Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

He had eight days, and he spent them the way he'd spent the last years — not being a king, which was the whole of what he'd finally learned. He let a widow bring him soup. He argued mildly with Kellan about a House matter neither of them had the strength to care about anymore. He let Wren sit with him in the afternoons, not teaching her anything now, past teaching, just letting her hold his shaking hand and tell him about worn fittings and Doss's standards while he listened with his eyes closed and, I think, heard her mother in every third word and her grandmother in the rest.

I got the last of him myself, on the seventh night, because he sent the others away and kept me.

"I want to say the thing," he said. His voice had gone to almost nothing. "While I still can. So sit down and don't make it graceful, you're bad at graceful, you get it from me."

I sat down on the cold stone by his chair, the ground of the dead, where I'd learned to sit beside him.