Sael and the Priestess had been talking for about ten minutes.
Meraine Grenn was her name. Priestess of the Light, forty-three years of service. Wind elementalist, contract-bound. Blind for the past six years, which Sael noticed from the way her gaze settled about four inches left of wherever he was actually standing. The wind elemental compensated for this by shifting and chirping whenever anything moved nearby, acting as a sort of living proximity alert that also, apparently, sorted rubble.
She'd told him about the eastern hill, the sword in the stone, the tradition of kingship she claimed he was technically still bound by and he'd listened, processed the implications, and set the entire subject aside for later because he had a finite amount of things he could deal with at once and the list was already full.
Then she told him about her son.
She didn't build to it, or frame it, or soften the edges or do any of the things people usually did when delivering information that was going to change the shape of a conversation. She just said it, the way she'd said everything else.
"The man the people are mourning," she said. "That was my son. Fassel. He was the steward in your stead."
...There was a silence after her words, though it wasn't awkward. Mostly heavy. It settled between them on the bench and didn't apologize for taking up room.
I'm sorry for your loss.
The words assembled themselves in his head automatically, the way a reflex worked. Someone tells you a person is dead. You say this. That's how it goes. Those five words, in that exact order, with a slight downward tilt of the head if you want to really commit to the delivery.
Sael knew those words very well. He'd been on the receiving end of them more times than he cared to count, starting after the war, when the people he'd spent years fighting beside had died.
Then after Eirlys' death, then Bran, then Koreth. Each time, dignitaries came at the funerals. They clasped Sael's hand with both of theirs and tilted their heads at the correct angle and said, I'm sorry for your loss.
And Sael had always stood there thinking: Why are you sorry? You didn't do anything. You weren't there. You didn't know them.
After that, Sael stopped going to funerals, even for his apprentices.
It wasn't the grief that drove him away. Grief he could manage, or at least survive, which amounted to the same thing if you didn't look too closely. It was the words. Those particular words. He'd developed a reaction to them the way some people developed reactions to certain foods: deeply unpleasant and best avoided entirely.
Every time someone said I'm sorry for your loss, something in his chest sealed shut. A door closing on any possibility that the person speaking might actually reach the thing the grief was made of.
So he'd made a decision, at some point, that if he ever had to stand on the other side of that exchange — if he ever had to be the person saying something to someone whose world had just contracted by one irreplaceable person — he would not say those five words.
He'd never really worked out what to say instead.
This was the flaw in the plan, and it was making itself known right now, just like it did when that little girl lost her mother earlier today.
Meraine waited. She was good at it. Decades of priesthood, Sael imagined, taught you that the useful parts of a conversation often happened in the gaps between the talking.
"...Your son walked out through those gates alone," Sael said. "To fight someone he knew he couldn't beat."
Her hands, resting on a chunk of marble in her lap, went still. Sael recognized the piece. It was part of the statue's jaw. His jaw, technically, though the sculptor had been generous with the chin.
"I've known soldiers who wouldn't do that," he continued. "People with more power than your son had by a very wide margin, who looked at those odds and found somewhere else to be. I think there's nothing wrong with that, self-preservation is a perfectly reasonable instinct."
He realized, about a sentence too late, that this could sound like the opposite of what he meant. Most people wouldn't do what your son did was not, on reflection, the most obviously comforting thing to say to someone whose son had just died doing it. He glanced at her, but she was just looking out toward the horizon, smiling faintly, which didn't tell him much one way or the other.
"What your son did wasn't self-preservation," Sael said. "It was the opposite of that. He chose the city over himself, and he did it knowing how it would end."
He stopped. Then, quieter:
"That isn't something most people can do. Even the ones who think they can."
Meraine's expression didn't change for a long time. Her fingers stayed still on the marble jaw. The wind elemental on her shoulder had settled into a compact shape, barely moving, as if it too was listening.
Then the corners of her mouth shifted, and her smile widened ever so slightly.
"He would have been mortified," she said. "Fassel practiced his speeches in front of a mirror. His hands shook every time. He told me once that he didn't understand how the old stewards did it, the composure, the certainty. He said he felt like he was pretending to be someone braver than he actually was."
Her fingers moved again, tracing the marble edge.
"But he did his duty," she said. "When the time came, he knew what was asked, and he did it. That is more than most can claim."
She said it plainly, like it was just a fact. Her son had done his job. The job had killed him. Those two things were both true, and she was holding them together without letting either one cancel the other out.
