Chapter 22: Moonlit Conversations

FOUR DAYS PASSED before I saw her again.

I want to say I spent them well. That I threw myself into productive work, that I studied and trained and advanced my understanding of the great mysteries that were closing in around me like the walls of an old story. But the truth is less flattering. The truth is that I spent four days doing what any man does after a fight with the person who matters most to him: I festered.

I avoided the Eolian. I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing her song there, couldn’t stand the idea of sitting in a crowd while the Yllish knots in her music rewrote the inside of their skulls. Instead I buried myself in the Archives, pulling every reference I could find on Yllish story-knots, filling page after page with translations that blurred together by the third sleepless night. I ate when Wil put food in front of me. I slept in fragments, waking to the memory of her voice saying things I couldn’t answer.

On the fourth night, I climbed to the rooftop of the Taps---the old alehouse three streets from the Eolian, the one with the slate roof that sloped gently enough to sit on without constantly worrying about sliding to your death. I went up through a third-story window that had been broken since my first term, following a route so familiar I could have done it blind. My private door to the sky.

The night was clear, the air carrying the dry spice of autumn and the distant sweetness of apples rotting in the orchard behind the Aturan church. Below me, Imre lay spread like a jeweler’s cloth, lamplights winking in windows, the dark ribbon of the river catching starlight. The moon hung three-quarters full above the eastern hills, close enough to seem personal, far enough to remind you how small you were.

I heard her before I saw her. The scrape of boot leather on slate, the whispered curse of someone negotiating a slope they hadn’t climbed in months. Then the sound of breathing---quick, slightly winded, close enough that I could feel the warmth of it against my neck.

I went rigid. Part of me wanted to speak. Part of me wanted to climb down the other side of the roof and disappear.

“You’re up here,” Denna said. Not a greeting. A confirmation.

“You came looking,” I said, without turning around.

“I came to say something.” She settled onto the slate beside me, leaving a careful distance between us. Not close enough to touch. “I’ve been thinking.”

We sat without speaking, but it was not the silence we used to share. This was a different animal---watchful, uncertain, the silence of two people testing whether the ground between them would still hold weight. I could feel her choosing her words the way a surgeon chooses instruments, and I was doing the same.

The sharpness I’d been carrying for days---the anger, the fear, the grinding certainty that I was right and she was wrong---had gone brittle. Not gone. But worn thin by sleepless nights and the slow, corrosive work of missing someone you’re furious with. Some of the edges had crumbled away, and what remained was less a blade than a bruise.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked.

“Where else would you be?” She drew her knees up, wrapped her arms around them. In the moonlight, her hair was dark as deep water, and the braids---the Yllish knots I’d been studying with such obsessive attention---were barely visible. Just shadows in shadows. “You always come here when you’re thinking too hard.”

“I always come here when I want to stop thinking.”

“Same thing, for you.” She glanced at me. In the pale light, her eyes were enormous, the dark centers swallowing everything. “You think by trying not to think. Most people are the other way around.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

More silence. A dog barked somewhere in the lower city. The wind shifted, carrying the smell of the river---wet stone, green things growing, the faint metallic tang of water that had traveled a long way.

“I heard Alleg play your song tonight,” I said.

Denna went very still. Not the stillness of surprise---the stillness of someone bracing for impact.

“And?” Her voice was careful.

“And it was the most extraordinary piece of music I’ve ever heard.” I paused. “And the most frightening.”

She let out a breath. Not quite a sigh. Something closer to the sound a bowstring makes when the arrow has already been released.

“You felt it,” she said. Not a question.

“I felt it.”

“Most people don’t. Most people just feel---moved. They think it’s ordinary emotional response to beautiful music.” She looked down at her hands. “You’re probably the only person in the Four Corners who would listen to that song and feel afraid.”

“Because I’m the only person who knows what Yllish knots can do?”

“Because you’re the only person who knows and cares.” She turned to face me, and her expression was raw in a way I’d never seen. Not vulnerable---Denna was never vulnerable. But honest. Stripped of the usual masks and deflections and elegant misdirections that she wore the way other women wore jewelry. “Kvothe, I need you to understand something. The song---I didn’t write it to deceive people.”

