Chapter 24: Ben’s Letter

THE LETTER FOUND me the way all important things do: when I wasn’t looking for it.

It arrived on a Felling, tucked into a bundle of correspondence that the bursar’s office had been holding for me—some for weeks, apparently, though no one had thought to mention it. There were the usual things: a note from Count Threpe regarding a potential patron, two invoices from the Artificery supply house that I suspected were duplicates, and a thin envelope addressed in a hand I didn’t recognize.

Or rather, a hand I didn’t immediately recognize. There’s a difference.

The envelope was battered. Its edges were soft with handling, the paper gone translucent in places where rain or sweat had soaked through and dried. It had been folded and refolded, sealed with wax that had cracked and been resealed with a different wax, then sealed again. Someone had crossed out the address and written a new one beneath it. Then someone else had crossed out that address and written a third.

The final address read simply: Kvothe. The University. Wherever they’re keeping him these days.

That was when I recognized the handwriting. Not from the address—that had been written by three different hands. But from the single word scrawled in the corner of the envelope, so small you’d miss it unless you knew to look.

Chaen.

It was Tema. Old Tema, the kind they used in the church before Tehlu’s reforms simplified the liturgy. It meant “listen” or “pay attention” or, more precisely, “open your ears, because I’m only going to say this once.”

Ben had taught me that word when I was eleven years old.

I didn’t open it right away.

I sat on the edge of my bed at Anker’s and held the envelope and felt the weight of it—not the physical weight, which was almost nothing, but the other kind. The kind that settles into your chest and makes it hard to breathe.

It had been years. Years since I’d seen Ben’s face, heard his voice, watched his thick fingers sketch sigaldry designs in the dirt while explaining why the world worked the way it did. Years since the last night I’d spent with the troupe, falling asleep to the sound of my father’s lute and my mother’s quiet singing and the creak of wagon wheels on a dark road.

Ben had left before the Chandrian came. He’d settled down with a widow in a small town—Hallowfell, I remembered—and we’d said goodbye the way you do when you’re young: badly, with promises to write that neither of us believed we’d keep.

I hadn’t kept them. In fairness, I’d been rather busy surviving.

But Ben had apparently kept his.

I turned the envelope over in my hands, studying the layers of redirected addresses, and tried to reconstruct its journey. It had started in one place, been forwarded to another, then another. Months of traveling. The original postmark was smudged beyond reading, but the paper itself was old—the kind of heavy linen stock that Ben had always preferred, because he said cheap paper was an insult to the person reading it.

I broke the seal and unfolded the letter.

His handwriting hadn’t changed. That was the first thing I noticed, and it struck me harder than I expected. The letters were precise and slightly cramped, leaning rightward as though they were in a hurry to reach the end of each line. He’d always written like that—with the urgency of a man who had more to say than space to say it.

The letter read:

Kvothe,

I’m writing this without knowing if it will reach you, which means I’m either a fool or an optimist. Knowing myself, probably both. I’ve sent it by way of a tinker I trust (as much as one can trust a tinker, which is to say exactly as much as they want you to), who will pass it to a merchant in Tarbean, who will pass it to someone at the University, who will hopefully have the good sense to put it in your hands rather than use it for kindling.

If you’re reading this, some part of the world still works the way it should.

I’ve heard things about you. I want to be clear about that from the start, because I know how you think, and I know your first instinct will be to wonder how much I know and whether you need to manage what I believe. So let me save you the trouble: I’ve heard quite a lot. Some of it from reliable sources. Some of it from drunks in taverns. And some of it from the kind of whispered stories that travel through the corners of the world where people still pay attention to the old names.

They say there’s a red-haired arcanist at the University who asks too many questions about things that should stay buried. They say he fought a draccus on the road to Trebon. They say he killed a king, or will kill a king, or is the sort of person around whom kings tend to die—the stories vary depending on who’s had how much to drink. They say he’s been to the Fae and back. They say he spoke to the Cthaeh.

That last one is the one that worries me.

I stopped reading. Set the letter down on my knee. Picked it up again.

Kvothe, I need you to listen to me. Not the way you listened when you were a boy—half-attentive, already three steps ahead, convinced you’d figured out where I was going before I got there. You were usually right, which made it worse, because it taught you that listening was optional. It isn’t. Not now.

If the stories about the Cthaeh are true—and I pray to any god still paying attention that they aren’t—then you need to understand something that the old stories make very clear but which clever young men consistently fail to grasp: the Cthaeh doesn’t lie. It doesn’t need to. Lying is a crude instrument. The Cthaeh simply tells you true things, selected with malicious and absolute precision, designed to make you do exactly what it wants you to do. And the cruelest part is this: you will believe you are making your own choices. You will feel free. You will feel clever. You will feel like you’re three steps ahead.

Sound familiar?

The cleverest trap is the one you build for yourself. The Cthaeh doesn’t cage you. It gives you the tools and the motivation and the absolute certainty that you’re doing the right thing, and then it watches you build a cage so perfect you’ll never notice the bars.

I set the letter down again. My hands were not quite steady.

Ben had always had this gift—this maddening, invaluable ability to see me clearly. Not the version of myself I performed for the world, not the brilliant young arcanist or the brave adventurer or the tragic orphan. Just me. The boy who was too smart for his own good and too proud to admit when he was afraid.

I picked up the letter.

I don’t know what the Cthaeh told you. I don’t want to know. Knowing would only give me the same poisoned knowledge it gave you, and I’m old enough to recognize when ignorance is the wiser choice. But I know this: whatever it said, it said for a reason. And that reason was not to help you.

Whatever you’re doing about the Chandrian—and I know you’re doing something, because I know you, Kvothe, and you’ve been carrying that weight since you were twelve years old—please, for the love of everything I ever taught you, be careful.

I know what they did. I was there the morning after, in a way. I was the one who taught you what they were. I gave you the names and the stories and the knowledge, and I’ve spent years wondering if that was the kindest thing I ever did for you or the cruelest. Probably both. Things tend to be that way.

But seeking them—actively hunting them—is not the same as understanding them. A man who studies wolves is a scholar. A man who hunts wolves is a hunter. And a man who walks into the wolves’ den and tries to reason with them is a corpse who hasn’t realized it yet.

You’re brilliant, Kvothe. You might be the most brilliant person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a few. But brilliance without caution is just a faster way to reach the wrong conclusion. I’ve seen it before. Bright young men who think they can outrun the things chasing them. Who think knowing the name of a danger makes them safe from it.

It doesn’t. Names are power, yes. But power without wisdom is a fire in a library. It destroys the very thing it illuminates.

There was a break in the letter here—a gap where the ink changed color, as if Ben had stopped writing and come back to it later. Hours later, or perhaps days. The new ink was darker, the handwriting slightly less controlled.

I’ve been debating whether to tell you this next part. The wise thing would be to keep it to myself. But wisdom and I have always had a complicated relationship, and you deserve honesty even when it’s inconvenient.

I’ve moved. Not far—not yet—but away from where I was. The reasons are my own, but I’ll tell you this much: the world feels different lately. The roads feel different. There’s a tension in the air, the kind you feel before a storm, and I’ve learned to trust that feeling even when I can’t explain it. I’ve settled closer to the southern roads now, nearer to the kind of crossroads where news travels fast and old friends might reasonably be expected to pass through.

Make of that what you will.

I should tell you other things. I should tell you about my life—about the garden I’ve been keeping, about the new shelves I built for my books, about the neighbor’s goat that keeps eating my herbs and how I’ve been engaged in an increasingly sophisticated war of attrition with the animal that I am embarrassed to say I’m losing. These are the things normal people write in letters. But you and I have never been normal people, and I suspect you don’t need to hear about my goats.

What you need to hear—what I suspect no one is telling you—is this: you cannot do this alone.

I know you believe you can. I know you’ve built your life around the principle that needing people is a weakness, that relying on others is a vulnerability, that the safest pair of hands is your own. And I know where that belief came from. When everyone you love dies in a single night, the lesson seems obvious: don’t love anyone. Don’t need anyone. Keep your heart behind walls so thick that nothing can breach them.

But that lesson is wrong, Kvothe. It’s the most understandable mistake in the world, and it is still a mistake.

The people around you—your friends, your teachers, anyone foolish enough to care about you—they aren’t just scenery in your story. They aren’t supporting players in the epic of Kvothe. They are the only thing standing between you and the version of yourself that the Cthaeh wants you to become.

Trust someone. Please. Not because they’ve earned it. Not because you’ve calculated the odds and determined it’s safe. Trust someone because the alternative is becoming exactly the kind of person who ends up alone in a room, wondering where it all went wrong.

I’ve seen that room, Kvothe. I’ve seen what’s inside it. It’s nothing. Just silence and regret and the certain knowledge that you were the architect of your own ruin.

Don’t build that room.

