Chapter 106: Aaron’s Decision

THE BOY CAME before dawn.

He came the way he always came — through the kitchen door, which Kote left unlocked for him, slipping in with the practiced ease of someone who has made the same entrance a hundred times. His boots were muddy from the walk. His coat was thin for the weather. His face, in the grey predawn light, held the particular expression of a young man carrying something heavy that no one can see.

Aaron was seventeen. He had the build of a farmer’s son — broad shoulders, thick hands, the kind of physical strength that comes from labor rather than exercise. His hair was the color of dried wheat. His eyes were blue and uncomplicated and, until recently, had held the particular innocence of someone who has never had to make a truly difficult choice.

That innocence was gone now. What remained was something rawer, less defined — the expression of a boy becoming a man, and not particularly enjoying the process.

He set about his morning work without speaking. Sweeping the common room floor. Carrying in wood for the fire. Drawing water from the well in the yard. These tasks had the rhythm of ritual, performed in the same order every morning, requiring no thought and no instruction. They were the foundation of his relationship with the Waystone — the simple exchange of labor for pay that had been the defining structure of his days for the past two years.

Kote had hired him when no one else would. That was the truth of it, stripped of sentiment and context. Aaron’s father had died the winter before — a cough that turned to fever, a fever that turned to stillness — and the farm had gone to creditors. His mother had moved in with her sister in Baedn. Aaron had stayed, because Newarre was home and because seventeen-year-old boys do not follow their mothers to live in their aunts’ spare rooms.

He had needed work. The Waystone had needed help. The arrangement was simple, functional, unremarkable. Kote paid fairly. Aaron worked honestly. They spoke little, because Kote spoke little to anyone, and Aaron had learned that the innkeeper’s silence was not unfriendliness but simply the way the man was built.

He had never asked Kote about his past. Had never wondered about the red hair, the green eyes, the extraordinary stillness. Had never questioned why a man of obvious intelligence and capability was running an inn in a town that could barely support one. These things were simply facts — features of the landscape, no more requiring explanation than the shape of the hills or the color of the sky.

Until the soldiers came.

Aaron finished his chores in silence. The common room was cleaner than usual — someone had swept it recently, and the tables had been wiped with more care than was typical. The fire was banked but warm, suggesting it had been tended through the night.

He noticed other things. The shutters were barred — unusual for morning, when Kote typically opened them at first light. The iron latches were thrown, each one secured. The door to the yard was bolted from inside.

And there was a man sleeping on a cot near the hearth. A stranger. Brown hair. Rough clothes. The man’s sleep was troubled — his face twisted, his hands clutching the blanket, small sounds escaping his lips that were not quite words. He looked like someone recovering from illness, or injury, or something worse than either.

Aaron looked at the sleeping man. Looked at the barred shutters. Looked at the signs of a night that had been longer and more eventful than the usual quiet evenings at the Waystone.

He said nothing. Put on water for tea. Began slicing bread for the morning.

The kitchen was where Kote found him.

“You’re early,” Kote said. He stood in the doorway, and the morning light from the kitchen window caught his hair and turned it copper. His face was drawn, lined, carrying the weight of a night without sleep. But his eyes were alert, and his voice was steady, and there was something in his bearing that Aaron had not seen before — something new, or perhaps something very old, rising to the surface after a long submersion.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Aaron said. Which was true, as far as it went.

Kote nodded. Moved to the counter. Began preparing breakfast with the mechanical efficiency of long habit — eggs, bread, a bit of cheese, a pot of tea. His hands moved with the particular grace that Aaron had always noticed and never understood. Too fluid for an innkeeper. Too precise. The hands of someone trained to do delicate work.

“Mister Kote.”

“Hmm?”

“Soldiers came through town yesterday evening.”

Kote’s hands didn’t stop. The knife continued its steady work, slicing bread into even portions. “Did they?”

“Five of them. King’s men, from the garrison at Abbenton.” Aaron kept his voice casual. Conversational. The voice of a boy reporting local gossip. “They stopped at the widow Creel’s first. Then the smithy. Then they came here.”

“I know,” Kote said. “I spoke with them.”

“What did they want?”

Kote set down the knife. Turned to face Aaron. His expression was mild, curious — the expression of a man who finds the question slightly puzzling but is happy to answer it.

“They’re looking for someone,” he said. “A fugitive. They showed me a broadsheet.”

“I know,” Aaron said. “They showed it to me too.”

The silence that followed was different from the Waystone’s usual silence.

