THE SKY UNRAVELS, thread by thread, as though Jax himself were plucking it apart. Stars wheel and drift like embers from a dying fire, their places subtly, maddeningly wrong. Two constellations blink down at me like animals seeing a man for the first time.
A watching sort of sky. A waiting one.
I lead us through the trees. There is no sun to steer by here, no path, no road, no mark of any hand that thought to make one. But something is pulling me dayward, soft and constant as the tide. I have stopped fighting it. Felurian. Her name melts against my lips, and my feet run ahead of me.
The air rings thin as plucked glass strings. The ground shifts soft between my strides, the slope of it gone wrong between one breath and the next.
It is not stable ground. It is a thing that wears the shape of stable ground the way a feather pillow wears the shape of something firm.
Sim stumbled at my side, filling the silence the way he fills all silences, with talk. His voice stretched like taffy, pulled too thin. Wilem walked behind us, watching the tree line with dark and level eyes. He moved the way a wolf does in the open, every step a weighing of the ground.
“We’re lost,” Wilem said.
I almost denied it. I had walked through Tarbean’s crueler alleys, through the ten thousand tangled shelves of the Archives. But those were places built from human hands, and human hands leave patterns you can learn. Streets have ends. Shelves have order. Here there was nothing firm to hold. The Fae slid around us the way blankets shift in sleep, and every landmark quietly rearranged itself the moment I looked somewhere else.
“Say it,” Wilem pressed.
“We’re misplaced,” I muttered.
Wilem shook his head. “Well, we’re not found.”
Before I could argue, something changed.
A sound threads through the trees. Light as a breath. Quick as a shiver. Not a voice. Not quite. It is closer to music than to any other thing I know. It finds the hollow of my chest the way a struck note finds the body of a lute, and learns to sing inside it. I am not hearing it so much as I am remembering it. A melody I have always carried. A song I did not know was mine.
It does not call me forward. It waits for me to come.
“What now?” Wilem’s voice, sharp behind me.
I didn’t answer. I stepped toward the song.
“Kvothe.” Wilem caught my arm, his fingers pressing hard against my shoulder. “You know what this is.”
“We can’t keep wandering,” I said, pulling free. The song still hung, patient, between the trees. “This is the only thing in this place that feels like it knows where it is.”
“That is how people die,” Wilem said flatly.
I turned to face him. “Then I’ll go alone.”
When Wilem didn’t speak, I stepped into the trees. By the time I reached the edge of the clearing, I was not alone.
“You really thought we’d stay behind?” Sim asked, appearing at my side. He was pale, his sandy hair pushed back from his forehead with one hand, his eyes wide as a child’s at a fire.
I was not surprised when Wilem pushed through the undergrowth behind us, muttering in Siaru beneath his breath.
The clearing opens like a held breath released.
Firelight moves among them, the shapes that are not quite human and not quite anything else. Their limbs bend in ways that make my eyes ache with wanting. Their faces are smooth as river glass, and in the dim glow their eyes shift from silver to green, slow and restless as moonlit water.
For a moment they are dancers wrapped in flame, each gesture seamless, each turn a phrase I almost recognize. Then the light shifts, and what is strange in them shows itself without apology. Ribs too narrow. Lips too full and flushed. Cheekbones carved so sharp the skin around them forgets how to move. Smiles that hold too long and too wide, as though no one has ever taught them when to stop.
“Tehlu’s name,” Sim breathes.
I cannot answer him. I cannot look away.
A silver-haired figure steps forward from the fire’s edge, cups in long, narrow fingers. They look us over, their voice humming like wind drawn across strings.
“No iron. No ugly things,” they say. It is not a request.
My hand is already setting my knife at my feet, with the care of a man laying down something heavier than steel. Sim followed. Wilem’s hand closed over his blade and stayed there, knuckles pale, eyes fixed on the watching Court. His fingers tightened. Released. Tightened again. Then he crouched and placed the knife beside mine, his throat working as though swallowing against a rope pulled tight.
The cup they pressed into my hands tasted of honey and thunder, thick, electric as it slid down my throat. It pooled in my chest and spread outward, loosening things I had not known were tight. The clearing softened at its edges. The fire grew warmer, closer, kinder.
Sim drank deep and laughed, a startled, boyish sound. His eyes had gone glassy, the way they did after his third round of metheglin at the Eolian.
Wilem held his cup but did not drink. He watched the tree line the way a man watches a door he might need.
Then another figure stepped from the gathered press of bodies. Hair like living flame, eyes like smoldering amber, and a stillness about them that made the air lean in close. They moved the way a blade moves, with the kind of grace that promises a cut.
“If you want safe passage,” they said, their voice precise, “you will dance.”
Sim swayed beside me. “Dance?”
But I was already dancing.
The first steps are mine. Measured. Deliberate. I lay them down the way I would lay the opening notes of a song I do not yet know the shape of.
But the music has its own intentions.
It folds over itself and finds me, pressing firm inside me like a second pulse. The ground hums beneath my feet. My body knows this rhythm before my mind can name it, the way my fingers know the frets before I’ve chosen the chord. I am not dancing so much as being played, and the song is older than anything I have words for.
