There is a particular cowardice in calling this patience

Let it be recorded that the heart, though smaller than a fist, has ruined armies more efficiently than winter, and that the difficulty with a political attachment is not always its beginning, nor even its betrayal, but the indecent length of time during which both parties know it has become unhappy and continue to set places for one another at table.

At Turn 1295, I find myself less interested in who first clasped whose hand than in what remains after the clasp has grown painful. A treaty is commonly described as a bridge, which is an agreeable image until one asks who is expected to keep repairing it, and whether the far bank has ever sent so much as a cart of timber. The answer, in the alliances that trouble me most, is that each side has been waiting for the other to notice the sagging planks. Meanwhile, couriers cross them with news of marriages, levies, and small insults; meanwhile, everyone calls the passage secure.

This is not necessarily folly. A bad alliance may be preferable to the clean loneliness that follows its end. One can be exhausted by a companion and still know the sound of that companion’s riders on the road; one can resent the old obligations and still depend upon the old habits, which is to say that resentment is not the opposite of attachment, but often its most punctual correspondent. [1] The chroniclers, who love a decisive villain and a satisfying date, are poor witnesses to this sort of endurance. They record the rupture. They seldom record the years in which both houses permitted it to deepen, each hoping the other would make the first costly gesture.

There is a particular cowardice in calling this patience. Patience is what we name the virtue when we do not wish to call it fear of the door closing behind us. Yet the choice to remain may be rational, even kind; the troublesome thing is that reasons accumulate like unpaid household accounts, until neither side can say whether it stays from affection, necessity, or mere unwillingness to count what departure would cost. A court may call such an arrangement stable. The word is not false. A frozen orchard is stable, too, until the thaw asks what survived beneath the black branches.

I have sometimes thought the test of an alliance is not whether it can withstand anger, but whether it permits a small repair without requiring a grand humiliation. Who sends the first messenger after an unkind council? Who admits that a promised escort arrived late? Who returns the ribbon, not with a flourish, but folded as it was lent? [2] These acts are beneath the dignity of treaties only to those who have never watched a kingdom lose a friend over a silence everyone considered too awkward to interrupt.

Lady Maelin once laughed across the chapel at a remark I had not meant as a joke, and for several hours I mistook the event for a prophecy. She is incomparable, naturally; still, even prophecy requires interpretation, and a laugh cannot be made to carry the whole burden of a vow. This is the lesson I resist most: that loyalty is not proved by the grand declaration at the beginning, nor disproved by every quarrel thereafter, but made visible in the small, uncelebrated return. Not the ribbon itself. The manner of returning it. [3]