Chapter 03: Tuition Admissions

ON THE MORNING of admissions, I counted my money.

This is something the wealthy never do. They know what they have like they know their own name. For those of us who have known true poverty, counting money is a ritual as familiar as prayer and twice as desperate.

I sat on the edge of my narrow bed at Anker’s and spread my purse out across the wool blanket. It was more silver than I had ever owned in one place, what the Maer’s service and a winter’s worth of Bloodless royalties had left me after the long road home. A span ago I would have laughed at any number the Masters cared to name. Alveron’s letter of credit had covered any tuition at all, and Riem and I split the profit on everything over ten talents, so that the last time Hemme tried to bury me under a cruel number I walked out of that hall richer than I walked in.

But my first errand that morning had been the bursar’s office, and Riem’s face told me the rest before he slid the letter back across his desk. The credit was closed. “It came from Severen,” he said quietly. “The house seal, a steward’s hand, and no signature.” I did not think the Maer had closed it himself. I thought I knew whose hand it was: the woman who sat beside him now, the one who had sent me out of Severen with a ring of pale wood and a contempt older than our meeting. Meluan Lackless did not suffer a Ruh to breathe her air, let alone draw on her husband’s coffers. And a careful lord, newly wed, does not leave an open line of silver in the keeping of a low-born player who knows which of his enemies once fed him poison by the spoonful. Whatever the reasoning, the line was cut, and whatever I paid now I paid out of my own pocket.

I counted the silver twice, as a man counts a thing he is afraid of losing. It was a good sum, and a span ago it would have felt like the far edge of safety. But safety was a letter of credit and the goodwill of powerful men, and I had just watched both slide back across a bursar’s desk. Whatever number Hemme set today would come out of this pile and no other, and I had seen how he smiled when he thought the smiling would go unnoticed.

The queue for admissions stretched from the Questioning Hall doors, down the corridor, around the corner, and halfway to the Mews. My tile had drawn the last day of the span, an afternoon slot, which was neither lucky nor unlucky, merely late. I took my place at the end, behind a broad-shouldered boy who smelled of the Fishery and stood with his arms crossed like a man waiting to be hit. A girl with ink-stained fingers fell in behind me soon after, muttering alchemical formulas nervously under her breath.

This was the ritual, the same every term. The Masters sat their high table, and one by one each student walked that long aisle to stand before them and be weighed. Tuition was set individually, which made it either brilliantly fair or cruelly arbitrary depending on which end of the purse you stood at.

The theory was simple. The Masters weighed your competence and set your rate accordingly: the better you performed, the lower your tuition. On paper it was a magnificent system, and I have never met a poor student who believed a word of it.

In practice it meant that every term I walked into that hall knowing the difference between eating and starving would be decided by nine people, most of whom had never missed a meal in their lives.

The queue moved slowly. Students came out of the Questioning Hall in ones and twos, some relieved, some dismayed, some blank-faced and still doing sums. One girl came out weeping silently, walking fast, and no one met her eyes. You didn’t watch the ones who came out broken. You looked at your shoes, because next time it might be you.

I’d been her. My second term, I’d walked out of that hall and sat against the cold stone behind the Mains and done the math on my fingers, adding and re-adding because the numbers couldn’t be right, until I accepted that they were and the world became a narrower place.

“Thirty,” someone ahead of me whispered. I caught it in the general murmur. “Basil got thirty.”

“Thirty’s not bad.”

“Thirty’s not bad if your father owns a mill. Basil’s father is a tanner.”

Numbers rippled through the queue. Everyone there was quietly weighing his own talent against his own poverty, working out the private sum that would decide whether he stayed or went. A Vintish noble’s son, four places ahead, had the loose-shouldered ease of a man who would pay whatever was asked and still have money left for wine. The alchemist girl behind me had bitten her thumbnail raw.

The broad-shouldered boy ahead of me shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back.

“First time?” I asked.

He glanced back. “Third term. You?”

“I’ve lost count.”

Something in my tone made him look at me properly, and I watched him place my face. “You’re Kvothe.”

“Depending on who’s asking.”

“They say you walked into Faerie and came back out.”

“Most people who walk in come back out. It’s the timing that gets them.”

He laughed, short and startled, and some of the tension left his shoulders. “They say Hemme sets tuition like a man trying to murder someone with arithmetic.”

“That,” I said, “is almost certainly true.”

Simmon found me forty minutes into the wait, slightly out of breath.

“I came to wish you luck,” he said. “Also to bring you this.” He handed me an apple, gravely, as if it were a legal document. It was bruised on one side and perfect on the other.

“You ran all the way from the Mews to bring me an apple?”

“I walked briskly. There’s a difference.” He arranged himself elaborately against the wall, trying and failing to look casual. “How are you feeling?”

“Like a man about to have his purse examined,” I said, and took a bite of the apple. It was mealy and wonderful. “Hemme has a long memory for grudges and the temperament of a stepped-on cat. And with old Herma abed since the end of spring term with a chest fever, he’s sitting Chancellor pro tem. Which means he sets the tone.”

