Chapter 17: Sim and Fela

SOME MEMORIES ARE like pressed flowers: beautiful, fragile, preserved between the pages of a life that kept turning long after the moment was gone. You don’t decide to save them. They save themselves, stubbornly persisting in the mind while grander events fade to grey, insisting with quiet obstinacy that this mattered. This was real. Remember this.

I am telling you about a night at Anker’s. I am telling you about my friends.

I need you to understand that what I’m describing was not remarkable. Nothing of historical consequence happened. No one said anything that would alter the course of nations. No dangerous secrets were revealed. No one fought or wept or made decisions that would ripple forward through the years.

It was an ordinary evening, among ordinary people, in an ordinary place.

And it was the most precious thing I’ve ever known.

Anker’s was warm that night—the deep, sustainable warmth of a well-built fire and close-packed bodies and the particular heat generated by people who are exactly where they want to be. The common room smelled of roast lamb and brown bread and the yeasty richness of ale drawn from casks that had been aging since midsummer, and beneath those honest smells was the subtler scent of wood smoke and tallow candles and the ghost of a thousand other evenings just like this one.

I arrived late, having spent the afternoon in my room trying to make sense of notes I’d taken in the hidden library. My eyes were tired, my back ached, and the bone ring on my finger hummed with a frequency that might have been encouragement or warning—I hadn’t yet learned to tell the difference.

But the moment I walked through the door and saw them—my friends, at our table, in our corner—something in my chest unclenched. A tightness I’d been carrying so long I’d forgotten it was there simply let go, and for the first time in weeks, I took a breath that went all the way down.

Simmon saw me first.

“Kvothe!” He half-rose from his chair, his face breaking into the kind of smile that made you believe the world was fundamentally decent. Sim had that gift—an apparently inexhaustible reserve of genuine warmth that could make even the most cynical person feel welcomed. “We were starting to think you’d been eaten by something in the Archives.”

“Not eaten. Merely gnawed upon.” I took my usual seat—the one with its back to the wall, facing the door. An old habit, born of years on the streets of Tarbean. “What are we drinking?”

“Anker brought out a new cask of metheglin. It’s dangerously good.” Simmon poured me a measure from the earthenware pitcher in the center of the table. The metheglin was honey-gold, the color of late afternoon light, and it smelled of clover and summer and something deeper—an almost floral sweetness that bloomed in the back of the throat. “Fela found it. She has an instinct for these things.”

“I have a palate, which is different from an instinct.” Fela sat beside Sim, close enough that their shoulders touched, and she looked up from the book she’d been reading with the patient, unhurried smile of someone who was exactly where she wanted to be. “An instinct is what you have when you choose your clothes in the morning.”

“What’s wrong with my clothes?”

“Nothing, if you’re a provincial farmer attending his first fair.”

“I’ll have you know this shirt was very expensive.”

“Expensive doesn’t mean good, Sim. As your course in Advanced Sympathy should have taught you.”

Wil was there too, quiet as always, occupying his corner of the table with the contained efficiency of a well-packed trunk. He nodded at me when I sat down—a small, deliberate nod that carried the weight of our conversation on the bench, an acknowledgment that he’d said his piece and wouldn’t say it again, and that the ball was in my court.

I nodded back. A truce, of sorts.

“How’s the term treating everyone?” I asked, sipping the metheglin. Sim was right—it was dangerously good. The sweetness was balanced by a subtle bitterness that kept it from being cloying, and the alcohol content was deceptive—barely noticeable going down but building a warm glow in the belly that spread outward like ripples from a dropped stone.

“I passed my intermediate alchemy exam,” Fela said. “Kilvin told me my theoretical work was exemplary but my practical execution needed refinement.”

“That’s Kilvin-speak for ‘very good,’” I said.

“I know what it means. I’ve been decoding Kilvin-speak for three years now.” She closed her book—a thick volume on crystalline structures—and set it beside her mug. “The real question is whether Sim is going to survive Master Hemme’s rhetoric assessment.”

“I am going to survive it through a combination of meticulous preparation and barely controlled panic,” Sim said, with the earnest dignity of a man facing an unpleasant but unavoidable ordeal. “I’ve been practicing my opening statement. Would you like to hear it?”