"It is quite alright," she said.
Sael looked at her and thought about what he'd done the first time he lost someone close to him. And the second time. And the third.
Each loss was supposed to teach him something about the next one. That was the theory. You got better at carrying weight the more weight you carried. Except the theory was wrong, and Sael had proved it wrong thoroughly and repeatedly over several centuries. It didn't get easier, to be honest, just worse. Each loss compounded the ones before it, and the accumulated weight didn't spread out over time the way everyone promised it would. It stacked.
Meraine Grenn had lost her son today, and she was sitting here sorting marble.
"You're taking this far better than I would," Sael said.
The words left his mouth about half a second before the part of his brain responsible for social calibration caught up and informed him that telling a grieving mother she was doing grief well was perhaps not the most sensitive possible contribution to this conversation. But the words were already out, and they were true, and he found that he didn't regret them, because they were true in a way that mattered to him specifically.
Meraine turned her head toward him.
"Is that so?"
"Yes," he said. He looked down at his hands, noticed they were still dirty from the field outside Darransh, and clasped them together. "I've lost people. Quite a lot of people, over a very long time. And every time, I handled it badly. Every single time." He paused. "Worse each time, actually. Which shouldn't be how it works. You'd think repetition would help, but in my case, it did not."
The woman was watching him. He could feel her attention even though it made no sense, and he didn't know what to do with that awareness, so he let his gaze settle on the fountain instead.
"There was no wisdom," he said. "Just the same collapse, over and over. And eventually I decided the problem wasn't how I was grieving, but that I kept putting myself in a position where grief could reach me... so I stopped."
He didn't say I stopped caring about people. That wasn't quite it. He'd stopped letting himself be close enough that losing someone could take apart the architecture of his daily life. Which amounted to roughly the same thing, but felt different on the inside.
"Which meant being alone," he said. "For a long time."
Meraine hadn't interrupted. She sat with her hands on the marble, her head still turned toward him, listening.
"So I'm asking," Sael said. He turned to face her. "I... I would genuinely like to know. Because I have spent longer than anyone should reasonably need on this, and I still haven't found the answer."
He leaned forward, slightly.
"How?"
Meraine didn't answer right away. She sat with it, turning the marble over in her hands, and Sael thought for a moment that she might not answer at all.
"I think you've been treating it like something you should be able to solve," she said. "Like there's a correct way to grieve, and you kept getting it wrong, and if you could just find the method — the trick — you'd be able to do it properly the next time." She shook her head, slightly. "There isn't one. There's no trick. You just lose someone, and it's terrible, and you keep going because the alternative is to stop, and stopping helps no one."
"That's what I did," Sael said. "Kept going."
"No, you left. That's different. You kept going in the sense that you were still alive but you removed yourself from everything that might cost you something. That's not the same thing." She said it gently, but she said it. "You can't outrun grief by making sure there's nothing left to grieve."
Sael didn't have an immediate response to that.
He wanted to argue with it, but the problem with arguing against something true was that you could hear yourself doing it, and it sounded exactly the way it should: unconvincing.
"I miss my son," Meraine said. "I will miss him tomorrow, and the day after that, and I expect I'll miss him for whatever remains of my life. But I don't believe he's gone. Not truly. I think he's simply somewhere else now, somewhere I can't follow yet, and if I'm right about that — even partially — then what I'm feeling isn't loss, but distance."
Sael studied her for a moment.
Here was the thing about death, as Sael had come to understand it over a very long stretch of years and a very long list of people who weren't around anymore: it was final. That was the whole of it. You lived, for however long you lived, and then you stopped, and your body went back to the ground and became part of whatever came next in the biological sense. The person you were — the thoughts, the habits, the particular way you laughed or held a cup or got annoyed at small things — that was gone. It didn't go somewhere, it just stopped.
He'd spent a long time, early on, hoping that wasn't true. After Eirlys, especially. He'd wanted very badly for there to be some continuation, some place where the people he'd lost were still going about their business in some form he couldn't see.
And he'd looked into it, read what there was to read, asked the people who claimed to know. And none of them could show him anything. Not one.
They could tell him what they believed, what their traditions taught, and they could describe in great detail the places they thought the dead went, but when he asked them how they knew — not how they felt, nor what they hoped, but how they knew — the conversation always arrived at the same place, which was that they didn't.
They believed, and belief, in Sael's experience, was just a word people used when they were certain about something they couldn't demonstrate.
