WE HAD ESTABLISHED a rhythm, Devi and I. Each night we would descend through the hole we’d made, our thieves’ lamps casting blue-green shadows across shelves that hadn’t seen light in centuries. We would select texts, copy them in my compressed shorthand, and return them to their places before dawn. It was slow, methodical work, but we were making progress.
Most of what we found was administrative. Records of expenditures, meeting minutes, correspondence between people whose names meant nothing to me. Documents from an organization that had operated within the University centuries ago, then vanished so completely that even its name had been scrubbed from history.
But scattered among the mundane, we found other things.
“Kvothe.” Devi’s whisper cut through the silence one night. “Come look at this.”
She cradled a ledger bound in black leather, its pages yellowed but intact. I moved to her side, holding my lamp close, and read over her shoulder.
The text was old Temic, formal and dry. A charter of some kind, laying out the structure and purpose of an organization. I recognized some of the language from my studies, but other words were unfamiliar. Technical terms that had fallen out of use.
I scanned down the page, my eyes catching on official titles, lists of jurisdictions, chains of authority.
Then I saw the name, and my breath stopped.
Ordo Amyr.
The Order of the Amyr.
Not legend. Not myth. Not children’s stories about shining knights who fought for the greater good. This was a budget. A hierarchy. A chain of command with names and titles and jurisdictions.
“They were real,” I breathed.
“More than real.” Devi’s finger traced down the page. “Look at this. They had members inside the University. Inside the Church. Inside the courts of half the kingdoms in the world.” She turned the page, and her eyes widened. “They had a seat on the Masters’ council.”
I took the ledger from her, the pages rustling in my trembling hands. The scope of what I was seeing began to unfold. Not just an organization, but a network that spanned kingdoms. They had operatives everywhere, working toward goals that were never fully stated but always justified with the same phrase, repeated like a prayer.
Ivare enim euge.
For the greater good.
I copied as much as I could of the ledger that night, my shorthand cramped and frantic, my lamp set low. The Amyr had been real. And they had been here, inside the University, shaping what was taught and what was hidden.
The question was no longer whether they had existed.
The question was where they had gone.
The Chandrian references were harder to find.
They weren’t gathered in a single text, neatly organized for my convenience. Instead they were scattered. A mention here, a fragment there, pieces of a puzzle spread across dozens of documents. I began keeping notes, cross-referencing, building a picture from the edges inward.
Some of what I found confirmed what I already knew. The signs were familiar. Flame turning blue, wood rotting at a touch, shadows behaving wrongly. The names, too, or some of them. Cyphus, Stercus, Ferule. The last one stopped me cold. Ferule. Cinder. The one with pale, cold eyes, who had smiled while my family burned.
But there were new things too. References to “the Rhinta,” an old Adem word that seemed to be used interchangeably with Chandrian. Mentions of a conflict so old it predated the University itself, a war that had ended not with victory but with binding.
The days that followed were a fever.
I pored over my copied documents obsessively, cross-referencing, annotating, building webs of connection that sprawled across the floor of my room. I stopped going to classes. I ate only when my hands shook too badly to hold a pen. I slept in fragments, waking with insights that demanded immediate attention.
The shorthand I’d developed became second nature, as familiar as breathing. I could read my compressed notes as easily as normal text now, my mind automatically expanding the symbols into words. The system that had taken days to learn had become part of me.
And it was working. The fragments were beginning to cohere into something larger. I found references in the hidden documents that pointed to texts in the regular Archives. Books I’d seen on shelves, never knowing what they contained. There were patterns in the gaps, places where information had been removed but the shape of its absence was still visible.
I was getting closer. I could feel the truth just beyond my reach.
But the damage from the potion was getting worse. The tremor in my hands had become constant, and my Alar slipped more with each passing day. I caught myself losing time, standing in different parts of my room with no memory of moving. In the hidden room, I sometimes looked up from my work to find minutes had passed like moments, or moments stretched into hours.
I kept going. Buried the fear beneath the work. And told no one.
Devi seemed distracted lately, more tense than usual. Her usual sharp humor had an edge to it, her movements less fluid. Once I caught her staring at the hole in the courtyard ceiling, her jaw tight, as if calculating something I couldn’t see.
