The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

he looked at her with open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth.

She was powerless without her patrons. Could power be real if someone else gave it to you?