"Everything, like allegiances and peoples' natures?" asked Cain. "What taint? Movement?"

If it were enough of an upset to cause such social unrest, he had very little doubt that hings would take a long time to repair. When an issue was made personal, it was almost impossible to disentangle it from the larger picture and make the clean break... to mix his metaphors, anyway. He had been dropped in the middle of an enormous clusterfuck and there was only so much care Cain could give at any one time. These weren't his people by anything but a tenuous association and yet he was going to be relying on them for support in a war he had no business fighting. Much as he wished to be hands-off about it... he would probably need to get in and get dirty sooner rather than later. Ugh.