DIRT CLUNG TO every inch of me, coating my boots, my shirt, and even my teeth. My ribs ached with every breath, but I didn’t let us slow. Denna followed without a sound. By the time we reached the Blind Beggar, the city had gone dark around us.
I knocked. A shuffle, the scrape of a chair, then Bast swung the door open. “Finally. I was starting to think you’d gone and gotten yourself,” he began, but he stopped short when he saw Denna. “Oh!”
Behind him, Sim half-rose from his chair. Wil set down the notebook he’d been writing in and didn’t pick it up again. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
“Denna,” Bast said carefully. His eyes moved from her to me and back, reading something neither of us had offered.
“Fell off my horse,” Denna said, brushing past all three of them. “Got anything to eat?” She paused, her empty hands hanging loosely by her side. “I’m starving.”
“Er, I think Wil has half an onion left from earlier,” Sim said, still catching up.
“An onion?” Denna blinked. “Just an onion?”
“It’s on a stick,” Wil said, already holding it out to her.
“God’s body, it might as well be roasted lamb,” she said, holding her hands out toward him. “Pass it over.”
As she moved through the room, she carried that odd air of hers, unshakable despite the shadows beneath her eyes. I collapsed into a chair and fought with my boots.
The Blind Beggar smelled of tallow and old beer. A single lamp burned on the table between Wil’s notes and Sim’s cup, and the walls leaned close as if eavesdropping. It was a miserable room. It was the best we had.
“Since when has Denna been,” Wil started.
“Later,” I said. Sim looked at me with that hopeful expression he always wore, too kind for what I was about to say. “The Maer wasn’t cruel, just absent. Drowning in caution. He knows something’s coming but would rather wait in safety.”
“So he won’t help,” Wil clarified.
“What about you?” I asked, looking between Wil and Sim. “Any luck with the letter?”
Sim answered, his voice clipped. “We got it into his hands. Taliver helped. But either it never left the servants’ floor or he read it and ignored it.”
“Then the court is deaf on both ends,” I said.
Bast made a low growling sound, rolled his shoulders. “We’re running out of cards.” He looked at me, waiting.
“It’s worse than you think.”
“Oh, lovely,” Bast said, his voice bright in the way that meant nothing good. “Let me guess. A horde of shamble-men is about to crash the city gates?”
“We spotted an army on the way back. Jakis’ colors on every tent pole. They’re camped in a ravine less than two hours from here. Waiting.”
Sim leaned back in his chair as if the words had weight enough to push him there. Wil cursed softly in Siaru. Bast’s posture sharpened, like a bow pulled taut. “If they’re that close,” he said, “why not bring it straight to the King?”
I shook my head. “Roderic’s buried beneath silk-tongued flatterers. News as bad as ours won’t reach him for a month, if ever.”
“Or ever,” Sim said bitterly.
Wil and Sim exchanged a look. The kind that has a whole conversation in it.
“What?” I asked.
Wil cleared his throat, folding his hands. “It’s not that we don’t agree. We do. It’s just that we’ve started cooking up something else. Not elegant. Not even lawful. But it might be the only thing left that works.”
“Tell me.”
“We start,” Sim said, glancing toward Denna, then back to me. “With kidnapping.”
Three days we spent on it. Three days of watching and waiting, which is the hardest kind of work because it looks like nothing. We learned the King’s personal tailor the way you learn a song. His habits, his hours, the route he walked each morning to the citadel. On the second night we took what we needed from his shop. By the third morning, Denna had re-cut the uniform to fit me, working with pins between her teeth and a focus I recognized from watching her untangle Yllish knots.
I have been many things in my life. A musician. A student. A beggar, a thief, an arcanist. But I had never been a tailor, and I discovered on that third morning that I had no gift for it. The role fit the way a borrowed coat does. Close enough to wear. Wrong enough to notice.
The sound of my boots on stone echoed in the cold halls of the citadel. Each step rang louder than it should have.
“Not much further, sir,” said my escort, a short man named Galeshim who walked as if lateness were a personal insult. He snapped endlessly at those who crossed our path. “Out of the way, move aside, urgent business!”
My skin chafed beneath Bast’s glamourie, my flame-red hair had been smoothed away, and my eyes had been dulled beneath the facsimile. When I caught my reflection in a polished shield on the wall, it was Artemi Ilario who looked back at me. A man who had stopped expecting good news. I held his gaze for a moment, the way you hold a stranger’s face before a performance. Then I walked on, wearing him like a second skin.
