To My Son, Whom I Shall Not See Crowned

If these words find you, then the bird flew truer than the headsman's aim, and by the time your eyes reach the foot of this page I am already a head the shorter for having loved you too loudly. Do not weep long. Tears are water, and water finds the sea whether you grieve or no. Save the salt of them. You will want it later, to rub into wounds that are not yours.

They will tell you I was a traitor. Remember this above all things: a crown decides who the traitor is only after the fact, and never once by asking the dead. The King upon the Aurelian throne named me one because I knelt a breath too slow, and a slow knee frightens small kings more than a raised sword. He sits in the white towers of the Capital still. He will sit there in your dreams. Go and unseat him from both.

But hear me, for a corpse has no reason left to flatter you: a peasant's rage is a fire in wet straw — much smoke, no warmth, gone by morning. Fury must be forged, not felt. Let me hand you the map I bought with my neck.

Gold is the first sorcery, and the only one every man believes in. Where the coin moves, kneel and watch it. Buy the herbalist's reagents cheap in the towns where a caravan has burned, and sell them dear where none has — this is the whole of commerce and half of war. When your purse is too thin for your ambition, there is a man in Greyport called Master Corvus of the Gilded Hand who will lend you a river of gold at a smiling price. Take it if you must — but know that debt is a collar that tightens itself in the dark, and Corvus never forgets the throat he has measured.

Power you cannot buy outright, you must braid from lesser things. Seek the bog-witch of Thornwood; her hut is where reagents become spells and a hedge-boy becomes something the Order fears. Steel you buy plainly — the sell-sword sergeants of Emberfall will sell you spears by the score, and in that same war-town drinks a landless knight, Ser Alric, worth ten of them. Buy his sword. But mark your dead father's warning, learned in a court of golden liars: a blade that has changed masters once will tell itself a pretty story to change them twice. Watch the men who smile at your table more closely than the ones who scowl at your gate. If you would see a heart before it betrays you, the spymaster Whisper keeps every keyhole in the realm — and the Scrying Eye you may conjure yourself, if you are brave enough to look.

And there is one door I would beg you leave shut, knowing you will not. Below the drowned steps of the Sunken Gate, a thing called Zar'Vokh deals in power without labour — great magic, whole legions, a life snatched back from death. It will offer you the crown by sundown. It will not tell you the price until the ink is your blood: your years spent double, your wounds cut twice as deep, a horde that eats your gold each dawn. Better to be feared than loved, the schemers say — but the demon teaches a colder truth: it is best of all to be needed, and worst of all to owe. If you go down those stairs, go with your eyes open and your soul counted. Come back up still my son.

Here, then, is the last thing I own, and it is only a sentence. A wiser prisoner than I once carved into a cell wall that all human wisdom is contained in two words — wait, and hope. He was a gentler man, and he waited well. I cannot give you his patience. I will not. So I give you a third word, and I give it to you in that order, which is the only order that saves a soul: wait — until your strength is real and not merely your anger; hope — that you take the throne without becoming the reason someone's father writes a letter like this one; and then, my boy, when the towers are white against the dawn and the King has forgotten your name —

— sharpen, and collect what the crown owes our blood.