Chapter 29: Beautiful Games

BREDON WAS NOT in the stables. I waited, and to keep my hands busy I checked my saddle and counted what I’d need for the road north, and that was how he found me.

His white-capped figure came into the doorway with the afternoon light catching the silver head of his walking stick.

My hand dropped to the knife at my belt.

“Leaving so soon?” His voice had that cultivated mildness I had always associated with him, pleasant as summer rain and just as hard to predict. “Without saying goodbye?”

“I know who you are.” The words came out harder than I intended. “Lord Brendan. You visited the Lackless door two years ago. Under a false name.”

Bredon’s composure cracked, only a little, a flicker of surprise in his eyes that I had not once seen there across a tak board.

“Meluan told you.”

“She told me enough.” I didn’t let go of the knife. “Enough to know you’ve been lying about who you are. About what you want.”

“I’ve been careful about who I am. There’s a difference.” He stepped into the stable, each movement measured and exact, like a hunting animal that has learned to look harmless. “And what I want is a good deal more complicated than you imagine.”

“Then explain it. Or I leave now and you never see me again.”

He watched me, and something in his face gave way gradually to a grudging respect.

“You think I’m Master Ash,” he said evenly.

The name hung between us. I hadn’t spoken it aloud. I had half-suspected him of it for a span, and been ashamed of the suspicion. But he’d seen it anyway.

“Are you?”

“No.” He said it flatly. “Though I understand why you’d suspect it. The pieces fit, if you arrange them a certain way. The knowledge, the interest in Denna’s song, the ties to powers most people take for legend.” He moved closer, his footsteps barely whispering in the straw. “But Master Ash is someone else entirely. Someone I have spent decades trying to put a face to.”

“Then let me save you the trouble.” I had carried the knowledge so long that it came out flat as slate, and I said it as his name, on purpose. “Cinder. Ferule, before the binding changed him.”

The candle on the stable wall went out. It didn’t sink and gutter and struggle at the end of itself; it was snuffed, as though someone had pinched the flame between two fingers. The shadows in the corners deepened, and the air went cold so fast I could see my breath. One of the horses stamped and whickered and pressed itself against the far wall.

The name had been heard.

Bredon had gone pale. His hand closed hard on his walking stick, and his eyes went once around the darkened corners of the stable before he spoke again, quietly.

“How long have you known?”

“Since before I came south.” I watched his face as carefully as he had ever watched mine. “The second time I crossed his path was in the Eld. Bandits. He slipped away and changed his face.” I stopped, started again, and kept my voice level by main force. “And now he writes on Denna as though she were a page in one of his books.”

“You know about the marks.” It was not quite a question. Something shifted behind his eyes: stones picked up and set down elsewhere on a board I couldn’t see. “Then you know why she defends him. The binding changes what she—”

“You’re wrong about that.” It was a strange feeling, correcting him, like stepping onto ice and finding it held. “She knows what he is. I’ve watched her fight the binding with nothing but her own throat, and lose, and fight it again. Whatever you think his marks have made of her, she is still in there. And she is at war.”

Bredon was silent. In any other man I would have called the look that crossed his face surprise.

“Then she is stronger than I had judged,” he said at last, slowly. “That changes several things.”

“And you?” I asked. “How does a Vintish lord with a taste for tak come to spend decades hunting a Chandrian’s face?”

Bredon’s face closed. I thought for a breath that he wouldn’t answer. Then he made up his mind.

“Because I’ve been watching the Chandrian for longer than you’ve been alive. Because stopping them is the work I was raised to.” He stepped back, straightening. “I am what remains of the Amyr, and I don’t mean the painted soldiers the Tehlins pretend to honor, or the knights out of children’s stories. I mean the real Amyr, who have been working to hold back the worst of it since Lanre’s betrayal.”

“Felurian told me there were never any human Amyr,” I said.

“Felurian is older than the Amyr and remembers them differently than we remember ourselves.” He held my gaze. “She is also right, as far as it goes. The first Amyr were not human. They were something else, something that lived longer and saw further, and what’s left of us is a smaller thing than they intended.” He paused. “But not entirely human, not yet.”

I filed that away. It explained the portraits, and nothing else.

I believed perhaps half of it.

He’d admitted to lying, and to moving me about like a piece on a board. And just as I began to suspect him, he handed me a story that made him an ally instead of an enemy. It came too easily.

But if he was telling the truth about Cinder and I called it one more trick, Denna would stay where she was and I’d have thrown away my only thread.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I asked. “About the Amyr. About Cinder. About any of this.”