“God, no,” Wil said. “We heard it four times already. Three of those times were improvements. The fourth was a catastrophe.”

“The fourth was a creative reinterpretation.”

“The fourth involved a metaphor comparing the Tehlin church to a diseased elm tree. Hemme is going to eat you alive.”

“The metaphor was apt.”

“The metaphor was suicidal.”

I laughed. I hadn’t laughed properly in days—maybe weeks—and the sound of it surprised me. It was rusty, unpracticed, like a gate that hasn’t been opened in too long. But it was genuine, and the genuineness of it seemed to ease something in the air, as if my friends had been holding their breath and only just realized they could exhale.

“Let’s hear the metaphor,” I said. “I’ll judge.”

Sim straightened in his chair, assumed an expression of scholarly gravity, and cleared his throat.

“The Tehlin church,” he began, in the sonorous tone he reserved for academic performance, “is like an elm tree that has stood for centuries at the center of a great city. Its roots are deep. Its branches are wide. It provides shade and shelter and a sense of permanence that comforts those who dwell beneath it.”

He paused for effect.

“But the elm is diseased. Not visibly—the bark is sound, the leaves are green. The disease lives in the heartwood, spreading slowly, invisibly, from the center outward. And by the time the outer signs become apparent—the dropping branches, the hollow trunk, the roots that no longer grip the earth—it’s too late. The tree that everyone believed was eternal has been dying for a hundred years, and its fall, when it comes, will crush the very city it was supposed to protect.”

Silence.

Then Fela said, quietly, “That’s actually quite good.”

“It’s very good,” I agreed. “Hemme will definitely try to kill you.”

“But he’ll fail,” Sim said, “because I’ll follow it up with three pages of carefully reasoned evidence that makes the metaphor seem inevitable rather than provocative.”

“The key word there being ‘seem,’” Wil observed.

“All rhetoric is seeming. That’s the point.”

The evening settled into its rhythm. We drank metheglin. We talked. We argued about things that didn’t matter—the relative merits of Cealdish and Aturan cooking, the theoretical possibility of a sympathy link between moonlight and tidal patterns, whether Elodin was genuinely mad or just performing madness for pedagogical effect.

“He’s genuinely mad,” Wil said flatly. “I’ve seen him eat a flower.”

“Eating a flower isn’t mad. It’s eccentric.”

“He ate it during a lecture. On the nature of naming. While making eye contact with a student who had asked a perfectly reasonable question about semantic theory.”

“What happened to the student?”

“Changed his field of study to rhetoric. Hasn’t been the same since.”

Sim laughed—a full, open laugh that started in his belly and worked its way up through his chest, unself-conscious and undiluted. It was the laugh of a person who found the world genuinely funny, who hadn’t yet learned to measure his reactions or moderate his joy.

Fela watched him laugh, and her expression was something I’ve spent years trying to find the right word for. It wasn’t just love, though love was in it. It wasn’t just affection or admiration or desire, though all of those were present. It was recognition. The look of someone who has found, in another person, the answer to a question they didn’t know they were asking.

She reached out and brushed a strand of hair from his forehead—a gesture so small, so automatic, that I don’t think either of them noticed it. But I noticed. And it hit me with a force that was entirely out of proportion to the smallness of the act, because in that gesture was everything I wanted and couldn’t have: the ease of being known. The comfort of touching without calculation. The simple, devastating miracle of another person’s hand finding your face and fixing something that didn’t need fixing, just because it could.

“What?” Sim said, catching me staring.

“Nothing.” I took a drink. “You have something in your hair.”

“I do not.”

“He did,” Fela said. “I got it.”

“What was it?”

“A strand of genius, I think. Easily dislodged.”

“Very funny.”

Later, after the metheglin pitcher had been emptied and refilled and emptied again, someone suggested the Eolian. I don’t remember who—Sim, probably, because Sim always wanted to go to the Eolian, and because his enthusiasm was the kind that swept others along without their quite realizing they’d agreed to anything.

