Always Opportunity

It is arranged with the huntsmaster that Fidel return to the charge of Renard.

After an awkward first couple days of adjustment, a rhythm soon comes to Fidel’s presence in the house: that Renard train him in the practical matters of swordsmanship, equestrian arts, equipment maintenance, battle strategy, and other useful skills all men ought know, whilst Colette, who becomes highly interested in this whole pursuit, whisks him away for secret talks in the parlour about the intricacies of art, etiquette, politics, and diplomacy.

Between them both, Fidel is catching up on the typical nobleman’s education that he missed in Ashurst, and he fundamentally is Renard’s squire.

For how Renard worried his influence may harm the boy, it is clear that his worry was really just that. Fidel is a decent swordsman. He is not anywhere near a spectacular one, and by that alone, he will never be a soldier, or an assassin, or a second Renard. The natural talents Renard divines through observation and training are the ones Fidel already displayed in Ashurst: a quick mind, an eloquent tongue, good intuition, and skill in navigating himself and others through questionable terrain. So if he were to excel, it would be as an adviser, a strategist, a scout, a warden — and in all those roles, if kept near a lord, he would likely be comfortable.

Renard feels stupid for realising this truth only after the fact, but the single thing Fidel truly needs is a supportive patron with recognised noble clout. If to be ‘Fidel Asphodel, who hunts wolves’ is unbearable on his dignity, to be ‘Fidel Asphodel, who great men favour’ is not; for the dignity of his master shields him from his own doubts. Ideally, he would come to find himself a greater lord than Renard, but for now, while he is learning, the training wheels Renard provides are enough.

With this training of Fidel being a far more positive, and far less grim, malicious, or draconian affair than Renard had anticipated, Nix becomes a complex subject to broach. ‘Will you come with me down to that pit?’ Renard asks, and Fidel says yes without deliberation. ‘The dangers would be great. What we faced in Ashurst…’ and upon truly knowing, Fidel does shiver. I am not sure I would go to the bottom, sir, he says, but at the very least, I would go.

It’s strange that Fidel’s fear so vividly stokes Renard’s own.

He is just a boy. Even so, the thought of Renard having him at his side in Nix truly does fill him with confidence, and returns to him that light feeling of the possibility of absolute success. But then to imagine that Fidel would stop — that, to reach Arsene, there must be a threshold into darkness that Renard must cross alone — that is what makes Renard’s core tremble, and doubt, and know that for every step, the isolating void of dark nothing would swallow him deeper.

The Iron King, Marion, these causes are not enough. Even filled with hatred, even knowing with all his heart he must face and kill this serpent, such passed memories can not fortify him with purpose against the fear.

Renard sighs, twisting in bed, a spiky black bur poking about his insides.

Colette is sleeping beside him, her hair tressed across the pillow like silk. The elegant cut of her chin from behind peeks over the great, mountainlike curve of her shoulder, then her chest, rising slow and falling with the majesty of the tides. A simple warmth radiates comfortably in Renard’s gut at the sight, casting out the cold and shadows, and lifting his cheeks into a smile.

It is then, at that moment, that an incredible thought strikes him.

In twenty, thirty, forty years, this woman will be twisted. Her soft flesh will be stretched over elongated bones like stinking leathers on a tanner’s rack, her fingers will be whittled into iron stakes, she will not speak but only screech through a sopping lamprey-mouth and her eyes will bulge like soulless tumours that wobble out of her face. She will be a clown juggling her own shrunken head, a slime-caked hag that pisses maggots, a buck-faced donkey that kills with its laugh. A horrible amalgamation of all the monsters Renard has seen and slaughtered interposes itself, switching ever with more and more grotesque possibilities, over her silhouette.

Pyroclast explodes. Renard strangles the empty air as viciously as he ran to murder the snake back in Ashurst, enraged growls and hisses half-aborted in his seizing throat and behind his clenched teeth. For how great the temptation is to take his blade, march down to the empty stables, and snap a wooden beam into splinters, however, Renard instead sheaths this rage, allowing it to simmer just under his heart, very, very near to the surface.