“You don’t,” Bredon answered, surprisingly direct. “You have no reason on this earth to trust me. I’ve lied about who I am. I’ve arranged events to bring you here. I’ve played games inside of games, and you’ve seen only a corner of the board.”

“The Cthaeh told me to stick by the Maer,” I said. “It seems everyone has been arranging for me to be here. Why should I listen to anything you say?”

“Because everything else is worse. Because Cinder has Denna, and you don’t know how to save her. Because the doors are opening, and you don’t have the knowledge to close them.” He paused. “And because despite all of it, I’m telling you the truth now. About the things that matter.”

I watched his face, looking for the mask underneath the mask. Either he was the best liar I’d ever met, or he meant every word of it. Possibly both.

“The Amyr did terrible things,” I said. “In the name of the greater good. How do I know you won’t do the same?”

“You don’t.” He said it as plainly as before. “The Amyr have always been willing to spend lives to buy something larger. We’ve burned the wrong books. Silenced the wrong scholars. Made choices that haunted us for centuries.” His voice hardened. “Including, I suspect, choices about your family.”

“You knew about my parents.”

“I knew they were digging at dangerous things. I knew they had come close to secrets we were sworn to keep.” He paused. “We were still arguing about what to do with them. We weigh every road, and we were trying to turn your father’s research aside without harming him.”

“But Cinder didn’t wait.”

“Cinder didn’t wait for the rest of us. He had his own reasons, his own seal to protect. He struck first, and by the time we knew what had happened…” Bredon went on heavily. “I didn’t order their deaths. But I knew they were at risk, and I didn’t move fast enough to protect them.” He met my eyes and held them. “If that makes me your enemy, I understand. But it doesn’t change what needs to be done.”

My hand found the knife before I knew I’d reached for it, and I was half a step forward with the blade clear of my belt. Bredon didn’t move.

For three heartbeats I stood like that, the knife between us, my vision narrowed to the point where his throat met his collar.

My hand shook, and the knife wavered with it. The sleeping mind was screaming, and it took everything I had to make myself breathe, then think, then choose.

What I chose was Denna, because a dead Amyr bleeding into the straw could tell me nothing about the marks on her skin and this living one might. So I would listen to him, even if I hated him for it, and I put the knife back in my belt one slow inch at a time.

“I owe you for two lives,” Bredon said, as quietly as if he were naming the price of a horse. “There is no coin that settles a debt like that. What I can pay is what I know, and you may count it against the debt however you like.”

“Then you’ll be paying a long while.”

“I expect so.” He turned toward the stable door and the light. “Come. There is a place where we can talk without being overheard, and a board I have been saving.”

We walked through gardens I had never seen.

It was a walled and quiet place, well away from the clipped paths where courtiers strolled and gossiped, where old oaks threw shadows that shifted with the wind and moss grew thick on stones that had been laid, perhaps, before there was an Empire to lay them. The air smelled of old leaves.

Bredon led me to a pavilion hidden among the trees, its timbers weathered to a silver-grey, its roof thick with climbing roses long since gone to thorn. Inside, a table waited, and on the table, a tak board.

It was a larger and finer board than the travel set we had used before, the wood dark as old blood and inlaid with silver that caught the dappled light. The pieces were carved from stone, pale and dark.

Bredon rapped a knuckle sharply against the edge of the board. “Sit,” he said briskly. “Play.”

“I don’t understand. If you have information, why not simply tell me?”

“What a man is given freely, he rarely values.” He settled comfortably into the chair across from me, arranging his robes with the neatness of long practice. “What he wins in contest he remembers. Treasures.” He gestured idly at the board. “Humor an old man. Play, and I will tell you a good deal of what you need to know.”

I looked at the board, and at the pieces waiting in their starting places, and at the man across from me who had just shown himself to be something a great deal more dangerous than a friendly old nobleman.

“Fine.” I sat. “But no holding back. If we’re going to play, we play properly.”

“I would expect nothing less,” he said pleasantly, reaching for a white piece. “Shall I begin?”

You place your flat stones to claim space on the board, building toward a road that will join one edge to the other. The game looks simple at first, just put down pieces and try to make a line. But that plainness is a mask, and underneath it lies a depth that has eaten up clever men for centuries.

Bredon set his first stone squarely in the center of the board, the classic opening, bold and commanding and demanding an answer.

I countered on the edge, building toward a position that could threaten multiple approaches.

