The Blog of Roon

In case Renate defies my expectations and actually does manage to do herself in, her backup is one Tancred Lasalle, Sealed Librarian of the University of Eldorado.

He’s actually a bit of a prick just at the moment, I’m afraid. Over-intellectual, tunnel-visioned, self-centered, melodramatic. His one saving grace is that he does love honestly and well.

That’s his problem at the moment; a spell gone horribly awry sent the woman he loves into parts unknown in Chaos. At the moment he’s trying to pick himself up enough to think straight—he’s insulted her uncle, repeatedly and once violently snubbed her uncle’s security chief (now assigned to him as bodyguard), and completely failed to recognize the usefulness of the people under his nose. (I said he was self-centered and tunnel-visioned. I wasn’t kidding.)

I have a Grand Vision for how he’s going to get her back—but I’m more than a bit hazy on implementation details. Shall have to work those out as I go along, I’m sure.

I owe Monrroyo posts. I have no energy to write them. I’ll do it tomorrow. Sorry, guys.

Renate gets into the most awful trouble with the best of intentions. She’s just gone and gotten into a love-affair that is Not Going To End Well. At All. I’m torn between hoping it’s short, hoping they at least manage to keep some kindness for each other—and just plain dreading the imminent trainwreck.

Yeah, okay, so she’s managed to land Coris finally, slippery fish that he’s been. As is her way, she was completely honest with him about their prospects: she’s a noblewoman, which translates in practice to “political-marriage pawn,” and she has her own ideas about what political ends her marriage might serve.

Sure, the uber-feminist thing for her to do would be to reject hundreds of years of history in favor of True Love, and that does seem to be what Coris wants of her. But I’m intentionally playing it a little more layered than that. She knows political marriage is a raw deal, but honestly, who doesn’t have to cope with raw deals now and then? If it’s what she has to do to justify her status, obey her dearly-loved father, and further her people’s ends, then so bloody well be it; she accepts the necessity. Especially if she also takes a bullet for her sister Sabine’s sake—Mad Stephen of nearby, traitorous Glenworth being a cogent example of this possibility.

So she can’t promise anyone a lifetime; she certainly hasn’t promised Coris one. In her heart of hearts, she judges that the affair may indeed be a lifelong one on her part, owing to her extremely jaundiced estimation of her own life expectancy. (An estimation I don’t necessarily share, mind you.) She will give him whatever she can, while she can, as long as she can. But duty comes first, if death doesn’t beat it to the punch.

Sad to say, Coris is very not getting it. It makes sense, really, that a man who has freed himself of serious political and personal obligations to wander the world a free spirit would expect Renate to do the same—but she put her priorities firmly in order when she was sixteen, and she chose Karlbotel, with all that that choice implied.

Worse still, Coris appears to have a potentially quite nasty jealous and possessive streak. “Well, if it comes down to it, I could always kill the other guy,” he said of the prospect of Renate’s political marriage, the exact amount of jest in the statement not precisely defined. This is less frightening in Dragonhunt-world than one might think, because of the easy availability of resurrection magic (and that’s precisely how Renate answered: “Eh, well, what are Raphaelites for?”), but that doesn’t make it a good thing, not at all.

Not least because Renate is not the kind of girl it pays to be possessive of. That’s what I think is going to wreck them, if Coris can’t get over it. Sexual fidelity she can give him, if that’s what he wants. (It’s an open question at this point whether they’ve actually done the deed. If they haven’t, I daresay they will, Rennie being the total snugglepuppy she is. And I’m assuming the Alchemist’s Guild does birth control—I expect Dragonhunt women have running jokes about “monthly dues.”) But if he can’t cope with her vivid and profound emotional ties to other men and women, well, they just won’t make it.

Which brings us to Rien, who took the news rather badly, if by “badly” we mean “total emotional meltdown.” He’s another one who wants to own her completely; it’s why she’s kept a small but definite distance between them, and she had to tell him so. And he still didn’t get it. Well, fairer to say neither of them quite gets what’s going through the other’s mind.

In her world, nothing’s really changing just because she’s become Coris’s lover. She is still terribly fond of Rien. She would still lay down her life for him without a moment’s thought. She will still care for him, watch out for him, be his friend and his advisor. She still won’t sleep with him—but she never has and never planned to.

But he can’t see it that way… and neither can Coris… and they’d just better not fight over her, because she’ll tick them both off for it. Her heart is big enough for both of them and more; are theirs big enough to share her, let her be her gentle, loving self?