Taoinor is the uncle of the king he is accused of killing. He is old, even for an elf, old enough that he had stopped expecting anything of his life beyond a respected elder's quiet, and when Istor XXVI died without a settled heir Taoinor was the nearest thing the western holdings had to a steady hand. He took them. He took the ancestral capital at Svedlind, the sacred Whitewood, the cursed length of Murder Creek, and the claim that the throne had passed to him rather than to a king's daughter who had no precedent on her side. None of this required him to murder anyone. All of it looks exactly like the work of a man who would.
That is the trap he lives in, and he knows it is a trap. He is a Traditionalist by conviction and not merely by faction. He has forbidden the cutting of the Whitewood even as his soldiers' equipment wears out around them, because the forest is the ancestors and the ancestors are not kindling, and the decision is costing him a war he might otherwise fight better. A man that careful of the old pieties is not an obvious poisoner of kings. But he is also a man who moved fast and certainly to seize half a realm the moment its king was cold, and the second fact drowns the first every time he tries to be heard. He cannot plead innocence of the murder without standing on the half-kingdom he stole, and the kingdom is the only thing his accusers need to see.
He governs from the island palace at Svedlind, in the seat where Istor died, and he governs by not deciding. His court calls it vacillation, and from the inside it is: he hears the hawks who want to push east and the doves who want terms, and he commits to neither and reverses what he does commit to, and everyone around him is exhausted by it. There may be a logic underneath. A prince who never quite chooses can never quite be blamed for the choice, and a man already condemned for one thing he did not do has reason to be careful about owning anything else. He is not certain he wanted the throne. He is entirely certain he will be killed for it, and he has settled into ruling like a man waiting for the verdict rather than appealing it.
I did not kill my nephew. I will say it once more and then no more, because I have learned what saying it buys. Each time the words leave me, the listener looks at Svedlind, at the chair I sit in, at the half a kingdom in my hand, and the words mean less than they did. Guilt I can deny. The chair I cannot give back. — attributed to Prince Taoinor, late in the war