Chapter 391

Berenice reached for the cup close to her hand and downed it. Yarvin, the last remaining elf in the room, quickly refilled it and the Cardinal drank greedily, taking deep and otherwise undignified gulps of wine between her frenzied words of explanation. Her arms began to move almost independently of her body when she got to the part about the mountain. "...Then there was a great boom!" She exclaimed, her arms flying wide apart at the table, her cup toppled over and red wine ran out to stain the table's cloth, but nobody noticed or cared for the faux pas other than herself, and she barely cared.

When she finally finished, she took a deep breath, righted her cup and held it out to Yarvin for him to refill. "We have to take action or we are screwed." She finished. "Finding the twelve shouldn't be hard, but we have to reorganize a lot and we have to do it fast to make sure there are no more incidents. And what's more, we have to do something to turn the hostility of the Allfather and his followers away from us."

Dominic was the first to speak, though when he did it was after a long silence wherein each Cardinal's thoughts were turned inward as dark imaginings came over them all.

"They want us to dismount from the tiger we're riding, but offer no security from its bite when we do… we can return the dozen. We can make an official apology and deny responsibility for the raiders. But we're still no better off than before. Nothing really changes. We're still in the same position as before." Dominic said and darted his eyes toward Raymond and saw his comrade was prepared to speak. "Don't say it, Raymond. Spare us your eloquence on justice, they don't offer a damn thing in the way of solutions."

Raymond gave his colleague a dark, baleful glare. Though he never saw what Dominic had done to Nua, the marks on her body and her own words were proof enough, and a burning hatred seethed deep in his soul that threatened to consume him every time he heard the voice of the Cardinal of Wind. But he concealed it in a pretense of professionalism. "As much as I hate to say it, Dominic is right."

The table of Cardinals shot their eyes at him, including Berenice, in the time since his return from the journey to Baharuth, Raymond's letters were copied and disseminated everywhere the literate lived and worked. And with them came the chronicles of the elves who escaped, their narratives of abuse and mistreatment stirred many an empathetic heart, and the once lone Cardinal had social and political allies for his position.

'So now is he reversing it? No. That's not him. Raymond may not want to admit it, but he's as stubborn as Dominic in his own way.' Berenice told herself and Raymond put his hands flat on the table, straightened up and took a deep breath.

"We either change or die. That's how it is. Cardinal Berenice's witnessing of that kind of destructive power isn't even necessary for us to know that. We have no allies, we have no trading partners. Our military is weaker than the Allfather's. These are not debatable, these are just the facts. What if we began a gradual liberation. Or set up some free farms close to the elf Kingdom border?" Raymond suggested, "If we move in the direction they want, we can demand concessions, such as reopening trade with us so that our actions are 'encouraged'."

"I have nightmares sometimes." Dominic said, looking not at Raymond, but at Berenice, "Nightmares of what feels like another world, a place where we fought the whole world, and in those nightmares the gods didn't come back. They didn't save us. Kami Miyako starved and our country burned as revenge seekers cast down our power and slaughtered us… I sometimes think those dreams aren't dreams, they're warnings from the divine." Dominic's voice was oddly calm as he spoke, his body lost its tension and his eyes, usually burning with zeal, were dulled to listlessness.

"I called you all here to dinner hoping for solutions. Ways to buy time for our country. King Mare's demonstration, and its reason for being done, confirms my fears. The Allfather's power is supreme, on par with or surpassing the gods, and…" He reluctantly moved his right hand to point toward Raymond, his open palm up as if it were offering to shake on a truce, "foolish though I think some of my comrade's beliefs may be, the Agante spies confirm the truth everywhere they go. The Allfather is human, and he brings prosperity to mankind. I don't understand why he has chosen to do differently than the gods of old… but when has resisting the will of the divine ever gotten humanity anything?"

The collective eyes of the rest of the table, and the waiting Yarvin who remained fixed at Dominic's left hand, were all pulled to the aging Cardinal of Wind.

"I believe we can buy time and favor for our nation, by proposing the deification of the Allfather as the seventh God, may he stay with us forever. In doing this, we can distract the world from our… other problems." Dominic suggested it, and the entire table's hearts began to pound in their breasts.

'Deification of the Allfather?!' The other cardinals tensed as if they were about to be examined for blood quality by a vampire. But the radical gesture, put forth in the sacred city of Kami Miyako where the Six Great Gods were said to have appeared for the first time, would have been a powerful one.

"That is… quite a thing to do… but… what if we do as Raymond wants, and we do that." Yvon suggested, the withered old man's serpent-like eyes lost their shock and locked like a predator on another idea. "Suppose we make this proposal and declare the liberation of the elves, but we then pass harsh laws with long penalties of 'public labor' or imprisonment. We could punish trivial thefts of food with decades of farm labor. To help keep them fed we've never really punished light hunting among the creatures, but if we pass harsh laws against it, pay trivial wages to the 'freed' elves, we can then justify selling the labor of these 'criminals' to the farms where we need them, and pocket the money from leasing them."

He smirked, "The elves are then free, but they're not. And we then simply require passes to leave the country, and any elf trying to leave can be arrested. We can introduce them to the black dust and then punish its use, even let them trade work for more of the stuff, then they'll never leave, the other nations can't complain because the elves are free, and our budget can be restored by leasing the labor. I see no real downside. We can even say we're doing it in accordance with the Allfather's will, a gesture of our sincerity before we declare his divinity."

"The Empress of Baharuth will see right through that. And even if she doesn't, the Bloody Queen Renner will if she's even half as clever as she seems. Not to mention the Queen of Frost." Raymond retorted.

Maximilian drummed his fingers on the table and added his own retort, "Hmpf, the Queen of Frost should be getting ready to rule only a grave soon. Every member of the Black Scripture except for Thousand League Astrologer has gone out to kill her and rescue their Captain. By this time next week, that Kingdom will be engulfed in civil war. The rest of the world will be too thrilled with our 'deification' and too distracted to notice we're following the letter of their wishes if not the spirit."

"To abuse the power of the law like that, people will notice eventually." Raymond exclaimed and jammed his forefinger down on the table, he leaned forward and snapped, "You can't just slow the melting of ice and say you've lengthened the winter! We'll just create a criminal underclass that is locked inside our borders. If we can't free them all at once, at least we should start settling them on some of the unused farmland. Let them have some self governing lands of their own, like the Frost Queen did with her captured humans and elven allies. We can then buy back the land and send the elves back to their country when we've stabilized."

"What if we don't want to go?" Yarvin asked. His voice was so small that he himself barely realized he'd spoken, and without thinking, his right hand came out to rest on Dominic's shoulder in an unprecedented display of public devotion.

"Yarvin-" Dominic gasped. "What did you say?"

Emboldened by the question, Yarvin looked not at his master, but at Raymond. "What if we don't want to go, Master Raymond? Some of us have lived here longer than the Theocracy has existed, some, like myself, would never want to leave where we are. Some of us have families and lives here. Some have no living memory of the Elf Kingdom. Some… hate how they are treated. But it is still home, and they won't want to start over, to go back to a place they barely remember or that has no better memories than they've made under humans."

"I… I hadn't thought of that." Raymond admitted. 'I was gauging all my expectations based on Nua, but as elves go she isn't especially old, and she has reason to have a special loathing for the ones who lead this place.'

To Yarvin's unexpected voice, there were no quick retorts as the problem became even more compounded than before.