We walked together through the University grounds, across the Stonebridge, and into Imre. The night was cool and clear, the stars so thick and bright they seemed to press down on the world like a weight. Our breath plumed white in the chill air, and our footsteps rang on the cobblestones with the irregular rhythm of four friends walking at four different paces—Wil’s steady and measured, Sim’s quick and uneven, Fela’s graceful and sure, and mine somewhere in between, adapting to theirs.

Sim and Fela walked ahead, close together, their hands intertwined. I watched them from behind — their bodies inclined toward each other, their steps naturally synchronized. Sim’s free hand moved when he talked. Fela’s head tilted when she listened.

“He loves her,” I said to Wil, who walked beside me.

“Yes.”

“Really loves her. Not the temporary kind. Not the kind that passes.”

“I know.” Wil’s voice was quiet. “That’s what worries me.”

“Why would that worry you?”

“Because people who love that deeply have the most to lose.” He looked at me, and there was something careful in his expression—a precision of emotion that suggested he was choosing his words with the same care a jeweler uses when setting a stone. “And because the world doesn’t protect people just because they deserve to be protected.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said nothing, and we walked in silence through the cool night air, and the stars watched us, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked twice and then was still.

The Eolian was lively—a Felling night crowd, thick with musicians and their admirers. The air inside was warm and close, rich with the smell of spilled wine and rosin and the particular musk of a room full of people who have been laughing and drinking and listening to music for hours. The stage was occupied by a young woman with a lute who was playing something intricate and melancholy, her fingers moving with a precision that I recognized as genuine talent.

We found a table near the back—not our usual spot, which was taken, but a decent one with a clear sightline to the stage. Sim ordered a round of Greysdale mead, which was lighter than the metheglin and better suited to an evening of listening.

“You should play tonight,” Fela said to me. “It’s been weeks.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“You’re never in the mood until you start playing. Then you’re always in the mood.” She smiled. “That’s how passion works.”

“She’s right,” Sim said. “Last time you said you weren’t in the mood, you ended up playing for three hours and making an old woman cry.”

“She was crying because she was happy.”

“She was crying because you played ‘Tinker Tanner’ at a tempo that somehow made a drinking song feel like a prayer.” Sim shook his head. “I still don’t understand how you did that.”

“Tempo and key change. Slow it down by a third, drop it into minor, and suddenly the words about a tinker trading pots become a meditation on loss and the passage of time.”

“See?” Fela said. “That. That’s what I’m talking about. You understand music the way a fish understands water. It’s not something you do—it’s something you are. And when you deny yourself that, you’re denying something fundamental.”

I looked at her—at her dark eyes, her strong jaw, the way she held herself with a quiet confidence that came not from arrogance but from deep self-knowledge. Fela understood craft. She was a shaper in the making, a student of Kilvin’s who could feel the structure of materials the way I could feel the structure of a song. When she spoke about fundamental things, she knew what she was talking about.

“Maybe later,” I said.

She accepted this with a nod—not pushing, just planting the seed and trusting it to grow.

The mead arrived. The musician on stage finished her piece to warm applause. Another performer took her place—a man with a deep voice and a fiddle, who launched into a rollicking jig that had half the room clapping along.

Sim leaned back in his chair, his arm draped over the back of Fela’s seat—not around her shoulders, not possessively, just resting there, present, available. A gesture that said I’m here without demanding anything in return.

“Can I tell you something?” he said, and his voice had shifted. The playful tone was gone, replaced by something quieter. Something that might have been vulnerability, if Sim had ever been capable of being truly guarded.

“Always,” I said.

He didn’t speak immediately. Instead, he looked around the Eolian—at the musicians, the listeners, the candle flames dancing on every table—as if he were trying to memorize the room.

“Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen is if nothing ever changed,” he said. “If we could just… stay here. In this. Forever. Drinking mead and arguing about moonlight and listening to music and being exactly who we are right now.”

“That’s a nice thought.”

“It’s a terrifying thought.” He said it so quietly that I almost didn’t hear him over the fiddle music. “Because wanting something to stay the same means being afraid of what comes next. And being afraid of the future means the present isn’t really peaceful—it’s just the space between fears.”

Fela’s hand found his, where it rested on the back of her chair. She laced her fingers through his and squeezed, and he squeezed back, and the small exchange said more than any words could have.

