Rashaan is King of Kabir at fifty-two, and unlike the other monarchs of the Council of Four Flames he did not so much inherit a throne as earn one. He rose through Kabir's great merchant houses, the trading families who hold the kingdom's real wealth, and he governs the way they trade: by leverage and the long calculation of what a thing will be worth later.
His argument to the Council is consistent and unpopular. The Neferati will not take Tarkhon back with armies they cannot afford to lose. They will take it back the way Kabir takes anything, by making themselves indispensable and waiting for the day the throne needs Kabiri money more than Kabir needs the throne. Khalira calls this collaboration. Rashaan calls it the only kind of power that lasts.
He is not soft on the Severance, whatever Wadiyah says of him. He believes the Evertorch is Neferati fire and that Tarkhon stole it. He simply will not set his kingdom's harbors and counting-houses alight to prove a point he expects to win by patience and coin. The merchant houses that raised him agree, which is the closest thing to a guarantee his policy has.