THE COMMON ROOM of the Blind Beggar was louder than it had any right to be.
Sim had bought a bottle of something amber and strong the moment we walked through the door, and now he was two cups deep and telling Bast how the whole thing must have looked. The story had flown ahead of us through the streets, carried by the crowd pouring out of the Citadel, and Sim had already made it his own.
“And then the knee,” Sim said, leaning forward, his eyes bright. “They said you could hear it across the courtyard.”
“You could,” Bast confirmed, not looking up. He was stitching my forearm with the unhurried focus of someone mending a shirt. The needle moved in clean, precise arcs, and if it hurt, the nahlrout made sure I didn’t care. “It was lovely.”
“Lovely,” Sim repeated, half laughing, half appalled.
Wilem sat across from us, a cup untouched at his elbow. He had not joined the retelling. Instead, he watched me with the careful attention of someone reading a document for what it left out.
“Stop fidgeting,” Bast murmured, drawing another stitch tight. “You wanted to play at swords beneath the sun. Now hold still and let me mend what it cost you.”
“It barely cost me anything.”
Bast glanced up, amused. “I know. That’s what makes it insulting to stitch.”
Sim poured another measure and slid it toward Wil, who ignored it. “They’re calling it something,” Sim said. “Kaysera. Do you know what it means?”
Bast snipped the thread with his teeth. “They’ll have it wrong by morning.” He pressed a cloth against my arm and held it. “There. You’ll live, as if there were ever any doubt.”
The nahlrout was already thinning. I could feel it leaving the way you feel the tide pulling back from the shore, each wave taking a little more of the ground you thought was solid. The brightness that had sharpened the world during the duel was gone. In its place, a cottony blankness behind my eyes that made even simple things require effort.
I rubbed at my temple. There was a thought nagging at me, something about the court that felt out of place, a shape just beneath the surface. But when I reached for it, it slipped away. I set it aside and said, “I saw Auri.”
Her name did not feel right in my mouth. Not here. Not in a place of thick wood and firelight. It belonged elsewhere, in the hush of old clay pipes beneath the city, in the rhythm of bare feet on tiled rooftops. Here she was Princess Ariel.
Sim straightened. “She was there?” His voice had gone tight. “Is she all right?”
Bast turned the cloth over in his hands, unconcerned. “Of course.”
The certainty in his voice dug at me. “Prince Trenati was with her.”
Bast scoffed. But it wasn’t his usual amused disdain. “The royal boy takes interest in his wayward sister. How very touching.”
Wilem leaned forward. “With her, or near her?”
“He wasn’t speaking to her. But I don’t think it was coincidence. He stood just close enough.”
“Like someone ensuring people saw him standing there,” Wilem said. He tested his next words before speaking. “More jailor than brother.”
The door creaked open. A man in the livery of a noble attendant stepped inside.
All four of us turned.
“Apologies for the intrusion. Lord Vatis has succumbed to his wounds.”
The room went quiet in the wrong way.
“Impossible,” I said. I had seen him. He had been fine.
Bast shook his head as if the whole situation were a joke not designed for laughter. “Ah, yes. A cut to the leg, a ruined knee, and a scratch from his own blade. Clearly fatal wounds, if you’re an idiot.” He paused. A slow blink. Then, dull certainty settled into his voice. “And naturally, this is your fault.”
The man had only been sent to deliver a message, not to argue. He lowered his head quickly and left.
Wil’s forehead creased. “Either someone was careless with the stitches.”
Sim touched his finger to his nose and said, “Or someone wanted him dead.”
Bast drummed against the table. “A dead man’s story is whatever you please.”
I touched my freshly stitched arm. There were lines here, I just needed to connect them. But the nahlrout had dulled the part of my mind that usually leapt ahead, the part that pulled threads together before I even knew I was reaching for them. Instead, I sat in the fog and grasped at shapes.
That brief exchange between Trenati and the steward. It was the one Bredon had made sure I noticed. Why?
I reached back, sorting through what I’d seen.
There had been a ring on Trenati’s hand, but it hadn’t been Roderic’s crest. One of those smaller details I had filed away without thinking, useful for some later need. It hadn’t seemed relevant then. Why would it have been?
Had it been worn down? Reforged? No, something else. The flame-light flickered against the carvings. Locked geometry carved into gold. The pattern pulled at me. I had seen this kind of work before, I was sure of it.
