Chapter 1: The Third Day

THE MORNING CAME slowly, as if the sun itself was reluctant to rise on this particular day.

Chronicler had slept poorly—three hours on a straw mattress, his dreams full of fire and silence and a man whose eyes held nothing at all. When he came downstairs, he found Bast on the hearth, back to the cold fireplace, watching the door the way a dog watches a door its master left through.

Kote was behind the bar. Of course. Chronicler wondered if the man slept anymore, or if he’d simply stopped bothering with the pretense.

“There’s bread,” Kote said, not looking up. “And cheese. The cider is warm.”

It wasn’t an offer of hospitality. It was a dismissal of a question that hadn’t been asked. Chronicler nodded and helped himself, eating mechanically while Bast watched him with those too-bright eyes.

The silence stretched.

Finally, Bast spoke. “You slept through the howling.”

Chronicler paused mid-chew. “Howling?”

“Around three bells. Maybe four.” Bast’s voice was carefully casual. “Closer than last night. Much closer.”

“The scrael—”

“Not scrael.” Bast stood, stretched with the boneless grace of a cat that has forgotten it was ever tame. “Something older. Something that used to have a name, before people learned it was safer to forget.”

Chronicler looked at Kote. The innkeeper’s face was expressionless, but his hands had gone still on the bar.

“They’re waking up,” Bast continued, “because the doors are cracking. Because the binding is failing. Because someone”—he didn’t look at Kote, but the accusation was clear—“broke things that shouldn’t have been broken.”

“Bast.” The word was quiet. A warning.

“Tell him, Reshi. Tell him what’s really happening. What’s been happening since Renere.” Bast’s voice cracked. “Tell him why we’re really here, in the middle of nowhere, waiting for something that’s going to find us eventually no matter how hard you try to hide.”

The silence that followed was absolute. Even the fire, newly lit, seemed to hold its breath.

Then Kote moved. Not dramatically—just a small shift, a settling of weight. When he spoke, his voice was the flat, careful voice of the innkeeper. But beneath it, something older stirred.

“There are two ways this story could end,” he said. “I’ve spent years trying to decide which one to tell.”

Chronicler’s pen was in his hand before he realized he’d reached for it. “Which one is true?”

“That’s the problem.” A ghost of a smile crossed Kote’s face—sad, knowing. “They both are. It depends on where you stop looking.”

The morning aged into something resembling warmth. Bast built up the fire. Chronicler arranged his papers. And Kote—slowly, reluctantly—began to speak.

“We left off with my return from Ademre,” he said. “With the months I’d spent learning the Lethani, the language, the sword. With Felurian and the Cthaeh. With everything that changed me into something I didn’t recognize when I looked in mirrors.”

“You came back to the University,” Chronicler prompted.

“Eventually. Time moves strangely in the Fae. What felt like weeks to me had been months in the mortal world. Nearly a year, by some counts.” He paused. “Long enough for everything to change. Long enough for the seeds the Cthaeh had planted to start taking root.”

“What had changed?”

Kote’s eyes went distant. “Everything. Nothing. The University was the same stone and scholarship it had always been. But the people inside it…” He shook his head. “People change more than places ever do.”

He picked up a glass—one of the endless glasses he was always cleaning—and began to polish it with his cloth.

“Simmon had advanced two ranks in my absence. He was Re’lar now, studying naming under Elodin. He and Fela had stopped dancing around each other and finally admitted what everyone else had known for years.”

“They were together?”

“They were happy.” The word seemed to cost him something. “I remember being surprised by that. By how simple it was for them. How easy.” He set the glass down. “I’d forgotten that love could be simple. That some people just… fit.”

“And Wilem?”

“Wil was Wil. Steady as stone. He’d been worried about me—they all had—but he expressed it the way he always did. By being present. By not asking questions I couldn’t answer.” A pause. “He was the first to notice something was wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

“I was different. Changed in ways I couldn’t hide. The Adem training was obvious—the way I moved, the way I watched people, the stillness that came over me in moments of tension. But there was something else. Something deeper.”

Kote looked up, and for just a moment, his eyes held a flicker of something that wasn’t emptiness. Something ancient and cold.

“I’d spoken with the Cthaeh. Heard truths designed to destroy me. And those truths were working their way through my mind like poison through blood.” He set down the cloth. “I didn’t realize it then. I was too young, too arrogant. I thought I could know dangerous things without being changed by them.”

“What truths?”

The innkeeper was quiet for a long moment.

“The truth about my parents’ death. About who killed them, and why.” His voice dropped. “The truth about Denna’s patron. About what he was doing to her. About what she was becoming.”

Bast made a small sound—pain or protest—but didn’t speak.

“The Cthaeh told me exactly enough.” Kote laughed—a hollow sound, like wind through empty rooms. “That’s the trap, you see. It doesn’t force you to do anything. It just tells you the truth. And the truth makes you do the rest.”

“Which was?”

“Come back to the University. Find my friends. Discover what had changed while I was gone.” He picked up another glass. “And then—inevitably, inexorably—set in motion the events that would crack the world.”

The fire crackled. Outside, the sun climbed higher, and the howling of the night seemed like a distant dream.

“Let me tell you about my return,” Kote said. “About the boy I was, and the man I was becoming. About the people I loved, and the disaster I was walking toward without ever seeing it.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, someone else looked out.

“I came through the gates on a spring morning. Wind at my back. Sun in my eyes. I had survived Felurian. Learned the name of the wind. Spoken with the Cthaeh and walked away whole.” He paused. “Or so I thought.”

His voice had changed. Richer. Alive. The voice of someone who still believed stories could save things.

“I was seventeen. Brilliant and foolish and certain I understood how the world worked. I’d bested a Fae seductress, trained with the greatest warriors alive, and called the wind by its true name. A panel of academics was hardly going to break me.” A sharp breath of laughter. “I had no idea that everything I loved was already burning.”

He smiled---a real smile, touched with sorrow.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you about what I found when I came home.”