“What did you write it to do?”

“Protect them.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

“You don’t believe me,” she said.

“I believe you believe it.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No. It’s not.” I looked at the moon. “Denna, the song changes how people think. Not with argument or evidence, but with magic. It reaches into their minds and rewrites what they know about the Chandrian. Whatever your intention---”

“My intention is to keep people from getting killed.” Her voice rose, then she caught herself, glanced down at the dark streets below. When she spoke again, it was barely above a whisper. “Do you know what happens when people tell stories about the Chandrian, Kvothe? The real stories, the true ones? Do you know what actually happens?”

“They come,” I said. “They find you and they kill you.”

“Yes.” She held my eyes. “They come. Every time. Without exception. Every person who passes on the true stories, who keeps the old knowledge alive, who says their names with understanding---they die. Their families die. Everyone who heard them dies.”

“I know. I’ve seen it.”

“Then you know why the song matters.” She leaned closer. “If people believe the Chandrian are tragic heroes instead of monsters, they stop telling the dangerous stories. They stop saying the names with fear and intention. The old knowledge fades, and people stop dying for it.”

“Or the old knowledge fades, and people stop being prepared for what’s coming.”

“What’s coming?”

It was my turn to go still. Because the truth was, I didn’t know. Not really. I had fragments and suspicions and the terrible, gnawing certainty that something vast was moving in the darkness, and that the Chandrian were part of it. But I couldn’t articulate the shape of it any more than you can describe the animal that makes a sound in the night.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I know the truth matters. Even when it’s dangerous.”

Denna laughed. It was a small, broken sound, like a glass dropped on stone. “The truth. You always come back to that. As if truth is a simple thing. As if there’s one truth and everything else is lies.”

“Isn’t there?”

“No.” She said it with such certainty that it silenced me. “There are a thousand truths about the Chandrian, Kvothe. Yours is one. Mine is another. Skarpi’s is another still. The old man in the tavern who tells his grandchildren to fear the dark---that’s a truth too. None of them are complete. None of them are wrong.”

“Some of them are more wrong than others.”

“And some of them keep people alive.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she understood that the song wasn’t protection---it was a weapon being wielded by someone who wanted the world to forget. That Cinder was using her compassion and her genuinely good intentions to serve an agenda she couldn’t see.

But I’d tried that. In the garden behind the Grey Man, the night of the fight, I’d said all of these things and more. I’d been passionate and articulate and absolutely right, and all it had accomplished was to drive her further away.

So instead, I did something I almost never do.

I listened.

“Tell me about the knots,” I said quietly. “Not what they do. How they work.”

Denna blinked. Of all the things I might have said, this clearly wasn’t what she’d expected.

“Why?”

“Because I want to understand. Not the magic---you. I want to understand how you think about this. How you see it.”

She studied me for a long time. The moon had moved while we talked, sliding westward, and the shadows on the rooftop had shifted. Her face was half in silver light, half in darkness, and the effect was like looking at two different women---one who trusted me and one who didn’t.

“It’s like naming,” she said finally.

My heart kicked.

“What do you mean?”

“The knots. They’re like naming, but…” She paused, reaching for words. “Naming is about understanding what something is. Its essential nature. Its deep truth. Right?”

“That’s close enough.”

“The knots are about understanding what something means. Not its nature---its story. The narrative it carries. The way it connects to other things.” She picked at the slate beneath us, pulling loose a thin flake of stone. “When I tie a knot, I’m not trying to know the thing I’m writing about. I’m trying to know how it relates to the person who’ll read it. I’m writing a bridge between the story and the listener.”

“A bridge that carries compulsion.”

“A bridge that carries meaning.” Her jaw tightened. “You make it sound sinister. But every story carries compulsion, Kvothe. Every song, every tale, every history lesson. When your father sang about Oren Velciter, he was compelling his audience to feel sympathy for a murderer. When Skarpi told you about Lanre in Tarbean, he was compelling you to see the Chandrian as villains. That’s what stories do.”

“Stories give people a choice. Your knots don’t.”