Ciphers. That was it. Kilvin had once shown me geometric ciphers used by artificers to disguise alchemical recipes. These patterns were woven to hide meaning in plain sight.
My first instinct was to see the ring as nothing more than a flourish, the sort of idle detail a jeweler might add. But when I told Sim, his hands grew still around his cup. Something in his expression shifted, as if the ground beneath a familiar word had given way.
“Tehlu’s wrath.” His voice was soft. Too soft, like a note played so quietly it was only meant for himself. “That’s Feyda’s Mark.”
Something snagged in my chest. The word pulled at me the way a half-remembered song does, familiar in a way I couldn’t place through the fog. Feyda.
Sim, who found himself far down the line of Aturan succession, knew his heraldry better than most. “You don’t understand. No one wears that ring. Not in jest. Not in secrecy.” He swallowed. “Two noble houses destroyed their own crests rather than be mistaken for it.”
“Feyda Calanthis,” I said, pulling the name up through the fog. “First king of Tarvintas. Posthumously declared.” The nahlrout made me feel like I was reading through water, but the facts were there, half-drowned. “They say he didn’t stay dead. A barrow draug. A wizard king who rose and wore his crown in the dark.”
But even as I spoke, the pull wouldn’t let go. Feyda. I knew this name from somewhere closer than history books.
Sim nodded, grim. “That’s the one. His mark was struck from every noble seal after the barrow wars. A death-sign. A promise of ruin.”
Bast was still.
“Human princes are foolish things,” he said. “But never fool enough to carve a buried name in gold. Not unless they mean it.”
I agreed, though my mind still pulled back toward the ring, toward the pattern. And slowly, through the fog, I saw the lines for what they were.
Someone had altered it. The geometries were turned, the framing holding just enough difference to hide the true intent. A deceit meant for those who only half-remembered.
No, that wasn’t possible. Feyda’s Mark was a piece of history, exiled long before my father’s father was ever born. Everyone knew that much.
Except I couldn’t actually say where I had learned it. Something tugged at me again, and this time it brought doubt with it. I had studied heraldry under every kind of teacher. Pored over succession laws and ruined bloodlines.
But I couldn’t recall any full accounting of Feyda’s Mark. No noble family disgraced for its use. No record of its exile.
A story erased unclean still leaves behind its ink. But there were no stains from this. Nothing left in the margins of history. As if Feyda’s Mark had been swallowed completely. Erased so thoroughly that even the disgrace was gone.
Just gone.
But that made no sense. This had been buried, and yet the University hoarded knowledge, even when its masters sought to leash it. I’d spent years among those silent tomes, and I had never once found a full accounting of Feyda’s Mark. Not its meaning, not its exile, not its absence.
And absence, I was beginning to realize, was its own kind of presence. My hands tightened on the table’s edge.
“Wil. Sim.” The question came out sharper than I intended. “How many texts in the University speak plainly about Feyda’s Mark?”
Wilem did not answer immediately.
Then, slowly, “I don’t know.” A pause. “No one mentions it past references in succession disputes.” Another pause. “But nothing recent. Maybe there’s some work in the locked stacks?”
My mind turned to Ambrose Jakis. His endless tenure at the University, dragging through his studies with the leisurely pace of someone who wasn’t actually interested in study. I had always assumed he lingered because of laziness or spite. Because he was too important to be made to leave.
But that wasn’t right, was it?
No. That was absurd. Ambrose is arrogant and cruel. He wastes effort on petty vengeance. He isn’t clever. He isn’t patient.
And yet.
Manet had muttered to me, years ago, that it wasn’t natural for a noble heir to linger at the University so long. Most sons of titled families spent two, three years at most. And younger sons, perhaps, might linger longer while they found their footing. But Ambrose was firstborn. The Jakis lands, the Jakis titles, the whole of his inheritance sat waiting for him.
Six years. Maybe longer. He had no hunger for study. So why had Ambrose stayed?
Had he wasted time? Perhaps. Or had he been buying time? No, I had to be wrong.
And yet.
Then it surfaced. The thing that had been snagging at me since Sim spoke the name.
“Feyda’s Legacy.”
I could see the book clearly. Its spine cracked, its pages soft with age. I had been three pages into it when Ambrose lifted it from my hands with his priority claim and smug walk toward the north reading nook.
I had been furious at the time. I had assumed it was another of his petty cruelties, another move in the small, spiteful game he played with me.
But the book had been about Feyda.
And now a prince of the realm was wearing Feyda’s Mark on his finger.
