Chapter 23: The Wilderness Beat

THERE ARE TIMES when the mind refuses to be still.

Not the productive restlessness of a scholar chasing an insight. This was the other kind---the grinding, circular churn of a mind that has taken in too much and processed too little. A mill wheel turning with no grain to grind, wearing itself smooth against its own momentum.

After Denna left, I climbed.

Not down---up. Away from the streets, away from the bridges, away from the University with its walls of stone and tradition and the weight of expectations I could feel pressing on me even from across the river. I climbed to the highest point I could find, which was the roof of Mains, four stories of ancient limestone topped by a sloping expanse of copper gone green with age.

I shouldn’t have been able to reach it. The architecture wasn’t designed for climbing, and the copper was slick with morning dew. But my body knew things my mind didn’t---the old Edema Ruh training from my years on the road, the balance and proprioception that had kept me alive on the streets of Tarbean. My hands found holds. My feet found purchase. I climbed without thinking, which was exactly the point.

The top of Mains was a different world. The wind was stronger here, steady and cold, smelling of distant rain and the deep green of the Eld. Below me, the University spread in its familiar pattern---the grey bulk of the Archives, the sprawl of the Artificery, the manicured grounds of the courtyard where students moved like ants on a sugar trail. Beyond that, the Stonebridge. Beyond that, Imre, still hazy with morning mist.

I sat on the copper roof and let the wind scour me.

The problem was this: I had too many threads and not enough pattern.

Denna’s song was spreading, carrying its beautiful poison into every tavern and every market square in the Four Corners. The Yllish knots woven into its structure were rewriting the collective understanding of the Chandrian, transforming monsters into martyrs with an efficiency that no argument or evidence could match.

Denna herself was bound to Cinder---Master Ash, the patron who controlled her through means I was only beginning to understand. The bindings on her were real, physical, encoded in the knots she wore in her hair and possibly in markings I hadn’t seen. She was a weapon being wielded by one of the Chandrian themselves, and she knew it. She knew and she couldn’t stop it, and she was trying to convince herself---and me---that the weapon was actually a shield.

The Chandrian were moving. After centuries of operating from the shadows, they were making plays that were almost visible. The song. The fire in the Archives. The crack in the Lackless door. Something was building toward a culmination that I could feel in my bones but couldn’t see clearly enough to prevent.

And I was sitting on a roof, staring at the horizon, utterly useless.

I thought about Ben. My first real teacher, the man who had opened the doors of my mind and taught me to see the world as a puzzle that could be solved. Ben had a saying for moments like this: When you can’t find the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.

What question should I be asking?

Not “How do I stop Denna’s song?” The song was already loose in the world, reproducing itself in the throats of every musician who heard it. You couldn’t stop a song any more than you could stop a rumor.

Not “How do I save Denna?” She didn’t want to be rescued. She’d made that painfully clear, and any attempt to free her from Cinder’s control would have to come through her, not around her.

The wrong questions. But if not those, then what?

I sat on the roof of Mains and watched the shadows shorten as the sun climbed, and I thought, and I could not find the right question.

The afternoon was dying when she found me.

I’d been on the roof for hours. My shirt was damp with sweat from the midday heat and then cold again from the afternoon wind, cycling through wet and dry until the fabric felt like a second skin. My lips were cracked from the dry air. I hadn’t eaten since the previous night, and my stomach had passed through hunger into a dull, indifferent emptiness that matched my mood.

She came from below---not climbing the walls as I had, but emerging from a small copper ventilation shaft that I would have sworn was too narrow for a human body. One moment the shaft was empty, and the next there was a pair of pale, thin arms, and then a shock of fine hair the color of cobwebs in moonlight, and then Auri was sitting beside me on the copper roof, her legs folded beneath her, her wide dark eyes blinking in the afternoon light.

“You’re sitting on a green thing,” she said.

“The roof, yes.”

“Green things should be in gardens. Not on top of buildings.” She considered this with the gravity of a philosopher wrestling with first principles. “Unless the building is a garden. Is this building a garden?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then you’re sitting on it wrong.” She leaned back on her hands and tilted her face to the sky, eyes closed. The sunlight turned her skin translucent, and I could see the fine tracery of veins at her temples, blue as ink, delicate as calligraphy. She smelled of soap and stone and something sweet---honey, perhaps, or the petals of flowers that grew in places sunlight didn’t reach.

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

“I heard you thinking.” She said this with absolute sincerity, as if the notion of hearing thoughts was as natural as hearing birdsong. “You think very loudly when you’re unhappy. It echoes in the pipes.”

“I didn’t know the pipes came up this far.”

“They go everywhere.” She opened one eye. “Everything is connected, if you go deep enough. That’s the secret. The underthing knows all the other things. It hears them breathing.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant this literally or figuratively. With Auri, the distinction was often irrelevant.

We sat together for a while. Auri pulled a small cloth bundle from somewhere in her ragged clothing and unwrapped it to reveal a wedge of white cheese, a handful of dried figs, and a piece of honeycomb still glistening with sweetness. She arranged these on the cloth with the precision of a court steward setting a formal table, then nudged the cloth toward me.

