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"My first priority is my people. As long as they’re safe, it doesn’t matter one whit what the rest of the world thinks of me."
See, that statement's easy. Naesala has a recreational sort of approach to saying words most days, and it's pretty well known that his relationship to little things like Truth and Facts is rocky at the best of times.
But he says those words to Sanaki, and they're almost true.
He's not good for the world necessarily, but he's good for Kilvas. There were stronger crows than him, more noble ones. The biggest ones, they matched the hawks blow for blow, strength for strength. Those better, stronger, braver crows died choking on their own blood, stewing in their own offal while their brains cooked from fever. They died along with their children, their parents, their siblings, their lovers, as the blood pact ripped its way through Kilvas and left five thousand and fifty crows dead, one plus two plus three all the way to a hundred.
Naesala is what's left.
Kilvas doesn't need a strong king. She needs a smart one, a wicked one. Someone has to set Her shattered bones, to bandage Her, to keep Her safe and warm and fed while She recovers. She needs a king with as few scruples as, say, the Senate that ravaged Her.
It is months prior to the great silence that engulfs the world, before the marches and the flights and the Alliance's desperate flight back across Begnion, through Crimea.
People will die in this fight. Beorc will, too. He's received the messages. Tibarn came personally to ask him to join, though perhaps ask is the wrong word; Tibarn asks things of Naesala in the same sort of way that thunder makes a little noise.
Of course Naesala listens, feet up on his desk. Of course, with every word, his boots move until they touch the floor instead. Of course Tibarn hears the sort of croaky raven-noise in the back of his throat that only comes when he's losing his composure, or his patience, or on rare occasions his temper. That sound usually comes when someone is about to have a painful accident in his presence.
The Senate ordered the burning.
And of bloody course his heart burns the same as Tibarn's. Of course the edges of his Imported Crimean Mahogany Desk (sent for his aid in the Mad King's War, because Bastian always tries to supply the finer things in life to useful people) goes crack just a little beneath his grip.
The facts are fourfold:
Naesala is a bastard.
Naesala is a slimy bastard.
Naesala is generally the worst bastard in any given room.
Naesala is still a Laguz.
Therefore, when he tells Tibarn that he hopes to see the entrails of lousy highborn beorc staining their manor walls before the year's out, he means it. Really, he does. For a moment, he allows himself the wildest of dreams, the sort that imprisoned crows have of the skies. A glimmer of damnable hope pops into his heart.
Wouldn't it be nice, he wonders in the emptiness of his soul, if they did slaughter them to a one? He dreams of a broken Begnion, of all the minor rebellions he knows are brewing taking advantage of the sudden war, of the Empire shattered into a dozen smaller kingdoms.
But like an irritating ingrown feather, the blood pact itches at the back of his mind, brings him back to reality. He tells Tibarn of course they have his support, anything for his brother hawks and the Herons and even those flea-bitten Gallians, ha ha, they share a laugh over that best described as political and Tibarn is on his way again, telling him that armies take time to mobilize but the Laguz will do it quicker than the Beorc.
He misses when Tibarn called them humans, before he met that annoyingly likable mercenary.
Naesala sits down, aware suddenly of how oppressive silence can be. Maybe Begnion will simply make him sit this one out like a poor player in a game of featherball (hey, champ, good effort but we need you on the bench for this one).
Of course, that's too much to hope for. But Naesala's a hopeful kind of guy, deep down, even if he'd rather rip his eyes out than admit it. He wouldn't be king if he didn't have hope for a better Kilvas, after all. It's something he's sort of ashamed of, but no amount of righteous crowing will remove that particular stain on his character. He's tried.
A month later, not long before the armies of the Alliance descend onto Begnion, the world does its best to help snuff his hope. Naesala is sat across from Lekain, wishing very badly to know if Senators' eyeballs are as squishy as sailors'. He listens very carefully to what he is going to do for Begnion, and tries not to vomit on his Imported Crimean Mahogany desk.
There's a point here, and he'll meander onto it, but first there's something to note: there's a way to compensate for bad luck, and it's by working very, very hard.
Naesala has turned, year after year and season after season, a blade to his throat into a tolerable situation. It is sort of a game that Kilvas and Begnion play, where the stakes are life and death for him and his and tax write-offs for them and theirs. Most of the time, the Senators like it enough to ante up, to allow piracy for pay. It stings their competition more that way— even after I pay this sub-human, I will still be richer than you, Lord So-And-So.
If he pitches it like he's for sale, like he can be bought, that's far more civilized than threatening the pact, and if the Senate's divided by his efforts maybe they can't bring the full might of the thing to bear.