The inn’s silence was passive — the absence of sound, the hollow left by departed voices. This silence was active. It hummed with tension, with unasked questions, with the particular charge that exists between two people when one of them knows something the other doesn’t know they know.

Aaron reached into his coat pocket. His hand closed around the object he had been carrying since the previous evening, since the sergeant with the sharp eyes had stopped him on the road outside the smithy and shown him the broadsheet and asked if he recognized the man in the woodcut.

He pulled out the coin.

The king’s coin. Heavy, thick, stamped with the Penitent King’s seal. The sergeant had pressed it into Aaron’s palm with the deliberate care of a man planting a seed. For reliable information, the sergeant had said. The King remembers those who help.

Aaron set the coin on the kitchen table. It landed with a dull, heavy sound that was louder than it should have been.

Kote looked at the coin. His face did not change. Not a flicker, not a twitch, not the smallest involuntary reaction. The absolute stillness of a man who has been expecting this moment and has prepared for it the way you prepare for a blow you cannot dodge — not by bracing, but by deciding, in advance, not to resist.

“They gave you that,” Kote said. Not a question.

“The sergeant. Last night. On the road.” Aaron’s voice was steady but his hands, folded on the table, were white at the knuckles. “He asked if I’d seen anything unusual. Any strangers. Any red-haired men who might not be what they seemed.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him no.” Aaron met Kote’s eyes. “I told him the innkeeper at the Waystone was just an innkeeper. That he’d been here for years. That he was kind and quiet and kept to himself and had never done anything more remarkable than pour a decent pint.”

“That was good of you.”

“Was it true?”

The question was simple. Direct. The question of a boy who has been raised to value honesty and is struggling with the discovery that honesty and loyalty do not always point in the same direction.

Kote pulled out a chair and sat. The movement was slow, deliberate — the movement of a man who wants to be at eye level, who wants the conversation to happen between equals rather than from the elevated position of employer to employee.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Aaron looked at him. Really looked, with the careful attention of someone seeing a familiar thing for the first time. The red hair. The green eyes. The stillness. The hands that didn’t belong to an innkeeper.

“I think,” Aaron said slowly, “that you’re the kindest man I’ve ever met. I think you gave me work when I needed it and never once made me feel like charity. I think you taught me to count money and tend bar and deal with difficult customers, and you were patient when I made mistakes, and you never raised your voice.”

He paused.

“I also think your name isn’t Kote.”

The morning light had shifted. It came through the kitchen window at a lower angle now, catching the dust motes in the air, painting the plain wooden surfaces with a warm, golden glow that made everything look more significant than it was. Or perhaps exactly as significant as it was, and the light was simply making that significance visible.

Kote sat across from Aaron and said nothing for a very long time.

He was performing a calculation — not mathematical but moral. The kind of calculation that cannot be reduced to numbers because the variables are human and therefore infinite. What does this boy deserve to know? What knowledge will protect him, and what knowledge will put him in danger? What is the cost of truth, measured not in abstractions but in the specific, concrete harm that may come to a seventeen-year-old boy in a town with soldiers in it?

“Kote is my name,” he said finally. “It’s the name I chose. The name I live by. The name that defines who I am now.”

“But it isn’t the name you were born with.”

“No.”

Aaron nodded. He had expected this. The confirmation didn’t surprise him — it merely replaced suspicion with certainty, which was both less and more comfortable.

“The man on the broadsheet,” Aaron said. “The Kingkiller. Is that you?”

“The man on the broadsheet is a story,” Kote said carefully. “A legend. Built from half-truths and exaggerations and the kind of details that make for good drama. The Kingkiller is a character. A villain in some stories, a hero in others. A useful fiction for a king who needs someone to blame.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No.” Kote almost smiled. “It’s not.”

He leaned forward. His elbows on the table. His hands clasped before him. The posture of a man who is about to say something important and wants to make sure it’s heard.

“Aaron. Listen to me. There are two things that matter right now, and neither of them is my name or my past. The first is that the soldiers will come back. When they do, they will ask you questions. Not politely. Not casually. They will lean on you, because you work here, because you’re young, because they’ll assume you know things and can be made to share them.”

Aaron’s face was pale but composed.

“The second thing that matters is this: whatever you tell them, whatever you decide to do — it has to be your decision. Not mine. Not the sergeant’s. Not the decision you think a hero would make, or a coward, or a loyal friend. Your decision. Based on what you believe is right.”

“What if I don’t know what’s right?”