The fire turns with me. The shadows lean. I feel the pulse in the soles of my feet, in the hollows of my wrists, in the base of my throat where breath becomes voice. For a span of time I cannot measure, there is nothing in me but the motion and the music and the heat.
Then something breaks the rhythm.
Sim stumbles. His feet catch on a beat that is no longer there, and he staggers sideways with a look on his face like a man waking from a dream into cold water. I catch his arm before he falls. He is trembling beneath my hand.
I pull him from the fire’s circle, away from the turning shapes, into the cooler dark beneath the trees.
Sim wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I think I’m dying,” he said, and meant it.
I crouched beside him, trying to shake off a dizziness that clung like cobwebs. Wilem stood a few paces behind, arms crossed, watching the dark between the trees.
Sim’s eyes were still glassy, unfocused. He swayed even on his knees, listing gently, like a mast in a slow wind.
At the edge of my vision, something flickered. A deep orange hue, half-hidden among the twisting shapes of the trees.
An orchard.
The branches hang low, gnarled and heavy. Their fruit gleams like molten copper in the dim light, and the shapes of them stir something deep and half-remembered, a song in a language I have never learned but somehow know. The air beneath them is thick and sweet, pressing close, pressing in, the way a lullaby presses against the inside of your chest before sleep takes you.
Then Sim was on his feet, moving toward the trees with the loose, dreaming stride of a sleepwalker.
“Don’t!”
Too late. He plucked one of the fruits and bit into it. Juice dripped down his chin, catching the light like fire-lit gold. His eyes drifted shut as he chewed.
“It tastes the same,” he murmured, turning to look at me. “You should try this.”
I slapped the fruit from his hand.
His mouth went slack. His brow creased. He searched my face for something I couldn’t give him. Then, somewhere behind us, a sound. A snap of branches. The quiet, deliberate weight of approaching steps.
A figure emerged from the trees. Tall. Silent. A spear leveled at my throat.
Black eyes, depthless as still water. Limbs that bent with a slow, coiling grace, as if the bones beneath did not quite match the shapes I knew. The Thiani.
Their dark gaze moved from Sim to me, then down to the half-eaten fruit lying in the dirt. A low sound rose from them before they spoke, thrumming up through the ground and into the soles of my feet.
“You have touched what was not given.”
I raised my hands. “Wait.”
Their mouth split open, and a sound poured out that was not a voice. Shrill. Furious. It carved through the forest like a blade drawn across bone. The air brimmed with answering calls, drawing closer with every heartbeat.
We were herded into the clearing at spearpoint. The hum of voices swelled and shrank around us like a tide. The ground tilted beneath my feet. The light bent strangely. My stomach rolled.
“The Talamas Grove has been defiled,” the Thiani leader announced, striking the butt of their spear against the ground. The sharp thunk of it rattled in my skull. “There must be justice.”
The assembled crowd muttered and hissed.
Then a voice. Soft, calm. Absolute.
“Bring them forward.”
The crowd parted.
He stood at the far edge of the clearing, tall and still. Dark skin. Dark hair falling past his shoulders like a curtain of black silk. He wore no crown, no armor. He did not need them. Everything around him leaned toward him the way shadows lean toward dusk.
“High Lord Remmen,” the Thiani intoned, their voice sharpening to a thin, bright edge. “These humans were caught eating from the sacred grove.”
Remmen. The name landed in the pit of my stomach where stories lived. Something old. Something heavy.
The Lord of Twilight. The Telwyth Mael.
Remmen tilted his head, those burning violet eyes considering us. He held power the way deep water holds cold. It was simply what he was.
Sim made a sound. It might have been a word. “We didn’t.” His voice cracked. “I didn’t.”
Remmen’s gaze settled on him.
“No,” Simmon managed, stumbling over the single syllable. If I had been sober, I might have shut my eyes in despair.
Remmen sighed. A quiet sound. The sound of something being carefully set down.
“Your hand,” he said, extending his own.
Sim blinked at him, swaying slightly. “Huh?”
A long, awful moment passed. Then, hazily obedient, Simmon held out his hand. His fingers were smudged in the low light, stained deep in the lines of his palm. The soft orange of crushed flesh, half-mashed under his nails.
A sharp intake of breath from the gathered Court. Hissing, seething.
“A thief and a liar!” someone spat.
“Hang them over the Black Morass,” Remmen said, already turning away.
Luckily, he had not meant by the neck.
We were thrust into a cage woven from living roots, an orb no larger than a closet, and left to dangle over a putrid swamp. What relief I felt at keeping my throat unbruised faded quickly. The cage creaked and twisted when any of us so much as shifted, and the air inside tasted of rot.
Sim groaned. “My head feels like Kilvin clamped it in a vice.”
Wilem, tense beside him, did not look up. “Don’t eat fruit that glows.”
Sim let out something close to a laugh. Then, quieter, “I haven’t had persimmons since I was a child.”
Wilem stilled for a moment, then turned to him. “Persimmons?”