Sim looked away, then back at me, and his eyes had gone soft and bright.

“What if—” He hesitated.

“What?”

“What if I lent you something? Just in case? Fela and I have been putting aside—”

“No.”

“You don’t even know how much.”

“No, Sim.”

“It’s not charity. It’s a loan. A very reasonable loan at extremely favorable—”

“Simmon.” I said it gently. “No.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and exhaled through his nose. “You are the most stubborn person I have ever met. And I once watched a mule refuse to cross a bridge for six hours.”

“Did the mule eventually cross?”

“It did not. It sat down and they had to build the bridge around it.” He paused. “I’m not sure what my point was.”

“That I’m worse than a mule.”

“That you’re exactly like a mule, and I mean that with tremendous affection.”

Wilem arrived a few minutes later. He didn’t offer luck or fruit, only appeared at my other side, leaned against the wall, and said nothing.

After a long silence, he said: “How much do you have?”

I told him.

He nodded once, his expression unchanging. Then: “How much can you make in the Fishery this term?”

“Depends on commissions. Four or five talents a span, if Kilvin has work.”

“And the arrowcatch royalties?”

“A talent and a half last term. Maybe two this term, if the orders keep up.” I shrugged. “The University takes its cut. Kilvin takes his for materials and workshop time. By the time the profit reaches me, it’s a trickle.”

“Better than nothing.”

“Better than nothing,” I agreed.

“And the Eolian?”

“Another two, if the crowds are good.”

“And Devi?”

I looked at him. He looked back, utterly without judgment. He laid options on the table like coins and let you count them yourself.

“Devi is a last resort,” I said.

“Last resorts are still resorts.” He crossed his arms. “What’s your number?”

“My number?”

“The number where you walk away. Where you say it’s too high and leave the University.” His dark eyes held mine. “Everyone has a number. What’s yours?”

I thought about it. Really thought.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

Wilem’s eyebrows rose a fraction. For him this was the same as clutching his chest and falling over. “Everyone has a number.”

“Not me. I’ll beg, borrow, steal, play music on street corners, sell my blood to the Medica, and eat nothing but bread crusts for three months if I have to. I’m not leaving.”

He studied me. Then he nodded slowly, and the corner of his mouth twitched.

“Then I suppose you’d better go in there and be brilliant.”

Then it was my turn.

I had expected friction. I had not expected Hemme’s smile, the smile of a man holding a good hand of cards.

“I have been reading about you,” he said, turning over a sheaf of papers with theatrical slowness, finding an unpleasant surprise on every page. “Reports. From Vintas. From the Eld. From a surprising number of people who crossed paths with a red-haired arcanist this past year and lived to complain of it.” He set the papers down and folded his hands on them. “Bandits put to the sword in the Eld. A nobleman’s household in an uproar. Rumors out of Severen that would curl a Tehlin’s hair. You have been busy, Re’lar Kvothe, for a young man who was sent out on the Maer’s leave to fetch himself a little rest.”

“I did the work the Maer set me,” I said. “Whatever the reports have made of it.”

“The work the Maer set you.” He said it as though tasting something spoiled. “And yet the Maer’s letter is nowhere on your accounts any longer. Curious, that a lord so well served would strike your name from his coffers the moment you’d served your purpose.”

The other Masters watched. Kilvin’s eyes gave nothing away, though he was listening hard. Lorren’s face was its usual stone mask. Elodin sat at the end of the table, apparently fascinated by something he’d found beneath his fingernail.

“I couldn’t say what moves a Maer, Master Hemme,” I said. “I’m only a student.”

“A student.” He let the word sit. “And yet the reports read like a mummer’s tale. This one is my favorite.” He tapped a page without looking down at it. “It claims you spent a season in the Fae itself. Dancing with spirits. Dining on moonlight.” His laugh was sharp and ugly. “Shall I enter that into the record, Re’lar? Shall we set it beside your competencies?”

I very nearly said among other things, but Ademre had taught me to hold a clever answer in my mouth until it stopped tasting clever. So I said nothing.

The silence stretched.

Then Lorren spoke. “Re’lar Kvothe. During your time in Vintas, did you make use of any archives or private collections? The University has lending agreements with several estates in that region.”

“I consulted the Maer’s personal library,” I said. “And the genealogical records his household keeps.”

Lorren held my gaze, then nodded once and looked away.

My shoulders came down from my ears. Lorren was taking inventory.

Elodin looked up from his fingernails. “He’s telling the truth. About the Fae.”

Every eye in the room turned to him.

“Excuse me?”

“Look at him. Really look. He’s got it all over him like smoke in a coat. The Fae leaves marks, if you know where to look.”

“This is ridiculous—”

“Then test him.” Elodin’s eyes locked on mine. “One of those high windows is cracked. Which?”

I closed my eyes.

The sleeping mind stirred, and it was nothing like the desperate grasping I had done when I was afraid. It came quietly, as if a door I had leaned against for years had come off its latch.

