I brought my daughter to my father on a grey morning, and I meant to stay, and he looked at me from the chair he barely left now and said, "You can stay. But you're going to have to let me tell her I think you're wrong, or she won't believe the part where I tell her you're right. Can you sit still for that?"
"No," I said honestly.
"Sit still anyway," said the Grey King, and I did, and it was the hardest listening of my life.
He was very old now. The winters had folded him down small; the hands that had buried a crown shook when they lifted a cup; but the eyes were still the eyes, and when he turned them on his granddaughter they did the thing they'd always done, which was make you feel that you were, for that moment, the only real thing in the room.
...