LEVENTIS WASN’T MUCH to look at, a gathering of crooked rooftops and muddy streets where the Four Corners tangled in trade. Nothing about it demanded notice.
Denna fell into step beside me as we neared the center of town, her dappled mare trailing lazily behind. A breeze caught the ribbon in her hair. Red, against all that dust.
“So, what’s the plan?” she asked. “There’s not much to do in a town like this besides find a quiet pint and a room for the night. Unless you had something more exciting in mind.”
“I need to do this alone.”
Denna raised an eyebrow at me, the one she used whenever my reasoning amused her. “I didn’t ride all this way to sit in a square by myself, Kvothe.”
“It’s not like that,” I said quickly. “There are things I haven’t told you yet. Things I should have said before now.”
Her amusement fell away. “Things,” she repeated slowly.
“Yes.” I forced myself to continue walking, though each step felt more awkward than the last. “If what I seek is really inside that tavern, it could put you in danger.”
She reached out, catching my arm and stopping me in the middle of the path. Her eyes found mine and held them. “Kvothe, I’m a big girl. I have taken care of myself far longer than you’ve known me.”
“I know that. But if something goes wrong in there,” I gestured toward the squat, sagging tavern at the edge of the square, “these people don’t take kindly to outsiders asking questions. If it’s just me, I can move without worrying.”
“Without worrying about me, you mean.”
I didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
Her grip loosened, though her fingers still lingered on my sleeve. “You really are terrible at lying, Kvothe.”
I offered her the best smile I could manage. “Then it’s fortunate I’m not lying.”
She released me then, crossing her arms. “Fine. But I won’t wait forever, and I won’t fish you out of a ditch if you stir up trouble.” She paused. “Don’t linger too long.”
I turned and walked toward the tavern. Behind me, I heard her cough once into her hand. A dry, thin sound. I nearly looked back. But looking back at Denna was something I couldn’t afford just then.
The Weeping Eye was nearly empty. Even so, there was nothing welcoming in its solitude. Dust drifted through a single shaft of sunlight from the twisted window, the air heavy with must.
A handful of patrons sat in shadowed corners, and their voices died as I pushed the door shut behind me. The barkeep glanced my way without interest. I walked up to the counter, noticing how the neglected floorboards sagged under a weight that hadn’t changed in years.
“Finger tea,” I said softly.
The barkeep grunted, reached for a cup, and began pouring with all the care he might lend to washing his hands.
I could hear the patrons breathing. That’s how quiet it was. Every eye in the room pressed against my back, urging me to turn. The cup was placed before me and I slid it aside, leaning closer to the barkeep.
“I’m looking for Claude,” I said.
His hand froze mid-motion, but his expression didn’t change. Without a word, he glanced over my shoulder. Footsteps scraped behind me, followed by the heavy sound of wood dropped into place. Someone had barred the door.
My hand found Caesura’s scabbard. The nahlrout I’d taken that morning still held, but I could feel the old tension in my knuckles, a tremor held down by the thinnest of leashes.
“I’d leave that sword be if I were you.”
The speaker sat alone at a nearby table. His hair was white, his freckled scalp showing through on top. His face had the deep-set lines of a man who made no effort to come in from bad weather, and the dagger at his hip was Ramston steel. Despite his age, the room seemed smaller for his presence.
“You wanted Claude,” he said, holding my gaze. “You’ve found him. Sit.”
Men stood at the edges of the room, hands resting on clubs and knives, and none of them moved as I crossed the distance to Claude’s table and eased myself into the chair opposite.
“Who sent you?” Claude asked, pale eyes unblinking.
“Dagon.”
“Dagon,” he repeated. “If that’s true, he gave you no token or sign known to us. Which leaves me wondering why he’d send a boy here without a proper mark.”
“I told him I had questions,” I said. “He told me you might have answers.”
Claude let out a dry laugh. “The Amyr rarely speak to outsiders.” He leaned back, fingers drumming lightly on the tabletop. “But I’ll humor you. One question. Make it worth both our time.”
One question. I had come with a dozen, but a dozen would buy me nothing with a man like this. So I asked the one that mattered.
“How do I find the Seven?”
Claude regarded me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. “You will not speak of them here. Not their names, not their titles, not even the number of them. Next time you won’t get the chance to finish.”
I nodded slowly. It was the kind of promise a man makes with his whole body, because anything less would get him killed.
He folded his hands on the table. “You don’t find them, boy. You make enough noise in the wrong places, and they find you. Names are a summons. Speak them in the wrong shadow and they’ll be at your door before you can draw that pretty sword.”
I sat with that for a moment.
Claude watched me, then seemed to come to some decision. “Others have tried what you’re thinking,” he said. “They killed one of them. Fire and iron and twenty years of preparation. And do you know what happened?”
I waited.
“He came back. Ash and ruin. The stories always end the same way. You cannot kill the wind. You cannot drown the sea.”
“Then what is the point of all this?” I said. “What do you do, hiding here in shadow?”
“We thwart them. We silence their stories. We erase their names from memory.” His gaze held mine. “A thing with no name has no purchase in the world. That is the war we fight. Not with swords.”
“For the greater good,” I said quietly.
“For the greater good,” he echoed. And for the first time, his weariness showed, plain as a crack in old stone.
The Amyr. I had spent years expecting warriors who would stand at my side, bright-armored and righteous, the answer to every prayer I’d whispered into the dark since I was eleven years old. Instead I had found an old man in a bad tavern, tending a war on memory.
But there was still Auri. Still Renere.
“A coup is stirring,” I pressed. “Renere will fall if no one acts.”
Claude looked at me the way you might look at a child who has said something true and beside the point. “We don’t meddle in affairs of state unless the Seven are involved. Even at our height, we did not fight for kings or their crowns.”
“Even if kingdoms collapse?”
“Even then.” He set his hands flat on the table. “We have one enemy, boy. Everything else is weather.”
I stood. The chair ground back against the stone floor and the sound of it rang in that quiet room like a wrong note. Claude did not try to stop me. But as I reached the door, he spoke once more.
“Boy.”
I paused.
“The strong ones never ask for help,” he said. “That’s how you can tell which ones won’t last.”
The bar scraped free behind me and the door swung open to let in the late afternoon sun.
Denna was sitting on the edge of a stone trough near the square, her legs crossed, one hand idly tracing patterns on the Lackless box in her lap. The same low sun had turned the dust to gold around her.
“Stoic, angry, and frustrated,” she said as I approached. “I’d recognize that expression anywhere. Didn’t go well, did it?”
“No,” I admitted, already untying the horses.
The Amyr would not act. The Maer would not act. I had run out of allies I’d never really had. So I would do what I had always done. I would find another way, or I would make one.
Behind me, Denna slid the box into her saddlecloth and stood. “That’s a shame,” she said. “It would have been nice to stop here for the night.”
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