I MOVED TO the doorway, though my body begged me to go back to the chair and let the world sort itself without me. Every step cost me. Gritted teeth. Shallow breath. One hand on the doorframe to keep myself honest. Saicere had found my other hand from the table as I passed, drawn the way breath is drawn in the dark. Without thought. Without choice.
I could see the main room clearly now, a table with two chairs, curtains closed against the street, and near the far wall, Denna with her shoulders drawn in, her whole body pulled tight as a bowstring with nowhere to aim, the white-haired man towering over her, his back to me. But I knew the language of his body. I had learned it in Tarbean’s alleys, where grown men would corner children with that same predatory lean, that same casual ownership of space.
“You are what I make you. Nothing more.” The crack of his palm meeting her cheek snapped through the room, loud as a splitting branch. She stumbled, her hand flying to her face, and the sound she made was small and broken. But when she spoke, her voice held. “Please. I can’t do this.”
I crossed the room in three strides and drove Saicere’s pommel into the back of his head. It was a poor excuse for a blow. My body had spent itself days ago and was running on fumes and fury. But he was an old man, and even a weak strike should have been enough.
He lurched forward, his cane skittering across the floor with a clatter like loose teeth. But then he caught himself, straightened, brushed some dust from his coat. That should have told me something. Instead all I felt was the impact throbbing up through the hilt and into my wrist, my whole hand shaking as if the blow had broken me instead. I was too busy being wrong to notice what was right in front of me.
Denna grabbed my arm with both hands and pulled, her fingers digging in hard. “You have to go,” she said, her eyes wide, her swollen cheek flushed red. “Now, Kvothe. Please. You don’t know how he is.”
But the man was already turning to face me, and everything I knew shifted like a wrong note in a familiar song.
He beats her, you know.
Bredon. The owlish old man I had shared wine with. The man I had played tak with through countless afternoons. The man I had called friend. And behind all those afternoons, the Cthaeh’s words, which I heard clearly now for the first time.
“I see you’ve finally joined us,” Bredon said, retrieving his cane without hurry. His tone dry. His eyes warm as a winter river. “How wonderfully efficient.”
“All those games. All that wine. And none of it was real.” The words came out of me like something torn.
Denna’s hand found my sleeve. “Kvothe, please, you promised you wouldn’t get involved.”
But my eyes had found something else. There on the table sat my box of dark roah wood, its surface gleaming like oil betraying water. “Why do you have that?” I barely recognized my own voice.
Denna looked at the floor, and in her silence I heard volumes. “He said he knew people who could open it,” she whispered, each word smaller than the last. “I thought if I could solve it for you, if I could hand you the answer like a gift, then maybe you wouldn’t have to go searching. That maybe you would stay.”
She leaned into me then, all the weight of her against my chest, her tears warm through my shirt. “Please go.” Her voice was barely a sound.
But cold bit into my hand before we could. I looked down to see my ring, that simple band of water-blue, crystallizing into ice.
My breath caught. The old rhyme surfaced unbidden.
You will know them by their signs.
“Cinder.” The name scraped out of my throat.
His smile spread like spilled ink, too wide for any human face. And then he wasn’t Bredon anymore. He was the thing with black eyes who had stood smiling among my parents’ bodies while the grass died white around his feet.
The air crackled with sudden cold. My strikes came wild, vicious, but my grip kept slipping. The tremor had wormed its way from my wrist into my forearm, and Cinder moved like flowing water, each of my blows cutting empty air.
“Angry, are we?” he said mockingly, sidestepping another ill-timed slash. “I can see it in your eyes. Just like your mother’s before she died. Your grandmother had that same fire too.” He drew a grey sword then, dull and lifeless as the edge of a gravestone, in one fluid motion.
I would like to tell you the fight was close. I would like to tell you I was brave and clever and nearly had him twice. But this is not that kind of story.
I lashed out again, slamming Saicere toward his throat, but he met the strike casually, moving faster than seemed possible. Each clash sent shivers spiraling through Saicere’s edge and I could feel it in my hands, the wrongness, the breaking. Like trust betraying itself. Like a heart giving up.
I stood there holding what was left of her, Saicere’s pieces hitting the floor, bright as tears, and Cinder’s blade turning toward Denna.
“Ferula!” I screamed, flinging his name at him and in the same heartbeat knowing it was futile. His hand closed on Denna’s arm, and his grey blade pressed to her throat.
“Drop what remains,” he said, his voice low and rasping with something unhuman.
I let Saicere’s hilt fall. My hands were shaking freely now, and my mind spun with them, tuneless and lost.
“Better,” Cinder said with evident amusement. And then he spoke a name, once, twice, thrice, each time colder than the last. “Alaxel. Alaxel. Alaxel.”
The air tore like silk. What poured through made darkness seem pale by comparison. From it stepped shadows given form, and among them, one whose shadow was absolute.
I have thought many times about how to describe Haliax. The truth is simpler than the stories make it. He entered the room and the room ceased to matter.
Something pressed against my chest when he spoke, heavy and close, making it hard to breathe. “Do you have what we seek?”
Cinder smiled, holding out the Loeclos Box and gesturing toward me. “I do, Lord Haliax. All of them.”
Haliax turned his attention to me, and being seen by him was like being known by the dark. When he spoke again, it was to Cinder. “Bring them. Bring everything.”
Cinder’s blade pressed closer to Denna’s throat, drawing a thin line of red. “You heard Lord Haliax,” he said to me, his voice light as a man offering directions to a stranger. “Walk with us, or watch her bleed out on these boards. Your choice.”
He began backing toward the rift Haliax had left in his wake, dragging Denna with him. It hung in the air, thick and grainy as wet sand. As Cinder stepped into it with Denna, they seemed to sink, the rift pulling at them with a hungry weight.
Denna’s eyes found mine through her tears. The dark was already at her waist, drawing her down and through.
I followed. And I have never once been able to figure out where I went wrong.
| Chapter 36 | Contents | Chapter 38 |