He had to remember that Moladians were too prim and proper to tolerate the customs and driving forces that rode the Nanruan blooded like himself. He had to remember that insults here were common and they meant nothing to those who would do the insulting. He forgot that Moladian wolves had no honor - worried more about saving face or some other such nonsense. He had grown up where insults were met with teeth and claws and brute force. He had grown up where family was more important than your own blood - than pretending to a people who should have followed with loyalty and the promise of their teeth and claws to match yours in your battles. Here there was no honor - only whispered lies and plotting and silly notions of loyalty that spoke nothing to the fealty that was owed to an Alpha. Does that mean that fealty or benefits were not returned for that owed fealty? No. Does that make followers any less necessary and beneficial to the Alpha's cause? No. But there was a purpose to being a leader - and that was to have a vision and a goal and a code by which they could follow.

               One such code that lived in the very core of Weylin's being was not to pretend, not to surprise his people with an explosion of rage that could not be predicted. They had seen him fester, seen him fume, seen him rot from the inside out over the damage that was done to his kin by both murderer and idle onlookers. Perhaps they had not truly seen the act - but this proclaimed land of assassins was more concerned for clever manipulation than providing justice for the family of the one wronged or if we must split hairs - vengeance for those left behind. Another excuse, over and over and over, was that she was too pregnant. Too pregnant to command that the doer be brought to Diveen so that her justice could be exacted at her convenience? He had seen those pregnant with litters of six or seven that could still part their maw to issue commands - that could still call for the incarceration of a foe who had not only stolen past their defenses, of a foe who would kill the soul of a Queen.

               His malcontent over being overlooked was warranted. If he was to have greeted anyone else before a ruler, it would be to make it clear that the most respected wolf in the company was not the ruler but the one addressed. It is no jump of logic - except for the daft or air headed - that he sees insult in those who he holds responsible for the failing of his family -- when now not only do they fail Finley's deserved justice, but then disrespect him. The angels and assassins alike seemed more worried about being able to decide what was and was not appropriate than to respect their equal - no matter that the 'equal' in question was blinded by a righteous feeling of rage. Does a blind king still not deserve the respect his title affords him - just as a Queen who fails her soul has a right to be angry that said king oversteps his bounds in her own eyes. She failed him, he failed her. They failed and neither had taken a moment to see their faults before laying the fault of others at their feet.

               Just because Kane and Isola are of the same mind - that somehow either of them are better than the man who has lost his brother first to a woman who snubbed the tether of her imprint and then to the teeth of a murderer who had had months to gloat and do to his body what disgrace she had seen fit - does not make Weylin any less right to call them on their failings when it concerned him and his own kin. If he had let Sinopa die, would Kane not toss heaven and hell into disarray if Weylin did nothing for months - not even so much as to call his able bodied men and women to take captive the wretch who had done it? Would he not have displayed the same unrestrained distress as Weylin did now? Oh, perhaps not. His love for Isola superceded the righteous imprinting on the girl - so that was probably the last thing a 'perfect, reserved, cool minded' assassin-born would do. Weylin would be guiltless as he sat idle.

               Yet the interference that he had made in taking Sinopa from her captors without consideration to the undermining that would do to Glorall's standing with Iromar said that would not be so. For all that their eyes - as Kane also exposes himself (and yes, he was backed to a river with the wind of Diveen facing him - as spoken before - so he would indeed have smelled him) - say that he is somehow something to look down upon in scorn, he does not budge. Insult upon insult upon failing and not an ounce of apology is offered. No acknowledgment that the situation had been handled anything but appropriately. Instead he stands alone in his pain - and it does nothing to assuage the anger he felt.

               Her voice is pitying and condescending and immediately that sets his hackles to itching - though he refuses again to let them rise. She says that he does not understand and yet she is decidedly blind to what he has spoken as much. She thinks she does him a service for not retaliating - that somehow she offers respect in how she coddles and pats his head like a silly child. She thinks she does him some great honor and waves aside the very plain solutions to her 'pregnancy' and the fact that she was selfish to have not seen beyond her own nose in Finley's justice. He sits up as she says that he dishonored himself in being only what he was plainly in his heart. A man who was done wrong, a king whose brother was left to rot in the mire of Iromar for the tender sensibilities of a woman who could not do right by her soul for her own selfish need to do it with her own - obviously incapable hands.

