The difficulty, Thomas discovered over the following months, was that he had no standing to mourn.
There had been no death. There was no body, no grave, no date anyone could name. There was a woman in another world who had, as far as anyone in Argenton could possibly verify, either died years ago or was alive and well and living an ordinary life in a version of a place Thomas could no longer describe accurately. There was no rite for that. Hamo, asked directly, admitted after considerable thought that the Church had nothing — that every form of mourning he knew required, at minimum, a person who had definitely stopped.
"I could invent something," Hamo offered. "I would do it seriously and I would not consider it a lie. But I want to be clear that I would be inventing it."
"I know. I don't think that's what I need."
What he needed turned out to be considerably harder to name, and he spent an unproductive autumn failing to name it.
He became, by his own later admission, difficult to be around. Not dramatic — he did not shout at anyone or vanish for days or do any of the things that would have been legible to the people who loved him. He simply went slightly grey. He attended councils and said sensible things and reviewed Cecily's cohort numbers and answered Maud's increasingly alarming questions about bearing alloys, and did all of it from behind a distance nobody could quite reach across.
Victoria let it run for eleven weeks before she said anything.
"You're doing the thing," she said, one evening, without preamble.
"Which thing?"
"The one where you carry something alone and remain perfectly functional so that nobody has grounds to intervene." She sat down opposite him. "You did it for four days about the number, once, and you told me afterward it was the thing you most regretted. You've been doing it for eleven weeks now and I've been waiting for you to notice."
Thomas opened his mouth and then closed it.
"I don't know what I'm grieving," he said finally. "That's the honest answer. My mother might be dead. She might be alive. She might be — thinned, whatever that means, in a way that's worse than either. She might be perfectly happy in a life where I was never born, or where I was born and moved far away and stopped writing, which is what she believed anyway. I don't know which of those to be sad about and they require completely different kinds of sadness."
"So be sad about all of them."
"That's not—"
"Thomas." Victoria's voice was gentle and entirely immovable. "You have spent nine years being extraordinary about uncertainty. You built a currency with no backing. You ran a town through a plague on protocols you weren't sure worked. You told a royal court you would not explain yourself and made it stick. You are, without question, the most capable person I have ever met at acting well without knowing the answer." She leaned forward. "And you have decided that grief specifically requires certainty before you're permitted to feel it. Why? Why is this the one thing where you need the facts first?"
He didn't have an answer.
"Because it's mine," he said, eventually, and was surprised by his own voice. "Everything else was the valley's. Every uncertainty I've acted through — it was for somebody. This one's just mine, and if I get it wrong there's no one it costs but me, and I think I've forgotten how to do anything that isn't for somebody."
Victoria was quiet for a moment.
"That," she said, "is the saddest thing you have ever said to me, and I want you to write it down."
He did, that night, and it went into the Codex — not the technical sections, not the succession document, but the strange back quire that had accumulated over the years and that nobody had ever formally named. Wat's letter was in there. Elias's. Victoria's unfinished page about a man who could not dance.
He wrote about not knowing what he was grieving, and about having no rite for it, and about discovering at forty-two that he had somehow arranged his entire life so that nothing was permitted to be simply his.
Cecily found the page eight months later, while cataloguing, and asked whether it was meant to be there.
"It's meant to be there," Victoria told her.
"It's not about anything. It doesn't teach anything."
"No," Victoria agreed. "It's about a man who was allowed to be sad without knowing why. Leave it in."
It stayed in.