This is rank self-pity, I said to myself, blinking tears away from my burning eyes. Really, Celehar. But the weight of grief would not be denied, self-pity or otherwise, and it was some uncounted length of time before I was able to start walking again.

The Grief of Stones was the shipwreck in Iäna’s opera, and I felt like a shipwreck, weighted too heavily with grief to stay afloat. Moreover, I knew the old wonder-tale from which the phrase came. To win the hand of the princess, the young man had to do three increasingly impossible things, the last of which was to learn the grief of stones. He went to the castle’s great defensive wall at midnight and dripped three drops of his own blood on a stone of the foundation.

The grief of the stones was grief for every man killed in the building of the wall, for every man who died defending or attacking, for every man executed by being thrown off the battlements. “But those are our worst criminals!” the king protests, and the young man says, “That doesn’t matter to the stones.”

There were different endings to the story. In one, the young man marries the princess and becomes the most just and merciful king in the history of the kingdom. In another, the young man refuses the hand of the princess, for learning the grief of the stones has made him think twice about his ambition, and instead becomes a prelate of Ulis.

That was a little too close to the bone. I stopped and evened out my breathing again. It was no use denying the grief I felt for the loss of my ability, an ability I’d thought about no more than I thought about the use of my hands, and it was not a grief I could chide myself out of like a spoilt child denied a treat. The loss was real.

I kept walking and gradually felt a sort of equilibrium returning, as if I’d shed some measure of the weight simply by acknowledging it was there. It was not, after all, so heavy that I could not carry it, and while it was unwise to hope the damage might miraculously be repaired, it was also unwise to forget that I had thought myself destroyed once before and been wrong.

I was surprised to reach the middle of the maze. I took a pebble from the bowl of tokens and put it in my inner waistcoat pocket with the token I’d found in Tedoro’s clothes and still did not know the meaning of.

And I probably never would know its significance, for I could not ask Tedoro. She was dead and I was deafened.

I walked the second half of the maze more mindfully, aware now of the cold, of the broad sweep of the cornfield around me, of every careful twisting step of my path. Nothing was resolved or changed, and the memory of the revethavar still waited, like the ogre in another old wonder-tale, but acknowledging my grief made it easier to bear, now that I was not wasting strength on denying it.