Rejected by His Heir, Chosen by His Crown

I would like to tell you the city understood at once, and wept, and carried my daughter home on its shoulders. It didn't. That is not how people work, and I'd have distrusted the whole thing if it had.

What happened was messier and took a season. For the first days after midwinter there was a kind of stunned quiet in the rings, the quiet of two hundred people who had come to give a gift and had it handed gently back, and not all of them took it gracefully. Some were relieved down to their boots. Some grieved — actually grieved, the way you grieve a thing you'd looked forward to — because they had wanted so badly to do right by her, and being told the right thing was to let her go felt, to a few of them, like being refused. A man from the second ring, who'd wept at the Honoring, wouldn't look at her in the tunnels for weeks after; he'd loved the Keeper, and he found he did not know how to love a thirteen-year-old apprentice with grease on her hands, and Kellan had warned her of exactly that, and it still hurt her, and I let it hurt her, because some things are supposed to.