“Don’t they?” She tilted her head. “What choice did you have when you first heard Skarpi’s story? You were twelve years old, starving, desperate, your parents murdered by the people he was describing. Were you in any position to evaluate his account critically? To weigh his evidence? To consider alternative interpretations?”

I said nothing.

“You believed him because you needed to believe him. Because his story gave you a villain, and having a villain gave your suffering a shape. That’s not rational choice, Kvothe. That’s emotional compulsion. The knots just… make the process more efficient.”

“More efficient and more dangerous.”

“Everything powerful is dangerous.” She flicked the stone flake into the darkness. I heard it tick against a lower roof and then nothing. “Tell me about naming. Explain how it works.”

The request caught me off guard. In all our conversations---and we had talked about everything, Denna and I, from the price of bread to the nature of the divine---she had never asked me to explain naming. She’d asked about sympathy, about artificing, about the Arcanum’s various disciplines. But naming was different. Naming was the thing I held closest, the art that felt most essentially mine, and some instinct had always kept me from sharing it with her.

Now, sitting on a rooftop in the moonlight with the taste of our fight still bitter on my tongue, the instinct felt less like wisdom and more like cowardice.

“Naming,” I began, and immediately felt the inadequacy of words. It was like trying to describe color to someone who’d always seen in black and white. Not because Denna lacked the capacity to understand---she had more natural talent than half the students at the University---but because naming lived in a place that language couldn’t reach.

“Naming is about listening,” I said. “Deep listening. Not with your ears---with everything. Your skin, your bones, the part of you that knows things before your mind does.”

“The sleeping mind,” Denna said.

I stared at her.

“That’s what they call it, isn’t it? I’ve read about it. The part of the mind that processes without consciousness. The part that dreams.”

“Where did you read about that?”

“I read a great many things, Kvothe. You’d be surprised.” The ghost of a smile. “Go on.”

I collected myself. “The sleeping mind is part of it. When you name something, you’re not… commanding it. Not exactly. You’re recognizing it. Acknowledging its deepest nature. And when you do that---when you truly see a thing for what it is---it responds. Not because you’ve forced it. Because you’ve understood it.”

“Like knowing someone’s name.”

“Yes.” The word came out rougher than I intended. “Like that.”

“Not their given name. Their real name. The name that holds everything they are.”

“Yes.”

She looked at me, and something passed between us---something that had no name, that existed only in the space between two people who know each other too well and not well enough. A recognition. An almost.

“Knowing someone’s name,” I said slowly, “is like knowing every secret they’ve ever kept. Every lie they’ve told, every truth they’ve hidden, every moment of weakness and strength and everything in between. It’s like seeing them without any of the masks we all wear. Without defenses. Without pretense. Just---”

“Just them.”

“Just them.”

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.

“That sounds terrifying,” Denna whispered.

“It is.”

“And beautiful.”

“That too.”

She was very close now. I could smell her---not perfume, Denna never wore perfume, but the smell of her skin, warm and clean with a hint of the road, of old leather, of something sweet and unnameable that I’d been carrying in my memory for years.

“Could you name me?” she asked.

The question hit me like a physical blow. My breath stopped. My hands, which had been resting on my knees, curled into fists.

“I don’t know your name,” I said.

“I know. That’s not what I asked.” Her eyes were steady. “Could you? If you tried? If you listened the way you just described---with everything, with your sleeping mind---could you find my name?”

I thought about it. Really thought, in the way naming requires---not with logic or analysis, but with that deeper sense. I looked at Denna in the moonlight and tried to see past the surface, past the beauty and the wit and the maddening evasions, into whatever lay beneath.

I let my sleeping mind rise. Let my waking mind fall quiet, the way Elodin had taught me.

For a moment—just a heartbeat—I felt something. A whisper. Not a full name, but a fragment, like hearing a word carried on the wind from very far away. It sounded like… Ludis. Or something close to that. The shape of it felt right, felt her, but incomplete. Like holding a single piece of a broken mirror.

I reached for more, tried to hear the rest—

The bone ring on my finger flared warm. A warning.

And Denna gasped, her hand flying to her chest. Her eyes went wide.