“Then you’re in good company. Most people don’t.” Kote’s voice was gentle. “The stories make it seem simple. The hero chooses the right side and fights the good fight and everything works out in the end. But reality isn’t a story. In reality, the right side isn’t always obvious. The good fight isn’t always possible. And choosing — really choosing, with full knowledge of the consequences — is the hardest thing a person can do.”

Aaron looked at the coin on the table. The Penitent King’s profile gleamed in the morning light. A young king. A frightened king. A king who had taken the throne in blood and was holding it with fear.

“If I give them your name,” Aaron said quietly, “they’ll come for you. Lots of them. And they’ll—”

“Yes.”

“And if I don’t, and they find out I lied—”

“Yes.”

“So either way, someone gets hurt.”

“Yes.” Kote’s voice was very soft. “That’s what choices look like, in the real world. Not right versus wrong. Just hurt versus hurt, and you pick the one you can live with.”

Aaron picked up the coin.

He turned it over in his fingers the way he’d seen Kote turn things — bottles, glasses, the small objects that passed through his hands with an unconscious grace that was, Aaron now understood, the residue of a life lived at a higher level of ability than anything Newarre had ever seen.

“You taught me to count money,” Aaron said. “Do you remember? My first week. I couldn’t make change without using my fingers. You sat with me for an hour, patient as anything, and showed me the trick with the sevens.”

“I remember.”

“And the time Carter’s mule kicked the wall and cracked the plaster. You fixed it yourself. Mixed the mortar and patched it smooth, and when I asked where you learned masonry you said ‘here and there’ and changed the subject.”

“I remember.”

“And the night Old Cob got drunk and started a fight with the travelers from Trebon. You stepped between them. Didn’t raise a hand. Just spoke. Quiet, like you’re speaking now. And everyone calmed down. Everyone just… stopped. Like your voice was a hand on their shoulder.”

Kote said nothing.

“The man on the broadsheet killed a king,” Aaron said. “That’s what they say. He’s dangerous. A fugitive. A murderer.” He looked up. “But the man who taught me to count money isn’t a murderer. The man who patched the wall isn’t dangerous. And the man who stopped a fight with nothing but his voice isn’t someone the world needs protecting from.”

He set the coin down on the table.

“Maybe they’re the same man,” Aaron said. “Maybe you did terrible things. I don’t know. But I know what I’ve seen. And what I’ve seen is a good man, running a quiet inn, hurting nobody.”

He pushed the coin across the table toward Kote.

“I don’t want the king’s money,” he said. “I don’t want to be the kind of person who takes it.”

Kote picked up the coin. He held it in his palm, feeling its weight — the weight of silver, of authority, of the machinery of power that could crush a boy like Aaron without noticing.

“You should keep it,” Kote said.

“No.”

“Aaron—”

“No.” The boy’s voice was firm. Firmer than Kote had ever heard it. “If I keep it, it means something. It means I’m theirs. I’m not. I’m not anybody’s.”

Kote closed his hand around the coin. Nodded slowly.

“You’re a better man than me,” he said. And he meant it. The words were not flattery or self-deprecation. They were the honest assessment of someone who had spent a lifetime making choices — some brilliant, some catastrophic, all consequential — and who recognized, in this boy’s simple refusal, something he himself had never quite possessed.

The ability to choose without calculation. To act from the heart rather than the head. To be loyal not because loyalty served a purpose but because loyalty was its own purpose.

Aaron stood. He wiped his hands on his trousers — a habitual gesture, unnecessary, the gesture of a working boy returning to work.

“I should finish up,” he said. “The wood still needs splitting.”

“Aaron.”

The boy stopped at the door.

“When the soldiers come back — and they will come back — tell them the truth. Tell them the innkeeper is just an innkeeper. Tell them you’ve never seen anything unusual.”

“That is the truth.”

“Is it?”

Aaron looked at him. Seventeen years old, with the weight of a man’s decision on his shoulders and the clarity of a boy’s conviction in his eyes.

“It’s the truth I know,” he said. “And that’s enough.”

He went out to split wood. The sound of the axe began moments later — rhythmic, steady, the sound of ordinary labor in an ordinary town on an ordinary morning.

Kote sat alone in the kitchen. He opened his hand and looked at the coin. Then he placed it in the darkest corner of the highest shelf, behind a jar of flour that was rarely moved.

The morning continued. The light strengthened. And somewhere in the space between the kitchen and the common room, in the gap between the innkeeper and the man he had been, something shifted.

Not dramatically. Not decisively.

But enough.