The Last Open Door

The heavy doors of the throne room thoom shut behind them. Colette grabs a disconsolate Renard by the hand and rushes him to the privacy of a guest room. She sits him on the bed and hugs him, rocking, her heartbeat pulsing in his ear faster than the feet of a jackrabbit.

She pulls away, gasping a wispy breath, shed entirely of the composure she held in the throne room.

“Are you okay?" she asks, near crying.

Renard’s brow scrunches.

With a breathy sigh, Colette dips in again for another loose hug, stroking his head.

Rising out of his quiet, sad funk, Renard eases her off him. “Colette, enough. I—" He runs his hand over his face, events in the throne room only now catching up to him, slamming into his mind like a runaway wagon. “—am well, but…"

Lowering his hand, he stares up at her in confusion. She herself looks a horror, grooves of worry cut deep in her forehead, eyes rimmed red and blinking furiously, yet failing still to clear the sheen of tears from her eyes. Between the throne room and here, she has aged twenty years.

Renard chuckles bitterly. Allowing a lady to look like that means he’s been a pathetic showing of a man. “How do you ask me such a question?"

She whistles out an airy breath, tension easing out of her shoulders. “I was so scared," she says, “I didn’t know where you’d gone — knowing what we spoke about, I feared…"

“Me?" Renard asks incredulously.

“Of course, you."

“But I do not understand, how could you care?"

Colette smiles grimly, choking back a darkly amused sob.

“I… have not given anything to you, have done nothing for you, have had poor motives towards you, and left you. We are barely strangers, how could you care?"

If Isobel spoke in profound silences, Colette speaks in numbed ones. If Isobel was a saccharine pouring of sunlight that dripped and beamed thickly into the heart, Colette is a long, still lake, the quiet face of which gently demands reflection and meditation. Perhaps it is that cooling, gentle presence of hers that makes it so hard to wear any bravado around her, and so easily rips what is buried to the fore.

“Is it worth so much, a careless promise?"

Colette shakes her head, smiling still, and blinks heavy to stare with chagrin. Her dark irises suck him in as were he staring into the pit of a well, as he had in those days after the slaughter of Pilamine, horrible and deep and transfixing, but painfully full of ghosts. To hear the voice in her silence requires this plunging, this immersion in darkness, and when it is heard it is heard as a whisper. The answer to Renard’s question, which she is struggling to speak, is obvious. It is a plain, unpretentious, I love you.

Even Renard knows that love, when real, is not something to interrogate with ‘why’s.

Stunned, Renard recoils and covers his mouth. His gaze shifts away. Is Colette’s love real? Did she uproot herself and come all this way to Sebilles, hunt him down, pressure the Queen, fight for him, rip him from a deathly rail, then collapse into a sobbing wreck at the end of it all, because she had some political motive in owning a Barony in Lacren with the clout of the legendary Sir Renard behind her?

It’s stupid to even consider. The clout of a killer? Of course she didn’t.

Renard’s hand falls from his chin in shock. His eyes widen as he turns to her, fear shooting like thunder in every heartbeat. He stammers, “Colette, I am not—the habits of a nobleman are not… inside my inclinations." Images flash through his mind of himself, dressed in fine silks, playing croquet, orating congenially on this or that courtly gossip and huffing over the tired politics that nobles often do. As it had been before when the Queen demanded he play ambassador, or when he went to party in the castle with Pleione, the person in these images does not feel like himself. “They sicken me. Yourself being of blood, I cannot imagine my partnership would… satisfy you, in this fashion. I was not raised in castles."

“But, noble habits did not carry you to here… titled men are not much different from any else, many of them, but taught pride too much to stray from agreeable dealings and words… this dignity is shallow. These who would do the motions because they must, they worry too much of trifles. You must not think you have to be like them, confused… I do not find much more distasteful than I imagine anyone would."

“You say."

She nods.

“You cannot think of how I could embarrass you. In so many foolish ways… I would gut a pig’s belly and wear the beast as a hood, to skulk through the fields, pounce, and say — boo! Nonsense antics…"

“Would you, though, outside of boy’s fun?"

Would he? Renard shifts uncomfortably. His brand of humour is innately crass and obnoxious, but he has not been ruled by humour in that way since he was a teenager. Then again, that humour does feel natural to him. He could resent that Colette would approach him with love and yet not love the parts of himself even he finds disgusting, or he could take it as a continuation of how he has felt for a long time, that he has simply grown more mature than he was a child.