“Stop,” she whispered. “Whatever you’re doing, stop.”

I pulled back immediately, my sleeping mind retreating. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“The binding.” Her voice was tight. “It felt you. Felt you reaching.” She was breathing hard. “Don’t do that again. Please.”

What I found there was vast and hurt and fierce in a way that I recognized because I was all of those things too.

But it wasn’t a name. It was too much for a name. Too many contradictions, too many edges, too many doors opening onto rooms I’d never explored. Denna was---

Denna was like the wind.

Not in the trite sense---not restless, not changeable, not free. In the deeper sense. The wind has a name, but it’s a name that changes with every breath. It’s different when it whispers through leaves and when it howls down from mountains. It’s different over the sea and over the desert and in the narrow spaces between buildings. The wind’s name is a living thing, endlessly shifting, and to truly know it you’d have to know every version of it simultaneously.

That was Denna. Every version of her, all at once. The woman who laughed easily but never let anyone close. The singer whose voice could break you and the fighter whose eyes said she’d break you first if you gave her cause.

“I don’t think I could,” I admitted. “I don’t think anyone could. You have too many names.”

She made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

“It wasn’t meant to be nice. It was meant to be true.”

“With you, those are usually the same thing.” She reached over and took my hand. Her fingers were cold from the night air, and I could feel the calluses on her fingertips---from the lute, from the writing, from whatever else she did in the hours when no one was watching. “Kvothe.”

“Yes?”

“Tell me about the moon.”

The moon.

It hung above us, serene and indifferent, pouring its borrowed light over the rooftops of Imre like a blessing or a warning. Three-quarters full, which meant---if the old stories were right---that three-quarters of its name was in the mortal world, and one-quarter was behind the doors of the Fae.

“You know the story of Jax,” I said.

“The boy who stole the moon. Everyone knows it.”

“Not everyone knows what it means.” I settled back against the slope of the roof, Denna’s hand still in mine. Her pulse beat against my fingers, steady and warm. “Jax wasn’t just a boy in a story. He was a Shaper---one of the old ones, from before the Creation War. And what he did to the moon wasn’t theft. It was something more like… kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping the moon.”

“Kidnapping part of her name. He folded it into a box---a box he’d built specifically to hold names. And when part of her name was locked away, part of her was locked away too. She was split. Half in the mortal world, half in the Fae. Never fully present in either.”

Denna was quiet for a moment. “That’s why the moon has phases.”

“According to the story, yes. When more of her name is on this side of the doors, the moon is full. When more is on the other side, it’s new. She moves between the worlds, forever seeking the part of herself that was stolen.”

“Seeking and never finding.”

“Never finding.” I looked at the moon, and felt something stir in my chest---not magic, not naming, but the simpler alchemy of metaphor. “She’s caught between two worlds, always pulled in both directions, never quite whole in either.”

The silence that followed was heavy with meaning. I could feel Denna thinking, turning the story over in her mind the way she turned notes over in her fingers---examining it from every angle, hearing harmonics I couldn’t.

“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said finally. “Not because she was stolen. Because she was divided. Because she can never just---be. In one place. Whole.”

“I know.”

“You know it as a story. I know it as a life.” She pulled her hand from mine, and the loss of contact was like a door closing. “Do you ever feel like that? Like parts of you are in different places, and no matter where you are, you’re missing something?”

“Every day.”

“Which parts are you missing right now?”

I thought about the question. Really thought, the way she deserved.

“The part that could tell you what I’m feeling,” I said. “The part that knows how to be honest without being clever. The part that could just---” I gestured vaguely. “Sit here with you without needing to solve anything.”

“You are sitting here with me.”

“My body is. The rest of me is trying to figure out how to save you from your patron, counter your song, protect the truth about the Chandrian, and keep the University from expelling me. All at the same time.”

She laughed. A real laugh this time, warm and startled and genuine, and the sound of it broke something open in me that I’d been holding tightly closed.

“That’s your problem, Kvothe. You’re always trying to do everything at once. The music and the magic and the saving and the knowing. You can’t just be somewhere. You’re always trying to be everywhere.”