We all wear faces that aren’t ours. I had simply gotten better at choosing mine.
I shifted the cumbersome bundle of fabric in my arms, impossibly white, smelling faintly of starch. In retrospect, this was the first mistake. A master tailor does not carry his own garments. He has someone carry them for him. I should have known this. I did know this. But we had no one else to spare, and I told myself it wouldn’t matter.
It mattered.
We reached a doorway guarded by two soldiers clad in the King’s crimson and gold. They stood unmoving, looking through us as if we’d already been refused.
“Open the door,” Galeshim commanded, waving his hands impatiently.
Neither guard stirred. The older one’s gaze had settled on the bundle in my arms, then moved to my hands, then back to my face. He didn’t say what he was thinking, but I could feel it. Something about this picture didn’t sit right.
“Are you deaf?” Galeshim snapped. “This is the King’s personal tailor. Let us through at once.”
The guards glanced at each other but did not budge. Galeshim’s mouth twitched. He turned to the guards again, more wary now than commanding. “Gentlemen, I assure you, this delay is not only discourteous, it is dangerous. If the King finds fault in the gown’s fit, it will not be my name he speaks with displeasure.”
Still, they held fast. Galeshim turned to me then, offering a stiff, apologetic gesture. “Perhaps, good master, you might impress upon them the urgency.”
I stepped forward, lifted my chin, and let the torchlight do its work. I spoke in an accent I’d spent two sleepless nights learning. “I’d love to waste the morning here exchanging empty words,” I said, “but I’ve no patience left for thick-headed guards who confuse stubbornness with duty.”
The younger guard flinched, and the older stepped aside, mumbling an apology.
Within, lamplight spilled from high windows onto mirrors edged with gold. A figure sat before a mirror, surrounded by maids hemming and pinning ribbons on pale swathes of fabric.
I shook the thin stick hidden within my sleeve, two quick flicks. Wil had inscribed it with sygaldry the night before, paired to a twin he carried at the outer gates. When one moved, the other stirred. Simple as a whisper across a taut string. At the gates, the others would feel it and know.
The maids around me froze mid-motion.
“Ladies,” I began firmly, my voice finding the register it needed, “His Majesty has sent me to make adjustments. Unburden yourselves of this task. Quickly.”
“We weren’t expecting anyone!” began one maid, but I clapped twice.
“Go. Now.”
They gathered their sewing baskets hastily, hurrying out until I stood alone with the figure at the dressing table. Her head bowed slightly, her hands folded in her lap as if she were keeping them safe for someone.
There are moments that refuse to move at the right speed. Some rush past before you can hold them. Others slow until you can feel every grain of the wood beneath your hand, every shift in the light. This was the second kind. I crossed the room and it took a hundred years.
“Auri,” I breathed, the name almost a question.
Slowly, she turned. Her wide eyes studied the face that wasn’t mine. One heartbeat passed, then another. Then she smiled, small and certain.
“You are still you,” she said and was in my arms before the relief had left my chest. She felt like almost nothing. She made a sound that was half laugh, half something else, and held tightly to me as she whispered, “And what have you brought me?”
A heavy crash shook the door. My body tensed and the tremors answered. I pressed my hands flat against my thighs until they steadied. “We need to leave,” I whispered, pulling out the alchemical vial Sim had handed me with far too much confidence earlier.
The liquid inside smelled like spoiled vinegar. I smeared it across both palms, then knelt and worked what remained into the soles of my boots. When I pressed one hand against the stone of the window frame, it held. Not firmly. But enough.
Auri peered over the ledge. She looked at the wall, then at the gel on my hands, then at the distance below. “The stones know you’re coming,” she said softly. “They’ll remember where to hold.”
The door shuddered again, harder, as I eased myself onto the outer wall. Below, the citadel sprawled beneath the late morning sun, pale stone and copper rooftops shrinking away beneath us. Auri wrapped her arms around my neck, her weight slight but present, and I lowered us one handhold at a time. The stone was cold against my knuckles. Each time I pulled a palm free, the gel made a faint wet sound, like a promise deciding whether to keep itself.
“There,” someone shouted from above. “He’s on the wall! After him!”