               She says that he owes her respect and that is where the hot fire in his eyes simmers - beginning to see that there was most certainly a difference in culture. “You would have be be false to you...” And truly he sounds bemused. It is not a voice that said she was the fool - which is what he thought of anyone who would have him lie to their faces about his heart and what burned in his blood. “I will lie for you, Queen of Diveen - if that is what your people seek in their Alphas... But know that it will not change the matter of which I spoke - nor the facts that lay within them - which you have called 'nothing'.” And while his voice is hard, it is obvious how he reigns in the part of himself they seemed to think was too hard to see as honest - or fact. If they wanted lies, he could try and produce them lies to satisfy their silly games and equally silly sensibilities. They are like the old and infirm, coddled for their infirmity against violence or honest and blunt truth.

               He grows silent while she explains her reasoning and excuses for the disdain and condescending eyes of both herself and her mate. He tries to see their side, tries to see what it is that led a people who supposedly held such high regard for heavenly virtues and yet could not bare to face truth - the greatest of all virtues. When she explains that a personal matter as private and deep as Finley was not a matter to be shared he looks to Selene with a sudden, dawning look of surprise. It does not occur to the Nanruan that the pack was not One. That the pack's Alpha was not One being but forced to become two. That in some way he can honestly understand what it is that Isola is saying -- and yet he hates it. He hates the notion that somehow the people who claimed to love and follow him would not follow him but a shade, a shadow, a ghost of who he was in truth. He hates the idea that somehow the wolves of a pack would be so selfish as to see any one wolf's hardship as more or less than another. Had he not kept Glorall from war because he knew that while Finley was his trouble - the other wolves ought to be given the choice to follow him in his vengeance? That he sends Natalya to do the deed because she has equal share in wrongs done by the wolf Jaidah? He drags no one to war for him, just as he would not drag Glorall mindlessly to war for himself.... Diveen? Diveen seems to think that the issues of the people weigh more on the scale of wrongs - that the whole of Diveen ought be brought to bear on the doorstep of the Iromarian's for the sake of a theft and yet leave well be the woman of that same place who had committed murder?

               It is nonsense and yet he sees how much of what he spoke was too much by the laws of their conduct. “I do not understand this need to be other than what you are - nor that your people would be so cruel to ask you to do so... But I did not know this to be your way and I have done you an injustice for not thinking of why you and your mate looked at me as though I was the one who had done wrong.” He closes his eyes and sighs, irritation both at himself and at Diveen forcing him to be something other than 'Weylin' released in that single breath. “I do not take away the insult that my own people say it is for a brother to be killed and left to rot within the reeds and muck of a foreign place - nor do I say that my anger is not placed right by the ways of my people...” He qualifies because the fact was that he still felt these things and he thought it was not wise for Diveen to presume he did not still feel slighted by their failure to he and his family. “But I have, as you say, spoken of things that are personal in a way that did not consider your ways, either.I owe you a debt for this wrong I have done and you may choose in what way this debt may be paid.” He bows his head, and though it is a concession - he does not remain bowed.

               “Dragon blood does not chill easily and runs only hotter for the blood that mingles there - I do not know what you know of Nanrua or it's people - if Finley spoke to you of our youth and mothers and mothers families... But it is no simple task to ask them to hold back who they are, what they feel. To hold back is to flirt with much more dangerous results than angry words. Spite is bred this way - as it was bred in me against Diveen while my Uncle did nothing, while I perceived you did nothing. I could not speak because peace is the staple of my Uncle's life and what I felt held no patience for peace.” He is settling more into this false Weylin better, playacting and miming the royal pair before him with eerie accuracy. He chooses Isola's less insulting face, for with them already quite insulted with him being no less than honest - he cannot imagine they would appreciate the face of Kane when turned on them. He adopts the settled nature of her posture as well and speaks a little more softly as she did. “That Angel's blood runs softer means we may find fault in one another for things that are simply our own nature. I do not pretend for my people, though in your words you protect yourself and your people this way. As I am, here, a guest... I will try better to suit your own... culture.”

               “Would you have me leave, to let our insults soothe, or acknowledging that I have already spoken to the dispatch of our mutual solution... Do we speak how to better understand and interact between our peoples - so neither is so insulted in the future?”And then he looks directly upon Kane - “And learn better than to interfere in the affairs of one another without consideration as to how that affects our peoples?” Oh no, even in his anger in the death of Finley, he has not forgotten that Kane undermined him and Glorall's very pack in acting without thought and doing in secret what Weylin was willing to do in open ways that suited Glorall far better.