Where the king lays stone, the gods go weeping.
He had heard the old saying often enough in his youth that the cadence of it had lodged itself somewhere behind his teeth, surfacing unbidden on long roads and longer nights. Back when he had first taken Owen as his squire, when the both of them were still green as spring wheat and glowing with that naive glee that only the untried ever truly possess, they had ridden down along the Magna Strata asking after its meaning of every soul they passed.
All they had ever received in return were hearty laughs, or else dry dismissals that it had been years beyond counting since anyone had sighted a weeping tree, delivered in the tone men reserve for children asking after the stars. Owen had shared the same quiet puzzlement that plagued his knight, and had put it to him one evening by the fire in that plain, earnest way of his.
How could a tree weep, ser? It has no eyes for it.