“You alright?” I asked.
Her smile was thin. “Fine. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Contingencies.” She turned back to her work. “Always good to have contingencies.”
Another night, after we’d heard footsteps on a nearby walkway and frozen in silence, she didn’t resume working right away. She stood beneath the hole, looking up at the patch of night sky visible through it. I couldn’t read her face.
“What are we going to do when someone realizes?” she asked quietly.
“No one will realize. The courtyard’s abandoned.”
“Someone always realizes.” She looked at me then, and something in her eyes made me uneasy. “We should talk about what happens when they do.”
“We’ll figure it out when the time comes.”
“That’s not a plan, Kvothe.” Her voice was sharp. “That’s hope dressed up as strategy.”
She was right. I knew she was right.
“Alright,” I said. “What do you suggest?”
“A cache. Somewhere away from Imre, away from the University.” She gestured at the satchel where we kept our copied notes. “If we don’t keep the texts with us, they can’t pin it on us. Suspicion isn’t proof.”
“You have somewhere in mind?”
“I don’t keep all my collateral in one place, darling boy. Bad for business.” Her smile returned, sharper now.
It was a good plan. Practical. The kind of thinking I should have done from the start.
We started that same night.
I should have pressed. Should have asked what she was really worried about. But I was too focused on my own research, consumed by the fragments I was piecing together.
I let it go.
That was my mistake. One of many.
I arrived at the courtyard at the appointed time.
We’d established a pattern by then. Every second night, weather permitting, we would meet here. I would arrive first, scale the wall, and start re-opening the hole. Devi would follow within a quarter hour, never more. It was a maintainable pace. One that we’d settled on over spans to avoid burnout.
I noticed that the wall was beginning to show wear in our path up. I would need to find us another route before the patterns became more obvious, some place where the mortar wasn’t so soft. At the top I sat for a moment, looking down into the courtyard. Moonlight filtered through the apple tree’s bare branches. The flagstones were thick with dead leaves, just as they’d always been. Our hole nestled next to the wall, directly above the room that held all my answers.
I dropped down and started clearing the debris we used to disguise our improved chute.
A quarter hour passed. Then half.
The chute was open now.
But Devi didn’t come.
The courtyard held its breath. So did I.
I told myself there were reasonable explanations. A client who stayed too late. Business in Imre that couldn’t wait. Maybe she’d simply decided it was too dangerous tonight. The moon was bright, the sky clear, too much risk of being seen.
But Devi didn’t make decisions like that. If she said she would come, she came. That was the bargain. That was the trust we’d built between us, one night at a time.
Another quarter hour. The moon climbed higher. The courtyard’s shadows shifted, and I moved with them, staying hidden.
Still nothing.
An hour passed.
Something was wrong.
I tried to dismiss the feeling. Devi could take care of herself. Better than I could, now, probably. Her Alar was still whole. She’d bested Master Dal. Whatever kept her away tonight, she could handle it.
After two hours of waiting, I made my decision.
I climbed back over the wall, dropped to the street beyond, and turned my steps toward Imre. If something had happened to her, I needed to know. If nothing had happened, she’d probably kill me for checking on her like a worried mother.
I walked faster.
The walk to Imre had never felt so long.
I crossed the Omethi bridge at a near run, my footsteps hollow on the ancient stone. The river below was dark and swift, reflecting nothing. On the far bank, Imre’s lights burned warm against the night, but they seemed dim, distant.
My hands were shaking again. I flexed my fingers, reached for a simple binding to steady them. Heat from my body to the cold air, just enough to warm my hands.
The connection formed. Held for a moment. Slipped away like water.
I let it go.
The streets were quiet. Most of the taverns had already closed for the night. A few late drinkers stumbled home, singing off-key songs about love and loss. A lamplighter made his rounds, his pole catching wicks with practiced ease, bringing light to the darkness.
No one paid me any attention.
I turned down the narrow street where Devi kept her rooms. The butcher’s shop below was dark. It was well past midnight, and old Teren always closed by sunset. But something about the darkness felt wrong. Too complete. Too still.
I climbed the exterior stairs, my boots quiet on the wood. At the top, I paused.