“You missed lunch,” she said. “And breakfast. And the meal between breakfast and lunch that doesn’t have a name but should.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Your body disagrees. I can hear it arguing with you.” She picked up a fig and held it out. “Bodies are usually right about these things. Minds are too busy being clever to notice when they’re starving.”

I took the fig. It was sweet and dense, and the taste of it broke something loose inside me---a recognition that I was, in fact, ravenously hungry, and had been ignoring it the way I ignored so many of my body’s signals. I ate the cheese and the figs and the honeycomb, and Auri watched me with the satisfied expression of someone who has solved an important problem.

“Better?” she asked.

“Better.” I wiped honey from my fingers. “Thank you, Auri.”

“You’re welcome. Though really the figs should thank you. They’ve been waiting very patiently to be eaten. Much more patiently than figs usually are.” She picked up a stray crumb and examined it with scholarly interest. “You’ve been sitting up here all day, looking at things from the outside.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re on top of the building. Looking out. Looking down. Trying to see everything at once.” She gestured at the panorama below us---the University, Imre, the river, the distant smudge of the Eld on the horizon. “But you can’t see everything from here. You can only see surfaces. The shapes of roofs. The colors of walls. You can’t see what’s inside the buildings. You can’t see what’s underneath.”

“Sometimes a wide view is what you need.”

“Sometimes. But not today.” She turned those enormous eyes on me, and for a moment they were clear and sharp and frighteningly sane. “Today you need a deep view. You need to go down, not up.”

“Down where?”

“Down where the answers live.” She said this as if it were obvious. “Answers don’t live on rooftops, Kvothe. Rooftops are for questions. Answers live underground, in the dark, in the quiet places where things have time to grow.”

I thought about this. It sounded like Auri’s usual oblique wisdom---beautiful, evocative, and maddeningly impractical. But there was something in it that snagged at the edge of my understanding, like a thorn catching on a sleeve.

“You sound like my teacher,” I said. “Ben. He used to say that the best place to find a thing was in the last place you’d look.”

“That’s silly. Of course it’s the last place. You stop looking once you’ve found it.” She wrinkled her nose. “But he’s right about the rest. The things you’re looking for are in the places you’ve already been. You just didn’t recognize them because you were looking for something else.”

“How do you know what I’m looking for?”

“I don’t. But I know what you’re not finding, and that’s the same thing, if you hold it up to the light the right way.” She reached into her pocket---Auri’s pockets were a marvel, containing objects that seemed to shift and change depending on the day---and pulled out a small, smooth stone. She held it up, and it caught the afternoon sun, casting a tiny rainbow across the copper. “See? Light goes in as one thing and comes out as another. The stone doesn’t change. The light does.”

I stared at the rainbow. For just a moment, I felt something stir in the deep part of my mind---the sleeping mind, the part that named. It was like hearing a familiar melody played in a key you’ve never heard before. The same and not the same. Recognition without understanding.

Then the cloud shifted, the sun dimmed, and the rainbow vanished.

“Auri,” I said carefully, “what do you think I should do?”

She tilted her head. “About which thing?”

“About all of it. The song. The doors. The people I’m trying to protect.”

“You can’t protect people from stories,” she said, with the flat certainty of someone stating a mathematical fact. “Stories are bigger than people. They go on after people end. Trying to protect someone from a story is like trying to protect them from the weather.”

“Then what can I do?”

“You can tell a better story.”

“I tried. It didn’t work.”

“Then your story wasn’t better. It was just different.” She picked at the copper beneath us, peeling up a thin curl of green patina. “A better story isn’t louder or cleverer or more magical. A better story is more true. And not your kind of true---not facts and evidence and proof. The deep kind of true. The kind that makes your bones ache.”

“I don’t know how to find that kind of truth.”

“Stop looking for it.”

The words landed like a stone in still water. I felt them ripple outward through my mind, displacing thoughts, rearranging assumptions.

“What?”

“Stop looking.” She set the curl of patina down carefully, positioning it just so on the copper surface. “You keep looking for doors to open. But some doors only close.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. You just don’t like the shape of it.” She looked at me with those impossible eyes, and her voice was gentle in a way that cut deeper than sharpness. “Kvothe. You’re so busy trying to find things---answers, enemies, names. You look and look, and every time you find something, you need to find more. It never ends, because looking is what you are.”

“What’s wrong with looking?”

“Nothing, if you know when to stop. But you don’t. You never do.” She stood, brushing copper dust from her dress. “The things you need most are already here. You found them years ago. You’ve just been looking so hard for new things that you’ve forgotten the old ones.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant. What old things? What had I found and forgotten? But she was already moving toward the ventilation shaft, her bare feet silent on the copper, her movements so fluid she seemed to flow rather than walk.

“Auri.”

She paused at the shaft’s opening, one foot already inside.

“What are the old things? The ones I’ve forgotten?”

She smiled. It was the kind of smile that contains an entire conversation---question and answer, hope and sorrow, hello and goodbye all compressed into the curve of a mouth.

