The rebel

The cell

He appears first without a name — part of the small Terrasen rebel cell in Rifthold that intercepts and confronts Chaol Westfall. A lord of a kingdom that no longer exists, running a resistance out of the capital of the empire that took it. He works with his grandfather Murtaugh throughout, and they meet Aedion at the docks to talk about rallying what is left of Terrasen's scattered court. It is not a glamorous rebellion. It is two men and a list of names.

The opium parlour

The king's new soldiers ambush him in Rifthold — the Valg-ridden ones nobody has explained yet — and he arrives at a rebel meeting badly wounded. They hide him in an opium parlour in the slums, where Murtaugh stitches him up. On a rooftop afterwards he and Aedion talk about the towers of Noll and Amaroth, about what happened to magic, and about whether any of this is working.

Sorscha

His contact inside the glass castle is Sorscha, the healer. When she is executed and Aedion is captured, Ren makes the alliance he had spent the whole book avoiding, and works with Chaol Westfall. Later, when Aelin comes back to Rifthold, she finds Ren living in her old warehouse apartment — the hideout she used when she was somebody else. He had no idea whose it was.

Orynth

He travels from Orynth with Murtaugh and Lord Weylan Darrow to meet Aelin and her court at an inn, and watches the lords refuse her claim to her own throne. He is there anyway when it matters. At the frozen Lanis River his archers hold while the Fae mages shatter the ice under Morath's advance. And on the walls of Orynth, with a Valg prince already swinging at a wounded Aedion Ashryver, Ren is the one who gets there first. He survives the war. Kingdom of Ash gives him no epilogue, which is its own kind of ending: he is simply still alive at the end of it.