Renato is the middle child of Ofrenia's founding house, born between an elder sister who was always going to rule and a younger brother everyone liked better. He inherited Sylke, the smallest and poorest of the three kingdoms, a strip of rough center-west country the other two never thought worth fighting over. By every reasonable measure that should have made him the least of the three siblings. Instead it made him the one the other two cannot do without.
The war between Tornia and Joswik is Renato's work, and he has spent the better part of two decades keeping it lit. His instruments are small and deniable. Sylke holds the only easy road across the island's waist, the western highway that crosses the river at Bridgeton under his palace windows, and he opens and closes it as the situation requires. When he needs the sea lanes to look dangerous, a Joswik grain convoy is raided in the Gulf of Joswik at exactly the wrong moment, or a Tornian factor's warehouse burns, and the blame settles wherever he has decided it should settle. Most useful of all, he sees the letters. His brother Edric has sought terms with their sister for years, and every envoy out of Padena bound for the north passes through Sylke, where the message that reaches Catalina is seldom the one that left.
A clerk's room above the Bridgeton bridge-gate, where the island's northbound post is sorted. Two copies are made of every Joswik letter, the true one for Renato's reading and a second, amended, for the road to Catalina. The originals are not burned. They are filed by year in a locked press against the western wall, because a man who manufactures a war likes to keep proof of how reasonable the other side kept being.
He does not want the war won. A victor would unify the island and make Sylke a province; a real peace would make Sylke irrelevant. What the kingdom needs is the present arrangement held exactly where it is, two armed neighbors who each believe the other is the aggressor, and one calm party in the middle who can still move goods, money, and word when nobody else can. Renato has made himself that party, and his price climbs every time the lanes go bad, which is precisely when he arranges for them to. Queen Alisandra is no one's victim in this. She wants the whole island under her throne and would take it tomorrow if she could. Renato simply makes certain that tomorrow never quite arrives.