SEVEREN HAD CHANGED.
Brown-robed figures chanted at intersections in the same rough cloth I’d seen in Renere. Soldiers watched from tavern doorways, their thumbs hooked in their belts. Wagons rattled along the cobblestones in loose columns, each one bearing the stamp of the Regent’s iron seal. Proclamations fluttered from doorposts like the brittle skins of trees long dead.
Denna noticed me looking. “I’ll be fine,” she said, reading my face while tucking the sheaf of genealogies tighter under her arm. “I survived Tarbean at twelve. I think I can manage while you go find your Maer.”
She said it lightly. But she chose the street that led away from the brown robes, her hand resting near the knife she kept beneath her cloak. I watched her go until the crowd swallowed her, and turned toward the estate.
Not fool enough to go to the main entrance, I showed Stapes’s letter at the servant’s gate. The steward read it, then read it again slowly, and disappeared for nearly an hour while I sat on a stone bench in a corridor that smelled of lamp oil and lye. I’ve spent longer waiting for less, but not often while the fate of a kingdom hung on whatever expression I could arrange for my face.
Dagon appeared without warning, the way he always had, as if the hallway had simply decided to produce him.
I knew him at once. The flat expression, the sense that he had already decided three things about you before you’d finished your first sentence. He seemed thinner than I remembered, the lines around his dark eyes cut deeper. Neither of us pretended this was an honor as he searched me in silence, hanging Caesura on a hook with the care of a man who respects a weapon even when he doesn’t respect its owner. He led me down through the servant’s corridors without a word.
Alveron sat alone at his desk. The surface sprawled with documents, Stapes’s creased letter already unfolded among them. Fire from the hearth turned the walls the color of autumn. The Maer regarded me, unreadable.
“Kvothe.” He gestured to a chair. “Sit.”
“Your grace,” I said, bowing low. “You seem. Well?”
“I am. Though I confess some curiosity as to why you are not in Imre, drawing on that extortionate tuition they demand of me.” He tapped Stapes’s letter with one finger. “This tells me that my manservant encountered you in Renere and found you sufficiently alarming to break protocol. It does not tell me why.” He paused. “Though I suspect it has something to do with the young lord you cut down in the Citadel courtyard.”
“Lord Vatis pushed the duel, your grace. He demanded satisfaction. I gave it to him.”
“You gave the court a dead nobleman and a story.” His voice was mild. “Meluan wrote me. She was not amused.” He leaned back. “Now. What business brings a University student to my gate with a letter from my manservant, when he should be back in Imre with his nose in a book?”
“A friend from the University is trapped in Renere. She needs help that I cannot provide alone.” I met his eyes. “In the course of trying to reach her, I learned of something larger. There is a coup forming. Regent Fascino is moving against Roderic.”
The Maer’s expression did not change. “And how did this find its way to you?”
“Regent Lugosi.”
He was quiet for a moment, almost amused. “Lugosi. A man who has spent twenty years whispering into every ear that will hold still long enough.” He rubbed his hands together in the firelight. “And you carried his words here. Tell me, Kvothe. Did it not occur to you that a man of Lugosi’s position might have his own reasons for wanting this story told? That you might be the mouth and he the puppeteer?”
“He is afraid, your grace. I saw that much clearly.”
“Afraid men are the easiest to use.” He let that sit. “What of Roderic? Has this reached his ear?”
“I cannot say. His inner circle is insulated. Lugosi has plans to warn him, but I left before they could take shape.”
The Maer looked into the fire. “You were wise to bring this to me, Kvothe,” he said after a time. “I will consider what you have said. I am due in the capital for his daughter’s wedding in the coming days. Perhaps I shall expand my retinue accordingly.” He said it all measured, giving exactly as much as he intended and not a syllable more.
“Will you send word to Roderic?” I pressed.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that Roderic has advisors for such things. And I think that a man who arrives uninvited at my gate might benefit from a touch more humility about the limits of his influence.” He eyed me. “Return to the University. Stay there.” His eyes held mine. “And Kvothe? Stapes took a risk for you today. Do not make him regret it.”
I nodded. “As you wish, your grace.”
Outside the Maer’s chambers, Dagon was waiting. He held Caesura out to me with the same care he’d used taking it, and set off down the hall through the east gallery, where the corridors were wider and the walls lined with portraits instead of just plaster. I followed.
Between two tall windows hung a painting taller than any man. The alcove had been bare during my last stay, but now a gilded frame held the likeness of a woman not yet old, with gray-green eyes that could have been looking at me over the neck of a lute on a summer afternoon.
Dagon had walked a few steps before he noticed I’d stopped. “Lady Meluan’s mother,” he said, turning back. “Anastasia Lackless. They hung it when her ladyship moved in.”
I barely heard him. Those were my mother’s eyes. No. Not my mother’s. Natalia Lackless.
I remembered being eight years old, singing the Lackless rhyme by the campfire. My mother had scolded me. Told me Lady Lackless was a real person with feelings that could be hurt. She’d said I could make it up to Lady Lackless and to herself by finding sweet nettle for the pot.
I touched the wooden ring at my finger. In a different world, it might have been a signet. In this one, it was a gravestone.
Dagon cleared his throat. “Keep moving.”
I turned away, but the painting stayed with me. “Why do you serve the Maer?” I asked him as we walked.
“His grace is a man of prominence,” he replied without hesitation.
“And yet we remain instruments to him. Useful until inconvenient. Discarded with a ring and a letter,” I said.
He shrugged. “We each have our roles to play. This is mine. When the Maer offers the carrot and it fails, I’m the stick.”
We walked in silence for a time after that, the kind of silence that comes after honesty. The corridor narrowed, and the evening light through the windows drew long shadows across the floor.
“Tell me, Dagon. How is the road to Tinue these days?”
He paused by the smallest margin. His dark eyes shifted toward me.
“Long,” he said. “For those who walk the path.”
It was the very phrase I had pulled from behind the Four-Plate Door.
“I heard that in a play once,” he added.
“So did I,” I said, keeping my voice level. “A very old one.”
He turned a corner, gesturing for a pair of minor guards to keep their distance. When we were alone again, he looked at me sidelong.
“And those who walk the path?” I asked.
“Don’t often return by the same way.” He said it flat. Rehearsed. Something carried a long time.
I should have stopped there. Any sensible person would have. But I have never been sensible when it mattered.
“For the greater good,” I said.
His hand moved to his cudgel. A reflex.
For a long moment he said nothing. When he finally spoke, it was barely above a whisper. “That phrase was burnt from doctrine nearly two centuries ago.”
“I didn’t take an oath,” I said. “But the cost was paid in full.”
The silence held between us until Dagon’s shoulders finally drooped. “If you have that much interest in old theater,” he said, his voice shifting back to something anyone could overhear, “there’s a man in Leventis. Claude. Runs the Weeping Eye. Order finger tea.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.
“Do.” He began walking again. “Three friends of mine visited over the years. Two said it changed their thinking. The third never wrote back.”
He let that sit for exactly one step, and added brighter, “All just an old play, of course.”
I met his eye. “Of course.”
“How did it go?” Denna asked. She was crossing the square from the direction of the lower markets, the sheaf of genealogies thicker than when she’d left. “I’m guessing from your expression not well.”
I’d been scanning the crowd for her, but the painting kept intruding. Anastasia Lackless’s gray-green eyes, the same ones I’d seen above an old lute on summer afternoons I could barely remember.
“Alveron’s not going to offer any aid to Roderic,” I said. I’d spent enough time in the man’s company to know when he’d already made up his mind.
“Ah, what now then, do we ride back to Renere?”
“Not yet,” I said, turning back to stare at Alveron’s residence. “I need to go north, but before that there’s one more thing I need to do here.”
The Maer’s estate stretched out beneath a darkening sky, the Lackless box somewhere inside. Meluan had shown it to me years ago, pulled from a chest she kept close, the only key hung around her neck. But Meluan was in Renere, and her rooms would be empty.
Some opportunities only come once. You learn to recognize them by the way they feel, like a note that will never be played again if you let it pass.
Denna waited at the treeline with the horses while I crouched atop a merchant’s roof overlooking the gardens. From there I watched the patrols. Lanterns lined the walkways in careful rows, placed as much for beauty as for light. The guards moved in patterns I knew by heart from my last stay here, staggered intervals, three-count rotations at the eastern corners.
I pulled the flask from my coat and forced down the last swallow of nahlrout. There was no turning back now. I had maybe a couple of hours before it burned through. Less if I spent myself on anything demanding.
Overcast had rolled in from the west, and by the time I dropped from the merchant’s roof and crossed the open ground to the outer wall, the first drops of drizzle had begun to fall. My shaed wrapped close as I began to climb.
The outer wall curved treacherously, built to deny a grip to anyone fool enough to climb it. I didn’t have a ladder. What I did have was a memory’s worth of footholds and hands calloused from harder things than just lute strings. My weight settled against the stone and I found the first grip by touch alone, fitting my fingers into divots where mortar had receded over decades, pressing my knees close to the wall’s face. Over the sound of wind through the ivy I could hear a guard’s boots fading on gravel, thirty yards east and moving away.
The drizzle was making the stone slick. Halfway up, a handhold shifted under my left hand and I caught the fault-line by reflex, knuckles jamming into the crack before the rest of me could follow it down. A splinter of masonry drove itself beneath my thumbnail. I bit the inside of my cheek and kept climbing.
At the top, a row of iron spikes jutted from the capstone like broken teeth. I threaded myself between two of them and pressed flat against the stone, catching my breath. The air felt different up here. A faint hum against my skin, like standing too close to a sygaldry lamp. A ward. A glyph scored into the stone’s underside, pulsing faintly.
Lying flat, I worked the copper ribbon and cider ash from my satchel by feel. Even a simple binding cost me now. I could feel the effort pull against the nahlrout as I whispered a shape to the ash, a single syllable meant to deaden the trigger. The glyph’s shimmer slowed and stopped.
I swung down into the gardens below. The servant’s chute in the west kitchen had been bricked over, so I took the garden arch instead, waited for the guard rounds to stagger, and slipped toward the servant’s sub-wing.
Another glyph near the molding. I ducked beneath it, but a gust of wind caught the trailing edge of my shaed and fluttered it against the wall. A flash, followed by a chime, brittle and not far off.
I found an alcove by smell, polished pewter and clean linen, and crouched behind a wardrobe with my breathing forced down to nothing. Footsteps approached. A guard rounded the corner, paused, and muttered “Damn rats” before moving on.
I moved through the servant hallway, keeping to the shadows and stepping over the fine threads strung ankle-high across the doorways, tripwires that would tell someone which rooms had been visited. I knew Meluan’s chambers from my time in the Maer’s service. Third floor, east wing, behind a door inlaid with the Lackless crest. I’d learned every passage and hidden corridor in this estate during my months here. One of those corridors opened into Meluan’s dressing room through a panel disguised as wainscoting.
The panel gave way with a soft click. The room beyond was dark and smelled of cedar and rosewater.
My eyes adjusted slowly. A vanity, a wardrobe, a writing desk with correspondence stacked in careful piles. Against the far wall, beneath a hanging tapestry, a chest. Oak and iron, banded with heavy straps.
I crossed the room, knelt beside it, and drew my picks from the lining of my coat. My hands were still steady. The first tumbler gave easily. The second took longer. The third wouldn’t turn.
I adjusted my grip and tried again. The mechanism was layered, each tumbler gated behind the last, and the tolerances were finer than anything I’d picked before. I could feel the nahlrout thinning, but my fingers held.
The third tumbler shifted.
Then the fourth.
The fifth was frozen.
