Quote Originally Posted by Sermil View Post
Another view of the plot:

A man with great power pretends to be a man with even greater power and a man with no power in order to find a man who could give him more power. But his servant, who appears to have no power, is actually the man with even greater power that the less powerful man is pretending to be, but he is pretending to have no power in order to strip one of the men of his inherited power so that that man can become even more powerful than any of them. Meanwhile, a woman with great inborn powers rejects those powers but embraces a different power taught to her by someone with, apparently, no powers.

Was that a powerful enough clue?

The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip!