Cards of Grief Read Online Free Page B

along the road I forget, though I know I wanted B’oremos to turn and talk to me. But he was intent on finding the quickest way there.
    And when we arrived at the great city of L’Lal’dome, with the twin towers marking the place like gigantic stone arrows, I was suddenly too frightened and too homesick to react. So I kept to the silence that B’oremos had begun.
    When the Queen saw me, she smiled. I was so young, she told me later, and so serious she could not help but smile at me. She smiled as most Royals do, more lips than teeth, but widely.
    “Come, child,” she said, leaning forward and holding out her hand.
    I did not know any better and took it, oblivious to the mutterings around me, and that marked the beginning of our strange friendship. Then I leaned forward and whispered so that she alone could hear it. “Do not fear the dark, my lady, for I am sent to light your way.”
    It was not the speech I had practiced with my mother, nor yet the one my grandmother had made me promise to recite. Nor was it the one I had made up along the way as I traipsed behind B’oremos hoping he would turn and speak to me. But when I saw the Queen with the grief of all those girl-barren years sitting above her eyes, I knew why I had come. B’oremos was just a pretty thing, a toy forgot. It was to serve this Queen and our land that I was there. So I spoke those words to her; not for the applause of the court or to turn B’oremos’s head, but for the Queen alone. And because I did it that way, she knew I was speaking the truth.
    She bade me sit at her feet, perched on the lowest cushion of Queenship. I thought I would never leave.
    Then she asked to see my grief poems and I took the first of the Gray Wanderer ones from the carry-basket. They are in the Queen’s Hall now, behind locked doors, where only the scholars can read them, but once they had been set out for everyone to see.
    She read them with growing interest and called up the white-robed priestesses to her.
    “A child of Lands shall lead the way,” the priestess said cryptically, rubbing her hands along the sides of her robe. They always speak thus, I have found, leaving a leader many paths to choose from. Grievers and priestesses have this elliptical speech in common, I think, though the priestesses would claim True Knowledge and Infallibility while I can only speak in symbols what I feel here, here in the heart.
    The Queen nodded and turned to me. “And can you make me another threnody? Now? Now, while I watch, so that I can see that you made these without the promptings of your elders?”
    I said what I then believed. “I have no one to grieve for, my Queen.”
    She smiled.
    In those days, remember, I was young and from a small village and a Minor Hall. What did I know of Queens? I thought it was a pitying smile. I know better now. It was a smile of power.
    Several days later word came that my grandmother had died and I had much to grieve for then. I wondered what my mother would do without someone to argue with, whether she would become a silent husk herself. But I was not allowed to go home to do my grieving or to offer myself as the other tongue to my mother’s lost duet. No, the Queen herself set me up at a table in a Major Hall and on that stage, surrounded by the sophisticated mourners of the court, I began my public life. I wrote thirteen threnodies in the seven days and composed a master lament, though I should not have had the skill. My grief was fed by homesickness and by the image of my mother struck dumb by grief.
    Grief was the gag that silenced her,
    She never sang again.
    That was really about my mother, and it turned out to be true.
    I had those hardened mourners weeping within a day. The Queen herself had to take to bed out of grief for my grandmother, though the strangest thing was that I had never realized before how much the old woman had meant to me.
    The Queen called the best grievers in the land to teach me in relays after the Seven was