Edmund asked on the ninth day, which Thomas afterward thought was about right — long enough for a four-year-old to establish that a thing was not simply late.
"When's Wat coming?"
They were in the kitchen. Victoria was at the table with Alys, and Thomas saw her go still, and understood that this was going to be his.
"Wat isn't going to come anymore," he said.
"Why?"
"Because he died." Thomas sat down, which put him below the boy's eye level rather than above it. "Do you know what that means?"
Edmund considered.
"He's in the ground," he said. "Sibb said. In the field by the water."
"That's right. That's where his body is."
"Why?"
And there it was — the first of the several hundred whys that Thomas had known were coming and had made no useful plan for whatsoever.
"Because he was very old," he said. "And bodies stop working when they're very old, the way a cart stops working when it's very old, and when a person's body stops working they die, and that's the end of them being here."
"Can he come back?"
"No."
Edmund absorbed this. Thomas watched him absorb it and could not tell, from the outside, how much of it was landing.
"Is he sad?" Edmund asked.
"No. That's the one thing I can tell you for certain." Thomas chose his words with enormous care. "When you die, you stop. You don't hurt and you don't miss anything and you're not frightened. Wat isn't sad. Wat isn't anything. We're the ones who are sad, because we're the ones who are still here, and we're going to be sad for a while and that's all right."
"Are you sad?"
"Very."
"You didn't cry." It was not an accusation. It was a four-year-old reporting a discrepancy.
"I did. Twice. You were asleep both times."
Edmund thought about this for some seconds.
"I want him to come," he said, and his face did the thing, and Thomas picked him up and let him do it.
It took a long time. Victoria did not intervene, and did not leave, and sat at the table with Alys in her lap and her hand over her mouth.
Afterward, in the small wrung-out quiet, Edmund said, into Thomas's shoulder: "Are you going to die?"
Thomas closed his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "Everybody does. But not for a very long time, and not soon, and not while you're small."
"Promise."
He had spent years of his life knowing exactly what a promise like that was worth, and had sat in a garden with a falling number in his pocket believing he would not see this child at all.
"I promise I'm not going anywhere," he said, which was not the same thing and which he knew was not the same thing.
Edmund accepted it completely.
Victoria raised it that night, in the dark, in the careful voice she used for difficult things.
"You promised him."
"I know."
"You promised a four-year-old that you would not die, and you have spent your entire adult life refusing to tell anyone a comfortable untruth, including a royal justiciar." She was not accusing. "I want to know whether you're going to be all right about it."
Thomas looked at the ceiling for a while.
"I said I wasn't going anywhere," he said. "Which is true, and which I'd have said differently at twenty-eight, and which I am choosing to let stand because he is four." He turned his head. "Ask me in a year and I may tell you it was the wrong call. But I've decided there's a difference between a lie that manages someone and a promise that's smaller than it sounds, and I'm going to live in that difference for about eight years and then tell him the truth properly."
"Eight years."
"When he's twelve. That's when you can say I am going to die, everyone is, here is what I want you to know about it and be heard." Thomas was quiet a moment. "Wat had that conversation with me. Sixty-eight years old, in this house, about a bench. I had the whole thing and I did not appreciate at the time what it cost him to be plain about it."
Victoria did not say anything for a while.
"He asked me the same question," she said eventually. "On the sixth day. Whether I would die."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him yes, eventually, and that it would be a very long time, and that I would be extremely old and cross about it." She let out a breath. "And then he asked if he would die, and I said yes, when he was very old, and he said I don't want to, and I said no, love, nor do I."
Thomas turned over and put his arm across her.
"That's better than what I did," he said.
"It's not better. It's mine." She did not move. "That's the whole of what Elsbeth told me, years ago, about loving them in different shapes. I hadn't understood she meant this as well"