“I’m happy,” Sim said. “I want you to know that. Right now, tonight, in this ridiculous tavern with these ridiculous friends and this ridiculous mead that tastes like someone made sunshine alcoholic—I’m happy. Genuinely, completely, all-the-way-down happy.”

“Good,” I said. “You deserve to be.”

“That’s the thing, though. I don’t think happiness is about deserving. I think it just… arrives. Like weather. Like music. It shows up, and you either notice it or you don’t, and if you’re lucky enough to notice, the only smart thing to do is sit still and pay attention and try not to scare it away.”

“Since when are you a philosopher?”

“Since I started dating a woman who’s smarter than me in every conceivable way. It’s very motivating.” He grinned at Fela, and she rolled her eyes, but her grip on his hand tightened.

“You’re not as dumb as you pretend to be,” she said.

“I’m not pretending. I’m genuinely of average intelligence. I just happen to surround myself with people who make me look like an idiot by comparison.” He gestured at the table. “Present company very much included.”

“You’re selling yourself short,” Wil said, and the fact that Wil—taciturn, undemonstrative Wil—offered this unprompted was a testament to the kind of evening it was. A generous evening. An evening when the usual barriers came down and people said what they meant. “You’re one of the finest natural alchemists I’ve ever seen. Your intuition for reactions is better than most Re’lar twice your age.”

“Wil just said something nice about me,” Sim whispered to Fela. “Did you hear that? Write it down. It may never happen again.”

“I heard it. I’m committing it to memory.”

“I retract the compliment,” Wil said, but he was almost smiling.

I did play, eventually.

The fiddle player finished his set, and during the lull between performers, I felt the pull—that old, familiar tug in my fingers, in my chest, in the part of me that was more music than flesh. I retrieved my lute from where I’d left it with the barkeep (a habit born of paranoia and confirmed by experience), tuned it quickly, and took the stage.

The Eolian quieted. Not because I commanded attention—though I did, and the talent pipes around my neck said I’d earned the right—but because the room itself seemed to recognize that something was about to happen. The candle flames steadied. The conversations dimmed. Even the serving girls paused in their rounds, trays balanced on hips, faces turned toward the light.

I didn’t plan what I played.

I thought of Sim’s face when he looked at Fela. I thought of the metheglin’s sweetness and the thrush’s three ascending notes and the cool night air on the walk through Imre. I thought of Wil’s quiet steadiness and Fela’s strong hands and the way Sim laughed—completely, unreservedly, as if he’d never once been taught to hold anything back.

And I played.

The song was slow. Simple. Built on a melody that rose and fell like breathing, like tides, like the rhythm of a heart that was full and knew it. There were no flashy runs, no technical displays, no moments designed to showcase my skill. There was just the music—clean and honest and achingly tender—and the room that held it, and the people who listened.

I played for about ten minutes. Maybe less. When I stopped, the silence that followed was the good kind—the kind that means something has landed, something has connected, something true has passed between the player and the room.

Then the applause came, warm and genuine, and I stepped down from the stage and returned to my friends.

Sim’s eyes were bright. Not with tears—Sim wasn’t crying—but with something that tears are a poor approximation of. A fullness. An overflow.

“What was that called?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You should call it something. Music like that deserves a name.”

I thought about it. About what the song was about, underneath the notes. About what I’d been trying to express with the only language I truly mastered.

“If I had to call it something,” I said, “I’d call it ‘What We Have.’”

“That’s perfect,” Fela said, and her voice was thick. “That’s exactly right.”

The evening wound down the way good evenings do—slowly, reluctantly, with the mutual understanding that leaving would break a spell that couldn’t be recast. We ordered one more round, then another, talking about nothing important and everything that mattered.

Sim told a story about his father—the minor noble in Atur who had wanted his son to study rhetoric and politics, who had been bewildered and then resigned and then quietly proud when Sim had chosen alchemy instead. “He writes me letters,” Sim said. “Long ones. Full of advice I don’t need and questions I can’t answer and a kind of worried love that’s so intense it practically vibrates off the page.”

“That’s what parents do,” Fela said. “Love you at a frequency that’s slightly off from your own.”

“Is that what it feels like? Being loved at the wrong frequency?”

