Chapter 19: Interlude — The Door That Stayed Closed

ONCE AGAIN the fire had burned low.

No one had tended it for the last hour. The fire in the Waystone Inn’s hearth had burned steadily all morning, fed by Bast’s absent hand whenever the flames dimmed. But now the logs had fallen in on themselves into a bed of dull orange coals, and Bast had not moved to add more. He sat on his stool near the bar, perfectly still, watching the innkeeper with a steadiness that was not quite human.

Kote stood behind the bar, looking at something a long way off. He had not spoken for several minutes. The quiet hung between the three of them, Kote and Bast and Chronicler, heavy and expectant, like the pause after a lute string is tuned too tight and before it goes.

The room itself had drawn in around them. Rain ran steadily down the windowpanes, and the morning outside had gone as dark as if evening had come early, so that Bast had lit the candles on the mantel for Chronicler to write by. The shadows in the corners were deeper than they should have been at this hour. The candles guttered, though the air was still. Chronicler had the distinct impression that the walls had moved closer since Kote began his story that morning, though he knew, rationally, professionally, that walls did not move.

“Reshi?” Bast’s voice was soft and careful. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” The words came automatically, empty of meaning. “I just need… a moment.”

Bast’s nostrils flared. The air had gone cold and tasted faintly of stone, like the air in a cave that has been sealed for centuries.

Chronicler set down his pen. His right hand was cramped nearly to uselessness, the fingers still curled in a claw around a pen that was no longer there. He worked them open slowly, wincing at the hot ache in the tendons.

He could have gone on writing, cramp or no cramp. He stopped because there was something in the innkeeper’s stillness a man did not talk through.

“I have questions,” Chronicler said, his voice careful but firm. “Things that don’t add up.”

Kote’s eyes focused, the distant look fading slightly. “Of course you do.”

“Yllish knots that control behavior. A patron who turns out to be a Chandrian. A woman being ‘written’ like a song.” Chronicler spread his hands, then regretted it as his right hand cramped again. He tucked it gingerly into his lap. “These are extraordinary claims. You understand why I might have doubts?”

“You write down stories about magic for a living.”

“I’ve written down stories people believe are true. That’s different from them being true.” Chronicler held Kote’s gaze. “How do I know this isn’t just… grief? A man who lost someone he loved, constructing an elaborate mythology to explain why he couldn’t save her?”

No one spoke. Bast shifted on his stool and the wood groaned under him, a noise that had no business coming out of furniture.

“You don’t,” Kote said finally. “You may not, when I’m done.” He paused. “Ask your questions. I’d rather have an honest skeptic than a credulous fool.”

Chronicler nodded slowly, rolling his pen between his aching fingers. Before he went on he made a small hooked mark in the margin, quickly and neatly, beside the last line he had written. It was the mark he had used for years against claims that rested on one witness, and he kept his wrist over it as he made it, as if Kote might read upside down. He glanced down at his notes, flipped back several pages, found the passage he wanted.

“You knew,” he said, returning to the narrative thread. “By this point in the story, you knew what was happening to her.”

“I knew enough.” Kote’s voice was flat. “She was being written. I was all but sure by then that the hand behind it was Cinder’s, the same Cinder who had burned my family down to the wagon-boards. And I knew the song was going to do something terrible.”

“But you didn’t stop it.”

“I couldn’t stop it.” For the first time in hours, emotion flickered across Kote’s face. “I knew enough to be afraid. Couldn’t stop any of it.”

Chronicler leaned forward.

“What would wisdom have looked like?”

“Walking away.” He said it quietly, without any particular feeling. “But I was seventeen. I was in love. I was sure I could fix it.”

“Pride,” Bast said. There was something strained in his voice, as if he were pushing the word past something thick in his throat. He was watching the corners of the room, all four of them at once.

“Pride.” Kote nodded. He picked up his cloth, began wiping the bar. “Same thing every time. Challenge Ambrose. Chase Elodin’s lessons. Talk to the Cthaeh.” The cloth moved in slow circles. “It never stays shut.”

“What doesn’t?” Chronicler asked.

Kote didn’t answer, only went on wiping slowly at a place on the bar that was already clean.

Chronicler waited patiently, and used the pause to dip his pen and check his ink. The bottle was more than half empty.

“There was a moment,” Kote said finally. “In the garden, after she ran. I could have done something different.”

“What?”

“Followed her, and not to save her. To listen.” His hands stilled on the bar. “She was trying to tell me something. Even through the bindings. And I was already walking the other way.”

“She asked you to stay away,” Chronicler said.

“She did.” Kote turned the cloth slowly over in his hands. “I’ve never settled whether listening to her meant following her or doing as she asked.”

“What was she trying to tell you?”

Kote was quiet a long while, his fingers pressed against the bar.

“That I didn’t know which side I was on.” He set down the cloth carefully and said nothing more.

The candle on the mantel went out, though no draught had touched it.

Bast stood up abruptly, his stool scraping back across the floorboards.

He walked to the window, moving with a quickness Chronicler found unsettling. His bare feet made no sound on the floorboards. At the window, he pressed his palms flat against the glass and stared out at the rain. His breath fogged the pane, and for just a moment Chronicler thought he saw shapes in it, lines and curves that looked like writing in no language he had ever set eyes on.

“You’re wrong,” Bast said. His shoulders were taut beneath his shirt, and when he spoke there was something behind his voice that belonged in forests, not in inns.

“Am I?”

“You didn’t cause what happened. Cinder caused it. The Cthaeh caused it. The people who’d been moving pieces in the dark for centuries, they caused it.” Bast turned back from the window.

“You were a boy, Reshi. Caught up in something so much bigger than you could understand.”

“Knowing that doesn’t help.”

“Maybe not.” Bast crossed the room quickly and stopped on the other side of the bar. “You’re telling this story like it’s a confession. But you’re not the villain. You’re the person who tried to do the right thing and got it wrong.”

“Does it matter? Right intention and wrong result, and the result is what people remember.”

“It matters to me.” Bast’s voice cracked. He reached across the bar, gripped Kote’s arm. “Reshi, please. Stop punishing yourself for being human.”

Kote looked down quietly at Bast’s hand on his arm.

Under Bast’s grip, Chronicler noticed, the skin of Kote’s right forearm was crossed and recrossed with old scars, most of them pale and thin as cracks in winter ice.

“I’m not punishing myself.” His voice was quiet. “I’m telling you what happened. Cinder held the pen, Bast, I’ll grant you that. But there were choices in it that were mine, and I’ll name each one when I come to it, and you can weigh them then.”

“Then tell the rest of it.” Bast’s hand closed harder on his arm. “Tell us what happened next. Tell us how you tried to save her. Tell us how you failed, and why, and what it cost you.” His voice dropped. “And then tell us how you’re going to fix it.”

“I don’t know that I can.”

“Then figure it out.” Bast released his arm, stepped back. His eyes were bright and wet. “That’s what you do, Reshi. You figure things out. You find solutions that nobody else can see. You’re not done yet, not while you’re still telling the story.”

The fire shifted in the hearth, a log collapsing inward, sending up a brief shower of sparks. The room brightened for an instant, and in that instant Chronicler saw something he hadn’t noticed before. On the wall behind the bar, beneath the mounting board where the grey sword hung with the word FOLLY carved under it, there was a mark. It was no stain, and no trick of the shadows, but a mark, dark and deliberately made, shaped like something he very nearly recognized. It was gone when the sparks faded, but it stayed behind his eyes.

He opened his mouth to ask about it, and closed it again. Some questions, he was learning, were better saved for later.

“He’s right,” Chronicler said instead. “About the story, at least. We’re not finished. And the ending isn’t written yet.”

He picked up his pen again, dipped it, held it ready above the page.

Kote looked between them, and picked up his cloth again. “The door I told you about, the one that stayed closed. I should have walked through it. I should have listened.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“The Maer sent a summons. There was a door in the Lackless estate. Bredon had games to play.” He shrugged, and it plainly cost him something. “I was too curious to refuse. I was always too curious to refuse. Every disaster I’ve ever walked into, I walked into because I had to know.”

His hands stilled.

Bast moved to the fire and added a fresh log. The flames caught slowly, reluctantly. The hearth had gone cold somewhere deeper down, and no amount of wood was going to mend it. But eventually the fire built, and the light pushed the shadows back to their proper places, and the room began to feel ordinary again.

Chronicler noticed that his breath no longer misted in the air. He hadn’t realized it had been doing so until it stopped.

“Severen, then,” Kote said, and there was some life in his eyes again.

He folded the cloth and laid it aside. He picked up the thread of his story.

The Waystone Inn creaked softly around them, easing itself as an old house eases itself when the wind changes.