All that's off the table now. There is no amount of good fortune, or civility, or hatred actively trying to metastasize into feather and talon and beak and blood (all over his repaired imported Crimean mahogany) that will get him out of this.
Not only will he abandon the Laguz Alliance at a key moment, but he will do it to allow for the butchery of Phoenicis.
Naesala's situation is untenable. He is reamed like a lady of the night in the brothels of Nevassa (and it's cold and harsh there, so certainly not gently). He will die. Either from the Blood Pact, surrounded by his dead kith and kin, or more likely hacking up bits of his ribcage when Tibarn is finished with him, assuming Reyson and Leanne's crystalized hate don't just erase his soul first. He thinks again about killing Lekain. He thinks about killing Lekain and following him to the next life shortly after, to kill him again there too.
In the end, though, the choice is like standing still while someone looses an arrow through your throat: easier than you'd think. Naesala is reamed, but his people don't have to be. Not by the Pact. Never again. Not while he can stop it.
... And maybe Phoenicis doesn't have to be either. Unbidden, again, that ugly little glimmer of hope springs into his mind— hope, and an idea.
"You'll kill the men," he says.
"We will," Duke Lekain replies.
"You'll leave the women and children," Naesala says.
"You are in no position to make demands, King Kilvas," Lekain begins, and Naesala leans forward, trying very hard to make it look like the hatred burning within is for the hawks and not this human. He lets that imagined cruelty into his voice. It's not hard to sell; he's just picturing all he'd like to do to the Senate in this moment, to their families, just like the families he watched die for nothing but the Senate's stupid human desires—
"We are masters of cruelty," Naesala says, grinding his palm into the edge of his (Imported Crimean Mahogany, he reminds himself, be gentle) desk to keep grounded. "It's the way of my kind, Duke Lekain. The Hawks are a proud people— if you slaughter all of them, you make martyrs. The army here will only fight harder. They'll get ideas about revenge. If you leave the women and children? You condemn them to a miserable, pathetic end. They will not be able to support themselves. They will starve."
His hands thud against the Imported Crimean Mahogany, and it cracks again cleanly down the same seam he made last time. He pretends not to notice, and lets his experience (his memories of the pact-plague at its worst) guide him.
"They'll rip one another apart for whatever scraps remain, and King Tibarn will be in two places at once. His heart will be with his people, worrying how to feed them, how to rebuild. It will not be on the battlefield, and it is then that you will lay him and their hope low."
This is a dangerous play, but there's a sort of genetic arrogance that comes with Senators specifically that makes Naesala think that this might just work. Hawks don't divide by gender, but beorc do. Hawks could do just fine for a while, with only women and children. He runs the numbers in his head like he's balancing the lean coffers of Kilvas.
Assuming the Laguz Alliance isn't slaughtered to the last, the population of Phoenicis will be able to rebuild with the returning army. That's a big if, of course, but… he's a hopeful sort of guy. Maybe he learned it when he was a fledgeling in Serenes, all that heron-song rubbing off on him.
He forces his face into a richtus sort of grin, which conveniently looks like he's come unhinged with hate for the Hawk tribe, and not at all like a man high on imagined victory.
Duke Lekain regards him blankly, coldly, and then that expression splits into something repulsive and ugly that Naesala knows to be his smile. "Despised by your fellow sub-humans, you turn against them. Humans do not behave the same way, of course, but even a broken clock may chime true twice a day."
Naesala wants to ask him where he was during the Mad King's War, but he already knows the answer. Best not to dwell on the proclivities of rich human perverts. Every time he says the royal title— King Kilvas— it drips with mockery. Let him mock—
Ah, he's still talking. Naesala forces himself back to the conversation.
"Why have the hawks eager to avenge, when they can mourn instead? So long as they still have something to lose, they will fall like pathetic dominoes. It will be so. Your counsel, King Kilvas, is as ever oh-so-helpful."
He extends a meaty hand, and Naesala takes it slowly so he doesn't snap the little bones in the human's hand. Duke Lekain looks at him for a moment, the same gaze he's seen on every Senator he's swindled before. The one where it's clear that they think he's the idiot. And then he is gone with a wave of his little Warp Staff, and the room is almost empty.
Naesala spends the afternoon resigning himself to his death, and will spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what to do when it doesn't come.
It is months later, and the world is stone, and he has mostly lied to Sanaki.
"You indeed are a good king to your people. I have no doubts of that," she says. She says something else, and he responds in kind, but all he can think is a simple correction. Naesala's not a good king.
Naesala is what's left.