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In the years that followed, Mitt kept remembering that conversation they’d had just before Maewen went away, about what it meant to be a good king.
The others had walked quietly through the empty streets of Hern's city, but Mitt lingered a moment longer by the old palace, and fell into step with Maewen. He couldn't help but notice how her eyes fell upon the crown slipping off his lank, unwashed hair. He reached up and straightened it self-consciously.
“I wonder what sort of king I'll end up being," Mitt had confessed to her. He was so full of nerves, it was all he could do to keep himself from jumping out of his own skin. He forced a grin. "Dalemark's never had a fishmonger for a ruler, I reckon."
"Well, Dalemark’s had all sorts of kings,” Maewen told him bracingly. “Some bad. Some ineffective, which was sometimes worse. But there were a few great ones in the mix.”
“What made them so great?” Mitt growsed. Already he was beginning to feel the weight of kingship weighing heavily on his shoulders, though he’d scarcely been the ruler of an entire country for more than a few minutes.
“Oh, you know,” Maewen said vaguely. Her freckles stood out in sharp relief against her pale cheeks. “Accomplishments. Statues and obelisks, palaces and canals, great feats of engineering. That sort of thing.”
“Things like winning wars?” Mitt asked gloomily. He was still not at all sure that he could do anything to really bring Dalemark together. No matter what the One and Hern had said, he still felt like a laughable pretender, rather than a true possibility for a ruler.
“Well, yes,” Maewen allowed. “Like that. Oh, I don’t know! I never was much interested in history before I came to stay with my father. I do wish I could see you be king, Mitt. It was the one thing I asked for, and it was the only wish the One couldn't give me."
Mitt felt a great sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. "I can't think how I'll get on without you, Maewen."
Maewen looked as unhappy as he felt. But then she forced an uncheerful laugh and shook her head. “Oh, Mitt, I just know you’ll do splendidly. You'll do great things, I know it. You really shall.”
It had been one of the last things she’d ever said to him. Now Mitt just hoped he wouldn’t let her down. Never mind the One; bother the crown. Maewen had been counting on him to do great things.
The capitol comes first, Navis told him, then we’ll get to work on constructing some of the projects you had in mind. No point, he had said with his usual sarcasm, having a royal road that leads to nowhere in particular.
“I’d be the king of nothing,” Mitt agreed. He was thinking of how Maewen had described the Dalemark of her time. The railroads she had talked about were mystifying and incomprehensible to Mitt--steam engineering sounded quite exciting, but Alk hadn’t been able to make them understand exactly how it would work, even Navis with all his learning was left gaping in bemusement. But the concept of railroads sounded quite similar to roads. Mitt could do roads, and he intended to.
But all in good time, as Navis kept saying. It’s not easy building a kingdom, Mitt found out. Turns out not everybody is jumping at the chance to be ruled by a high king again, and don't they just let you know it. For the first few months of his reign, Mitt could manage nothing more than putting out fires of all over Dalemark.
The first building that went up in Kernsborough was the great Hall of Law. Not a palace, like Navis had suggested offhandedly. Mitt, having never so much as stepped foot in a manor house until he'd come to the North, still did not see much use in finery. He was perfectly content to go on living in the tent that he shared with Navis and Yven until kingdom come, for all he cared. But Navis had assured him that he’d need one eventually.
“You’ll find yourself in need of a place to store your courtiers and retainers,” he said dryly. Mitt had other suggestions for where these courtiers might be allowed to reside, none of them suitable to Navis.
But the Hall of Law was a place where Mitt could meet with his lawmen and scribes, where cases could be settled and justice, such that it was, could be administered. The masons Navis hired had erected the building swiftly, yet the hall was quite handsome for all that, with gleaming timber rafters overhead, and freshly-plastered walls painted with decorative motifs, and heavy polished chairs decorated with scrollwork.
One of those great chairs was meant for him. It was so handsome that Mitt hadn't felt quite right about sitting in it. And so Mitt had, on a sudden whim, taken a knife and carved in the arm of the chair some of the letters that Hildy had taught him. Not the name Amil, or the mark of his signet. Just the name he'd come up with for her, one that no one else would recognize.
Tannoreth.
If Maewen couldn’t be here to see him becoming a proper king, then maybe she'd take a little interest in history in her own time, after he was gone. If only, Mitt thought forlornly, looking around his empty great hall, she could come back to tell him what she thought of all this.
Navis got his way after all: The palace was built eventually. So was the blacksmith's forge, and the gristmill, and even the brewery. Before Mitt’s astonished eyes a town had sprung up where the ghost of Hern's city had been. There were thatched-roof houses hastily constructed for the artisans and millworkers, and open-air lodges put up for the barrel makers and carpenters; there was even a thriving colony of bricklayers near the quarry. Mitt had set laws down in scrolls, and designated sheriffs and deputies to enact them, and he even had a law-staff of his own, which, to his great surprise and trepidation, included Hildy.
All together, Mitt had the uneasy feeling that, as though he had whispered Libby Beer’s lesser name in his sleep, somehow Kernsborough had grown quite out of his hands and, taking on a life of its own, sprung up overnight.
“I just feel like it’s not enough somehow,” he confessed to Navis one night in the Hall of Law. They had burned the rushlights down to almost nothing, and yet Navis was still hunched over his scrolls, scribbling away in his fine, dignified script which Mitt admired so but had never been able to replicate, leading him to believe that fine handwriting must be another one of those things you were born to, or not; Mitt hadn’t been born to much, and his handwriting was, according to Hildy, downright illegible no matter how he’d practiced.
Mitt could just barely make out what Navis was writing; something about Regret to inform you..., though after that, Mitt could make neither heads nor tails of Navis’s formal diction. There had been an uprising in the South, pushed back by Mitt and his kingsguard. Many of Mitt's men had died. Navis had been writing letters of condolences to families for days.
