Chapter 04: The Weight of Months

THE NIGHT AFTER admissions, I climbed onto the roof of the Mews to steal a song.

I have done many foolish things in my life, and I have defended most of them in the telling. This one I will only explain. Thirty-six talents hung over me like a headsman’s contract. Denna was gone. Her song was loose in the world, doing its slow work in every taproom between the University and Imre, and I had promised my friends, with drink-fed arrogance, that I would follow it back to the man who had paid for it. But you cannot follow what you have not heard. Taproom talk gave me a verse here, a chorus there, mangled by drunks and cheerfully dressed up by liars. I needed the thing itself, whole, and I had no coin to spare for nights in Imre waiting on some minstrel to oblige me, not with thirty-six talents due and every silver I owned already promised to Riem’s plate.

But the wind goes everywhere, and I knew the wind’s name.

It was a clear night, cold at the edges as early summer nights are, the season still glancing nervously back over its shoulder. I sat cross-legged on the tiles with the courtyard three stories below me and the river a dark seam to the east, and beyond it the low glow of Imre, where music is traded across tables like coin.

I called the wind the only way I knew then, snatching at it as you snatch at a fleeing bird. Aerlevsedi. All clutch and desperation, the name of the wind spoken like an accusation. It is a wonder the wind ever answered me at all in those days. But it came, indulgent as an old dog, and it brought me pieces. A fiddle across the river, playing something that wasn’t hers. The smell of tar from the docks. A woman laughing, two streets past the laughing being any of my business.

And then, thin as a hair drawn through the dark, a melody I had never heard before.

Three bars of it. Maybe four. It went into me somewhere below the ribs and stayed there, faint as a thing remembered rather than heard, and I knew it as you might know a stranger by a dead friend’s coat. Her song. It had to be. Then the wind moved on, carrying its cargo elsewhere, indifferent as a river to what a man on the bank wants from it.

I should have been patient. Patience I had spent months learning in Ademre, and I would like to tell you the learning held.

I reached deeper. I went past the wind entirely, because the melody had lived in the spaces between the wind’s breathing, and so, reasoning like a greedy child, I reached for the spaces. For the stillness underneath, the silence her song sat inside like a stone in a stream.

I found it.

It pulled back from me.

The world drew in tight. Sound died, and it did not go out gently, as sound does when a door swings shut. It was torn away. My vision bled dark at the edges, a pressure built behind my eyes, and something warm ran from my nose to my lip. I was on my feet without having decided to stand. My heel found the roof’s edge, and for one lurching moment the courtyard swung up at me, three stories of empty dark. I threw my weight back from the edge, hit the tiles hard on one knee, and whatever I had been holding slipped from my grasp.

Sound rushed back: the wind, a dog barking somewhere near the Mains, my own breathing, ragged and too fast. I touched my face, and my fingers came away dark.

In time, Elodin would give me rules for the thing I had touched that night. It never occurred to him to say: never in pride. I suppose he assumed that not even I was that foolish.

“Well,” said a voice behind me, conversationally. “That was thorough.”

Elodin sat on the ridge of the roof as though he had been there all evening, knees drawn up, coat pooled around him. I had not heard him arrive. No one ever did.

“You spoke a name into silence,” he said. He was not looking at me. He was looking east, across the river, at weather I could not see and he could. “That kind of thing echoes. They’ll be listening for you now.”

“Who—” My voice came out in rags. I swallowed blood and tried again. “Who will?”

He didn’t answer. He only watched the east a while longer, as if the east might be watching back.

“You really were there,” he said. “The Fae. How long?”

I shrugged wearily. “A few weeks, maybe. It felt like longer.”

“It always does.” He turned to face me then, wearing a look I had never seen on him before, frankly worried, and something close to afraid underneath it. “Did you speak with anything? In the Fae. Anything with more than animal intelligence?”

I thought of shadowed boughs. Of butterflies falling in halves.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“A tree.”

Elodin stopped watching the east and looked at me. Then, quietly: “The Cthaeh.”

“Yes.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again he had slumped where he sat, and all the mad restless energy had gone out of him, and what was left was a plain tiredness that looked to have been years in the making.

“I asked you about the Chandrian once,” I said. “You told me they were nonsense.”

