I REACHED DOWN AND Devi’s small hand gripped mine. Unused to climbing, she scrambled up, graceless but determined, and for a moment we sat together on the wall, looking down into the courtyard. Moonlight filtered through the apple tree’s branches, the same tree I’d climbed down countless times to visit Auri. The flagstones were thick with moss, just as they’d always been. But tonight I was seeing it with different eyes.
“It’s smaller than I thought,” she said.
We lowered ourselves down. Our boots crunched on dead leaves. The sound was impossibly loud in the stillness. I held my breath, waiting for a shout, a light, some sign that we’d been heard. Nothing. No one. We were alone.
Devi unpacked her satchel. Jars of acid compound. Brushes. Cloths soaked in neutralizing solution. A small trowel.
“Here,” I said, pointing to a section of flagstone near the wall’s center. “This was where its ceiling should be.”
Devi knelt and pressed her palm against the stone. “The acid works,” she said, “but it’s not quick. We’ll need to be patient.”
“How patient?”
“Spans, not days.” She unstoppered one of the jars, her smile returning. “Patience isn’t your strong suit, dear boy. But I’m an excellent teacher.”
She applied a brushstroke of acid to the stone. It hissed as the vapor rose.
The nights blurred together after that.
We developed a rhythm. Every night, we scaled the wall. Devi would apply the acid while I prepared the neutralizing cloths and disposed of the powdered stone we scraped away. At first, we worked in silence, speaking only when necessary.
The stone was harder than we’d expected. Worn smooth and dense. Some nights the depression deepened by a finger’s width. Other nights the acid accomplished nothing and we left before dawn with little to show but aching knees and chemical burns on our fingertips.
I never saw Auri during those nights.
At first I told myself she was simply keeping her own hours, as she often did. By the fourth night, I knew better. The courtyard was hers. The apple tree, the moss-covered stones, the moonlight that pooled between the walls. She would have noticed the acid smell the first night. She would have heard the hiss of vapor, felt the wrongness of what we were doing to her place.
I imagined her retreating into the deeper parts of the Underthing. Down past Mantle and Wains, into the places she had never shown me. Tucked away in some deep corner, waiting for the violation to end.
I should have gone to find her. Should have explained, or apologized, or at least made sure she was safe. I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her face. Couldn’t bear what I might find in her eyes.
So I decided she was fine. That she understood. That I would make it right when this was over.
I was good at telling myself things back then.
The days blurred too. I attended classes, worked in the Fishery, acted as if I had nothing to hide. My mind was always in the courtyard, calculating how much deeper we’d gone, how much further we had to go. I ate without tasting. I slept in fragments, never deeply. The world had gone gray, and all that remained was the courtyard, the stone, the door beyond.
On the ninth night, Devi was brushing acid into the depression, now nearly a foot deep, when footsteps sounded on the second floor walkway. We froze, acid still hanging from her brush.
The footsteps were slow, pausing once at a window. My chest went tight. But they continued on, fading into the distance.
Devi let out a long breath. “My, that does get the blood moving.”
I smiled at the absurdity of it. Two people crouched in an abandoned courtyard, dissolving stone in the middle of the night, freezing at the sound of footsteps.
“We should be more careful,” I said.
“We should stop entirely and go back to Imre instead,” she replied, smiling as she turned back to her work.
During those hours, I began to know her.
Not the Devi who bargained and smiled and kept her secrets close. Not Demon Devi, the gaelet who dealt in blood and debts. The other one. The one who could let her guard down.
One night, as she worked, she talked about her expulsion. She skipped the official story, conduct unbecoming or whatever it was, and told me the truth beneath it.
“I was better than them,” she said. “Better than Elxa Dal, even. They knew it. The Masters. They could see what I was becoming, and it frightened them.”
“That’s why they expelled you? Because you were too good?”
“Because I was too good and too hungry and too unwilling to pretend otherwise.” She scraped away a layer of softened stone with more force than necessary. “The University is built on hierarchies, Kvothe. Master and student. Teacher and taught. Male and female. They couldn’t tolerate someone who threatened to climb faster than they allowed. Especially not a young woman with leverage.”
I thought of my own struggles with the Masters. The way Hemme had looked at me. The careful dance of deference and defiance I performed every day just to maintain my place.
“So you left,” I said.
“I was thrown out.” Her voice hardened. “There’s a difference. They took everything from me. My rank, my access, my future. They reduced me to a gaelet operating out of a room above a butcher’s shop.” She turned to look at me. “I’m not just trying to get into the Archives, Kvothe. I’m taking back what they stole.”
I understood that hunger. The need to reclaim something lost. For her it was status, potential, the life she should have had. For me it was answers. Justice. The truth about what had happened to my family.
“What about you?” she asked. “Why does the door matter so much?”
I hesitated. I had never told anyone the full truth. Not even Denna. But with stone dust on my hands and the smell of acid in my lungs, I spoke anyway.
“The Chandrian,” I said quietly. “They killed my family. My whole troupe. I was eleven years old.”
“Oh Kvothe.” Devi’s voice softened, but only slightly. “The Chandrian are a myth.”
“They’re not.” I kept my eyes on the stone, my hands still. “I saw them. Haliax, their leader. Cinder, the one who smiled at me over my parents’ bodies.” I stopped. “They’re real, and they’re out there, and no one will believe me because the stories make them into bogeymen for children.”
“And you really think the answers are behind that door?”
“I think someone has been systematically removing information about them from the Archives. Every book I find, every reference I chase, leads to empty shelves and missing pages. But whoever built that room, whoever sealed it away, they kept records. They have to have.”
Devi looked at me. She weighed my words, and I knew she didn’t believe me. Not really. But something passed between us all the same. I couldn’t have named it at the time. But I understand it now.
Neither of us spoke for a long moment. Then Devi turned back to the stone, her brush moving with renewed purpose.
“Well then,” she said quietly. “I suppose we’d better get through this door.”
We worked until nearly dawn then, our purpose rekindled. And when I finally made my way to my narrow bed, sleep took me quick and dreamless.
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