A Novel
"Even the purest soul can be corrupted by power. Even the strongest tree can be hollowed from within."
Prologue: The Half-Withered Tree
There is a tree at the edge of the village of Aldenmere that no one planted and no one tends. It simply grew, as things in this world tend to do — quietly, without permission, reaching toward whatever light it could find.
Arthur stood before it in the grey morning light, his breath curling like smoke in the autumn cold. He was thirty-four years old, though some days he felt ancient, and other days he felt like the boy he used to be — the boy who had carved his name into this very bark with a stolen kitchen knife while his mother scolded him from the doorway of their cottage.
Half the tree was dying. On the left side, the bark had turned grey and peeling, the branches reaching nowhere, holding only dead air. But on the right — on the right side, there were still leaves. Amber and gold and trembling in the wind. Still alive. Still trying.
Arthur thought: this tree is like life.
He had seen trees all his life — had watched this particular tree since childhood — and what struck him was how a tree simply endured. Drought came, and it cracked. Storms bent it nearly double. Ice coated its branches until they snapped. Yet it did not uproot itself in protest. It did not curse the sky. It simply endured, and grew, and when spring returned, it gave. It gave shade without being asked. It gave fruit without expectation. It gave leaves that fell and became the earth that fed its own roots. A tree was selfless in a way no man could ever truly be.
People, Arthur had come to understand, were different. People grew. People endured hardship. Some even bore fruit — kindness, wisdom, courage — and gave it freely. But most, if he was being honest with himself — and standing before a half-dead tree in the cold dawn seemed like the right moment for honesty — most people grew their fruit and clutched it tight. They counted it. They traded it. They hoarded it against the winter of other men's need.
A tree did not have the capacity for selfishness. That was both its limitation and its grace.
Arthur reached out and pressed his palm against the bark. The living side. It was rough and steady and cool under his hand, and for a moment he remembered being ten years old and doing exactly this. His father had stood beside him then, a broad quiet man who smelled of sawdust and rain.
'It's sick,' the young Arthur had said, pointing at the withered half.
'Yes,' his father had said.
'Will it die?'
His father had been quiet a long time. 'That depends on what it chooses to feed.'
Arthur had not understood then. He understood now. He understood too well.
He turned away from the tree and walked toward the castle that had once imprisoned him and now bore his flag.
PART ONE: ROOTS
In which a boy grows alongside a tree, and the world breaks both of them.
Chapter One: The Village at the Edge of the Kingdom
The kingdom of Valdenmere was not an evil place, exactly. It was a place that had allowed an evil man to sit upon its throne, which amounted to the same thing in the end, but which felt — to the people who lived there and tried not to think too hard about it — like an important distinction.
King Maren had come to power through marriage and then through the convenient death of his father-in-law, and he had spent the following twenty years governing the kingdom the way a man might govern a purse — by reaching into it whenever he wished and caring nothing for whether it ever grew fuller. The taxes were brutal. The soldiers who collected them were worse. And the people of Valdenmere, who were essentially good and essentially tired, had learned the art of looking elsewhere.
Aldenmere was a village at the kingdom's eastern edge, close enough to the border forests that its people sometimes pretended they were not quite of Valdenmere at all. It was a modest place — a mill, a market square, two dozen cottages, and the one remarkable thing: a tree at its border that no one had planted.
When Arthur was born, the tree was perhaps three feet high. A sapling, really. A thin and earnest thing reaching toward a sky it had not yet learned to mistrust.
~ The sapling grew two inches that first spring. So did Arthur. His mother measured him against the doorframe with a notch of her thumbnail. His father measured the tree against his outstretched hand and reported gravely that it was 'doing well.' ~
Arthur's parents were good people, which is to say they were people who did not have the luxury of being anything else. His father, Emery, was a carpenter — not a skilled one, but an honest one, which meant he built things that did not fall down and charged what they were worth and went to bed each night having done neither more nor less than was required. His mother, Sera, kept a small garden and a precise ledger of their household accounts and read to Arthur from a single dog-eared book of histories that she had carried from her own childhood home.
They were happy in the way of people who have decided that what they have is enough. It was a decision, Arthur would later understand — not a circumstance. Happiness of that kind had to be chosen every morning, against the evidence of the world.
He was a quiet child, given more to watching than to speaking. He spent long afternoons sitting beneath the growing tree — it reached his shoulder by the time he was seven, his chin by eight, the top of his head by nine — and reading the histories his mother had loved, or simply watching the other children of the village from a comfortable distance. He was not unfriendly. He simply found that most things were more interesting when you observed them rather than participated in them.
The exception was Corra, the miller's daughter, who was impossible to observe without being drawn in. She was eight to his nine, loud where he was quiet, careless where he was deliberate, and possessed of a certainty about the rightness of her own opinions that Arthur found both exasperating and, he would not have admitted, a little wonderful.
'That tree is going to be a problem,' she told him once, sitting on the exposed root that had begun to arch above the earth. She was eating an apple with complete disregard for the core.
'How?'
'It's going to grow into the road.'
'The road can go around it.'
'Roads don't go around things, Arthur. That's not what roads do.'
He thought about this seriously, the way he thought about most things. 'Maybe it should,' he said finally.
Corra looked at him. Then she took another bite of apple. 'You're strange,' she said, in a tone that implied she found this acceptable.
Chapter Two: The Night the Soldiers Came
Arthur was twelve years old on the night that the kingdom arrived in Aldenmere and took everything.
The soldiers came in the blue hour before dawn, when even the roosters are not yet certain of the morning. They came on horses, six of them, wearing the iron-grey livery of King Maren's household guard. The village was behind on its taxes — had been behind for three seasons, after a bad harvest and then a flood and then a sickness that had taken the Henner family and cost the others two weeks of work and a great deal of grief.
Arthur's father had gone to speak to them. This was the thing that Arthur would carry longest — not anger, not grief, but the simple image of his father walking out the cottage door in his work clothes, patting Arthur once on the shoulder as he passed, calm and deliberate and careful, the way he built everything.
'Stay inside,' he said.
Arthur did not stay inside. He watched from the window, and he saw the argument — saw the moment when the captain's face changed from impatience to something colder, saw the hand go to the sword, saw his mother come running from the door behind him calling Emery's name. He saw everything, standing at a window, unable to move, while the world on the other side of the glass became a different world.
They were gone before the sun rose. Left two bodies and a cart full of confiscated grain and the sound of hooves fading down the eastern road.
~ That autumn, a blight took the tree's lower branches. Three of them died overnight — turned grey and brittle — and the bark on the north side began to peel away in long strips, like skin after a burn. The tree did not die. But it was never quite the same shape again. ~
Arthur went to live with his mother's sister in the village, a thin and practical woman named Maren — not named for the king, she was always very clear about this — who fed him and clothed him and asked nothing of him except that he not be trouble. He was not trouble. He was, for two years, almost nothing at all.
But grief, Arthur was learning, was not a thing that emptied you. It was a thing that filled you — slowly, the way a crack in a dam widens — and eventually you were so full of it that it had to become something else or it would break you open.
In Arthur, it became purpose.
He was fourteen when he made the decision. He was sitting under the tree — the tree that was now half again his height, growing still despite its damaged branches — and he thought about his father walking out the door and the captain's hand going to his sword and King Maren sitting in his castle collecting taxes from dead men's families. He thought about it clearly and carefully, the way he thought about everything, and when he was done thinking he knew two things.
One: that what had happened to his parents was not an accident or an aberration but the natural result of a system designed to produce exactly this outcome.
Two: that he was going to end that system.
He was fourteen years old and he had no money, no power, no training, and no plan. He had a burning sense of injustice and a dead man's capacity for patience.
It would have to be enough.
PART TWO: BRANCHES
In which a young man reaches toward the light, and finds others reaching with him.
Chapter Three: The Company He Kept
He was twenty-two the first time he tried to speak openly about the king's corruption, at a gathering in the back room of a tavern in the market town of Keswick, and a man named Dorin Ash pulled him aside afterwards and said: 'You're going to get yourself killed. Also, your argument needs work.'
Dorin was a former soldier — had served in the king's army for five years before deserting when ordered to burn a village for harboring a suspected traitor. He was broad and scarred and possessed of a sense of humor so dry it was nearly imperceptible, and he had spent the years since his desertion making himself useful to various resistance movements in ways that those movements rarely knew about until after the fact.
'I don't need my argument to be better,' Arthur told him. 'I need more people like you.'
Dorin studied him for a moment. 'What do you want, exactly? I've seen a dozen men like you. Full of fire. Fire burns itself out.'
'I want to change what the kingdom is,' Arthur said. 'Not just who sits on the throne. The whole system. The way taxes are collected, the way laws are made, the way soldiers are commanded. If we only remove Maren and install someone else, we've done nothing.'
Dorin was quiet a long time. Then he ordered them both another drink. 'All right,' he said. 'What's the plan?'
The plan took three years and four companions to build. Dorin was the first. The second was Lena, a physician's apprentice from the capital who had watched her master die in the king's dungeons for the crime of treating a man Maren had declared an enemy. She was brilliant, precise, and angrier than anyone Arthur had ever met — the kind of anger that had been kept in a very small, very controlled space for a very long time, and had consequently become something like a fine blade.
The third was Pip, who was not a fighter or a scholar or anything in particular — who was, in fact, a baker's boy from the northern towns who had happened to help Arthur escape a patrol one rainy evening by shoving him into a flour bin and sitting on the lid. He had joined them afterwards with the matter-of-fact ease of someone for whom adventure was preferable to bread. He was the youngest of them, barely seventeen, and he was also — Arthur gradually realized — the most essential: the one who made the others laugh, who remembered birthdays, who noticed when someone had not eaten, who could walk into any village in the kingdom and within an hour know every person's name and situation and quietly win their trust.
The fourth was Corra.
He had not seen her in eight years. She had not changed much — still loud, still certain, still possessed of the apple-core confidence that had always both annoyed and delighted him. She had spent those years studying law in the eastern cities, had become one of the few women admitted to the guild of advocates, and had been quietly and systematically building the legal case for the king's removal for the past four years.
'I've been wondering when you'd show up,' she said, when he found her in her office above the Keswick courthouse. 'You took longer than I expected.'
'You knew I was coming?'
'I knew someone was coming. You were the obvious candidate.' She looked at him steadily. 'Your parents were good people. The whole village knew it. Grief like that either destroys you or gives you direction.'
'Which one am I?' he asked.
'I don't know yet,' she said. 'That's what worries me.'
~ In those years, the tree was at its finest. It had grown past the damage of the blight and put out new branches that reached wide and generous over the road — Corra had been right about the road — and in spring it was heavy with white blossoms, and in summer it gave shade to travelers, and in autumn its fruit fed anyone who passed and cared to reach. The villagers had begun to leave things at its base. Small offerings. A ribbon. A smooth stone. They could not have said why, exactly. It was just a tree. But it felt, somehow, like more. ~
Chapter Four: The Rebellion
It is tempting to make a rebellion sound glorious. It was not. It was cold and frightened and hungry and punctuated by long stretches of nothing, during which Arthur lay in whatever barn or cellar or back room they were hiding in and stared at the dark and wondered whether he was a man of conviction or simply a man who had not yet found anything better to do with his anger.
There were setbacks. There were betrayals — two, and both of them hurt in different ways. There was a winter so brutal that they lost Pip to fever for three terrible weeks, watching him burn and shiver in a shepherd's hut while Lena did everything she knew how to do and Arthur sat outside in the snow because he could not bear to be in the room where Pip might be dying.
Pip did not die. He recovered, thinner and quieter, and on the morning he was well enough to sit up and eat, he asked Lena very seriously whether his hair would grow back where it had been shaved to cool his fever, and when she said probably yes, he said good, because he had opinions about his hair. Dorin, who had not left the hut for three weeks, made a sound that might have been a laugh.
They built their rebellion slowly and carefully, village by village, the way Arthur's father had built furniture: by understanding the grain of the wood, by working with the natural structure of things rather than against it. Corra's legal framework gave them legitimacy with the minor lords and merchants who resented the king's taxation but feared anarchy more than corruption. Dorin's military connections gave them access to soldiers who had not yet found a reason to stop serving the crown but could be given one. Lena's medicines gave them a reason to enter villages as healers and leave as organizers. And Pip — Pip was everywhere, talking to everyone, remembered by all, trusted by instinct.
Arthur himself was the center of it — not the most skilled or the most brilliant, but the one they all oriented toward, the one who held the shape of the thing in his mind and kept coming back to it when they were exhausted and afraid and ready to compromise the whole for the sake of some manageable piece of it.
'Why you?' Dorin asked him once, at a low point, when they had just discovered the second betrayal and Arthur had not slept in two days. 'Of all the people in this kingdom with grievances, why are you the one who gets to change things?'
'I'm not the one who gets to,' Arthur said. 'I'm the one who couldn't stop.'
Dorin considered this. 'That's either a great answer or a very convenient one.'
'Probably both,' Arthur admitted.
The final confrontation came in the seventh year of their effort. By then they had half the kingdom's soldiers, the support of three of the five great lords, and the paper legitimacy that Corra had spent six years constructing. King Maren, faced with the choice between a negotiated abdication and a siege, chose the siege — and lost it in thirty-one days.
Arthur walked into the throne room of Valdenmere Castle on a grey autumn morning and stood before the empty throne for a long time.
'You should sit down,' Corra said, from beside him.
'Give me a moment,' he said.
He was thinking about his father, walking out a door. He was thinking about a tree.
He sat down.
PART THREE: BEARING FRUIT
In which a king is good, and then is not, and does not notice the difference.
Chapter Five: The Good Years
They were good years. Arthur would insist on this, later, even when insisting on it became uncomfortable. The first years of his reign were genuinely, concretely good.
The tax reform that Corra had designed was implemented within the first year — a system based on actual harvest yields rather than projected ones, with provisions for drought and flood and illness that removed the cruelest edge from the system's blade. The military code that Dorin wrote, which held soldiers to account for violence against civilians, was a law that had never existed in Valdenmere before. Lena became the kingdom's chief physician, and the first woman in that role, and built a network of healers that reached every village within three years.
Arthur held audiences four days a week, in a hall with the doors propped open, and made himself available to any citizen who wished to speak with him. This was, he knew, partly theater — he could not govern by individual conversation — but it was also not only theater. He listened. He paid attention to what he heard. He made himself remember that the kingdom was made of people, and that its systems were abstractions that only mattered insofar as they affected those people.
He was loved. This was new to him, and he did not entirely trust it.
'You should trust it more,' Pip said, on one of his periodic visits to the capital — Pip, who had declined any official role and instead traveled the kingdom as a kind of unofficial ambassador, going where he wished and reporting back what he found. 'People aren't stupid. They know the difference between someone who's good at seeming fair and someone who actually is.'
'Do they?'
'For a while,' Pip said. He was quiet a moment. 'It's later that gets tricky.'
~ The tree in Aldenmere had never been so full. Its canopy had spread to shade a wide circle of ground, and in summer the children of the village played in that circle as children had played in it for two generations. Its fruit was abundant. Travelers picked it freely. No one owned it; it gave to anyone who came. ~
Chapter Six: The Weight of the Crown
It happened gradually. This is the most honest thing that can be said about it: the change in Arthur did not happen all at once, but accumulated in the way that sediment accumulates at the bottom of a river — invisibly, slowly, until the riverbed is a different shape than it used to be and the water above it flows differently, and no one can say precisely when the change occurred because it did not occur, it accrued.
There were specific moments that could be identified in retrospect. The first was small: a lord from the northern provinces who had been obstructing the tax reform in his district, and whom Arthur had, in a moment of impatience, simply overruled without the council process that the new laws required. It was faster. It was correct — the lord was obstructing the reform for personal financial reasons, not principled ones. And the harm done to the legal framework was, in that instance, small.
But it established a precedent in Arthur's own mind: that the framework was a tool, and that he — who had designed the tool, who understood its purpose better than anyone — could choose when to set it aside.
The second moment was his response to an assassination attempt — a legitimate one, organized by what remained of the Maren loyalists — that came in his eighth year. He survived it by chance and distance, and the men responsible were captured and tried under the law, and he agreed, reluctantly, to the court's sentence, which was imprisonment. But he added, outside the courtroom, without consulting anyone, a decree that any further contact with former Maren loyalists would be considered treasonous. It was fear speaking. He told himself it was prudence.
The third was the evening he spent four hours alone in the throne room, not doing anything in particular, just sitting. He realized afterward that he had been waiting for someone to ask his permission to enter. And he realized, more quietly, that he had found the waiting satisfying.
He mentioned none of this to his friends. Partly because he did not recognize it fully in the moment. But also — and this is the more important part — because he had begun, without quite deciding to, to spend less time with his friends. The open audiences had become monthly, then quarterly. The dinners he used to host for Corra and Dorin and Lena had become rare; they had things to do, he told himself, as did he. Pip still came, but his visits felt shorter, and Arthur found, to his discomfort, that he sometimes wished Pip would not ask so many questions.
'You're different,' Pip said, on one of the last visits that could still be called friendly.
'I'm tired,' Arthur said.
'That's not what I said.'
Arthur looked at him. And because it was Pip — who had sat in a flour bin on his behalf, who had nearly died in a shepherd's hut while Arthur sat in the snow — he said: 'I know what you're saying.'
'Good,' Pip said. 'So?'
'So nothing. I'm still doing the same work. I'm still trying to do right by the kingdom.'
Pip was quiet a long time. 'You used to say: right by the people.'
Arthur did not have an answer for that. He told himself it was the same thing. He almost believed it.
~ The tree's left side had begun to grey. It happened slowly — a branch here, a patch of bark there — and the villagers told themselves it was simply the natural aging of an old tree. They were not wrong. But they also noticed, and did not say aloud, that the fruit on that side was beginning to taste of something. Not quite bitter. Almost. As if the sweetness were being drawn out of it, slowly, by something in the wood. ~
Chapter Seven: The Man He Had Become
By the fifteenth year of his reign, Arthur was not the man he had been. He knew this — there were still moments of painful clarity, late at night, when he could see the distance between the boy who had sat under a tree with a book of histories and the king who now held court in a hall with the doors firmly shut. Those moments came less frequently now, and when they did he found it easier to turn away from them.
The new taxes were not so different from Maren's, if one was being precise about the numbers. Arthur told himself they were different in spirit — that the money went to better things, that the system was more rational, that the enforcement was more humane. Some of this was true. But he noticed that he never allowed himself to be precise about the numbers. He noticed, and looked away.
He had dismissed three council members in the past two years for what he called obstruction and what they had called, in their formal letters of protest, principled disagreement. He did not read their letters. He had advisors for that.
Corra had resigned her position four years ago, quietly, without a public statement. She was living in Aldenmere now — had gone back to the village, of all places. He had not spoken to her since. He told himself she was the one who had chosen distance.
Dorin served still, nominally — the title of military commander, the formal loyalty — but they both understood it was performance. Dorin had written two memoranda in the past year about what he called the growing disproportion between the king's personal guard and the publicly accountable standing army. Arthur had not responded to either.
The thing that Arthur could not see — or would not — was the particular nature of the corruption that had taken hold of him. It was not Maren's corruption: not the simple greed of a man who wanted gold and power for their own sake. Arthur was not greedy. He did not want the trappings of power. He wanted, genuinely, to do what he believed was right.
This was, in its own way, more dangerous. Because a greedy man can be argued with, can be shown the limits of what his greed can purchase. But a man who is absolutely certain of his own righteousness has no such limit. Every cruelty can be reframed as necessity. Every excess can be reframed as sacrifice. Every silenced voice can be explained as the unfortunate casualty of a more important truth.
Arthur had started his life trying to stop exactly this kind of man. He had forgotten, somewhere along the way, to keep checking whether he had become one.
PART FOUR: THE BLIGHT
In which a king is faced with his mirror, and cannot bear what he sees.
Chapter Eight: The Boy from the Northern Villages
His name was Oryn, and he was seventeen years old, and he had walked three days from a village in the northern provinces to stand in the capital's market square and shout that the king's tax collectors had taken his family's seed grain.
He was arrested by the fourth hour. He was in a cell by nightfall. And he would have stayed there, fading into the long quiet of forgotten inconveniences, if a guard had not made the mistake of mentioning him to Dorin during a routine inspection.
Dorin looked at the arrest report for a long time. He noted that the charge was 'public disturbance and seditious speech.' He noted that the boy had not threatened anyone. He noted that the complaint about the seed grain, when he looked into it, was factually accurate — that a collection error had occurred in that district, and that the error had not been corrected despite two formal petitions from the village headman.
He went to Arthur with the report. Arthur read it and was quiet a moment.
'He was causing a public disturbance.'
'He was saying true things in a public place,' Dorin said.
'There are proper channels.'
'His village used the proper channels. Twice.' Dorin kept his voice level, the way he had learned to keep it in twenty-five years of managing men in difficult circumstances. 'You know what I keep thinking about?'
'Don't.'
'I keep thinking about a tax collector coming to a village in Aldenmere, some years back. And a carpenter who went out to speak to them.'
The silence in the room was very long.
'That's not the same,' Arthur said. His voice was quiet.
'No,' Dorin said. 'The boy is still alive. That's the difference. That's all the difference. So far.'
Arthur released the boy. He also ordered the collection error corrected. He told himself this was proof that the system still worked — that he still worked. He did not ask why the correction had required the military commander's personal intervention rather than the functioning of the systems he had built.
Oryn went home. He told everyone what had happened — the arrest, and then the release. He was a careful, intelligent young man, and he did not draw the dramatic conclusion. He drew the practical one: that the kingdom had a system that could imprison people for telling the truth, and that the system worked until someone important enough happened to notice and object.
He spent the next three years learning everything he could about the law, the economy, and the particular places where the kingdom's new systems had calcified back into old patterns. He was seventeen when he was arrested. He was twenty when he started talking to people.
Chapter Nine: The Tree at the Edge of the Village
Arthur went back to Aldenmere in the twentieth year of his reign. He had not been back since the day he left as a fourteen-year-old boy with a purpose and no plan. He went quietly, without an official entourage, with only two guards who had the good sense not to speak to him.
The village had changed — grown, slightly, with a few new buildings at its eastern edge — but its essential character was the same. The same market square. The same mill. The smell of wood smoke and river mud and the particular green of autumn grasses.
And the tree.
He stopped when he saw it, because it was not what he had expected. He had carried it in his memory as it had been at its peak — full and generous and extending its shade over half the road. But half of it was dead. The left side had gone completely grey, its branches bare and brittle, the bark peeling away in long strips. Only the right side still held leaves — amber and gold in the autumn light, trembling, alive.
He put his hand on it. The living side. He stood there for a long time.
'I thought you might come back.'
Corra was standing at the edge of the road. She was older — they both were — and she looked like someone who had made her peace with a great many things without surrendering the opinions that had produced them.
'I didn't know I was coming until I was on the road,' Arthur said.
'I know.' She came to stand beside him, and looked at the tree. 'It's been like this for two years. The village is worried about it, but no one can say what's wrong. It's still alive. Just not — not all of it.'
Arthur looked at the dead half. The living half. He thought about choices made in small rooms, about voices silenced for convenience, about the distance between right by the people and right by the kingdom.
'Corra,' he said. 'Tell me what I've become.'
She was quiet a long time. The wind moved through the tree's living branches, and the dead ones stood still.
'You've become someone who asks the question,' she said. 'That's something.'
'Is it enough?'
She looked at him. The same steady, honest look she had given him when he was nine years old and telling her roads should go around trees.
'I don't know,' she said. 'That depends on what you do next.'
PART FIVE: THE CYCLE
In which history repeats itself, as it always does, and the question remains.
Chapter Ten: The Rebellion Returns
The irony was not lost on Arthur — could not have been lost on any man with a working memory — that what was coming for him had begun exactly the way his own campaign had begun: in tavern back rooms, in quiet conversations, in a young man's inability to stop.
Oryn did not hate Arthur. This, too, was something Arthur would come to understand, and to find more painful than hatred would have been. Oryn had read everything Arthur had written in his younger years. He had tracked down the original legal framework that Corra had built. He had spent three years in the archives of the capital's courts, reading the gap between what the law said and what it did.
He organized with the same patient logic that Arthur had used. He sought legitimacy before force. He built coalitions of the aggrieved — not the destitute and desperate, who were too exhausted to organize, but the ones who had just enough to lose that they were motivated to act. He was careful. He was methodical. He was, Arthur's spies reported back, persuasive in a way that seemed effortless, the way true things often seem effortless when spoken aloud.
And he was right. That was the thing that kept Arthur awake at night. Not the threat of the rebellion — Arthur had, after all, survived an assassination attempt and a siege; he was not a man easily frightened. What kept him awake was the understanding that Oryn was saying true things, that the complaints were legitimate, that the gap between what Valdenmere had promised to be and what it had become was real and documented and visible.
Dorin came to him when the first serious reports arrived. He sat across the desk with the measured calm of someone who had rehearsed the conversation and still found it difficult.
'I know what you're going to say,' Arthur said.
