#I mean. I understand that the Doylist reason is: we need Kell in WL so the Danes plot can happen

[ravencromwell]

Current Shades Of Magic question haunting me: was Maxim Maresh working a deal with the Danes to make something comparable to an Inheritor for Rhy? (And by "working", I mean: he thought he was being real savvy while the Danes lied through their teeth for years and kept the credulous arnesian king on a fish-hook while they figured out how to rip a hole through time and space.)We know Tieren flatly refused to help him make one, and that Makt is highly skilled in binding magic. And Maxim's entire White London dynamic, especially in Darker Shade, never made a bit of fucking sense to me. Take, as exhibit 1: "Holland delivered a letter yesterday," explained the king. "But couldn't stay to collect the response. I told him I would send it back with you. Kell frowned. "All is well, I hope," he said carefully. He rarely knew the contents of the royal messages he carried, but he could usually glean the tone—the correspondences with Grey London had devolved to mere formality, the cities having little in common, while the dialogue with White was constant and involved and left a furrow in the king's brow." In scrupulous fairness, Schwab does give us an explanation for the involved nature of the letters, saying that the Red Crown was haunted by its decision to seal the doors between Red and White; that they wanted to provide magical advice as a kind of recompense and reparations. But we're also provided a very plausible explanation for how Vitari helps Lila move through the worlds, which gets very undermined by Lila as Antari. And living in the midst of the most nakedly imperial power of our modern age, I'm incredulous at best and scoffingly dubious at worst. With some very! rare exceptions, large, prosperous countries give small struggling ones shit either to look good, or because they want something out of the exchange.

Was it being _haunted that made Maxim Maresh send twelve-year-old Kell into the middle of a very violent country? Or was it _knowing by that time that Rhy most likely wouldn't be manifesting any magic. Kell says to Vortalis that this will be the beginning of "re-opening relations". Which makes sense, seeing as Antari are a dying breed, and Arnes hasn't had one for a while and Makt for even longer. It's not Maxim's bad parenting in sending Kell to White so young that has my antennae raising, but the bad diplomacy. Maxim's Kell flaw, after all, is that he sees him more as a political and propaganda tool than a person. And he's letting him go to Makt at twelve? When Kell could die, and a large reason Faro and Vesk are in line right then is because they believe Kell is integral to Arnes strength. I don't believe Maxim Maresh, who had the political cool to immediately think of how Faro and Vesk would react and demand secrecy about Rhy's near-death in Conjuring while everyone else is in knots of grief and he must be pushing down his own feelings with herculean effort decided to resume communications to salve his conscience. It just doesn't fit with the rest of who he is as king.

But, as several people wonder when Tieren chastises Maxim over the Inheritor: what wouldn't a father do for his son? Put his other son in jeopardy, if he thought he could make an attractive enough offer to get a (probably) ruthless king of a ruthless people to make him something? It would certainly line up with what he does throughout the series.

Finally: Maxim is adamant that "The Danes will pay" before he learns they're dead. Except seriously? How, Maxim? You planning to send the Antari who they already used as a pawn back as a one man army? Because no one else is going through.

Maxim Maresh, for all his faults, is too good a soldier to send Kell into that battle. So, either he's just blowing off steam and the threat has no teeth, or the threat has vicious teeth. Because the Crown has been sending the Danes advice: maybe instructions on relatively—to Arnesian thinking—small elemental magics like minor water redirection that have become integral to Makt's irrigation under the Danes, or something else entirely. There are a million little ways the Crown could've been helping; the question is _why. Why, in Darker, did Maxim, a a busy man, concoct a thick response within a day and send his best weapon into a violent place _after _dark when it could have waited till morning. Feels to me like a man hurriedly running after something the Danes are always "close to finishing" and that he wants, very, very much.