Ill Thought

After his dismissal for the night, in his quarters, Renard’s mind eddies around that announcement. While part of him cheers in reverence that the Iron King has, again, demonstrated his power, a pit in his gut weighs heavily, telling him that this is wrong.

There are legitimate reasons to bring Pilamine to war. They incited hostilities by trapping the Iron King, so to say the Iron King is merely responding to that provocation is fair. Moreover, Lacren still needs Pilamine’s water. Abandoning the compromises and claiming Pilamine as Lacrenese territory removes the persistent issue of water Lacren will otherwise always have, and disallows Pilamine from manoeuvring into a more advantageous position in both the short- and long- term. Just as they did before, if they desire to defeat Lacren, all they have to do is withhold water. And indeed, with only a couple months’ worth of water left in the wells, the Iron King feels impelled to strike now.

Equally, though, Renard feels only uncomfortable with this aggression. Pilamine has a whole coalition of allies who all want the Iron King gone, and who would all claim Lacren for themselves in his absence if able. What conquering Pilamine does is commit Lacren to massive escalation, drawing more and more hostilities from more and more powerful nations in what will ultimately be a gauntlet of every great power versus Lacren. Even if Lacren survives this onslaught, which Renard suspects it actually might, it will do so as an aggressor and conqueror, annexing the territory of its broken foes.

Annexation of enemies is hardly atypical — so why does the prospect of this kingdom growing to such a great size feel so horrible?

Maybe because Renard can see a path whereby it doesn’t need to happen, and cannot understand why the Iron King picked war when there was an alternative.

Murdering Herjas worked to establish the Iron King’s unquestioned authority, but it was also an extremely brutal and needless dismissal of what could have been a valuable pawn. Or even ally, since negotiating agreements and swaying people to causes is the core of sophisticated politics, which the Iron King is supposed to be good at. Either way, the Iron King could have concealed his return to power from the coalition, and probably from Lacren itself, while using Herjas as his mouthpiece. Soon nobody would have suspected Lacren to still be under the reign of a ghoul, eliminating the core problem that has always hampered the Iron King politically. In that way, he would be free.

Why escalate? If Renard perceived this course, surely so did the Iron King.

Is this voice of doubt just cowardice? Is there some rationale he’s too dumb to get? Or is Renard now a hypocrite who scorns open ambition? Though he does not pursue this thought, it flits through his mind: what would Isen have done?

Renard smooths the covers of his bed and sighs as he takes off his boots. Maybe he can sleep off these thoughts, and if he’s truly so bothered, present them to the Iron King in the morning, with the benefit of a sleepless night’s worth of rumination backing his rhetoric. …Then again, with Herjas dead, to insist the Iron King take a softer track now probably isn’t useful.

A gentle knock comes at Renard’s door. Surprisingly, it is Pleione. When Renard asks what she is doing here, she answers that she has spoken with his Iron King, and from that talk, learned something she thought prudent for Renard to know.

Renard deposits himself on his bed, already sick of the subject, but unable to send her away. He cannot even find it in himself to boast of the Iron King’s equanimity, and how it surely must have impressed itself upon her, or how she must see now that he is as reasonable as any other man, but only make the bitterly dry observation of, ‘is that why you come not in shackles?’

Pleione absent-mindedly rubs her wrists, answering yes, and seats herself beside Renard.

He shoves her off the bed and back onto her feet.

She gulps minutely, glances away, and backs off a couple steps. Her gaze lowers to the ground briefly. “Come," she says, “I will show you something."

Reluctantly, Renard heaves himself off the bed and follows her to the parapets. The city of Sebilles stretches far below them, familiar dwellings bleeding into taverns and shops and guild-houses, out to the gates, out to the forest that blankets the south road and easterly hills. It’s an everyday sight for Renard, but still one that impresses light sentiment. Here is his home, full of humbly ambitious and industrious people, whose day-to-day struggles, smiles, and triumphs are precious. Though he may be a black sheep, it’s a place where Renard can say he carved his spot and found his flock.

But what Pleione wants him to see is not this familiar panorama. She splays her hands to the sky, urging him to look up.

Overhead is the night sky, bloated with stars that peek from behind wisps of cloud. She may well have pointed to a rock or slobbered over a twig, as her brand of naturalists infamously do. Because yes, the sight is pleasant, but it’s one too distant to matter to Renard.

Each of these is the soul of an ancestor, Pleione explains, of men and women who lived hundreds or thousands of years before us, who can be traced by bloodlines back to eminent progenitors, hand-crafted from a vision of God. The legacies of these progenitors carry on in the blood, for every human alive today, and of course for Renard.

Renard crosses his arms and frowns up at the sky, uncomfortable. Whatever she is implying feels somehow dangerous to consider, and better laughed off as prattle from an airbrained spiritualist. But given how the stars overhead do shine like souls now that he thinks about it, the idea that God would have put these in the sky, stringing them like pearls on a necklace, does feel weirdly feasible.

This is the true order of things, Pleione continues. The care taken to glorify each one will forever remind us, despite the curses that poison our earth today, of how much God loved every one of us.

Cease this! Renard snaps, feeling her words prickle at his brain. The more he listens and stares up into this blackness, the more fingertips scrape at the corners of the night, to peel away the mask of empty sky and reveal something underneath. He cannot explain what is so terrifying about the shift of perspective Pleione is trying to impose on him, but if he lets these ideas settle in his head, it risks changing him into a different person.

Pleione falls quiet.

Renard accuses Pleione of using her shamanistic powers to beguile him, though he cannot say to what end. He is unable to grow angry enough to further accuse her of manipulation, hostility, or treachery, as indeed it doesn’t feel like any. Rather, she is a missionary, and a foreign element rife with foreign ideas. Her world is simply different to his and spreads to his mind when she opens her mouth. Renard could curse her for it, but blame lies more in the surprising potency of the effect, and the apparent weakness of Renard’s spirit, than in her for being different.

In the silence, the night sky readjusts properly into a bland backdrop, instead of some significant thing of the universe. Relieved that her ideas are flushing themselves out of his mind, Renard asks if that’s all she brought him out for.

She bites her lip and tells him carefully that she has been released from holding, and allowed to work freely in this castle, because the Iron King would like to see the fruition of research into the purification of ghouls.

The Iron King wants to be purified, is her meaning.

Renard trembles, sweating, terrified again for reasons he cannot pinpoint. You’re lying! He would yell. Or, it’s a good thing to want that research! But why does this prospect bother him in the first place? Why does it feel like such an attack when it should be something that Renard supports?

Pleione bows her head and turns to leave, commenting that Renard is welcome to speak with her if he is ever in need of it.

Again, Renard wishes he could grow angry, and levy accusations of arrogance or trickery at her, but the patient sincerity in her offer disarms him. As she disappears from the parapets, Renard can only growl, clench his teeth, and strike his trembling fist uselessly upon a merlon.

Conflicted, lost, afraid, indignant, and despondent, Renard returns to his quarters for the night, ruminating on nothing but how he must sleep fast and prepare for the war.