It’s an odd thought. For how easily the idea came to his mind, and how much fun it still sounds to be, he can say now how stupid and inappropriate it would be in most contexts. Rather, he would probably only do it if he were trying to offend and repel someone, and in this hypothetical case, Colette, as to harry her, disgrace her, and break the relationship.

Darkness bubbles inside him. To break this relationship, given the lifeline it represents, means he must be already fantasising the life it offers as being horrific and stressful. Yes — these images that flashed through him, of smiling over champagne or attending parties or dressing up in formalwear to go play croquet — are indeed so horrific and antithetical to himself he would rather just die and go to Nix.

Fantasising pain on someone approaching him with sincere affection is a horrible thing, however. If Colette’s care is genuine, then the more prescient fear may be…

“Colette, would it not disgrace you? To receive men of pedigree, and I be beside you? If you would live as a Baroness, among the peers you have always known, to the station you have always known, with the luxuries you have always known, by what standard does my presence improve that? I am not cultured or affectionate; not clever or kind. I am merely cold enough to thrust in a blade. You may keep teasets beside flagons — to you, is that truly pleasant? Shallow dignities, may as they be, but dignities they are. How these prestigious men would look at me, then look at you — does that not strangle you at all?"

“In their heads and in their clades, those prestigious men can whisper what they wish. They have not done what you’ve done."

Renard falls silent.

He supposes that’s true. You’re an awful, base, embarrassing person, but you’ve brought much good to the world, so you’re exempt from much judgement. The balances now are even. Still…

“You are the only one who has done what you’ve done," Colette continues. “The only one. What’s taken you here, it was you."

But Isen, Pleione, they would have walked my steps more wisely and with more justice. They would have faced the problems I did and found superior solutions to the ones I chose, or so Renard would have once protested. Now he cannot help but feel that Colette is correct.

Isen would have never taken a blade against ghouls. With a more gentle and positive core of sentiment driving him, he would have circumvented the problems that imparted Renard his insane drive long before it could ever be forged. Even if Isen had Kingslayer, no slaughter of ghouls in the thousands across this whole region would have occurred at his hand. The Lacren that Isen’s presence would have crafted would be positive, no doubt, but now as Renard considers it, likely, unrecognisable.

And if Renard is being honest, the actual state of Lacren currently is — fair.

It’s good. Though to call himself the primary driver behind that success would take more brazenness than Renard cares to sit with, his presence has been far from inconsequential in shaping this territory into its present state, in a fundamentally positive fashion.

Is there some trap he’s missing here? Is there more he must do?

Would Isen have even opened the prospect of going to Nix? Shockingly, he may not have. Renard had been exceedingly pushy, exceedingly rash, exceedingly sanctimonious, exceedingly impulsive, and exceedingly fraught with a unique personal pain when he arrogantly impressed that idea into court. If Isen had already resolved matters with the Iron King peacefully, obsession with the ghoul menace may not have occurred.

He may have actually surpassed Isen in this regard. Were he alive, Renard can imagine now the two of them each upon mountain peaks, parallel in their talents, but standing at the same height. The image is incredible — were Isen alive.

The work is unfinished, Renard surely thinks, even as he slides his mind away from the snake in its pit to the woman, still tearful, in front of him, and his heart kicks with a peculiar warmth.

“The bitter blood of that woman, so black and vile, that is the thickness that makes me not breathe!" says Colette. “She says she would use you — no, she would kill you! She would kill you, she would kill you, she would kill you…" she drapes herself over his shoulders, presses a kiss against his ear.

Renard clasps her hand as she, with a sigh, withdraws. Tears she had composed off her face now dapple again the pits of her eyes, soon wiped away. She shakes her head absently.

A sense of strange ease falls over Renard. In a life where every road feels inevitably to end at Nix, as though every step he treads is upon an incline funnelling him slowly down into that black, and into death, there is from this woman a ray of springlike brightness slicing through, a plane of level ground upon which he may walk stable, and perhaps even turn and see something he had not conceived he would ever find again, a prospect of life, and of future.

Allowing this calm to settle in his chest, despite his uncertainty, Renard smiles lightly.

Patting Colette’s back, he quietly assures, “I will try."