“And your problem is that you won’t let anyone help you.”

“And your problem is that you think everything is a problem.”

“And your problem---”

“And yours---”

We were both laughing now, which was absurd, which was impossible, which was exactly the kind of thing that happened with Denna. One moment you were arguing about the fate of the world and the next you were breathless with laughter on a rooftop, and you could never quite explain how you got from one to the other.

The laughter faded. The moon had moved further west, and the shadows had grown longer, and somewhere below us a night bird was singing a melody so simple and perfect that it made my chest ache.

“I’m afraid,” Denna said.

The words were so quiet I might have imagined them. But I didn’t imagine the way her body tensed beside me, or the slight tremor in her breathing, or the way her hand found mine again and held it with a grip that was almost painful.

“Of what?” I asked, though I knew the answer. I knew a dozen answers, and all of them were true.

“Of what’s coming. Of what the song is for. Of the person I’m becoming.” She paused. “Of losing this.”

“This?”

“This. You. The fact that there’s one person in the world I can sit next to in silence and feel like I’m not alone.” Her voice cracked, and she mended it with the practiced skill of someone who has had a lot of practice mending. “I know it can’t last. Everything I touch---”

“Don’t.”

“Everything I touch turns to ash, Kvothe. Every good thing. Every person who gets close. There’s something about me that---”

“I said don’t.” I turned to her, and in the moonlight her face was the most beautiful and the most heartbreaking thing I had ever seen. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to write the ending before we’ve finished the story.”

“I know the ending. I’ve always known it.”

“You know an ending. But stories have more than one.”

“Not mine.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to take her face in my hands and tell her she was wrong, that the future was unwritten, that we had choices and those choices mattered. I wanted to say all the brave, hopeful, heroic things that heroes say in stories.

But I looked at her eyes, and I saw something there that I recognized. Not despair. Something past despair. The quiet certainty of a person who has looked at their life from a great height and seen its shape clearly, and knows that the shape is a tragedy.

I’d seen that look before. In my own reflection, in the dark months in Tarbean. In the eyes of people who have run out of stories to tell themselves about how things will get better.

So instead of arguing, I did the only thing I could do.

I sat beside her. I held her hand. I breathed when she breathed. And I let the silence between us say the things that neither of us had the courage to put into words.

I love you.

I’m sorry.

I don’t know how to save you.

Please let me try.

The moon drifted west and the night bird fell silent. The two of us sat on a rooftop in Imre and held on to each other, and it was not enough, and it was everything, and both of those things were true at the same time.

Dawn found us there.

Not sleeping---neither of us had slept. But we’d gone quiet, and the quiet had deepened into something that felt almost like peace. The sky in the east was turning the color of old iron, and the first birds were beginning their morning arguments, and the smell of bread was rising from the bakery on Selmon Street.

“I should go,” Denna said.

“I know.”

“My patron will be wondering---”

“I know.”

She stood, brushing slate dust from her clothes. In the grey pre-dawn light, she looked older. Not aged---experienced. Weathered. Like a book that’s been read so many times the pages are soft.

“Kvothe.”

“Yes?”

“The thing about names. About knowing someone’s name being like knowing all their secrets.” She paused at the edge of the roof, one hand on the chimney. “If you ever did learn my name---my true name---would you still…”

She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Yes,” I said. “Whatever the question is. Yes.”

She smiled. Not the sharp, knowing smile she wore like armor. A real smile, small and fragile and so achingly hopeful that I had to look away from it or my heart would have cracked straight through.

“You’re a fool, Kvothe,” she said softly.

“I know.”

“A beautiful, impossible fool.”

Then she was gone, down the slope of the roof and through the window, leaving behind the ghost of her warmth on the slate beside me and a silence that was not empty but full---full of everything we’d almost said and almost been brave enough to mean.

I sat on the rooftop and watched the sunrise, and thought about moons and names and the spaces between the people we are and the people we wish we were.

The city woke around me. And somewhere below, Denna was walking away, carrying secrets I couldn’t touch and a name I would spend the rest of my life trying to learn.

I never did learn it.

But Tehlu help me, I never stopped listening.