“Your music, Kvothe. Your friends. The feeling of being somewhere without needing to be somewhere else.” She dropped lightly into the shaft. “The name of the wind.”

And she was gone, swallowed by the building’s depths as completely as if she’d never been there at all.

I stayed on the roof.

The sun was low now, stretching the shadows of buildings across the courtyard like reaching hands. The light had turned amber, and the copper beneath me was warm, and somewhere a bell was ringing the hour in a tone that resonated in my sternum.

Auri’s words should have given me pause. They did give me pause, in the way that a horse pauses before a jump---a momentary gathering, a brief reconsideration, and then the leap.

But I leapt the wrong way.

Stop looking. I turned the phrase over in my mind, examined it, admired its elegance. And then, with the relentless, self-defeating logic that has been both my greatest gift and my deepest flaw, I set it aside.

Because how could I stop looking? How could I sit still while Denna’s song rewrote the world? While Cinder used the woman I loved as a tool to prepare something terrible? While the Chandrian’s plans, whatever they were, moved toward fruition in the shadows?

I was Kvothe. I was the one who found answers, who opened doors, who pressed forward into the unknown with the unshakeable conviction that if I just knew enough, I could fix everything.

Auri had said to stop looking for doors. But doors were what I was for. Every turning point in my life had been a door---the Archives, the wind, the four-plate door, the Fae. I was a person who opened doors. It was the fundamental action of my existence.

How could I stop?

The answer, of course, was that I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. The distinction between the two has always been unclear to me, and I suspect that’s the point.

I sat on the roof and made my decision.

For a moment---just a moment---I felt the other path. The one where I climbed down from the roof and went to find Simmon and Wilem. Where I sat in Anker’s and drank cheap ale and talked about nothing. Where I played my lute for the simple pleasure of playing, not to prove anything or save anything. Where I let the wind be the wind and the doors be whatever they wanted to be.

I felt it the way you feel the warmth of a fire from across a room. Close enough to recognize. Too far to touch.

Then the moment passed, and I was Kvothe again---the Kvothe who could not sit still, who could not let a door close without knowing what was behind it.

I would not stop. I would go deeper into the Archives. I would find the truth about the Chandrian that Denna’s song was trying to bury, and I would uncover the history of the Yllish knots and learn how to counter them.

I would find answers. I would open every door.

And if the doors were dangerous---if some of them led to places I shouldn’t go, truths I shouldn’t know, powers I shouldn’t wield---then I would be careful. I would be clever. I would be Kvothe.

It was the most natural decision in the world. The most obvious. The most completely, catastrophically wrong.

I can see it now, of course. From the distance of years and the weight of consequences, I can see the moment clearly for what it was.

Kvothe paused, and his hands went still on the bar. Chronicler’s pen hovered.

I can see the rooftop. The copper going green. The amber light. The place on the surface of my life where the road forked, and I chose the path that led me here, to this inn, this silence, this story.

Auri had given me the answer. Not in riddles, not in metaphor---in plain, simple words. Stop looking. Some doors only close. She’d been telling me that the answers I needed were already in my possession, had been for years. My music. My friends. The name of the wind. The ability to be present instead of demanding that the world become what I wanted.

If I’d listened---truly listened, with the sleeping mind, the way I listened when I named---I might have understood. I might have realized that the way to counter Denna’s song was not with a louder song but with a deeper silence. Not by opening doors, but by learning to let them close.

But I was twenty years old, brilliant and terrified and in love, and I had never in my life chosen stillness when action was available. My nature was to reach, to grasp, to pry open every closed thing I found.

So I stood up from the copper roof, brushed the green patina from my clothes, and climbed down from Mains in the golden light of evening. My mind was already racing ahead to the next step, the next door.

The descent was easier than the climb. It always is---gravity is generous in a way that ambition never manages. I dropped from handhold to handhold, my body moving with practiced efficiency, and by the time my boots hit the courtyard flagstones the last of the amber light was fading and the first lamps were being lit in the Artificery windows.

I went to the Archives. Not to the public reading rooms, where students bent over their texts in pools of sympathetic light, but to the deeper sections---the places where Lorren’s organizational system gave way to older arrangements, where books were shelved not by subject but by the date of their acquisition, some of them centuries old, their spines cracked, their pages whispering of things the University had forgotten it knew.

I was looking for information about Yllish sound-magic. About songs that carried compulsion. About the techniques that predated naming and sympathy, from the age when all magic was one magic and the division between shaping and knowing had not yet torn the world in two.

I found fragments. I always found fragments. The old knowledge had been so thoroughly destroyed that what remained was like trying to reconstruct a body from its shadow. But fragments were all I’d ever had, and I’d built a life on less.

I worked until the lamps burned low. Until the student on night duty tapped my shoulder and told me the Archives were closing. Until the words on the pages blurred and my mind, at last, went quiet.

But it was the wrong kind of quiet. The exhausted kind. The kind that comes from running until you can’t run anymore, not from finding a place worth standing still.

Behind me, somewhere above, the wind moved across an empty rooftop, carrying the ghost of Auri’s words away like dandelion seeds.

Some doors only close.

I didn’t listen.

I almost never do.