“I told you what you needed to hear. You weren’t ready.” He nodded once, mostly to himself. “A student asking about the Chandrian is a curiosity. A student who has actually spoken to the Cthaeh and has reason to hunt them is a catastrophe in progress.”

“And now?”

“Now you’re a catastrophe that has already happened.” There was no ghost of a smile this time. He looked at the blood drying on my lip, at my hands, which were shaking badly and would not stop. “Do you know what the morning offers, Re’lar Kvothe? A student found reaching bare-handed into Silence. Untrained. Unsupervised. Alone on a roof at the dark end of night. If I bring that to the Masters, the kindest word spoken will be Haven, and Master Hemme will not be reaching for the kindest word.”

The night air moved between us. Below, in the courtyard, a linden stirred its new flowers quietly in the dark.

“Or,” he said.

“Or?”

“Or it was a lesson. Badly supervised and worse timed, which nobody who knows me will question, but a lesson all the same. A Master and his Re’lar, and a nosebleed, which is the traditional way naming lessons end.” He stood, brushing ineffectually at his coat. “I can arrange the truth in a merciful order. But lessons carry fees, and mine is this: everything. Tonight, in my rooms, you will tell me the whole of it. The Fae. The tree. And every other thing you carried back alone and have never once said aloud. In order. Sparing nothing.” He looked at me, and his eyes were old. “That is the price of my name on your foolishness.”

He did not float down from the roof. He went down the ladder like an ordinary man, complaining steadily about his knees.

Somehow that frightened me more.

His rooms had the studied disorder I remembered from my first term under him: a windowsill regiment of river stones, a chair with a book jammed under one short leg, three cups that had never matched anything including each other.

He turned the key in the door behind us, and I heard the bolt seat in the frame.

He didn’t offer me wine or pleasantries. He went to the windowsill and began rearranging the stones, slowly and with great attention, as though their order mattered rather more than I did. Without looking up, he said, “What color was the sky there?”

“Where?”

“In the Fae. When you spoke with the tree.” He set a stone down, picked up another, and frowned at it as if it had spoken out of turn. “The sky matters. People never think the sky matters.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You do. You just haven’t looked at the memory from the right angle.” He waved a hand vaguely. “Begin. All of it. That was the fee.”

So I paid. I told him about Denna’s patron and the beatings, about Cinder doing as he pleased, about the Maer, and about all the things that had been hiding in plain sight where I couldn’t see them.

Elodin listened without interrupting. He’d stopped arranging stones.

Then I reached the part I’d never told anyone: why they came.

I stopped. The words were there, pressing against the inside of my chest, but my mouth wouldn’t shape them. Five years. Five years I had carried this alone. Through Tarbean’s gutters, where I’d been a feral thing that barely remembered language. Through the University’s halls, where I’d built a new self, piece by careful piece, on top of the ruin of the old one. I had almost told Denna about my father’s song once, in a room full of firelight, when the wine was low and the hour was late and she’d looked at me with an expression that said I know you’re hiding something. I had almost told Sim what the Chandrian had wanted, after too much scutten, when the easy warmth of friendship made the walls feel thin. Each time I’d pulled back. The secret had become a keystone. Pull it loose and the whole arch I’d built above it might come down.

“There’s more,” I said.

“Of course there’s more. You’re like a well with a false bottom.” He picked up a stone, turned it over. Set it down. “Go on.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. The room was quiet, and the stones on the windowsill caught the lamplight, and Elodin waited patiently, without helping me at all. I think he knew he couldn’t.

“My—” The word caught. I swallowed hard. Tasted copper and ash. My hands had curled into fists, nails biting into my palms.

“My parents,” I said. “My father was writing a song. The real story of Lanre, and never mind the children’s version or the cleaned-up histories. The truth. He was as much a scholar as a musician. He’d spent years gathering up the scraps of it, chasing old songs back to the men who first sang them, doggedly setting one telling against another until he could see where they lied. And the song he was writing named things that were never supposed to be named.”

I stopped and drew a breath.

“The Chandrian came for him. Cinder did the killing, and a man wrapped in shadow held his leash. They killed my father. My mother. Every member of our troupe. Fourteen people, burned in their wagons, because a musician got too close to a truth that was supposed to stay buried.”

The room had gone completely quiet.