Then my right hand slipped. The gel had thinned, gone slick against the stone, and for one lurching moment I held our combined weight on three points of contact while my fingers scraped for purchase.
The wind found me there, pressing my hair flat, stinging my eyes, filling the space between my ribs and the stone. With it came the pull of an impossible thought. Let go, trust it, let it take you as it took Taborlin.
I considered it for half a heartbeat, but my fingers tightened on the stone without my permission. Such stories suited Taborlin the Great. But I was not great. Not yet.
Auri’s breath was small against my ear. “No,” she whispered. “The stones won’t let you fall. They remember how to hold hands.”
I forced myself to see the stones beneath my fingers, the same thick blocks that held every wall in the citadel. I felt their cold weight. Then, as clear as my own name, I sensed it, not one stone but three. I reached for the name that bound them. The thought pressed against the edge of my mind, but when I spoke, the tension in the rock eased, and the block beneath my toes pushed itself forward.
A step.
I reached for the Name again, but my sleeping mind was slower to surface, the way a familiar word sometimes slips further away the harder you chase it. Still, it came. Another stone shunted out. Then another. I crawled downward, one handhold and then the next and then the next, my hands trembling against the stone. Below us, a balcony. I dropped onto the slick surface and let myself breathe.
Through the open balcony doors an empty chamber stretched ahead. Stone floors worn to a dull shine reflected the glow of an iron chandelier, its candles burning low. A long oak table ran the length of the room. I lowered Auri gently and grasped her hand. “Come on,” I said. The sound of boots echoed faintly above us.
The first door was locked. I rattled the handle, ready to move on, but Auri pulled at my sleeve. “That’s the one,” she said softly. “There’s a passage behind it. It runs north to the old tower.”
“Where does it come out?”
“It doesn’t,” she said, her voice small. “The tower sits at the end.”
A dead end. I left it and tried the next. The second door gave a pitiful inch before the scrape of metal announced its bolt still held. Then the third swung wide and four knights spilled into the room, swords drawn.
I pulled Auri close, pressing her against me as the knights fanned outward. A man wearing a captain’s sash called out. “Hold!” His eyes darted between me, the open balcony, and Auri.
“Trust me,” I murmured into her ear. Then, quick as a magician’s flourish, I drew a knife from my boot and pressed it to her throat. “Stay back!” I shouted, filling the room with it.
Auri gasped, trembling against me. “Oh, please,” she whispered, her eyes glass-bright. “He’ll cut the moon right out of me.”
The captain froze, his hand settling on the hilt of his sword. “Easy,” he said carefully. “No one has to get hurt.”
“Over there,” I hissed, motioning with the knife. “All of you, to the far wall.”
The steel-clad soldiers obeyed, their boots scraping across grout until their backs touched cold stone. With my knife still held against Auri’s throat, I maneuvered us toward the third door, the open one, the one the knights had come through. Three paces from it, I heard new footsteps, deliberate on the stone.
Roderic entered, his chest heaving, crimson cloak trailing behind him. Baron Jakis hovered at his right, flanked by two of his guards. Behind them, half-hidden by the press of armored men, I caught a glimpse of an ink-stained apron and a furious face. The real Artemi Ilario. A good thief accounts for the person he’s stolen from. We hadn’t.
Jakis stood very still at the King’s elbow, his face carefully composed, the way a liar holds his expression when he knows a single twitch will give him away. Behind Roderic, more armored men lined the walls like instruments tuning to the same ugly chord.
“Unhand her!” Roderic’s voice cracked on the second word. “If she is harmed, I will have you opened from throat to navel and left for the dogs.”
“You’ve left me no choices, Your Majesty.” My words came out angling instead of striking. “Your city isn’t safe. Your court isn’t safe. Ask Jakis about the army camped two hours from your gates.”
Before Jakis could answer, Fascino Regent appeared at the edge of the room. His stride was unhurried. He was smiling. His guards did not acknowledge Roderick as they entered. They did not take positions along the walls beside the King’s men. Instead they spread to the doorways, blocking them, and turned to face inward. Every man in the room saw it. Every man but Roderick.
“Fascino,” the King said, something loosening in his voice. “Thank Tehlu. Secure this room.”
Fascino met the King’s eyes without fear. “Jakis brought his little forces, but mine never truly left.”
For a moment Roderick’s face held nothing. Then it held everything. “You,” he said. “After everything I’ve done?”