The wind in the chamber moved in slow currents, shaped by the curved walls and funneled by the high windows, carrying dust off the stones and warmth off the bodies of the Masters. High on the east wall, one thin thread of it came in where no air should come, cool from outside and whistling too high for an ear to catch.

“East wall, third window from the left,” I said. “Top pane. The crack runs corner to corner.”

I opened my eyes. Kilvin had already turned in his chair to look, which was more than Hemme did, and he grunted approvingly when he found the thin silver line across the glass.

Elodin’s face gave me nothing. Then he sat back, and something in it closed.

“That will do,” he said. “Thank you, Re’lar Kvothe.”

“Master Hemme.” Lorren’s voice was quiet, but it parted the tension cleanly. “Is there a specific academic concern you wish to raise, or are we merely engaging in speculation?”

Hemme’s face reddened. “We cannot allow a student to leave a trail of blades and burned bridges from here to Severen and answer for none of it—”

“The consequence,” Kilvin interrupted, “is that Re’lar Kvothe will show us his competence, as any student must. If he has fallen behind, he will be reduced in rank.” The Artificer’s accent thickened slightly, as it always did when he was impatient. “This is the procedure. There is no need for inventing of new torments.”

“And what of the reports from Vintas?” Hemme demanded. “The evidence of reckless behavior?”

When nobody answered him, he straightened in the Chancellor’s chair. “Regardless. This body must weigh a student’s progress against the University’s safety.”

The vote went for readmission, all but two hands. But the tuition Hemme set made the room go quiet. Thirty-six talents. Even Brandeur looked uncomfortable.

The doors closed behind me. I kept my face stone and my hands steady, and all the while the numbers ran quietly behind my eyes. I had come back from Vintas the richest I had ever been, and thirty-six talents would take all of it and as much again, and that second half I would have to earn or borrow before the second span was out.

“Well?” Sim asked.

“Thirty-six.”

“Thirty—” He stopped. Swallowed. “That’s…”

“I know what it is, Sim.”

Wilem straightened from the wall. “How much do you have?”

“We covered this.”

“We covered it before we had the number. Now we have the number.” He held up a hand, counting off fingers. “Eighteen in your purse, if you’re honest about what the road left you. Eight or ten from the Fishery, over two span. Two from the arrowcatch. Two from the Eolian. That’s thirty, near enough.” He folded his arms. “You’re a handful of talents short, and I can see on your face where you mean to find them.”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“Will you.”

“I always do.”

“You always have,” he corrected. “What a man has done is no promise of what he will do. My father says this about every venture that eventually ruins a family.”

Simmon made a strangled sound. “Wil, that’s not helpful.”

“It was meant to be accurate.” His dark eyes found mine. “Devi.”

“I said last resort.”

“And I said last resorts are still resorts. I also notice you didn’t say no.”

The three of us stood in the corridor while other students filed past toward their own reckonings, each of them carrying a number of his own.

“I’ll go to the Fishery,” I said. “Kilvin mentioned he had commissions. And there’s the Eolian.”

“And the rest?”

I thought of Devi’s door, and of Devi behind it, smiling sweetly and without malice at a man she knew she had.

“I’ll think of something.”

Sim put his hand on my shoulder. “You know the offer stands.”

“I know.” I covered his hand with mine, briefly. “But this one is mine to carry.”

Wilem made a sound that might have been disagreement, but he didn’t argue.

Manet was waiting further down the corridor, where the crowd thinned.

“I’d heard you were back, and then you vanished into your room for a season.” He fell into step beside me. “The rumors beat you through the gate by a span at least.”

“I spent time with the Adem.”

“So they say.” His eyes were shrewd beneath their bushy overhang. “The rumors say a great many things. Most of them contradict each other. Some of them worry me.”

“Which rumors concern you most?”

He was quiet a while. Then: “The one about the Fae. And the one about Hemme having a dossier. Reports from Vintas. Statements from people who claim to have witnessed… various things.”

I did not like the sound of that. “What kind of things?”

“Things that make a student sound less an arcanist than a reckless menace.” His voice was gentle, which made it worse. “Hemme’s been collecting statements since midwinter. Thirty-six talents is Hemme writing you a letter.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He gripped my shoulder briefly. “For what it’s worth. I’m glad you’re back.”

He walked away before I could respond.

I walked out into the courtyard. The sun was high and the air carried the first real heat of summer. Somewhere the fourth bell rang, and the notes came across the cobblestones clean and wholly indifferent.

Thirty-six talents, due in full before the end of the second span.

I’d been poor before. Tarbean poor, where hunger stops being something you feel and becomes something you are. This was not that. I had money in my pocket, real money, and that was the joke of it. I had climbed all the way up from nothing, and the climbing had bought me exactly one thing worth the naming: a longer way to fall. Without the Maer’s letter behind me, every term from here was a door Hemme could lean his weight against, and all my talents and naming would not matter a whit if I could not put silver on Riem’s plate before the second span ran out.

I still had the bent ha’penny in my pocket. I took it out and turned it slowly between my fingers, feeling where the metal had been bent past what it could bear and would not come straight again.

I put it back in my pocket and went to find Kilvin.