The Widow and the King

by John Dickinson

[Ambrose] could see, through a square window behind the Widow's chair, the brown lines of hills he had travelled to come here. Out there were the comfortless places where barns stood ruined and fields all run to seed. That was where he had seen his mother fall, crumpling under the blow at the clifftop. That was where Wastelands was going, where enemies still roamed with steel in their hands. The walls between there and here were deep, hard stone. He could measure the casement of the window with his eye. The depth of it was longer than his arm's reach -- maybe twice as long. And now these people had taken his name, and put it beyond the walls with all the rest.

They had made him into someone else. He could still feel his sadness, but it had moved a little further from him.

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They were pulling her away, murmuring in her ear. [Sophia] let herself be pulled, because she had no strength to stay. She could not see. There was something wrong with her eyes. She put up her arm to wipe them, and found they were stinging with tears.

We've gone wrong, she thought. We made a mistake. Can't we go back to where we were? Can't we make a little change, so that he could be alive again?

And now the world crumbled, silently. Its floor gave way in a pouring of dust and left her hanging in its void -- empty colors, empty flowers, empty sky. Faces that came and went and spoke without meaning. Her eyes blinked, and opened again, and the colors were still there. A bee the color of soot rattled lightly among the thorn flowers a yard away. And none of it was worth anything any more, because Chawlin would never be again.

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And what was that, away to his right where the cleft opened into a broader valley? At first he thought it must be a boulder, strangely shaped, but otherwise the same as any in that land. Then he wondered if it was an old man, sitting in a cloak and hood with his back to them. But it did not have a hood.

He could see what he thought was long, dark hair falling to the figure's waist as it sat. He supposed it must be a woman. It seemed to be weeping.

"Don't look," came the word down the column of armed men. "Orcrim says, don't look."

Ambrose looked, and kept on looking as they straggled past.

It was impossible to guess how large she was, or how far away. At one moment he thought she must be no taller than his own mother, sitting at a distance of a hundred paces from them. The next he imagined himself walking and walking towards her, mile after mile and watching her grow as he approached until she was the size of a mountain. And whichever way he walked around her, she would always have her back to him.

And she would never see him. And she would never listen. And she would never, ever, cease from weeping.

"Don't look," said Hob.

Weeping, weeping. A lost child, and all the loss of all the world. Mar and Develin and Bay. Aunt Evalia, dead with her arms around him. And Adam diManey. And he must make peace with the killer.

"Don't stop," said Hob urgently, beside him.

He had made peace. Why?

Because he must. Because if he did not, he must make a corner in his heart that would be like that, like that. That endless rage and weeping.

He looked at the creature that was Beyah. He could hear her: that unending cry that shook the world. But it did not shake his heart. He had made his peace. He would hold to his purpose.