THE ROAD AHEAD WAS little more than a gray scar stretching into the early light. Above, the last stars blinked faintly, smeared across the sky like chalk. Below, I kept walking. Each step felt like a small rebellion against common sense. My boots were borrowed, and they made sure I never forgot it, gnawing at my heels with every step.
Renere seemed impossibly far. Somewhere ahead, Ambrose pressed onward, and Auri was dragged along with him. Every time I thought of her, the despair was too much. So I did the only thing I could. I kept my eyes on the road and put one foot in front of the other. A single step means nothing against that kind of distance. But enough steps, one after another, and even an impossible road begins to shorten.
That’s when I heard them. Footsteps on the road behind me, closing fast. I turned and saw two figures against the dawn, their shadows stretching toward me. I reached for something, anything, but before I could act, one of them called out. “Still warm.” It was Wil’s voice, cutting through the dim as his silhouette came into focus.
The fist came wide, smashing into my jaw before I could say anything. I swayed, vision swimming, arms wheeling for balance. Anger surged through me and the taste of plum and nutmeg filled my mouth. I clenched my fists and took a step forward, but my arms were already trembling. Those damnable potions. Before I could embarrass myself, Simmon slipped in between us and caught Wil’s wrist.
“Charred hands, both of you,” he said, his voice strained.
Wil looked away, breathing hard. When Sim was certain we wouldn’t lunge at one another again, he stepped back and turned to face us both.
“You are right to be angry,” Sim told Wil. “I don’t condone what he’s done either. But I saw the look on your face when I told you he was safe. You were relieved. Don’t act like you don’t care.”
Wil met his gaze but said nothing, his stillness more pointed than any reply. When it was clear Sim would neither budge nor relent, Wil turned away, but the anger in his eyes hadn’t died.
Sim watched him retreat, then turned to me, disappointment written plain on his face.
I raised a hand to stop Sim before he could say anything. “Wil, if I could have done something for Lorren, I would have.” Shame closed around my throat. I opened my mouth to say something more, but the rest would not come.
Wil’s expression barely shifted. “It’s not just Lorren. The Surthens pulled their collection. The Alveron loans will follow. And more after that. Generations of work. Generations of trust. All. Gone.” He spat the last word. “For what? Curiosity?”
“It wasn’t just that,” I said, defensive without meaning to be.
“Then explain it,” Wilem pressed.
“You owe us at least that,” Sim added gently, though his gaze was firm. “Stop burying the truth.”
I opened my mouth to argue, to deflect, but thought better of it. They were right. More than that, they deserved it. So I breathed out slow, as if I could push out more than air. Let my shoulders drop. Let the silence have me.
“How did you even find me?” I asked, grasping for somewhere to start.
“You’re predictable,” Sim said. “The moment I realized you’d slipped out, I knew you’d be on the eastern road. Heading for Vintas and Ambrose.” He bent to massage his calf. “We ran most of the way. Those hills are brutal.”
Every minute I spent here was a minute Ambrose pulled further ahead. But these were my friends, and I owed them more honesty than I had been giving them. “I guess you better get comfortable,” I muttered. “This is going to take a while.”
Sim gestured down the road. “Tell us on the way.”
I blinked. “You’re coming with me?”
“Of course we are,” Sim said, incredulous. “Do you think we’d let you do this alone?”
Wilem nodded, clapping my shoulder. “Tel ausa,” he said quietly. Then, as if remembering I wouldn’t know the Siaru, “It means, ’Our fool.’”
Something tangled itself in my chest, too complicated to name. I turned away quickly.
Sim nudged me with his elbow. “We’re your friends, Kvothe. Stop being so surprised by it.”
The road ahead did not grow shorter, but at least I wouldn’t be walking it alone.
The morning sun climbed higher as we walked, and the first wagons of the day began to appear on the road. We had stepped aside to let yet another farmer pass when he slowed his cart and looked us over.
“You boys need a ride?”
We clambered into the back and let him flick the reins. The road was rough. The cart rocked beneath us, wood groaning, axles creaking, dust curling up behind in lazy snakes.
It was there, jostled along by road and memory, that I let the words tumble out. The road. The Edema Ruh. The laughter of my parents in firelight. Their murder. The shadow under the stars. The secret name of the Chandrian. I spoke on. Wilem was still, eyes fixed on the horizon. Sim’s mouth moved silently, the way it did when he was turning something over that he couldn’t quite believe.