So he'd stopped looking. And he'd arrived, slowly and without much fanfare, at something that wasn't really a philosophy so much as an observation: you lived the best you could, and then you died, and the only part of you that continued in any meaningful way was whatever the people who knew you chose to remember. That was your afterlife. A space in someone else's head, shrinking a little more each year, until eventually the last person who remembered you died too and then it was done.
It wasn't a comforting conclusion. He hadn't arrived at it because it made him feel better, but it was the only one he couldn't argue himself out of.
Which made listening to Meraine talk about her dead son being somewhere else difficult in a way he hadn't expected. Not because he thought she was wrong (he did think she was wrong), but that wasn't the difficult part. The difficult part was that she clearly wasn't lying to herself. She meant it.
"And if you're wrong?" he said.
"Then I'm a blind woman sitting on a bench talking to a very old king about things neither of us can prove, and at least one of us felt better for a while."
He almost smiled at that.
"But you do believe it," he said. "Genuinely. This isn't just... a thing you've told yourself enough times that it started to feel true."
"I'm a priestess, my king. I've served the Light for forty-three years. If I didn't believe the dead went somewhere, I'd have picked a different career."
"Belief isn't the same as knowing."
"No," she agreed. "It isn't. But I've stood in places where the boundary between this world and whatever lies beyond it felt very thin, and I have felt things there that I cannot explain to you in a way that would satisfy whatever standard of proof you're looking for. I believe souls are real. I believe they go somewhere. I cannot show you a soul in a jar and point to it and say there, look, but I don't think that makes me wrong. It just makes it hard to argue about at dinner."
Sael leaned back on the bench.
"Then where do they go?"
He did not want to break her comfort, but his curiosity got the best of him.
"There's a teaching in the faith. Older than the temple and most of the traditions it absorbed along the way. It says that between the worlds of the Primordials — between all the worlds, really — there's a kind of passage. It is not a place you can walk to or find on a map. It's something in between. The Path of Souls, we call it."
She paused for a moment.
"When someone dies, their soul enters the Path. It moves through it, toward whatever comes next, another world, another life, we don't know exactly. The Primordials themselves use it to move between their domains, though for them it's something different, something they can navigate by will. For the dead, it's a crossing. You enter on one side, and you come out somewhere else, and the living can't follow."
"...And you think Fassel is there?"
"I think he's already through it," she said. "I think he's in some world I'll never see, doing something I can't imagine, and I think when my time comes I'll walk the same Path and find out where it leads." She ran her thumb along the edge of the marble. "I could be wrong. I've been wrong about things before. But this is what I believe, and I did not come to it because it was easy."
"The Path of Souls..." Sael said, quietly.
Meraine's fingers paused on the marble.
"That is not something I should have shared so freely," she said. "The Path is kept among those who serve the Light. It is not spoken of to outsiders, and even among us, most acolytes don't learn of it until well into their service."
"Why keep it secret?"
"Because people would look for it," she said, simply. "If it were widely known that a passage existed between worlds, someone would try to use it to reach the domains of the Primordials, or other worlds entirely to follow their dead. And when people who have no business crossing between worlds attempt to do so, the results are never small and never contained to the person responsible."
Sael opened his mouth — the beginning of an objection forming, something about how suppressing knowledge had never actually prevented its misuse — and then stopped.
Because he was thinking about Bran. Bran had never said how exactly he arrived here because he didn't know. He'd woken up as an infant in the royal house of Münso with no memory of crossing, no sense of transition. Just a life that began in one world and continued in another, with a gap he couldn't account for.
Sael had always assumed it was magic. Some form of translocation, a summoning gone sideways, something operating at a scale large enough to move a person between worlds without their knowledge or consent. He'd filed it away and never revisited it.
He had never once considered that Bran's soul might have walked the Path.
He drew a breath. A sharp one, sharper than he intended, and Meraine smiled.
"I heard that," she said. "That sounded very much like something clicking into place. Did you just have an epiphany, your highness?"
Sael sat with it for a moment, turning it over the way she'd been turning the marble.
"This Path of Souls," he said. "Would you let me learn more about it?"
Meraine didn't answer immediately, which he took as a sign she was at least considering it rather than dismissing it outright.
"Even setting aside the question of souls," Sael continued, "the Corruption that almost destroyed your city is from a Primordial trying to enter this world. If the Path is how things cross between worlds — if that's the mechanism — then understanding how it works might be the only way to close the door before the thing on the other side finishes walking through it."