I acknowledged the old weight of grief for Evru and set it aside. Grief for the stone-faced Marquess Ulzhavel and for his wife and their love that had lasted fifty years only to be destroyed by a foolish and desperate panic. Grief for Tedoro, who had come so close to freeing herself from Osmin Temin. Grief for Isreän and for Merrem Pel-Venna’s stillborn child. Grief weighted upon grief like a pile of stones and at the bottom, a stone with a flaying edge, the unceasing grief for myself, a Witness for the Dead who could no longer witness.

I had thought my calling lost once before and been wrong, but I could not count on being wrong twice. Ulis was not a god of miracles.

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.