“I was twelve,” I said. “I was in the forest when it happened. I came back and they were dead. All of them. The wagons were still burning.”

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, and it came up at me as it always does, all at once and in no order at all: the smell of charred wood and cooked meat, my mother’s lute case cracked open in the ashes, my father face-down in the grass with his hand still reaching toward the wagon where she’d been sleeping.

“The Cthaeh told me the rest. It told me what I had long suspected, that Cinder was the one I wanted, that Cinder was the one who killed my parents. The rest I pieced together myself, on the nights the pieces wouldn’t let me sleep. That the same Cinder is the patron grooming Denna, teaching her to write the same kind of song, a song that will rewrite what the world believes about the Chandrian. I have no proof of it. Only a pattern, and a certainty that frightens me more than proof would. And Denna doesn’t know. Or she does know, now, and can’t stop.”

I hesitated over the last of it, because it was the piece that felt most like a hook with bait on it.

“It told me where to stand,” I said. “Stick by the Maer and he will lead you to their door. The single most useful thing it said all afternoon. Which is precisely why I don’t trust it, and precisely why I’m going to do it anyway.”

When I came to the Cthaeh’s words, the exact words in the exact order it had spoken them, his face went pale.

Then it went past pale, as if he knew those words, and underneath the knowing there was a quiet grief.

“You’ve never told anyone this,” he said, and he did not wait for me to answer it.

“Sim and Wil know pieces. They know the Chandrian killed my troupe. But no one knows about my father’s song. What he was researching. Why they came.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked at the ceiling. “Do you know why spiders build webs in corners?”

I stared at him. “What?”

“Corners. Spiders love corners. Do you know why?”

“Because that’s where the flies go?”

“Because the geometry is efficient. Maximum coverage, minimum silk.” He stood abruptly, began to pace. “The Cthaeh doesn’t build webs. It is the corner. Every fly in the world thinks it’s choosing where to land.” He stopped. “Did you think you walked away from that tree?”

“I did walk away.”

“Your legs moved. That’s not the same thing.” He ran a hand through his hair. “What it said is still in you. It’ll stay in you, and go on being in you.” He frowned irritably. “I’m saying this badly.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

He stopped pacing, picked up a stone from the windowsill, put it in his pocket, and took it out again. “I don’t know. I genuinely do not know.” He sat again, heavily. Then he held the stone up between two fingers. “A stone rolls downhill. The hill already knows where it lands. The stone rolls anyway—” He turned it over and frowned at it, plainly disappointed. “No. The stone doesn’t choose to roll. You do. That’s the only difference between you and the stone, and some nights it won’t feel like much.”

“And if I choose wrong? If I destroy everything?”

“Then you’ll have done it as yourself. Not as a puppet.” His eyes were fierce. “That has to count for something. Even against a thing that old.”

A long silence.

“Be afraid,” he said, almost gently. “But don’t stop choosing.”

“That seems convenient,” Bast said skeptically from the hearth, chin propped on one fist. “Just the right amount of dramatic.”

Kote’s hands paused on the bar.

“Elodin was brilliant and half-mad. But you’re telling this story, Reshi. And in your telling, everyone speaks in exactly the right cadence at exactly the right moment.”

A silence followed, not a long one, but long enough that both of them noticed.

“He said what he said,” Kote replied, a little too quickly. “Or close enough.”

“Close enough,” Bast repeated, and let it rest.

I left his rooms with more questions than answers, and lighter by a secret I had carried so long its absence felt like a wound.

On the stairs, I stopped. The University was quiet around me. I leaned against the cold stone wall and closed my eyes.

Everything after the Cthaeh was aimed. I could still choose. But every choice of mine landed where the tree had already looked, falling along a curve I could not see.

I hadn’t told Elodin the worst of it. The worst was the suspicion, quiet as a hairline crack in a foundation, that everything I’d done since climbing down from that tree had been of its making. That I was a story the Cthaeh was telling to an audience I couldn’t see.

Three bars of her song rode the back of my mind, bought with blood and very nearly with more. Fragments would not do. Somewhere across the river the whole of it was being sung nightly, and somewhere nearer than that, in the Archives, in the catalogues and the gaps between them, lay the answer to what a song like hers was built to do. The wind would not hold still for me. Books would.