No light showed under Devi’s door.
I knocked softly. “Devi?”
No answer.
I knocked again, louder this time. My knuckles hurt against the wood. “Devi, are you there?”
Still nothing.
The handle turned under my hand. It was unlocked.
Devi never left her door unlocked.
I pushed it open.
The first thing I saw was the destruction.
Devi’s room looked like a storm had torn through it. Her bookshelf lay on its side, volumes scattered across the floor. The desk was overturned, papers and vials everywhere. One of her perfume bottles had shattered, and the scent of cinnamon mixed with something sharper, more acrid.
Burnt metal hung thick in the air, sympathy pushed far beyond safe limits. The air itself felt wrong, pressurized.
The second thing I saw was the men.
Three of them in a loose triangle. Two wore traveling leathers, the practical kind that suggested long roads and hard use. They stood ready, alert, hands positioned for quick movement. Watchful. Waiting.
The last of them I recognized.
Viari.
The giller from the Archives, the one who traveled the world searching for rare books. Cealdish features, dark hair tied back, scars up both arms. I’d seen him in the stacks a dozen times, always polite, always moving with quiet purpose. He’d helped me find obscure references once, directed me to the right section with a knowing smile.
He wasn’t smiling now.
His hand was outstretched, fingers spread wide, his whole body tense with effort. The air around him shimmered with heat, the distortion of a powerful Alar made visible. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the cold.
The third thing I saw was Devi.
She knelt in the wreckage of her possessions, one hand braced against the floorboards to keep from falling. Her strawberry hair had come loose, its ends dark with blood from her nose. Her breathing came harsh and ragged, each breath a visible effort.
But her eyes burned with desperate concentration.
She was fighting back. Holding her own against three trained sympathists at once. Barely.
Poor-boys lay scattered around her, four of them cracked open and spent, their heat exhausted. She was burning through energy faster than she could replace it, and there were no more warmers within reach. Her free hand trembled. I could see the shimmer of her Alar in the air, a barrier of will holding back the combined force pressing against her.
She was losing. Inch by inch, breath by breath, she was losing ground.
The fourth thing I saw was Master Lorren.
He lay by the window, still but for the spasms. The moonlight behind him showed at least one of his eyes swollen shut. Somehow his hand still clutched a small ledger bound in red leather.
Not one of his Archives books. This one was different.
I knew that binding. I’d watched Devi stitch it together with her own hands. I’d seen her tuck it into her satchel a hundred times.
One of ours.
Time seemed to slow. I stood frozen in the doorway, caught between one breath and the next.
They found us. They know. This is over.
Devi is going to die here.
I should run. I should help. I should do something.
Devi’s eyes found mine.
I saw recognition first, sudden and sharp. Then understanding, the pieces fitting together with horrible clarity. Then something worse than anger, worse than fear.
Betrayal.
Her face changed. The desperate concentration transformed into rage.
“You,” she breathed.
The word carried more weight than any accusation I’d ever heard. It held everything. Every night we’d worked together, every secret we’d shared, all of it gone.
I tried to speak. To explain. To tell her I had nothing to do with this, that I’d been waiting in the courtyard, that I’d come looking for her.
But she wasn’t listening.
Her Alar hit me like a thunderclap inside my skull.
Not a binding. Not a careful working. Nothing precise or controlled. Just raw sympathetic force, thrown with all her remaining strength. All her energy, every scrap of will she had left, focused into a single devastating blow.
Aimed at the person she thought had destroyed her.
My own Alar tried to rise in defense. Tried to match her force, turn it aside, build a wall, anything.
But the boundaries I’d maintained in my damaged mind failed.
In the corner of my vision, I saw Viari’s bindings slam into Devi’s unguarded side. Saw her reeling backwards.
Then the world fractured.
I was falling but the floor was above me.
Time bent sideways.
The room dissolved into pure sensation.
I couldn’t remember how to breathe.
Then I remembered too well. Every breath I’d ever taken, all happening at once.
The floor wasn’t there.
Then it was there twice.
Everything was too much.
Everything was not enough.
I fell into darkness.
Then into something darker than darkness.
I fell.
And fell.
And fell.
| Chapter 12 | Contents | Chapter 14 |