I tried a different pick, a thinner one bent at the tip for exactly this kind of deep-set gate. Working it in, I felt the tumbler’s profile and applied pressure. Nothing happened. My right hand fluttered, and I knew the nahlrout was burning down.
Faster this time. The pick slipped and I caught it before it fell. My fingers were shaking now, a fine vibration running through them.
One more attempt. I steadied my right hand with my left, guided the pick toward the keyhole, and watched my fingers refuse to hold the line. The tip scraped against the plate, skating across the opening without finding it. I tried again. The tremor was worse now, a rhythm my hands were playing without my permission. I could see the keyhole. I knew exactly what I needed to do. My hands would not do it.
I knelt there in the dark with a pick in my hand that I could no longer use, the tremor working its way up through my wrists. But the cracks in my waking mind that had cost me so much were letting the other one seep through.
I could feel the iron the way you feel a note hanging unresolved in the air. The bands. The straps. The pins in their housings. All connected, all pulled from the earth and beaten into shape but never forgetting what it was.
“Feralthalien.”
The bands on the chest went soft. The iron straps sagged like warm wax, and the lock’s pins wept from their housings in slow dark drops that pooled on the floor and went still. The lid opened.
There would be no hiding what I’d done here. The ruined iron told its own story. But that was a problem for tomorrow, and I might not have a tomorrow if I didn’t move.
Inside, wrapped in velvet, was the box. Dark wood with a deep red grain. Heavier than it should have been. And a smell I remembered. Spicy, almost like lemon.
I lifted it out, pressing it against my chest because my hands were shaking too badly to trust my grip.
Getting out was harder than getting in. It always is, when the thing that carried you forward has burned away and left you with nothing but what you actually are.
The nahlrout was gone and the tremors had full hold of me. My legs felt unreliable. The servant’s passage back felt twice as long as it had coming in, and I navigated it through memory alone.
The wall was a problem. I got one leg over the parapet, threading past the spikes by feel, and looked down at the handholds I’d used on the way up. My fingers twitched against the stone.
A low whistle from below.
“You look terrible,” Denna called up, a rope already loose in one hand. “Catch.”
The rope came up. I caught it against my chest because my hands couldn’t close around it properly, looped it under my arms, braced my feet against the wall, and let myself down in a barely controlled slide that left my palms raw.
Denna steadied me when I reached the ground. I was shaking hard enough that she could feel it through my shaed.
“Can you ride?” she asked.
“It probably wouldn’t hurt to tie me down,” I said.
Dawn brushed the horizon as we rode north. The box rested in my pack, an itch I couldn’t ignore. I’d been turning it over in my mind for miles, the weight of it pulling at me the way an unfinished song pulls at a musician.
“Denna,” I said, breaking the rhythm of hoofbeats. I pulled out the box and handed it to her.
She turned it in her hands without speaking, running her thumb along the grain before hefting it once with a frown at the weight. She gave it a cautious shake and something stirred inside, a clink that deepened her frown.
“These are Yllish knots,” she said, her fingers tracing the carvings. “The grammar is old. Older than anything my patron showed me.” She looked up. “This is a family piece, Kvothe. The kind that gets people killed.”
“I know.”
She held my gaze for a moment, giving me the space to say more if I wanted. I didn’t. She looked back down at the box.
“Can you read them?” I asked.
Denna’s fingers moved across the carvings the way a musician’s move across strings, learning the instrument. “The outer ring of knots is a lineage marker. Like a signature, but for a whole bloodline. The inner pattern is different. Denser. I think it’s instructions. But the syntax is layered. I’d need time and a flat surface and better light. May I hold onto it?”
I was handing a piece of my blood to a woman who did not know she held it. Every part of me wanted to keep the box close, to never let it out of my sight. But if I couldn’t trust Denna with this, I couldn’t trust anyone.
“Just make sure you return it.”
“When have I ever not?” she said with a smile too bright to trust fully.
We rode on in silence, the box wrapped in Denna’s saddlecloth, the road stretching north toward whatever waited in Leventis.
| Chapter 26 | Contents | Chapter 28 |