The locked stacks. The documents that disappeared before I could reach them. I had always assumed Ambrose destroyed things because it was inconvenient for me.
But what if it had never been about me at all?
The silence stretched. Finally, I let the words slip, slow and careful, “What if Ambrose wasn’t just in the University for himself?”
Saying it aloud gave the thought weight. Ambrose Jakis had been erasing things that didn’t belong to him. Books. Stories. Names swallowed by burned ink. And now, he was doing the same with Auri. Rewriting her into Ariel, erasing everything she truly was.
My right hand had begun to tremble again. The nahlrout had retreated fully now, and the tremor had returned with interest, as if punishing me for the hours I had kept it leashed. I pressed my palm flat against the table and held it there.
She hates being looked at. Hates it so much that even when I called her “Auri” for the first time, she had flinched. Not at the sound, but at the weight of it.
I had learned what kind of silence to leave for her. I knew when to look away so she could exist as herself, unobserved. Sometimes, the length of a shadow or the hush of moving air was all the proof I needed that she was there.
I remembered once, finding her on her rooftop, face turned toward the wide-open sky. She hadn’t seen me yet, hadn’t stiffened. The moment I stepped closer, she had curled away, tucking herself into a place small enough where she thought no one could follow.
And now she is being fitted for court. Displayed before noble eyes. Attendants smooth her hair, starch her gown, and fit her with the name they have chosen rather than her own.
I had promised her she would always be safe under my protection. Auri trusted me.
I tried drinking after that. Three sips told me it wasn’t going to help.
Beneath the table, my hand would not stop shaking. The cottony slowness of the nahlrout’s aftermath made my thoughts feel like they were dragging through sand.
Bast noticed, because Bast always noticed. His eyes flicked to my hand, then away, as if he hadn’t seen. But a moment later, without a word, he set a clay cup in front of me. Dark tea. Bitter as anything.
Nahlrout.
I looked at the cup. I looked at Bast. He said nothing. Only raised an eyebrow, as if the choice were beneath discussion.
I should have refused. I knew what it was doing, the way a man who drinks to steady his hands knows exactly what the bottle is doing. Each dose bought clarity and borrowed it from the hours ahead. Each time I reached for it, the distance between needing it and wanting it grew a little thinner.
But the tremor in my hand would not stop, and my thoughts were still too slow, and Auri did not have time for me to be anything less than sharp.
I drank.
Within minutes, the fog began to lift. The brightness crept back into the edges of things. My hand steadied. The ache behind my eyes retreated to a dull hum.
Better. For now.
I leaned forward, studying Wilem and Sim across the table. “We need leverage on Trenati.”
“That is not what we need,” Wilem countered. His voice was measured, but the tension beneath it was plain. His shoulders held rigid, his expression tight. Then, lower, “You don’t understand what you’re reaching for.”
The fire crackled. A chair creaked somewhere in the room.
“These types shape cities. Silence rivals.” His jaw clenched. “You survive men like this. If you’re careful. If you’re lucky.” He shook his head. “Damn you, Kvothe. You don’t run from fire. You always run toward it.”
He wasn’t wrong.
But it did not matter. There was no right way to do this, no safe way to tear a locked door off its hinges. I was not hoping for equal footing. I was searching for a weakness, a flaw in the iron or the wood. I was looking for the place where their rules could splinter.
And I was willing to bet that if we found the right type of evidence, we could convince Trenati to hand over Auri.
Auri’s time was running out.
I should have spent every hour on the search. Most of them, I did. But Trenati was not a man who left clean footprints. Every trace we found led somewhere wrong. While Wilem took the official channels and Sim took the streets, Bast and I took the parts no one could talk about afterward.
We started at the east wall when the Palazzo de Contraier was quiet enough to hear the third bell echo, its windows shuttered to the darkness, its reputation doing most of the work a guardsman should. The ivy grew thick here, enough to hold weight, and from there we found a balcony I remembered from Fascino’s gathering. The shutters were latched but I’d been opening worse since I was twelve.
The steward’s ledger was where I remembered it. Months of entries in a clerk’s careful hand, with Trenati’s name appearing much too often for a prince supposedly occupied with affairs of state. But it wasn’t the frequency that caught my eye.
The early entries were specific. Prince Trenati, 4th of Caitelyn. Arrived ninth bell. Discussed northern tariff arrangements with Lords Vaen and Harrick. Departed past midnight. Three bottles Feloran red, billed to the Citadel account.