'Do you?'
'You're going to tell me I have a choice. That I can respond with force, which will work in the short term and prove his point. Or I can respond with the reforms, which is harder and takes longer and requires me to admit, publicly, that things went wrong.'
Dorin watched him. 'Which will you do?'
Arthur was quiet for a long moment. Outside the window, the capital's streets were bright with morning — the ordinary life of a kingdom, people going about their business, buying and selling and arguing and loving, indifferent to the conversations happening in high rooms.
'I don't know,' he said. 'I want to say the right thing. But I have been sitting in this chair for twenty years, and I am not certain I can tell the difference anymore between what I believe is right and what is right.'
This was, Dorin would say later, the most honest thing he heard Arthur say in the last years of his reign. It was also, he would say, the most heartbreaking.
Chapter Eleven: The Abdication
Arthur stepped down in the twenty-second year of his reign. He did not do it gracefully — no man gives up a throne gracefully, whatever story they tell afterward — but he did it voluntarily, which was more than Maren had done, and he tried to hold onto this distinction as something meaningful even as he understood it was a small thing to be proud of.
He met with Oryn once, privately, before the formal transfer. He had expected to find it unbearable. He found it strange, and sad, and also somehow necessary — like pressing on a bruise to know the true size of it.
Oryn was young. Arthur kept catching himself on this, the way you catch yourself on an unexpected stair. He was so young. He was Arthur's age when Arthur had sat under a tree and decided to change the world.
'You know what's coming for you,' Arthur said. It was not a question.
Oryn looked at him with the directness of the very young, who have not yet learned to coat their observations in tact. 'I've read about you. All of it. The things you built. The things that fell apart.' He paused. 'I know you were good, once.'
'I believe I was,' Arthur said. 'I also believe you, right now, are exactly what I was. And I don't know how to tell you what will happen. I don't know if there's a way to hold power without losing the thing that made you want it for the right reasons. I looked for that way for twenty years. I may simply not have been strong enough to find it.'
Oryn considered this for a long moment. 'Why are you telling me this?'
'Because maybe you are.' Arthur stood. 'And because someone should have told me.'
Epilogue: The Tree at the Edge of the Village
Arthur went back to Aldenmere. There was nothing particularly dramatic about this — he had no home left in the capital, and the village was as good a place as any to be old in. He found a small house. He kept a garden, badly at first and then with some improvement. He read a great deal.
Corra was still there. They had dinner once a week, and she argued with him about everything, and he was grateful for this in a way he could not entirely articulate.
Pip came to visit in the first spring. He was grey now, and moved a little slowly, but he was still Pip — still noticed everything, still remembered everyone's name, still had opinions about his hair. They sat under the tree together for an afternoon and talked about nothing important, and it was one of the better days Arthur could remember.
The tree, Arthur noticed, was changing.
The dead half was still dead — that bark did not come back, those branches did not bud. But new growth had appeared, not where the blight had been, but in the spaces between. Thin new branches emerging from the living trunk, reaching carefully upward. It would not be what it had been. But it was not only what it had become.
'What does it mean?' Pip asked, watching Arthur watch the tree.
'I don't know,' Arthur said. 'Maybe that things can still grow, even after they've been damaged. Maybe that the damage doesn't disappear. Maybe both.'
'Very profound,' Pip said. 'Very old man sitting under a tree.'
Arthur laughed. He had not laughed like that in a long time — unguardedly, without calculation. It surprised him.
He thought about Oryn in the capital, trying to be good, trying to hold the thing that made him want power for the right reasons. He thought about the way history moved: not in straight lines but in loops, each repetition changed just enough by the previous one that it was never exactly the same circle, even if it rhymed. He thought about his father, who had built things that did not fall down and charged what they were worth and gone to bed each night having done neither more nor less than was required.
A tree grew toward the light, whatever light it could find. It did not ask whether the light was worth it. It simply grew.
People were different. People had to choose.
The question was whether they kept choosing, or whether at some point they decided they had chosen enough.
Arthur pressed his palm to the bark. The living side. Cool and rough and steady.
He thought: keep choosing. Every morning. Against the evidence.
He thought: it depends on what you feed.
The autumn wind moved through the tree's remaining leaves, and in the light they were gold and amber and trembling, and for that moment — just that moment — they looked like something that might last.
— END —