And when my story ended, the tightness in my chest let go. It hurt. It helped. Teccam wrote that confession draws the poison out, makes the wound clean. Perhaps he was right and some of the poison was bled away.
Not all. Doubt still lingered between us, unspoken. Wilem hid it well, but I saw the glance he shared with Sim. Neither spoke. Neither needed to.
The cart creaked onward. Sim stared at his hands. Wil’s eyes were distant, his expression unreadable. The farmer hummed softly to himself, a melody that tugged at something in the back of my mind. When I realized it was the children’s rhyme about the Chandrian, I gave him a long look, but his eyes stayed on the road and his humming wandered off-key into something else entirely.
It was Sim who finally broke the silence. “The Chandrian,” he said, lowering his voice as if the name itself might draw them. “You’re certain?”
“Look, you don’t have to believe in the Chandrian,” I said. “But my first teacher, Ben, once said something that always stuck with me. He said every culture in the world has stories about them. The same stories. The same signs, the same fears.” I paused. “When every traveler you meet warns you away from the same stretch of road, at some point you stop walking that direction instead of asking why.”
He nodded. Wil was quiet, but his eyes had sharpened. I had reached him too.
After a moment, I noticed a smooth stone rattling loose among the boards of the cart. I picked it up and turned it over in my fingers, feeling its weight. They watched as I spoke the Name of stone, and it reshaped itself in my palm, flattening and curving until it became a ring. I slipped it onto my finger beside the silver one with its pale amber stone that Auri had given me.
“Rings like these,” I murmured, flexing my fingers, “are meant to give my enemies pause.”
“Or make them laugh,” Sim quipped.
Wilem just shook his head. “You’ll draw attention, good and bad.”
“How far you headed?” the farmer called back over the noise of the cart.
“The greystone circle,” I said. “The one on the bluff, half a day east.”
He was quiet a moment. “That place feels wrong after dark. I can take you farther if you like.”
“We won’t be there long,” I said.
He shrugged and didn’t ask more.
In the easier silence that followed, something shifted between the three of us. Not forgiveness, exactly, but the beginning of understanding. Sim asked questions. Careful ones, the way you’d probe a wound to see how deep it went. What had the documents said about the Chandrian? What did I plan to do when I caught Ambrose? Did I have any kind of plan at all?
I answered as honestly as I could, but often enough I just didn’t know. Wil listened more than he spoke, but he was watching me, and the anger was finally gone.
The farmer dropped us at the greystones as the light was beginning to fade. They stood like giants too tired to move, their surfaces worn smooth by wind and years. I cursed myself silently. The text I needed, “En Temerant Voistra,” was cached half a day’s ride back toward Imre, tucked safely away with the rest of the copied documents. I would have to work from memory.
I closed my eyes and tried to picture the book. The pages had been brittle with age, the Temic archaic. But I could see the drawn circle of greystones, and slowly the words returned to me.
I recited what I could, the old language feeling strange on my tongue. Wilem listened with a scholar’s patience, occasionally stopping me to correct a pronunciation or clarify a construction. I fished a scrap of paper and a nub of charcoal from one of my many pockets and passed them to Sim, who copied down the fragments as we went, his scribe’s hand keeping pace. Between the three of us, we managed more together than I could have alone. Yet even working in tandem, we all faltered when confronted with a single word.
“Dance?” Wilem murmured, disbelief coloring his voice.
Sim let out a short scoff. “That can’t be right. Are you sure about that one?”
I thought of Denna. Of a night spent sitting on greystones much like these, high on a bluff near Trebon, watching for blue flame in the distance while the world grew quiet around us. We had talked for hours that night. About names. About secrets. About the things you can only say to someone when neither of you is looking at the other.
I placed my hands on the nearest surface and leaned into the hum.
The Name didn’t come as a sound but as a movement. A slow turning, deep in the stone, like the memory of a rhythm older than music. I felt it build, patient and vast, the weight of something that had waited an age to be asked. When it came whole, it left my lips before I could stop myself. “Cyaerbasalien.”
The stones shifted beneath my hand as the Name took root, a low tremor rippling through the circle. The world paused for a breath, then stilled.
“It didn’t work,” I began, frustration already bleeding into my voice.
But then Sim’s hand settled gently on my shoulder, stopping me. “Kvothe, look,” he whispered, pointing upward.
I followed his gaze. The sky above was velvet black and full of unfamiliar stars, bright and fixed in constellations I had never seen. The air around us had changed too, grown thick and sweet, carrying a warmth that had nothing to do with the season.
We had crossed into the Fae.
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