“The Amyr were never what the stories claim,” Bredon said, setting his second stone down gently. “We were practical men who understood that some evils have to be done to keep worse ones from happening.”

“The greater good.” I placed my stone, extending my line.

“A phrase that has been worn past recognition. But yes, near enough.” He considered the board. “You know what was sealed at the end of the Creation War. What you don’t know is that someone had to make sure it stayed sealed.”

“And that someone was you.”

“That someone was never one man.” He stood a stone on its edge, firmly, a wall across my advance. “A long chain of people across the centuries, handing down what they knew and what they owed. We didn’t call ourselves Amyr at first. That name came later, when we needed to hide in plain sight.”

I bent over the board. The wall changed everything, and I would have to find some new road around it.

“Hide from whom?”

“From everyone. Those who wanted the doors opened. Those who wanted to forget there were doors at all. And the great mass of people who would have gone mad with fear if they knew what sat behind the seals.” He watched me weigh my choices. “We worked out of sight, nudging things along, pulling up threats before they had a chance to grow.”

We played in silence for several moves. Twice, when I could see nothing better, I moved a stone of mine onto another of mine near the eastern edge, and he let me waste the turns. What he had told me in the stables, about my parents, about the choices the Amyr were willing to make, sat on my hand every time I set down a stone.

The game had shifted, and I was answering his threats now instead of making my own. Every stone he set down seemed to know my answer before I made it, as if he were playing out a game the two of us had finished once already, and it closed off roads I had not even seen.

“The Chandrian,” I said finally. “What do you know about them?”

“More than anyone alive, probably.” He moved one of his stones onto one of mine, delicately, between two fingers, and my line was broken under it. “They were Amyr once. Or called themselves Amyr; the difference goes soft that far back. They sealed the doors, and some of them came to regret it. Which—I don’t know.”

“The letter in the Lackless box says they gave their names to hold the locks,” I said. “It says nothing about regret.”

“A letter says what its writer could bear to set down.”

“Then why would any of them want the doors open now?”

“Different reasons for different members.” He placed a stone. “Haliax, Lanre, as he was called, believed that what’s behind the doors could end his suffering. Could finally grant him the death he’s been denied for three thousand years.”

“And Cinder?”

Bredon’s hand paused over the board. Then he placed his stone and said nothing.

“Bredon.”

“Cinder has… other reasons,” he said, more coldly now. “More complicated ones.”

“He killed my parents. He’s writing on Denna. His motivations don’t seem complicated to me.”

“They are, though.” Bredon leaned forward, and his gentleness slipped for the space of a breath, showing something harder underneath.

I traced the lines on the board. Bredon’s pieces were not building one road. They were building two, and the two plans were crowding each other for the same ground.

“The Chandrian aren’t united,” I said. “Cinder isn’t following Haliax. He’s a renegade.”

Bredon looked up. “What makes you say that?”

“Your board.” I pointed. “Two roads that get in each other’s way. You’ve been playing me a picture of it this whole time.” I looked up. “Cinder is working toward an opening, but not the same one Haliax wants.”

“You see faster than most.” He placed a stone that blocked my best remaining path. “Haliax leads by force of will, but several of his seven have ends of their own. Cinder is the most dangerous because his end might actually come to pass.”

My position was crumbling, every move opening some new hole while his own shape grew stronger with each piece he set down.

“What is he trying to do?”

Bredon didn’t answer. Instead he took his capstone, the one piece of his cut taller than the rest, and set it at the head of his second road. Alone. Above everything else on the board.

I looked at the capstone for a long time. Cinder’s song was remaking the Chandrian in the world’s belief, and not into monsters, because monsters get hunted. The song was making them into something wronged. Something wronged and beautiful and owed.

You don’t spread a religion for a prison break.

“He’s trying to become a god,” I said.

“Gods don’t exist.” I placed a desperate blocking stone.

“None of the gods in the Tehlin scriptures,” Bredon said calmly, and I had never heard him sound more certain of anything. “But in the right circumstances a mortal can become something more than mortal. Belief comes first and the world follows after. That is the oldest magic there is.”

“And Cinder thinks he can do this.”

He looked at the board, and everything in him seemed to narrow down to the stones between us. Three moves passed in silence before he spoke.

“Has been working toward it since the binding.” He set another stone down deliberately. “The song Denna is singing isn’t only about opening the doors. It’s about changing how people think of the Chandrian, and of Cinder above all. The doors are only the match.”

“The world ends?”

“The world changes. In ways that might make ‘ending’ look merciful.”