Navis glanced up then, his face firmly immovable even in the flickering shadows of the last remaining rushlight. “Enough for what?” he asked distractedly.
“Enough for me to have been worth all of it,” Mitt said rather hollowly. “All those men dying, and for what? Just to protect me? Navis, I'm never going to be the kind of king they need. I should have been the one to get cut down, if it came to it.”
Navis looked at him, hard, and set down his quill.
“Mitt,” he said, and that was all.
Mitt tried to grin, to show Navis he was only in jest, but instead he choked on a half-drawn out sob. Oh, ye gods, he thought wretchedly, what’s wrong with me--this isn't how a king should act!--but by then Navis had stood up from his table and put his arms around Mitt.
Mitt cried in his shoulder for what felt like forever. Then he pulled himself back and stumbled away, scrubbing at his face. He’d hate to know what Navis thought of him now. Some king I am, he thought bitterly. Can’t keep my own men alive, can’t even earn Navis's respect.
But Navis was not looking at him with disgust or distaste or even as if Mitt had done anything reprehensible at all. His eyes didn’t have pity in them either, though there was a certain sympathy in his face.
“It’s late,” Navis said, “and you’re tired. I know it's been a terrible strain. You are very young yet, Mitt, and a ruler three times your age would have had trouble making the decisions you’ve made over the past few days.”
“It just doesn’t seem worth it,” Mitt said hollowly. “I’m not worth it. Not worth anyone losing their life over me, anyhow. I’m not a great king, Navis. I--I wait too long to make decisions, or sometimes I just go on and make them without putting a lick of thought into them at all. Look at the drained fenlands.”
The draining of the fenlands had been a thorn in his side since he’d given the order and signed his seal. The villagers of the South Flate had been notoriously unhappy with him ever since.
Navis said reasonably, “Well, what’s your basis for comparison? Uniting a bunch of vastly different territories is much different from leading one’s own household, or even a village. Mitt, you’re doing things no one has ever dared do in Dalemark since Hern's age."
"Failing at things--not doing them," Mitt said bitterly.
“Just think about it,” Navis adds kindly. “Just tell me you’ll think about it, before you write off your reign entirely. Promise me that, Mitt.”
“I will,” Mitt said. And he did think, on and off again, over the coming days and months, as the tiresome Southlands threatened to revolt once more, and as the eastern villages made merry havoc of his new trade regulations, and the fenlanders continued voicing their complaints, and the bandits from the north forests stole from everyone regardless of personal loyalties altogether. It was a constant conversation Mitt had with Maewen in his head, arguing with her, wondering what her opinion would have been on this or that, whether she would have liked the new ornate trimming in the ballroom of Tannoreth Palace, or whether she’d have had to admit that the entire affair was too ostinatious for words.
I wish Maewen could tell me how I'm doing, Mitt thought. And then it occurred to him that maybe she already had.
“I don’t want to be a great king,” he said to Navis next day as they were out riding the bounds of Kernsborough, surveying the foundations of the city’s newest watermill.
"What's that, Mitt?" Navis asked, reining in his horse.
“I don’t want to be a great king,” Mitt repeated. “I just want to be a good person. I reckon if I can manage that, it'll be enough.”
There was the faintest hint of a smile on Navis’s sardonic face.
“I think,” he said, “that shall do nicely. Now, Mitt, what shall we do about the fenlanders?”
The years passed and Mitt didn’t. At first it was terribly frightening, then horribly lonesome. It turned out to be awful, watching your friends and family pass on and you never getting to join them. But then there was the thought of Maewen. Suddenly centuries didn’t seem quite so terrible a thing to endure, if he could only find her at the end of them, and Mitt wondered, on and off again, if Maewen had become any more interested in history than she had been since the last time they'd met, and if he would ever see her again.
But Maewen doesn't give him four years. When she finally catches up to him again, it’s at the Hall of Law.
The Hall had stopped being used as a courthouse more than half a century ago, and now it is the place where schools shuttle their students to develop a burgeoning sense of history. A bus pulls away from the curb, leaving behind a clump of children who seemed all too happy to be released from the confines of their schoolroom for the day.
And, just as if the Earthshaker himself had pulled her straight out of the ground, there she is.
Maewen's wearing a leather jacket that might have been a match of Mitt's own, and her hair is flying about her shoulders like a cloud of thistledown.
“It’s been a long time,” Mitt says, with trepidation. An understatement if it ever was. "And I've changed, Maewen. I might not be the person you remember."
"You've been busy," Maewen agrees. "That tomb! Really, Mitt, what were you thinking? And a whole palace, for me? You haven't changed a bit."
Maewen is grinning up at him through her pale lashes. Her cheeks are scoured bright red from the brisk wind. It's been two hundred years since he saw her last, and Mitt wants to kiss her so badly that it hurts.
"I thought you might like that," he concedes. He jams his hands down in the pockets of his battered jacket, hard. "But I hope that history gives me credit for more than that."
He wants, more than anything, to ask her how he'd done. If he had managed, through hard work or painstaking effort or even just sheer dumb luck, to be the king that Maewen had wanted him to be. Mitt's hands are trembling with the effort it takes to hold the question in.
But Maewen has always had a knack for knowing exactly what he means to say. She cranes her head back to look up, past at the Hall of Law's peaked roofline, past the profile of Tannoreth Palace looming ostentatiously just beyond, towards the pale blue mountains on the very edge of the horizon. Mitt knows those mountains better than most. When you reach the peak, it's as if you can see all of Dalemark at once.
“Oh, Mitt,” she says. “I was right. You really were splendid."