The letter ended simply:

I remain, as ever, your teacher and your friend. If the roads bring you south, look for the old man losing a war to a goat. I’ll have a seat by the fire and a question about the Alar that I’ve been saving for years.

Be careful. Be brave. Be less stupid than your considerable intelligence sometimes makes you.

Ben

P.S. — I enclosed a pressing of lavender from the garden. If it survived the journey, put it somewhere you’ll smell it unexpectedly. Scent is the strongest anchor for memory, and I want you to remember that there was a time when someone taught you things simply because you were worth teaching. No conditions. No debts. Just the pure, unreasonable pleasure of watching a brilliant mind discover what it could do.

I looked in the envelope. There was something at the bottom—dry, papery, flat. I shook it out onto my palm. It was a pressed sprig of lavender, thin as parchment, its color faded to a pale ghost of purple.

I held it to my nose and breathed in.

The scent was barely there. A whisper. A suggestion. But it was enough.

I was eleven years old again, sitting on the back steps of Ben’s wagon, watching him demonstrate the principles of sympathy with two iron drabs and a length of string. The sun was warm on my face. My mother was singing somewhere behind us—not performing, just singing, the way she did when she thought no one was listening. My father was arguing with Trip about the best route to Hallowfell. And I was happy. Simply, completely, unremarkably happy—the way children are before they learn that happiness is something that can be taken away.

The memory lasted a handful of seconds. Then it faded, the way all true things do, leaving behind only the ache of its absence.

I should have written back.

I know that. I knew it then, sitting on my bed with the lavender in my palm and the letter spread across my knee. I should have taken pen and paper and written something—anything—even if it was only I’m alive, I’m careful, I haven’t forgotten.

But what would I have said?

Dear Ben, thank you for your letter. You’re right about everything. The Cthaeh spoke to me, and I’ve been carrying its words like splinters ever since—too deep to pull out, too sharp to ignore. I am doing exactly what you warned me against. I am building the trap and walking into it and telling myself I’m the one in control. I know this, and I’m doing it anyway, because the alternative is letting the Chandrian go unpunished, and I can’t do that. I can’t. Even if it destroys me. Even if it’s exactly what the Cthaeh wants.

Also, I haven’t trusted anyone the way you’re asking me to. Not fully. Not the way you mean. Because every time I get close to trusting someone, I remember the sound of my parents’ troupe dying, and my chest closes up like a fist, and I think: this is what happens when you let people in. They become something that can be taken from you.

Also, I think I’m in love with a woman who is being used by my enemies, and I can’t save her without destroying the one thing she values most—her freedom—and I can’t destroy her freedom without becoming exactly the kind of person she’s been running from her entire life.

Also, I miss you. I miss you in a way I don’t have words for, which is unusual, because I generally have words for everything.

Your student, Kvothe

I didn’t write any of that. I folded the letter carefully, slipped the lavender back inside, and tucked the envelope into the lining of my lute case, where it would rest against the wood beside the few other things I couldn’t bring myself to throw away.

Then I went to class.

That night, lying in bed, I thought about what Ben had said about trust. About the room he’d described—empty, silent, built from the accumulated weight of every connection refused and every hand pushed away.

I thought about Sim and Fela, and how they’d looked at me across the table at Anker’s with something I kept pretending I didn’t recognize. I thought about Wil, who never asked questions but always seemed to know the answers. I thought about Devi, who terrified me and understood me in roughly equal measure. I thought about Auri, who trusted me with such devastating completeness that it made me want to be worthy of it.

I thought about Denna. But thinking about Denna was like thinking about the wind—the more you tried to hold onto it, the faster it slipped away.

And I thought about Ben. About a heavyset man with kind eyes and quick hands, sitting in a garden somewhere south of here, fighting a losing battle with a goat, waiting for a letter that would never come from a student who owed him everything and had given him nothing in return.

The guilt settled over me like a second blanket—warm in the worst way, heavy and suffocating. I had been given good advice by someone who loved me, and I was going to ignore it. Not out of malice. Not even out of pride, though there was plenty of that. But because the path I was on had narrowed to a single track, and I couldn’t see a way off it that didn’t involve abandoning the only purpose I had left.

The Chandrian had killed my family. The Cthaeh had shown me the shape of my revenge. And Ben, dear Ben, had written me a letter that said, as clearly as words could say it: the revenge is the trap.

I knew he was right.

I closed my eyes and smelled lavender and heard, somewhere in the vast and echoing chambers of my memory, a woman singing and a man laughing and the creak of wagon wheels on a long road.

I fell asleep and did not dream.