Chapter 33: The Mother’s Name

I DID NOT SLEEP that night.

I sat in the chair by the window of my chambers, my mother’s letter in one hand and the silver ring in the other, and I did not sleep. The candle burned down to a nub and guttered. The moon rose and crossed the sky and set. The estate grew quiet as even the most restless courtiers found their way to bed, and still I sat, turning the ring, reading the letter, trying to fit the shape of my life around a truth that should have been obvious years ago.

My mother was Netalia Lackless.

I said the words aloud, testing them the way you test ice before stepping onto it. Feeling for cracks. For weakness. For the moment when the surface would give way and the cold black water would rush up to claim me.

“My mother was Netalia Lackless.”

The words hung in the dark room, solid as stones.

Meluan was my aunt.

The Maer’s wife—the woman who had looked at me with open contempt, who had spat on my Ruh blood like it was mud on her shoe, who had been the primary force behind my expulsion from Severen the first time—she was my mother’s sister. My family. My blood.

I had Lackless blood in my veins. Noble blood. The oldest noble blood in the Four Corners, if the histories could be trusted. A lineage that stretched back to the founding of the world, to the original Namers, to the sealing of the doors.

And what had I done with that blood? I’d begged in the streets of Tarbean. I’d slept in alleys and eaten from gutters and fought other children for crusts of bread. I’d been beaten and starved and broken in ways that most Lackless heirs couldn’t imagine, and all the while, the blood in my veins had been the same blood that built empires.

I laughed. It came out harsh and bitter, scraping against the quiet of the room like a blade against stone.

Some inheritance.

The memories came whether I wanted them or not.

My mother. Laurian. The woman who smelled of selas flowers and road dust, who wore her dark hair in a braid that swung like a pendulum when she walked, who sang with a voice that could make the rain stop and listen.

I remembered her hands. Long-fingered, elegant hands that didn’t quite fit the rest of her—hands that had been trained for embroidery and harp-playing and all the delicate arts of a noble upbringing, but that she used for mending wagon wheels and skinning rabbits and tipping my chin up when I’d been crying, making me look at her eyes instead of the ground.

“Look at me, Kvothe. Look at me. The world is hard, but you are harder.”

I remembered the selas flowers.

She grew them wherever we stopped. Even when we were only staying for a day or two, she’d find a patch of dirt—by the wagon, by whatever roadside camp we’d made—and she’d plant selas. Not seeds. She carried cuttings, wrapped in damp cloth, packed in a wooden box that she guarded more carefully than anything else she owned.

“Why selas?” I’d asked once, when I was small enough to still ask questions without expecting complicated answers.

“Because they’re beautiful,” she’d said. “And because they’re stubborn. They’ll grow anywhere, if you give them even the smallest chance.”

I hadn’t understood then what she meant. I thought she was talking about flowers.

She was talking about herself.

And I remembered the rhyme.

Seven things has Lady Lackless Keeps them underneath her black dress One a ring that’s not for wearing One a sharp word, not for swearing Right beside her husband’s candle There’s a door without a handle In a box, no lid or locks Lackless keeps her husband’s rocks There’s a secret she’s been keeping She’s been dreaming and not sleeping On a road, that’s not for traveling Lackless likes her riddle raveling

I had sung it once. Just once.

I was eight, maybe nine. We were camped near Hallowfell, and I’d learned the rhyme from some village children—the bawdy version, the one that made the older boys snicker and the girls blush. I didn’t understand most of the innuendo. I just liked the rhythm of it, the way the words bounced against each other like stones in a stream.

I was singing it while helping my father tune his lute, barely paying attention to the words, when my mother appeared.

I had never seen her face like that.

Not angry. Anger I could have handled—I’d been scolded before, for climbing things I shouldn’t climb and touching things I shouldn’t touch and asking the kind of questions that made adults uncomfortable. Anger was familiar. Manageable.