I counted the roads I had left. The game was nearly lost. His stones made an almost unbroken line across the center, while mine lay scattered and unjoined.

“One question,” I said.

“Ask.”

“If you’re Amyr, if you’ve been watching the world for centuries, why haven’t you stopped this before? Why wait until the doors are already opening?”

“Because we failed.” It cost him something to say it. “The Amyr have been losing since before your grandfather’s grandfather was born. Our numbers thinned. And the opening we have spent ages trying to prevent is happening anyway.”

“So you’re desperate.”

“Desperate enough to tell the truth. Desperate enough to go begging to someone who has every reason to hate us.” He looked at me, and his eyes brightened with calculation wearing hope’s face. “You can do things we cannot, Kvothe. You have spoken with the Cthaeh. You have gone further into naming than most arcanists ever go. And you have one foot in the Faen realm and one in the mortal world.”

“You want me to join you.”

“I want you to work with us.” He held out his hand palm up, as though there were something in it he meant me to take. “We can’t force you. We can only offer what we know and hope you’ll make the right choice.”

“The right choice being your choice.”

“The right choice being whatever stops Cinder. Whatever keeps the doors closed. Whatever holds off the ruin we have been fighting for longer than there have been kingdoms to fight it in.” His hand stayed where it was. “I’m not asking you to forgive what we’ve done. I’m asking you to help us mend what’s been broken.”

I looked at his hand, and at the old man who was not only an old man, and at all the years standing behind him and leaning on that one small moment.

Then I looked at the tak board.

“We should finish the game first.”

Bredon smiled. “Indeed we should.” He drew his hand back and looked at the board. “You’re losing, you know,” he added cheerfully.

“I’m aware.” I examined my remaining options. His road was nearly complete, one more stone and he would connect opposite edges. “But I’ve noticed something about how you play.”

“Oh?”

“You play safe.” I stood a stone on its edge in the one square his road still needed, and he answered at once, patiently, bending his road around the end of my wall until it was one stone short again. “You build slowly. Carefully. You don’t take risks unless you have to.”

“And you find that… problematic?”

“I find it predictable.” I looked at the little stack near the eastern edge, three of my own stones piled one on another over several idle turns, which he had taken for wasted moves. “You’re so focused on your grand strategy that you miss the small things. The pieces that don’t seem to matter.”

Bredon studied the board, and his brow furrowed.

“What are you doing?”

“Something reckless.” I lifted the stack and walked it west, dropping one stone on each square as I went, and the scattered flats he had stopped counting joined up behind it into a straight road that should not have been there at all, cutting clean across his perfect defenses from one edge to the other. “Something you didn’t expect.”

He stared at the board. Then he laughed, a great delighted sound that startled something out of the roses above us.

“Ho ho! Magnificent. I’ve been playing this game for sixty years, and I’ve never seen anyone build a road like that.” He leaned back in his chair. “You see order where other men see nothing but a mess. That’s exactly why we need you.”

“I haven’t agreed to anything.”

“No. But you haven’t refused, either.” He gestured at the board. “The game isn’t over. Neither is our conversation. Tell me, what would it take?”

“I want the truth,” I said. “Not your version of it. Not what you think I need to know. The actual truth about what happened. About what’s happening. About what’s going to happen.”

“The truth is complicated.”

“Then explain it. All of it.” I leaned forward. “Start with Lanre. Start with the beginning. And don’t leave anything out.”

Bredon studied me. Then he reached for the board and began setting the pieces back into their starting places.

“I can tell you some things,” he said. “Not everything, and not yet. You have stood under the Cthaeh’s tree, and what I don’t tell you today, it can’t aim through you.”

“That’s not what I asked for.”

“No. But it’s what I’m offering, and it will cost us both. You may walk out of this garden short of something you’ll wish you had, and I will have spent a good part of the trust I only began to buy this afternoon. You’ve earned a great deal today, Kvothe. Don’t mistake it for everything.” He looked at me over the board, and in his eyes I saw something I hadn’t expected, which was caution, less of me than of what he might set moving simply by talking.

“It began,” he said softly, “with a love story. Like so many disasters do. It began with Lanre and Lyra, and the war that broke the world.”

He told me some of it, not all. Twice I asked him how many of the Amyr were left and where they were, and each time he turned a stone over in his fingers and went back to Lanre as though I had not spoken. I could feel the other gaps in it, the places where the story should have gone on and didn’t, where he chose a word too carefully or turned aside a beat too soon. He was still playing tak, still placing stones.

I listened patiently, and tried to work out what he was leaving unsaid.