“Not the wrong frequency. Just a different one. Like two instruments playing the same song in different keys. It’s not wrong—it’s harmony.”

Sim looked at her, and the expression on his face was one I will carry with me until the day I die. It was the face of a man who has found, in another person, the missing frequency—the note that turns dissonance into music. It was love, yes, but it was more than love. It was gratitude, and wonder, and a kind of fierce, quiet determination to be worthy of what he’d been given.

“I’m going to marry you,” he said. Not as a proposal—as a statement of fact. As self-evident as gravity, as certain as sunrise. “Someday. When I’ve figured out how to be the kind of person who deserves you.”

“You already are,” she said.

“I’m really not.”

“You really are.” She leaned in and kissed him, softly, briefly, and the kiss was unremarkable in every way except that it was happening, now, between these two people, in this place.

I looked away. Not from embarrassment—from a sense that this moment belonged to them, and watching too closely would be a kind of theft.

Wil caught my eye from across the table. His expression was unreadable, which meant he was feeling something he didn’t want to show. He raised his mug, just slightly—a toast without words—and I raised mine in return.

To this, the gesture said. To exactly this. Whatever comes after.

We walked home together. All four of us, through the quiet streets of Imre and across the Stonebridge and back onto University grounds, where the buildings stood dark and solid against the star-scattered sky.

Sim and Fela peeled off first, toward the dormitories on the south side of campus. Sim waved—a big, full-armed wave, the kind a child gives from the back of a departing cart. Fela raised a hand, more restrained but no less warm.

“Goodnight, you lot,” Sim called. “Same time next span?”

“Same time,” I said.

“Good. I’ll practice my elm tree metaphor.”

“Please don’t.”

“I’m going to. I’m going to refine it until Hemme weeps with its beauty. You’ll see.”

He turned, still talking, and Fela took his arm and guided him gently toward their building, and I watched them go—two figures growing smaller in the lamplight, their shadows stretching long and thin across the cobblestones, their laughter floating back to us like music played at a distance.

They turned a corner. The laughter faded. The night was quiet.

“He’s going to be all right,” Wil said, beside me. “Sim. He’s stronger than he looks.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because sometimes you look at him the way you look at things you’re afraid of losing. Like you’re already mourning something that hasn’t happened yet.”

I didn’t answer. Because Wil was right, and I didn’t know how to explain the ache in my chest—the one that had nothing to do with Denna or the Chandrian or the Doors of Stone, and everything to do with the simple, terrible knowledge that good things end. That the people you love are mortal. That every evening like tonight is a loan from a future that charges interest.

“He’s going to be fine,” Wil repeated. More firmly this time. As if saying it with enough conviction could make it true.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course he is.”

We parted at the corner of Mains—Wil heading toward his room, me heading toward mine. The night was cold now, properly cold, and I pulled my cloak tighter and walked quickly, my boots loud on the empty path.

In my room, I hung my lute on its hook and sat on the edge of my bed and thought about Simmon.

About his laugh. About his warmth. About the way he loved Fela—openly, honestly, without reservation or defense. About the elm tree metaphor, which was brilliant and dangerous and perfectly, characteristically Sim.

About his voice, saying: Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen is if nothing ever changed.

I thought about all of this, and I pressed it into my memory the way you press a flower between the pages of a book—carefully, gently, with the understanding that the act of preservation is also an acknowledgment that the thing you’re preserving is already passing away.

The candle on my desk burned low. The night settled deeper. And somewhere, in a dormitory on the south side of campus, Sim was probably still talking—about elm trees and moonlight and the terrible, wonderful fragility of happiness.

I hoped he was.

I hoped he would never stop.

I am telling you this, Chronicler, because you need to understand what was at stake. Not the grand stakes—the Chandrian, the Doors, the fate of the world. Those are easy to understand. Those are the stakes that stories are built around.

I’m talking about the other stakes. The quiet ones. The ones that don’t make it into legends.

A man’s laugh. A woman’s hand brushing hair from a forehead. The particular warmth of a corner table at a tavern on a cold night, among people who know you and love you and haven’t yet learned to be afraid.

Those are the things I was trying to save.

Those are the things I failed to save.

And that, more than anything else in this long and terrible story, is the thing I need you to understand.