Fascino waved him off lazily. “Spare us the lamentations, Roderick.” His voice dropped, and the smile went with it. “You ruled with song when the world demanded flame.”
What followed came all at once. Screams from below, metal on metal, too close. Roderic shouted something, but his words were lost as Fascino’s men drew their weapons. Blades flashed. Swords met swords. Blood spilled mute and black across pale stone.
I looked for a way out. The third door, the one I’d planned to escape through, was choked with Fascino’s men. The second was still bolted. That left the first. The dead end.
The lock was old iron, heavy in its housing. I didn’t have time to pick it. I didn’t need to. “Feralthalien,” I whispered, and the bolt slid free with a sound like a long-held sigh.
“Through here,” I said, pulling Roderic by the arm. He saw the corridor beyond and balked.
“That tower is a dead end,” he said. “We’ll be trapped.”
“We’re already trapped,” I said. “At least the tower has walls and a door.”
He looked at the room behind us, where his men were dying, and went through. Auri followed, light on her feet. The passage beyond was narrow, the stones damp, the air stale with disuse. A servants’ corridor. Auri ran ahead as if she’d walked it before. Perhaps she had.
We ran. Our footfalls echoed off stone. I snapped the sygaldry sticks in my pocket, breaking them clean. The sharp crack meant the paired set would do the same. At the outer gates, the others wouldn’t just feel a stir. They’d hear it break. They’d know.
“Kvothe!” Auri’s cry caught me. I looked back to see them, a dozen knights with Fascino’s sigil bright on their chests, filling the corridor behind us.
I stopped without thought, planting myself between them and the others. “Keep going!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Get to the tower!”
“Kvothe, no!” Auri’s voice broke, but Roderic grabbed her, pulling her onward.
I turned to face them. The passage was narrow, three men abreast at most. Iron torch brackets jutted from the walls at shoulder height. Torchlight caught their drawn swords and threw long shadows across the low ceiling. No armor. Nothing but Saicere and whatever I had left.
But I could feel the Name of the wind the way you feel a word caught in your throat, not yet spoken but already true.
When I let it go, the walls seemed to lean away from the sound.
The wind hit the passage like water flooding a channel, tearing forward with nowhere to go but through. It ripped torch brackets from the stone and sent them tumbling, caught the front rank of soldiers and flung them backward into the men behind, armor crashing against armor, bodies against stone, and somewhere in the tangle a window burst outward and a man went with it, arms reaching for something that wasn’t there.
Then the wind passed. What it left behind was dust and groaning.
But not all of them were down. The second rank had knelt behind the first, crossbows braced against the floor. One of them fired.
I didn’t see the bolt. I felt it. A punch below my left collarbone that drove me backward, and then a second impact as the shaft struck the stone wall behind me and the tip bit into mortar and held. For a moment I hung there, pinned between the bolt and the wall, my feet barely touching the floor.
The pain came after, filling the whole left side of my chest with a bright wrongness that made thinking feel like swimming through sand. My left arm went heavy. My fingers stopped answering.
I reached for the Name of Stone with what I had left, and the floor beneath their boots remembered it was solid all the way through. Two men stumbled, caught, their boots locked in place.
Then something moved at the edge of my vision, low and fast, coming from behind me where there should have been nothing but empty corridor. Steel caught the torchlight. The bowman who had shot me folded over with a sound like a cough and didn’t rise.
I tried to turn my head but the bolt held me short.
Sim’s hands found me, one bracing my chest, the other gripping the bolt’s shaft. He hesitated for half a breath, searching the unfamiliar face, then our eyes locked and he twisted the tip free of the mortar. I slid down the wall and Sim caught me before I hit the floor.
Wil appeared beside him, a short-handled hatchet held in a grip that said he knew its weight. He scanned the corridor behind us, then looked back at me. “Charred body of Tehlu. I thought you would be dead by now.”
“So did I,” I croaked.
Sim searched the corridor, his eyes stopping on every shadow. “Where’s Auri?”
“With Roderick. The tower, ahead of us.” I coughed, tasting iron.
Wil’s eyes went to the corridor behind us, then back. “The coup is happening. Now.”
“Denna and Bast are at the gate,” Sim said, already working his shoulder under my good arm to haul me upright. “Kvothe, we need to run.”
But as the screaming continued above us, I turned toward the Tower. “Not without them.” With steel crashing at our backs, we ran toward what remained.
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