Chapter 6: The Changed University

THE UNIVERSITY HAD changed while I was gone.

Not the buildings—stone doesn’t shift in eight months. The Archives still loomed, the Fishery still smoked, the Mains still wore its patient dignity like a well-fitted coat. But the people inside those buildings looked at me differently now.

I felt it in the Mess Hall at breakfast.

Conversations didn’t stop when I entered, exactly. But they shifted. Voices dropped half an octave. Eyes tracked my movement from table to serving line to the corner seat I’d always preferred. A first-term student—pale-faced, nervous—literally stepped aside to let me pass, pressing himself against the wall as if I were contagious.

“You’re famous,” Sim had said the night before, trying to make it sound like a joke. “People talk about you the way they talk about stories.”

Stories. Not people. The distinction mattered.

I ate quickly, tasting nothing, and left before anyone could approach me with questions I didn’t want to answer.

The Fishery was different too.

I arrived early, before most of the other students, and found my workbench exactly as I’d left it. Someone had cleaned it—oiled the tools, organized the components, even repaired the small crack in the vise that I’d been meaning to fix for months.

Kilvin’s work, I suspected. The Artificer didn’t do sentiment, but he did maintenance.

I was settling onto my stool when I heard footsteps behind me.

“Kvothe.”

I turned. A girl stood there—maybe sixteen, with ink-stained fingers and the careful posture of someone who’d been practicing what to say. An E’lir, judging by her plain robe.

“I’m Maris,” she said. “I’m working on a schema for Master Kilvin. A heat funnel based on your preliminary designs from last year.” She hesitated. “I wanted to ask—there’s a binding junction I can’t solve. The copper conducts too much, but iron would interfere with the sympathy. I’ve been stuck for two weeks.”

I looked at her. Really looked. She wasn’t afraid of me. She was nervous, yes—but in the normal way students get nervous when asking for help. Like I was just another Re’lar, not the protagonist of whatever dark rumors were circulating.

“Show me your schema,” I said.

Her face lit up.

We spent an hour bent over her drawings. The problem was elegant—the kind of technical puzzle that made the rest of the world fade away. She’d been approaching it from the wrong angle, trying to isolate the binding when she should have been layering multiple weak bindings to achieve the same effect.

“Brilliant,” she breathed when I showed her. “That’s—I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

“You would have. Eventually.” I handed back her drawings. “The trick is knowing when to step back and look at the whole pattern instead of the individual threads.”

“Thank you.” She hesitated. “People say you’re dangerous. That you’ve done things—” She stopped herself. “But you’re just… you’re just good at this. At seeing patterns.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes I miss them entirely.”

She nodded, gathered her papers, and walked back to her bench with the relieved gait of someone whose problem has just become solvable.

I watched her go and felt something loosen in my chest.

Maybe the University hadn’t changed completely. Maybe some things were still exactly as they should be.

I found Ambrose in the courtyard.

He wasn’t alone—he rarely was these days. Two other students flanked him, both older, both carrying themselves with the easy confidence of minor nobility. I didn’t recognize them. They must have arrived while I was gone.

Ambrose saw me first.

“Kvothe,” he said, loud enough to carry. “Back from your… adventures. We were just discussing the rumors.”

I stopped walking. The Lethani counseled avoidance of pointless conflicts, but Ambrose had a talent for making avoidance impossible.

“Which rumors?” I asked. “There are so many.”

“The ones about the Fae. About you dancing with demons and bedding monsters.” His smile was sharp. “Though I suppose when a man has your particular tastes, the line between beauty and monstrosity becomes rather blurred.”

The two students flanking him laughed. It was the kind of laughter that comes from

obligation, not humor.

I could have responded. Could have made him look foolish with a dozen different barbs—his cologne, his reputation, his sixteenth-in-line status that he clung to like a drowning man to driftwood. The old Kvothe would have done exactly that.

“You’re probably right,” I said instead. “I’ve never been good at seeing the difference.”

I walked past him without waiting for a response.

Behind me, I heard one of his companions mutter something. Then Ambrose’s voice, quieter now, with an edge I didn’t like: “He’s changed. That makes him more dangerous, not less.”

I didn’t look back.

The rooftops were where I went when I needed to think.

Auri found me there as the sun was setting, the sky bleeding orange and purple above the University. She sat beside me without speaking, her legs dangling over the edge in the same carefree way mine did.

“They’re scared of you,” she said finally.

“I know.”

“Not because you’re dangerous. Because you’re different now. People don’t like different.” She picked at a hole in her ragged dress. “I’m different. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“You’re you, Auri. That’s not different. That’s just… complete.”

She smiled at that. “You’re nicer when you’re sad.”

“I’m not sad.”

“You are. You’re sad because you came home and it isn’t home anymore.” She tilted her head, watching me with those too-bright eyes. “But home is a thing you carry, not a place you find. You know that.”

“I used to know that.”

“You still do. You’ve just forgotten.” She stood, brushed off her dress, and looked down at me with an expression that was far too old for her face. “The University hasn’t changed, Kvothe. You have. And that’s all right. Changing is what people do when they survive things that should have killed them.”

She walked away before I could respond, vanishing into the shadows between buildings like smoke in wind.

I sat alone on the rooftop as the stars came out—one by one, then in clusters, then in great swaths of light that turned the sky into something vast and beautiful and utterly indifferent to the small concerns of students and universities and young men who didn’t know where they belonged anymore.

Auri was right. Home was a thing you carried.

But somewhere between the Fae and the University, between who I’d been and who I was becoming, I’d set it down without noticing. And now I couldn’t remember where I’d left it.

That night I lay in my narrow bed at Anker’s and listened to the sounds of the University settling into sleep.

Footsteps in the hall. Voices through thin walls. The creak of old wood adjusting to the cold. Somewhere distant, someone was playing a lute—badly, but with enthusiasm.

I thought about Maris and her schema. About Ambrose and his calculated cruelty. About the first-term student who’d pressed himself against the wall, afraid of a story he’d heard about someone he’d never met.

The University had changed. Or I had changed. Or both.

Tomorrow I would go to Elodin’s class. Tomorrow I would return to the Archives, navigate Lorren’s watchful suspicion, and begin the careful work of finding the answers I’d come back for.

Tomorrow I would pretend to be the student I’d been before Ademre, before Felurian, before the Cthaeh had planted seeds in my mind that were growing in directions I couldn’t predict.

But tonight, in this small room that smelled of old wood and older stone, I let myself be nothing but a young man who was tired and lonely and very far from home.

It was a small comfort.

But it was enough.