He wafts in and out of dreams that night, not truly sure if he slept, or simply fell into bouts of meditation, where his soul stands upon this sure purpose as though walking upon an ocean of steel.

Barely-tempered aggression teems from Renard in the days following, quickly noticed by Colette. Though she pleas, ‘what is wrong’, and ‘are you well’, and even must at one point urge him he is being too rough, the only response Renard can give, after quick apologies, is an obsessive, seething growl of, ‘I must kill that snake.’

He pens letters as if carving the paper with the nib of the quill, indeed ruining several drafts with rips from the force of his writing, not simply demanding but asserting that the Queen add him to the front lines of Nix. These messages are only satiations of fantasies for now, rewritten fresh every day. Though softened a slight around Fidel, even with him Renard has grown forceful, and in any moment he is not called elsewhere, he is practising his swings in the stables.

Weeks pass.

A clear morning comes, the sky pale and lucid outside the grand upstairs window. A panorama stretches of grassy autumn planes outside, all the way out to the mild curves of distant hills, and even past that to the imprint, barely visible on the horizon, and only visible today by the queer fidelity of the air on this morning, of the mountain trails around Sebilles.

“Darling," Colette calls, catching him at the window.

Renard tears his eyes from the view. Her hand is planted upon her stomach, and her gaze carries a heavy profundity.

Stricken by the oddness of her expression, he answers, “mountain-lark?"

She walks to him, her silver gown flowing after her careful motions like the wisps of a ghost. She licks her lips, and as if sharing an old secret, whispers, “I’ve not bled, for two months."

She withdraws, eyes wide, smiling subtly behind the fingers that shield her lips.

Renard pauses.

The implication of the words only strikes a second later, and he double-takes in disbelief. ‘Truly!?’ his wide, boggling eyes urge, but she simply nods and strokes her stomach as if it were the surest thing in the world: truly.

Though nothing shows yet in her silhouette, this information in itself infuses the sight of her smooth belly with a sanctity as natural as sunlight on clouds and as deep as the springwater hidden in the root of a well. Breathless, Renard grabs her, squeezes her, spins her in a hug, able only to articulate a reverent cheer of, “Colette!" between his awed kisses and amazed laughter.

He sets her back on the floor, giddily drunk. A proud, venerated smile blazes in her eyes.

“Will you write your letter to the Queen, now?" Colette asks.

“No," Renard says, the word jumping straight from his heart to his tongue. He wipes his hand down his chin, the incredible truth of this answer only registering into sense after it has been spoken. “Not now. Far later, if I will tell her anything…"

Renard stumbles back, mystified at his own thoughts. Indeed. What a stupid thing it feels to even contemplate touching Nix, when what he clearly must and should do is stay here to care for this blooming beam of sun, his wife! And after that, after the child is born… Renard’s heart wrenches as an image flashes to his mind. A little toddler giggling up at him, reaching with a tiny hand to grasp Renard’s finger.

All dark of that void, of that pit, of that cursed den of rot and death and sick aberration, shatters at the thought of this image. All of it — that whole place, it’s utterly irrelevant. But there worry strikes. Was this not to be the starting gun for his descent, as affairs in Nix clearly were worsening? And what of Pleione’s worries? Is he to tell her that yes, he merely wasted her time for two months, and she should craft for herself a Kingslayer?

Renard can only stand in disbelief with himself as the answer coheres in his mind: ‘yes’.

It is insane. That he could finally, after months, work up the resolution to go, only for it to collapse so totally.

Renard truly is, and has always been, a despicably cowardly person with not a shred of virtue or principle. But right now it does not even matter. The sun is an ocean beneath his feet, that soaks and permeates every inch of him, until any steel in him is just a smothered, tiny pit.

Colette marches to him with a grin of uncompromising victory. She reaches out for his chest, to take him closer to her.

In that instant before her fingers make contact, the sky outside the window rolls, screams, and shears apart, leaving a massive crescent swath of night bleeding into the morning.