This was something else. Pain. The specific, intimate pain of hearing something private turned into something public. Of hearing your own history reduced to a children’s joke.

“Where did you learn that?” Her voice was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that precedes storms.

“Some boys in the village. It’s just a silly—”

“Never sing that song again.” She knelt in front of me, taking my shoulders in those long-fingered hands, and her grip was harder than it needed to be. “Do you understand me, Kvothe? Never. Not that version. Not any version.”

“But it’s just a—”

“It’s not just anything.” Her eyes were bright—with tears, I realized. My unshakeable, impossible, road-tough mother was crying over a children’s rhyme. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll never sing it again.”

“I promise.”

She held me for a long time after that. Longer than the situation warranted, I thought. I could feel her heartbeat through her shirt—rapid, unsteady, the heartbeat of someone who has been badly frightened.

I didn’t understand then. I thought she was overreacting, the way parents sometimes do about things that seem perfectly harmless to children. I filed it away as one of those adult mysteries that would presumably make sense when I was older.

Now, sitting in the dark with her letter in my hand and her ring on my finger, I understood.

She had been Lady Lackless. The rhyme was about her family—about the secrets her family had guarded for three thousand years. Every time some village brat sang it, they were unknowingly mocking the heritage she had abandoned, the duty she had fled, the name she had given up for love.

And her son—her own son, the child she had borne and raised and loved—had thrown it in her face without knowing what he was doing.

I closed my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said to the empty room. “I’m so sorry.”

My mother didn’t answer. She’d been dead for years. But I said it anyway, because some things need to be said even when no one is listening.

I stood and went to the mirror.

The glass was old, slightly warped, giving back an image that was close to true but not quite. I studied my face in the candlelight—red hair (my father’s), high cheekbones (my mother’s), eyes that were green in some lights and dark in others (I’d never known whose those were).

I tried to see the Lackless in me.

It was there, if you knew where to look. The shape of the jaw. The set of the brow. The way the cheekbones caught light. I’d seen the same features in Meluan’s face, though she would have been appalled to hear it. We shared a grandmother. We shared blood that had flowed unbroken since the world was young.

But I also saw the Ruh.

Not in my features—the Edema Ruh don’t have a “look” in the way that noble families do, because the Ruh are everyone. We’re the blood that refuses to settle. The wanderers, the storytellers, the musicians who carry the world’s songs from one end of the Four Corners to the other. You can’t see the Ruh in a man’s face because the Ruh are in his feet, in his voice, in the way he looks at the horizon and sees not a boundary but an invitation.

My father had been Ruh to his bones. Arliden the Bard. The man who could play anything with strings, who told stories that made grown men weep, who loved my mother with a devotion that was not lessened one fraction by the knowledge that she had given up everything—wealth, title, family, name—to be with him.

Had he known? Had he known she was Lackless?

Of course he had. You don’t marry someone, share a life with them, travel the roads together for years, without learning their secrets. He had known, and he had loved her anyway. Not despite who she was, but because of it. Because the woman who had been brave enough to abandon everything for love was exactly the kind of woman Arliden would have fallen for.

And together they had made me. Half Lackless, half Ruh. Noble blood and wanderer’s blood mingled in a combination that should have been impossible and was, instead, the most natural thing in the world.

I was the heir to the oldest name in the Four Corners.

I was also the barefoot orphan who had nearly starved to death in the gutters of Tarbean.

Both things were true. Both things lived in me, side by side, and I had no idea how to reconcile them.

I thought about what it would mean to claim the name.

The Lackless lands were vast—hundreds of square miles of the richest farmland in Vintas, plus estates, holdings, investments, and political alliances that spanned the Four Corners. The Lackless name opened doors that no amount of money or talent could open. It carried weight. Authority. The kind of old, deep power that doesn’t need to announce itself because everyone already knows it’s there.

If I stepped forward. If I said the words. If I showed Meluan the ring, the letter, the proof that was now undeniable—I could claim it all. The lands, the title, the political power that came with being the last male heir of the oldest line in Vintas.

