We buried the crown on the first warm day of the year.
It was Sable's idea, which was right, because it should not have been mine — a Blood Moon burying a crown is a story about a Blood Moon, and we were all so tired of those. It came up out of one of the endless ledger arguments, the way the good ideas did now, sideways, from someone who wasn't trying to be remembered. What do we do with the Grey Crown, someone asked — the old circlet Soren had carried out of a burned age, the last real crown in the drowned world, the thing the Council would have set on his head if he'd let them. Melt it, someone said. Sell it, said someone poorer. And Sable, who had spent a year teaching me that the deepest power is refusing to make a thing sacred, said: No. We give it to the water. Same as everyone.
So we did.
The whole city came, or enough of it that the deep gallery couldn't hold them and they lined the tunnels back for a quarter mile, and it wasn't a coronation and it wasn't a funeral, though it borrowed the shape of both. My father carried it down himself. That was the only part we argued about — whether the Grey King should be the one to give up the Grey Crown, whether it made him too central even in the act of ending centrality — and in the end he settled it the way he settled things now, quietly, without asking permission.
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