Like before, he boarded a carriage that took him straight to the palace. He had already sent the palace a letter, so they were aware of his arrival. As the carriage made its way down the single path leading to the palace, he half-expected to be ambushed by Charlie and Dagfinn again, but no such incident occurred.

The palace guards, who had already been so reverent when he had arrived at the palace nearly a month ago, bowed with their heads so low that he worried that they would topple over. They led him to the same extravagant room that he had been in before and with another dangerously low bow, told him that they would come back for him when the king called for him.

He considered undressing so he could relax, but it’d be a hassle to put everything back on later. There was no chair in the room – in the palace, a chair was a symbol of authority and was only permitted for ordinary use in the dining halls – so he sat on his four-poster bed and prepared himself for his meeting with the king.

As Ghislain had predicted, the king would use any opportunity to start a war. What Roel hadn’t considered was that his own name would be so closely associated with the war. Now that he saw and understood the impact of the Siege of Rove, he wondered how much had been planned beforehand.

Had they known that the paladin they chose to send to the siege would become celebrated throughout the kingdom? If so, why had they chosen him out of all the other paladins? What were they trying to set him up for? He didn’t believe it was a coincidence; again, coincidences were rarely that.

And what were King Mathieu’s plans? Was sacrificing his younger brother the only way to start a war? Was he trying to capture the entire continent?

Calorin, which was made up of all the western territories, controlled roughly a third of the continent of Erebusune. The Graecian Empire controlled the midsection, or so it was estimated – the eastern part of the continent was said to belong to savages, and it was unclear how much of that land had been conquered by the Graecians. If King Mathieu sought control of Erebusune, it would be a bloody war that could last decades.

He pored over everything he knew again and again, but there was nothing he could safely conclude. Just paranoid conjecture. If only Olivier was there with him to help him make sense of it all.

A few hours passed before there was a knock on his door. When he opened it, it wasn’t the guards but a man in a white and scarlet cassock. High cheekbones, a goatee, and short-cropped brown hair – he had the look of a mild-mannered clergyman, but Roel knew better.

“Cardinal Eudes,” he said with a low bow. “It’s good to see you again.”

“And you, Sir Roel.” He was a soft-spoken man, but Roel often wondered if that was part of his farce. Whenever the cardinal wanted to be heard, his voice would be loud and commanding. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there when the king assigned you your task, but I’m pleased to hear that you did a spectacular job. Nothing less from the paladin that I stake my honor and reputation upon. Perhaps I should start referring to you as the Hero of Rove.”

He forced a chuckle. “No, that’s fine. My name is popular now, but within a few weeks, they’ll have moved on to someone else.”

“True, the people have a short attention span,” the cardinal said with a thoughtful nod. “But don’t be so pessimistic. Your name will remain in their thoughts from here on out. Do you know why?”

Roel was confused for a moment by his question, but then he understood with a cold fury. Two of his questions had been answered: the Siege of Rove had been planned as the beginning of the war, and it was the cardinal who had convinced the other council members to send Roel to fight at the siege.

"Because there is nothing more important than the beginning and the end,” he said quietly. Two names – his and the prince’s – would come to the Calorins’ minds when they spoke of the beginning of the war.

“Yes, that’s exactly it,” the cardinal said with a pleased smile, but he saw it as a sinister one. “It is as it goes in the Divine Writ. Why is it that the Lord’s brothers and sisters, some of whom contributed great good and great evil, go unnamed in most texts? At the very least, we don’t place the same amount of importance on them as we do with the Lord.”

“Because the Lord is the beginning of the universe.”

“Precisely, He is the one who began the process of Creation, and when we have served our purpose, He is the one who will bring forth the End.” The cardinal beamed at him. “I’m pleased that you still retain your devotion to the Lord.”

“You taught me well, Your Lordship,” he said with his eyes to the ground.

When he had awoken to his powers at the age of twelve, he had been escorted to the Basilica of Gaul where he had spent three months with the bishops in order to be ordained as a Divine Paladin. There hadn’t been a moment wasted; every day was the study and recital of religious scriptures. The basilica hosted a great library of ancient texts that were said to be compiled together by King Gaul the Absolute. It was Eudes, just another scholarly bishop at the time, that gave him most of his lessons.

“You’re awfully young,” Eudes had said in his soft voice when he first saw him. “Must we send children to fight for us now?”

He hadn’t thought much of the bishop at the time. He couldn’t. He was a kid who was just told he was going to become one of the heroes of legends. Eudes was nothing more than one of the stuffy middle-aged men who prattled on about the Lord and lectured him to be patient.

If only his relationship with the cardinal had ended there.

This was the same man who had nominated him for the Battle of Wetshard. There were no expectations that the 58th Divine Paladin, even with the help of two other paladins of a similar rank and a few thousand troops, could hold off Ganelon, the 13th Divine Paladin. He had been offered as a sacrificial pawn. Then, after the battle, when he woke up from his injuries, he learned that the cardinal had claimed him as his personal champion.

It was a parasitic relationship. He was nothing more than a tool for the cardinal, a hero whose accomplishments would elevate his position in the Royal Council. The cardinal had first sent him to the Wetshard Lands, and now he had sent him to Rove.

As always, the cardinal’s face betrayed nothing. He had aged well, still looking almost exactly as he had when they had first met all those years ago.

What are you scheming now? he thought.