A hesitant nod. “My parents had an estate outside Renere. They grew wild along the cliffs. That’s why,” he muttered, glaring at nothing in particular, “they named me Persimmon.”
A slow beat of silence stretched between the three of us.
“You’re joking,” I said.
“Hardly. I prefer Sim.”
“I’m sure you do, Persimmon,” Wil said.
Sim dropped his head back against the woven roots. “Are we going to die here?”
“No.”
The cage swayed. The swamp breathed beneath us, thick and slow.
The air brightened around us, though no sun had risen. The darkness simply grew tired and slunk away to gather itself elsewhere.
We were cut from our cage before I had time to brace against the fall. The ground met my feet too soon, as if it had been farther away just a breath before.
The Court had gathered again. Quieter now. Even the ever-present hum of unseen things had drawn itself thin.
Remmen sat upon the great twisted roots of a massive tree. Dark skin against pale bark. Violet eyes that watched without seeming to watch. Even at rest, his presence filled the space around him the way a low note fills a room.
The Thiani leader stepped from the crowd, there where a moment before there had been empty air. “They have defiled the Talamas Grove,” they announced. “There must be justice.”
“What,” Remmen said, “must be done?”
“They have no place here. One clean stroke. The head will do.”
Sim made a strangled noise in his throat.
“You would kill a man over fruit?” The words were out before I could stop them.
Soft laughter rippled through the crowd. Not kind.
“It was no mere fruit. It was a sacred offering. Such theft is blasphemy.”
The word settled over the clearing like ash.
Remmen shook his head.
“Then cut out this one’s tongue,” the Thiani said, pointing to Sim.
“No.” The word came out of me harder than I intended. Harder than was wise.
Remmen looked at me. “No? And who are you to decide in matters of this court?”
“I am who sets the challenge,” I said. “In the old ways.”
The words felt strange in my mouth. Old. Borrowed. As if I had heard them in a tale long ago and they had been waiting inside me ever since.
A stir passed through the crowd. Murmurs. A bright flicker of interest.
Remmen’s lips curled faintly. “You would challenge me?”
“I would.”
Then, with a gesture sharp as falling leaves, Remmen summoned a group of attendants.
They moved quickly. A small wooden table was set between us. A board was placed upon it.
Tak.
The word lands in me like a stone placed on a board. Around the clearing, the murmur of the Fae draws tight.
Remmen’s gaze meets mine. He reaches forward and places his first stone.
I let my breath settle. I lay my first stone on the board, and something surfaces in my chest, warm and sudden, like a memory shaken loose from where it slept. A courtyard in Severen. An old man’s voice, patient and precise.
Play to be good.
Remmen plays his next piece. There is no hesitation in his hands. He plays the way rivers move through stone, each piece arriving where it was always meant to be. A rhythm that keeps turning just before I can find it. I have felt this before. Only once. The board opening beneath me into a depth I cannot reach the bottom of.
I lay my next piece.
Play to be better.
The game deepens. Remmen’s stones spread across the board in patterns I almost recognize, shifting just as I begin to read them. I adjust. I play something looser.
I know this feeling. The board seen from an impossible height, every move connected to the waking mind, every move connected to the sleeping mind. I learned from a man whose depth I could never reach. Even my best games had been allowed, the way a child is allowed, without ever being in danger of losing. I hated it. I never told him so.
But I learned.
A beautiful game.
My fingers find the next stone. And the next. Something old wakes in my hands, a rhythm I did not know I carried. Deeper than strategy. The game is strumming through me now.
Remmen’s eyes narrow. A single crease appears at his brow.
I place my stone. It settles with a quiet click.
The fire crackles. The air between us holds still.
“Tak,” I say softly.
The board rests between us. The crowd murmurs.
Remmen studied the board for a long moment. Then, with the slow certainty of twilight dimming toward dark, he brushed the stones aside.
“Well played.”
I allowed myself a breath. A slow blink. A moment to believe it.
Remmen turned toward the gathered Court. “A victor must receive their due.”
“My due?”
The Court stirred.
A figure steps forward from the press of watching Fae.
He is young and thin, bright as a candle flickering in restless air. His hair is a mess of inky curls that catch the firelight at their edges, glinting deep blue like raven feathers. And bright mercy, his eyes. They burn with an impossible blue, and they lock onto mine and do not look away.
“A child?” I heard myself say.
Remmen smiled. “Such a small word for what he is.”
The boy did not flinch. Those uncanny blue eyes held mine, weighing me, and I had the sudden strange sense that I was the one being won.
“My son, your ward. The Prince of Twilight.”
I looked at Remmen. “Why?”
“You called for the old ways.”
“And in what old tale does a game of Tak win a man a prince?”
Remmen’s violet eyes held mine. Steady. Ancient. Sure. “In all of them.”
Then the rightness of the story settled into me. The rightness of a hero’s story that becomes the truth. My tongue recoiled, realizing if I had lost, I would never have sung again.
I turned back toward the boy. He grinned at me, bright and sharp as moonlight on a blade.
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