I could be Lord Lackless.

The idea was intoxicating and repulsive in equal measure.

Intoxicating because—let me be honest—I had been poor for most of my life. Not the genteel poverty of a scholar who chooses austerity, but the grinding, desperate poverty of a child with no parents, no home, no safety net of any kind. I knew what it was to be hungry. Really hungry, the kind of hungry that makes you eat things that aren’t food because your body is dying and doesn’t care about dignity anymore. I knew what it was to be cold, to be scared, to be invisible. To be nothing.

And here, in my hands, was the key to never being nothing again.

But it was repulsive because claiming the Lackless name meant becoming something my mother had explicitly rejected. She had left. She had walked away from the wealth and the title and the ancient burden, and she had done it because she believed that freedom was worth more than power. That love was worth more than duty. That being Laurian was better than being Lady Lackless.

To claim the name would be to say she was wrong.

And there was the other problem. The insurmountable, immovable, devastating other problem.

Meluan.

My aunt hated the Edema Ruh with a passion that went beyond prejudice into something closer to pathology. I had seen it firsthand during my first visit to Severen—the way her face changed when she learned what I was. The way her voice dropped to absolute zero, becoming as cold and hard and empty as the space between stars.

The Ruh had stolen her sister. That was how she saw it. They had lured Netalia away from her family, her duty, her rightful place, and they had turned her into a vagabond. A wanderer. A woman who slept in wagons and smelled of campfire smoke and died on a nameless road, murdered by something Meluan didn’t understand.

In Meluan’s mind, the Ruh had killed her sister as surely as the Chandrian had.

If I revealed my parentage—if I stood before her and said “I am your nephew, your sister’s son, the heir to the Lackless name”—what would she do?

She might accept it. The letters, the ring, the box that had opened for me—the evidence was irrefutable.

But acceptance wasn’t the same as welcome. Meluan could acknowledge the facts while still hating what I represented: proof that her sister had chosen the Ruh. Proof that the Lackless bloodline now ran through the veins of a travelling player. Proof that everything Meluan despised had become inextricably woven into everything she valued.

She would never forgive that. Some hatreds are too old, too deep, too much a part of who a person is. Tearing them out would be like tearing out the heart.

And beyond the personal—there was the political. Meluan had married the Maer. She was Vintas’s most powerful woman. If I stepped forward as a Lackless heir, I would upend the political landscape of the entire kingdom. Factions would form. Alliances would shift. People who had spent decades positioning themselves in the Lackless orbit would have to recalculate, and some of those calculations would end in blood.

The Maer was already dying. The Penitent King’s soldiers were already at the gates. The world was already fraying.

Adding a disputed succession to the mix would be like throwing lamp oil on a house fire.

I thought about my father.

Arliden. The man who had taught me music the way other fathers teach their sons to ride horses or swing swords—not as a skill, but as a language. A way of understanding the world that goes deeper than words.

“Music isn’t about the notes, son. Notes are just the bones. Music is the breath inside the bones. It’s what makes the difference between a skeleton and a person.”

Would he have wanted me to claim the Lackless name?

No. Absolutely not. My father had been Ruh to his marrow, and the Ruh don’t claim things. We share. We carry. We move. We are the road itself, not the destination.

But my father was also the man who had spent years researching Lanre. Who had written a song so dangerous that the Chandrian came to silence it. He had been a seeker of truth, and the truth was that I was Lackless.

He wouldn’t have wanted me to deny it, either. He would have wanted me to carry it the way the Ruh carry everything—lightly, honestly, without letting it own me.

I looked at the ring on my finger. Small. Silver. Inscribed with words my mother used to sing.

I slipped it off.

Held it up to what remained of the candlelight. The inscription caught the light—delicate letters in a script I recognized as ancient Yllish, the same language that was woven into the Lackless box, the same language that Denna wore on her skin.

