A/N: This one was written for and published in the May 2006 edition of the Icefall 'zine, which Heidi and I took to Boston at a conference where we went to a writing workshop with Tamora Pierce. It was a lot of fun, and I really like this piece.
Disclaimer: The characters and situations here belong to Tamora Pierce. I don't own them; I just use them.

It was after an audience when Petranne found me. She'd spent the entire session fidgeting, playing with a doll she had little interest in and obviously wishing she were somewhere else. When I suggested to Pembery that her highness might be happier somewhere else, I discovered that Petranne had asked to go. "I have been minding her this long," she said, her professional pride wounded. "I wouldn't be so stupid as to make her sit through harvest reports."

"I know," I said. "I saw Dunevon through his audiences."

She looked stricken as she realised the stupidity of what she'd just said, and I wish she hadn't. I've been a soldier long enough to dislike a look of pity.

Such a little thing, Petranne--destined to be a petite and fine-boned lady, but only inches taller than (and it hurt to remember) her brother, though taller than the King. The dead King; there wasn't a King anymore, and not a Queen for another four months. His grandfather's crown lay on a pillar in the Gray Palace, amongst the litter of a conquering people's spoils. Dovasary was not above winning a few petty victories back for the raka.

"Can I show you something?"

She looked so anxious, and when I assented, so relieved, that it explained the mystery of her presence in Dove's court. She'd wanted to talk to me, and in her child's mind didn't realise that she only had to ask. She was clever, for all that she was only six, and knew that I would be at the same audience.

The 'something' was hidden outside the palace, by the stables. Petranne carefully knelt next to a bush--and unearthed a little wooden sword.

"It was Elsren's," she whispered anxiously as I knelt next to her. "I- I kept it, because he got to go on the boat and I didn't and I was so angry at him. I wanted to go. And then he d-died--" she stuttered, beginning to cry, "--and he'll never get it back." The next thing I knew there were little arms around my neck, and a little face pressed against my shoulder, and she was crying in the fashion of a child not yet trained to pretend that nothing hurts. "And I don't know what to do, and you g-gave it to him."

The little sword was the size of my dagger. The hilt was carefully painted in Balitang colours, and the blade's silver gilt was chipped on the edges and dirtied from its existence under the shrub. I resettled Petranne's weight, rubbing her back, taking a very odd comfort in letting a child cry. I'd forgotten--made myself forget--what that felt like.

But I was an adult, more than trained to pretend that nothing hurts.

"Here's what we'll do," I told Petranne when her howling stopped. "You know the Black God guards the Realms of the Dead, right?" She nodded dutifully, miraculously still ready to accept that a grown-up would have the answer. "Well, we'll go pray to the Black God, and he'll give the sword back to Elsren."

Her eyes went round. "He can do that?"

Somehow, I managed to smile. "He most certainly can. We'll throw it back into the sea, so Elsren will have his boat and his sword."

"I want to throw it myself!"

How I value the resiliency of children. "All right, then. You can."

Dove had the doubtless thrilling prospect of a private afternoon audience with a Carthaki bookseller, and short of an unprecedented offer of marriage on her side, I saw no problems. She went to tell her mother, and I went to prepare an escort.

She rode double behind me on our way into Rajmuat. "Why is everyone waving?" she asked.

"Because you're a princess. People like princesses."

She pondered for a moment. "Why am I a princess?"

"Because your cousin was a King," I said, "and your sister will be the Queen."

"And what will I be?"

Alas, the fate of younger children. "You'll be a princess."

"Oh."

What gave me the most hope for her was the look on her face when she put the sword on the altar and said, "I'm giving this to my brother Elsren. He didn't take it with him on the boat, and he might miss it."

That was that. Elsren was dead and gone to another place, and she admitted that she missed him sometimes and cried, and worried about him, because he was alone and didn't know the way. I paid the Black God's servants, and they blessed the sword and gave her a little paper lantern. "This will give your brother light to see by," the priest said kindly. "Then he'll see the way and won't get lost, and the Black God will see his light and find him."

She put her little hand in mine as she threw the sword and lantern off the pier, and suddenly burst into tears and shouted something incomprehensible to her brother off the pier.

The crowds were kind; a princess was mourning her brother, and it was nice for them to realise that the royals truly were human, after all.

Nobody realised that I still had Dunevon's coronet. One crown had drowned with the Rittevon, and they'd made another for him to be buried in. I had the tiny prince's coronet from Hazarin's coronation. Dunevon had worn it for the entire ceremony, and earned an entire regiment of toy soldiers from his nurse for it. After that, the coronet had been relegated to some treasure room or other.

After his death I stole it and kept it in a locked drawer of my desk.

When Petranne was back in Winnamine's sympathetic arms, and all my other work for the day was finished, I locked myself in my office and took out my only remnant of Dunevon.

In that place I didn't dare look at most of the time, I didn't truly believe Dunevon was dead. I'd burned prayers for him, lit candles for him, obediently said the words and held the banner and borne the place of honour in carrying his casket. All the rites and rituals by which I was supposed to grieve were over, and I'd opened the gates and bent knee to another monarch now. When I saw Dovasary on that horse descend out of the sky, when I'd talked to my lieutenants about Imajane and badly built ships, Dunevon was not a part of it. He'd gone away to a country estate, to school in Tyra, to the nursery, to the land of the dead, and I needed to keep an extra handkerchief in my pocket in case he got his face dirty.

I wrapped the coronet in my extra handkerchief and wondered how parents did this. He was such a little child; it seemed impossible.

"I'd like to thank you for what you did for Petranne."

Dove, over accounts of palace safety. I didn't know how to reply. Somehow she knew (it must be something about the Rittevon line; you can't say their women aren't intelligent), and she smiled. "She talks about Elsren now. Sometimes she says he's in the realm of the dead, but she says she plays with him. It's like he's invisible, or only she can see him. I think she's lonely."

We were starting to get each other's measure, and I knew that I could almost smile. "I wish I could do as much."

Elsren's sister looked out the window. "None of us know how to say goodbye."

In the Hall of Crowns, they keep a list of the kings of the isles on a wall. It's all copper inlaid on marble. They try to polish the names as much as they can, but with the summer being what it is, some of them had gained a layer of tarnish.

My king's name was no longer bright and untarnished. A few fingerprints had left black marks.

I think there must be a lifetime of agony in that wall. I had a sense of the isles, of the ground I stood on, drenched with blood and death and dying. I stood ten feet from the spot of King Randen's assassination in 278, twenty from a pillar commemorating an entire generation of royals from the early days of luarin rule, and three hundred feet outside was Dunevon's grave.

I could almost let go of him, that way. His death was one of so many, it was almost a tide I could let sweep him away.

A little more every day, I could stop pretending it didn't hurt. A little less every day, it hurt to think about him. I kept his coronet. Nobody knows I have it, now.

In some ways, I think adults are more like children than we like to admit. Neither Petranne, nor I, nor anyone else, know how to give those boys up completely.