its sessions are dominated by the wealthiest guilds, and journeymen, laborers, and the poor of the lower city have no voice in it.
The Council also decides who is granted burgher right, the status that allows a person to own a house within the walls, work as a guild master, and vote for the Council. It has never granted burgher right to a tiefling. Eastwall lies outside burgher law and is the one quarter where tieflings may hold property, which is why it has been the tiefling quarter for generations. Burgher right leads to guild mastery and guild mastery to a Council seat, which is reason enough for the guild families who hold those seats to keep things as they are.
The Bailiff is the King's appointed judge within the city. He is chosen by the Crown rather than elected by the Council, keeps his offices in the Rathaus, and enforces royal law inside the walls. He presides over the court for serious crimes such as murder, robbery, arson, and assault, oversees arrests, and commands the city watch in the King's name.
The office places a royal officer at the heart of the city's own government. The Council pays the watch, maintains the Rathaus, and resents any Bailiff who forgets whose coin feeds his men. The Crown expects the Bailiff to remember that he serves the King first. A capable Bailiff keeps both satisfied, and an unwise one is caught between the Council and the White Keep.
The city watch keeps the peace in every district of Alveron, from the docks to High Town. It guards the city gates, patrols the streets and markets, enforces curfew and fire laws, collects tolls at the gates with the Council's clerks, and brings offenders before the city courts or the Bailiff. Its members are townsmen paid from city dues, armed with halberds and crossbows, and answerable to the Bailiff.
Patrols are frequent and orderly in High Town, steady in the markets and along Guild Row, and thin in Eastwall, where the watch seldom enters except in force. Guild halls of the Adventurers Guild stand outside its reach in matters the Guild claims as its own, and the watch does not arrest members inside them.
Justice in Alveron is divided among several courts, and much of the capital's legal business consists of deciding which one a case belongs to. The city magistrates of the Council hear petty theft, brawling, debts, market fraud, property disputes, and breaches of city ordinance. The Bailiff's court hears serious crimes committed within the walls. The royal court of the High Steward hears treason, crimes against the Crown, crimes by or against nobles, and appeals that the Crown agrees to take up. Prisoners awaiting the royal court are held in the dungeon of the White Keep, and sentences of death are carried out by hanging in Cathedral Square.
The Church holds its own jurisdiction over heresy, forbidden cults, and proven dealings with infernal powers, exercised by its inquisitorial orders under the Archprelate. Since the King's decree, issued at the petition of the Church, no one in Alveron may be mutilated or put to death for having the appearance of a fiend. Inquisitors may still investigate tieflings as they would anyone else, but appearance alone is no longer evidence of a crime. A prisoner already held by the city or royal courts may not be taken into Church custody without the consent of the High Steward.
The government of Alveron works because each authority has its own domain, and it strains wherever those domains meet. The High Steward holds the King's trust but not the King's crown. The Chancellor holds the seal but commands no soldiers. The Royal Guard holds the White Keep but not the streets. The Council governs the city but cannot touch the Crown's officers. The Bailiff enforces royal law with soldiers the Council pays. The Church judges heresy but must ask the Steward for prisoners it does not already hold.
The deepest tension lies between the King's reforms and the city's charter privileges. The Crown has ended the worst cruelties against tieflings, but the Council still decides who may become a burgher, and the guild families who sit on it see no reason to change. Reformist clergy press the Crown to amend the charter, traditionalists defend the Council's right to govern its own city, and the High Steward, with the succession unsettled, has shown no wish to open a quarrel with the guilds that fill the treasury.
Those with business in the capital learn quickly where to take it. Petitions to the Crown, royal charters, and matters of high justice go to the White Keep, where they are received by the High Steward's officers. Licenses, property records, market disputes, guild matters, and city taxes go to the Rathaus and the Council's clerks. Crimes and complaints against offenders go to the city watch or to the Bailiff in the Rathaus. Heresy, cults, and matters of faith go to the clergy at the Great Cathedral.
The King himself is seldom seen. Those who wish to reach him must pass through the Royal Guard, the High Steward, and the chancery, and few petitions climb that far before they are answered in his name.