I couldn’t read all of it. My Yllish was good but not perfect, and the archaic forms were tricky. But I could make out fragments.

…the blood remembers…

…door and key and…

…what was given cannot be taken…

…the name endures…

The name endures.

I closed my hand around the ring.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from learning who you are too late to do anything about it.

Not the grief of loss—I’d processed that years ago, in the brutal crucible of Tarbean, where I’d either come to terms with my parents’ death or gone mad. Not the grief of betrayal, because my mother hadn’t betrayed me by keeping her secret. She’d protected me. Given me the chance to be free of a burden she’d carried her whole life.

No, this grief was something else. Something quieter, more insidious. The grief of missed connections. Of conversations that should have happened but never did. Of questions I should have asked and answers I should have demanded and truths that should have been spoken in the safety of a campfire’s light, with my mother’s arm around my shoulders and her voice soft in my ear.

She could have told me. On any of those countless nights when we sat together while my father played and the stars wheeled overhead, she could have said: “Kvothe, there is something you should know about who you are.”

But she hadn’t. Because she’d wanted me to be free.

And I was free. Free and ignorant and orphaned and alone, carrying a name I didn’t know was mine, running from a heritage I didn’t know I had, searching for answers that had been sitting in a box in my family’s estate the entire time.

If I’d known earlier—if she’d told me before the Chandrian came—would it have changed anything?

Yes. Everything. Nothing.

I would have been a different person. A person who knew he had a family, a place, a name that meant something. A person who might have gone to Meluan instead of to the streets of Tarbean. A person who might have grown up in a manor instead of a gutter.

But that person wouldn’t have been me. Wouldn’t have been Kvothe. Wouldn’t have survived Tarbean, won his pipes at the Eolian, been admitted to the University at fifteen, called the wind, named the things that needed naming.

My mother had given me freedom. And freedom had made me who I was.

The question was whether who I was would be enough for what was coming.

Dawn came grey and cold.

I was still sitting in the chair. The candle had died hours ago. My mother’s letter was creased from being folded and unfolded so many times that the paper was soft as cloth. The ring was warm in my palm, heated by the hours I’d held it.

I made my decision the way you make all the important decisions: not with a grand revelation or a dramatic gesture, but with a quiet settling. A recognition of what was already true.

I would not claim the Lackless name.

Not because I was ashamed of it. Not because I rejected my mother’s heritage or denied the blood that ran in my veins. But because claiming it would serve no purpose except to satisfy my own vanity and destabilize an already crumbling world.

The doors were opening. The Chandrian were moving. The Maer was dying. The world was fraying at the seams.

None of those problems would be solved by a disputed succession. None of those dangers would be lessened by a homeless musician suddenly declaring himself nobility. The Lackless name was a weapon, and like all weapons, it had a right time and a wrong time.

This was the wrong time.

I put the ring in my pocket. Not on my finger—in my pocket, where it would be close but hidden. Where I could feel it against my leg as I walked, a constant reminder of who I was without being a declaration to the world.

I folded my mother’s letter and tucked it inside my shirt, against my chest, where her words would rest against my heartbeat.

And I stood. Washed my face with cold water from the basin. Ran my fingers through my red hair—too red, Denna had always said, like someone had set a fire on my head—and looked at myself in the mirror one more time.

I looked the same. That was the strange thing. I’d expected some change—some visible mark of the transformation that had happened inside me overnight. But the face in the mirror was the same face it had always been. Same green eyes. Same sharp jaw. Same expression that hovered between arrogance and anxiety, never quite settling on either.

I was Kvothe. Son of Arliden and Laurian. Son of a Ruh bard and a Lackless lady.

I was both, and I would carry both, and I would let neither own me.

There would come a time for the ring, for the name, for the truth. But not today.

Today, I had a Maer to save, and a poisoner to catch, and a world to keep from flying apart.

I opened the door and walked out into the morning light, carrying my mother’s secret like a stone in my pocket—heavy, warm, and entirely my own.