Then, gradually, the entries thinned until I was lucky to find Prince Trenati. Present. Usual business. But the entries around them remained as detailed as ever. Lord Vaen’s wine preferences. The Modegan ambassador’s departure time.
I closed the ledger. Bast was standing in the middle of the room with his head tilted back, testing the air the way a hound tests a cold trail. “There’s no iron,” he said, turning slowly. “Your kind reeks of it. Every door you touch, every coin you carry. It gets into your skin.” He breathed in again. “This room smells like nobody at all.”
We put everything back and left the way we came. By the time we slipped through the back door of the Blind Beggar, the sky was beginning to grey at its edges.
Wil reported back first.
Four days of court records had shown a perfectly ordinary schedule for Prince Trenati. He had cross-referenced every entry against independent sources. His father had raised him on double-entry bookkeeping the way other fathers raised sons on bedtime stories, and the Cealdish did not leave numbers unverified.
The glassmakers’ guild meeting on the 22nd was the first crack. One merchant swore Trenati had been present. Another, seated at the same table, swore he hadn’t. “Neither of them hesitated,” Wil told me, flattening his hands on the table the way he did when a ledger wouldn’t balance. “I showed them the same record. Same date, same event. They looked at the same page and saw different things.”
An aristocratic gathering on the 27th was worse. The House of Seven Wells kept meticulous attendance records, and the ledger showed a blank space where Trenati’s name should have been.
“The attendant told me the night was full,” Wil said. “Every guest accounted for. Then I asked about Trenati, and she said she was certain he’d been there. I asked her to show me his name in the ledger.” He paused. “She looked at the blank space for a long time. Then she closed the book and told me she couldn’t help.”
“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?” I asked.
“Neither,” Wil said. “It was as if she’d walked into a room and forgotten why she’d come.”
We were a few rounds in before Sim came back with his report.
He’d taken the markets and docks, the places where people without an agenda might have crossed Trenati’s path. At the harbor, a sailor swore the prince had overseen an ivory shipment. “Clear as day. Wore that dark blue brocade coat of his, same as always.”
Sim had pressed him. Same as always? The sailor nodded. Same coat last time, too. When was last time? The man scratched his jaw. Couldn’t say. Felt recent. Usually stopped in at the Brewer’s Rest on his way back to the Citadel.
Sim’s face went a bit red then, and he started studying his hands.
He’d gone to the Brewer’s Rest. The innkeeper’s wife and one of the barmaids had been clearing up after the midday meal. Sim had asked his usual questions. Had Prince Trenati been through recently? The innkeeper’s wife shook her head. Not that she could recall. Business had been slow.
Then the barmaid, still stacking plates, had said, “That’s not right, is it? He was here just two weeks back. Don’t you remember? That was when Garret was settling accounts in Tarbean and you looked half dead from running the place yourself.”
The innkeeper’s wife smiled and waved her hand away. “It’s always such a blur when Garret’s away. I probably couldn’t place a single face if I had to.”
The barmaid had gone off to fetch something from the cellar then, but not before giving Sim an appraising look. Before he could leave, the innkeeper’s wife had laid her hand on his hip and asked if he was planning on staying a night or two. She had rooms upstairs, and it might be worth inspecting them to see which would suit him best.
Sim wouldn’t look at any of us by this point.
“She reminded me of Fela,” he said quietly. “The hair. The way she smelled.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “But I don’t think she was lying about not remembering Trenati. I think the memory of him being there was genuinely gone. And she was just rearranging what was left inside to make it all feel natural.”
No one said anything for a while. The nahlrout was fading and I could feel the ache gathering behind my temples. I turned toward Bast. He had been watching the street through the open shutters, his face cast wary in the shadows. “You’re quiet,” I said.
Bast rolled a silver coin between his fingers, watching the lamplight flicker over the ridges. He had stopped smirking.
“Nothing to say?” I asked.
The coin glinted as it flipped over his knuckles. “I don’t like cities that learn how to hold their tongue,” he said finally.
Wilem glanced at me. “What does that mean?”
Bast caught the coin in his palm. “It means,” he said, “that even a place can be taught to forget.”
“You knew this the whole time,” Wilem said.
Bast shook his head. “No. But I suspected. And now I don’t want to know.”
Sim’s cup stopped halfway to his mouth. “If you don’t want to know, should we be worried?”
That easy grin flicked back to Bast’s face. “Simmon, I have always assumed you should be.”
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