The Dove

She seems surprised by Renard’s visit, but not inherently uncomfortable with his presence.

“Soothsayer, which conniving prince bounded eastward and pluck’t ye flower to plant in his court?" Renard asks.

She leans in, glancing down the hall and easing open the door. “My roots recede from your princes; their soil is swamp for us missionaries."

“Hoh, fortune," Renard laughs blandly, bowing his head as he presses into her room.

She shuts the door behind him. Her room is plainly furnished but cluttered with small stone vials, mortars, strange-smelling powders, and odd little tools she must use in augury. Thick plants grow from damp hides wadded against the wall, among piles of fat, messy notebooks and buckets filled with ash.

The shaman herself is also peculiar. Her white skin and long, pale blonde hair are exoticisms Renard has seen on house-bred rabbits and dogs, but never before on a human. Wooden beads and bangles, carved with symbols, clatter around her wrists, with blooming flowers twined through her hair and coiled over her breast, seeming to grow out of her clothes. Deep, patterned scars, remnants of some childhood ritual, pock her arms. Though still some decades from seniorhood, her light crow’s feet betray her as some years older than Renard.

She turns gracefully to him, hands folded behind her at the door, her gaze questioning and vaguely suspicious.

Renard grinds his teeth and clenches his fist, pricked by her somewhat accusatory manner. Recognising the fruitlessness of growing angry or violent with her over nothing, though, he releases the anger with a sigh and plops himself in her chair at the desk, rubbing his temple.

“A missionary," Renard mutters to confirm it, weighing the word.

He probably can trust a missionary.

“Though the esteem of the Architect’s word less waters these territories than my practice as a Taurine…" she confirms, stepping away from the door with a glance to the shrub-growing lumps. Her manner softens with quizzical realisation. “Your land has been very defiled."

“It is these princes," he snaps, “warlords, snapping as buzzards at bones! So stretches the pious pride of dignity."

The shaman purses her lips as if facing a challenging question, and carefully explains the situation as she sees it. The esteem of Lacren has become weak, as she implies, owing to the rule of the Iron King. The same way that a river flows downward, the overflowing esteem of these conquering princes drives them to occupy and renew this cavity, filling it with their esteem. She sees this as a fundamentally good thing. But since this is a foreign energy, she can understand the acrimoniousness of this situation to Renard and the tribe of Lacren as a whole. However, she cannot conjure esteem for Lacren, or for Renard as its executor, that can reverse or stabilise this natural flow of energy. If he doesn’t want Lacren to be conquered, he must reap and use esteem from a higher source or assert his authority to alter the existing flow of esteem.

Gobbledygook.

“I do not care of this ‘esteem’!" Renard snaps again, and sighs, his hand trembling on his forehead. As the flash of anger fades, though, and anxiety eclipses it to churn in his chest, Renard finds a certain logic underneath the jargon of the shaman’s words.

Essentially, the conquering princes are attracted to Lacren because there is opportunity to take it and they have power. There isn’t a hunger to claim it for any material reason; it’s simply a matter of course to consolidate the weak into the strong. So if Lacren itself was just a smidgen more powerful, not even enough to be a threat but just enough to say ‘no, we don’t need you’, the princes would be rebuffed without argument.

But the greatest locus of Lacren’s power, indeed so powerful as to keep all of these varied kingdoms timid and shivering, an unshakeable well of this ‘esteem’ the shaman raves about, is the Iron King. Single-handedly, he is Lacren’s bulwark. But, the problem is…

“By this pious conspiracy, my Lord cannot action his power…" Renard mutters to himself with grief. If these outsiders would give him the chance to operate as their peer in princehood, and resolve contentions by conventional diplomacy and trade, this ‘problem’ of the hexant kingdom they see so fit to liberate would disappear overnight. They corner him into this conception of ‘ghoul’! But if they would only accept him…!

“You name the monster your Lord?" the shaman says, eyes wide in alarm.

Renard’s throat and shoulders lock. A cold sweat oozes down his arms and back, the shiver of fear only barely staying under his skin.

What of it!, he wishes to snap. But aggression will only worsen his straits, more than the stupid confession he just made. The shaman pads across the room to the shrub-lumps, ready to use them if needed, but as much wary as confused. Renard finds himself sharing in that confusion.

Why is he so attached to someone who makes him so scared?

Renard looks down, hand over his face, straining not to show weakness in front of this woman. His face reddens and palm warms. But through this strain and hurt, an odd rush of levity opens in his chest like a window into summer. Wonderful images flow into his mind of the Iron King, recognised and loved for his equanimity and kind justice as a firm but loving King, bold and glorious in a triumph of human spirit above his ghoulish nature. The sun glints off his raised palm and the breeze splays his hair as a majestic cape, jubilant and free from the trammels of sin. More than just wanting to see him happy, the prospect of the Iron King’s exaltation into virtue feels to prove some fundamental, and powerful, principle to the world.

That is what Renard truly desires. It is for this prospect of redemption, that determination and love may grant the King the joyful life his birth ought have owed him, that Renard is so loyal to the King. Realising this, Renard thinks it a wonderful thing.

“I do not even know his name…" Renard’s palm falls from his face, still red but not wet. Not even the Iron King knows his name; he died too young to conceive it.

The shaman relaxes.

Renard puckers his lips in thought, then turns to her. He asks if there is any way she knows, with her mystical teachings, to cure a ghoul of being a ghoul, in the sense of purifying them or returning them to a human state.

This question takes the shaman off-guard. There is no precedent for the purification of ghouls — the typical answer is to just kill them. But the suggestion, audacious as it is, hooks her interest. She gnaws her lip, thumb to her chin. Theoretically… theoretically, since a ghoul is a corruption of a human soul, were there a way to reverse the process of soul rot…

If such an innovation could be achieved, it would change everything…

But she shakes her head. It’s all hypothetical. Even if she can see principle for it, garnering results would likely take years of intensive study… She gives Renard a suggestively questioning look, as though she might say more, but stays quiet.

Renard heaves himself off the chair with a grunt. The shaman has given him an idea of what to do.

The shaman warns that she can just as well study the Iron King under the coalition’s captivity as Lacren’s — it does not necessarily serve her to argue for Renard, before the princes, if that is where he is thinking of taking this.

Renard raises the back of his hand dismissively in his stride for the door. He pauses at the doorframe to shoot her a grin. “Why doth victory argue?"

The shaman bites her tongue, unable to deny these words. She hums in consideration as he turns again to leave.

“Pleione Gayle, cavalier." She smooths her hand through her hair, smiling. “Called so for a reason, I see."