Chapter 42: The Binding

DEVI TAUGHT ME for three days.

Not sympathy—I knew that already. Not even naming, though what she taught touched on similar principles. She taught me the grammar of compulsion. The syntax of control.

“Every binding has structure,” she said, tracing the knots on the table. “Every compulsion follows rules. The person creating it might not understand those rules—Cinder certainly doesn’t think in terms I would use—but the rules exist. And anything that follows rules can be broken.”

“By learning the rules.”

“By understanding them so completely that you can find the flaws.” She pointed to a specific knot. “This is Yllish magic at its core. The knots aren’t decorative. They’re a language—a way of writing commands directly into reality.”

“Commands that Denna’s skin is carrying.”

“Exactly. The patterns carved into her flesh are instructions. They tell her what to think, what to feel, what to do.” Devi’s voice was clinical, but I could hear the horror underneath. “It’s not possession. It’s worse. She’s still herself—still has her own thoughts and feelings—but they’re filtered through the commands. Distorted.”

“How do I break them?”

“You don’t break them. You rewrite them.” Devi picked up the incomplete binding. “This is a counter-pattern. If you can get close enough to her, if you can touch the marks on her skin while speaking the proper words…”

“The commands change.”

“The commands become something else. Something that contradicts the original instructions.” She handed me the binding. “It’s not freedom. It’s replacing one set of orders with another. But the new orders can be ‘ignore all previous commands.’ It’s the best we’ve managed.”

I studied the knots. The pattern was complex, layered, requiring precise execution.

“This isn’t complete,” I said. “There’s something missing.”

“The naming component.” Devi nodded. “Reta never figured out how to integrate it. The binding needs a name—a true name—spoken at the right moment. Without that, it’s just pretty rope.”

“Whose name?”

“The victim’s. The person being controlled.” She looked at me carefully. “You understand what I’m saying, Kvothe. To break the binding, you need to know Denna’s true name. And you need to be willing to speak it.”

The true name.

I’d thought about Denna’s name before. In quiet moments, in the space between sleep and waking, I’d wondered what word could possibly capture everything she was.

Wind, I’d thought once. Because she was always moving, always changing, never staying in one place long enough to be pinned down.

But wind wasn’t right. Wind was too simple. Denna was—

“You’re thinking about it,” Devi said. “About her name.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Your face goes distant when you think about her. Like you’re looking at something no one else can see.” She sat back. “You know it, don’t you. Her name. You’ve known it for a while.”

“I don’t—”

“You do. You’re just afraid to admit it.” Her voice was gentle. “Naming isn’t about learning something new. It’s about acknowledging what you’ve always known. And you know Denna better than anyone.”

I thought about the first time I’d seen her. The way she’d moved through the crowd like water through stones. The way her eyes had caught mine and held them.

I thought about every conversation we’d had. Every argument. Every moment when the truth lay between us, unspoken but understood.

I thought about the way she never let anyone see her completely. The walls she built. The masks she wore. The desperate, beautiful loneliness at the core of everything she was.

And the name rose in my mind. Clear and perfect and terrible.

“Ludis,” I whispered.

The word felt wrong in my mouth. Not because it was false—because it was too true. Too intimate. Saying it felt like stripping her naked.

“The moon’s name,” Devi said softly. “Or one of them. The name the stories say Jax used to steal part of her.”

“That’s her name?”

“That’s what she is. What she’s always been.” Devi’s eyes were sad. “A woman divided. Half in this world, half in another. Always moving, always changing, never fully present. The moon in human form.”

“If her name is Ludis—”

“Then she’s more connected to the doors than anyone realized. The moon is the bridge between worlds. If Cinder is using someone whose essence is the bridge…”

“He’s not just controlling her. He’s using her as a key.”

“A living key. One that can open what’s been closed.” Devi stood abruptly. “This changes things. The binding I gave you—it might not be enough. If she’s truly bound to the moon’s name, if Cinder has woven his commands into something that fundamental—”

“Then what do I do?”

“You find a way to speak her name and mean it. To call her back from wherever she’s been taken.” Devi’s voice was urgent. “It’s not just about breaking compulsions anymore. It’s about reminding her who she is. Who she was before Cinder started writing on her soul.”

I practiced with the binding.

Over and over, until the knots felt natural in my fingers. Until the words Devi taught me came without thought. Until I could perform the counter-pattern in seconds.

But every time I tried to add the naming component—every time I tried to speak Ludis with the full weight of a true name—something stopped me.

“You’re holding back,” Devi said, on the third day. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.” She crossed her arms. “You’re afraid. Afraid of what speaking her name will do. Afraid of the power it will give you over her.”

“Power I didn’t ask for. Power she didn’t agree to give.”

“Power that’s the only thing that can save her.” Devi’s voice was sharp. “This isn’t about consent, Kvothe. This is about survival. Hers. Yours. Everyone’s.”

“If I speak her name without permission—”

“Then you’re no different from Cinder.” She nodded. “Is that what you’re afraid of?”

Yes. That was exactly what I was afraid of.

I’d spent months learning about what had been done to Denna. The violation of it. The way Cinder had taken her will and twisted it into something that served his purposes. And now I was supposed to do the same thing?

“There’s a difference,” Devi said softly, reading my expression. “Between using someone’s name to control them and using it to free them. The intention matters.”

“Does it? Or is that just what every controller tells themselves?”

“Both.” She sat beside me. “Every tool can be a weapon. Every medicine can be a poison. The difference is what you’re trying to accomplish.” She touched the binding. “You want to free her. You want to give her back the choice that was taken. That’s not control—that’s liberation.”

“But I’m still making the choice for her.”

“Yes. Because she can’t make it herself.” Devi’s eyes met mine. “That’s the horrible truth of rescue, Kvothe. Someone who’s been imprisoned can’t consent to being freed. You either act without their permission or you leave them in chains.”

I looked at the binding in my hands.

“What if I’m wrong? What if I think I’m freeing her but I’m just replacing one prison with another?”

“Then you’ll have to live with that.” Devi’s voice was gentle. “That’s what it means to act in a world where certainty is impossible. You do what you believe is right and accept the consequences. All of them.”

That night, I dreamed of Denna.

Not the Denna who had run from me in the garden. Not the Denna whose eyes had gone flat and wrong. The Denna I’d met on the caravan to Imre—young and sharp and impossibly beautiful.

She was standing at a window, looking out at something I couldn’t see. Moonlight fell across her face, half-illuminating, half-shadowing.

“You know what you have to do,” she said.

“I don’t want to.”

“That doesn’t matter.” She turned to face me. “What matters is whether you’ll do it anyway.”

“Denna—”

“You know my name.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “You’ve known it for a long time. You were just too afraid to say it.”

“I didn’t want that power over you.”

“No. You were afraid of what accepting that power would mean. That you love me. That you’ve always loved me.” She stepped closer. “Speaking my name means admitting what we are to each other. And you’d rather let me stay lost than face that truth.”

“That’s not—”

“It is.” Her hand touched my face—cold, like moonlight. “But I’m not asking you to save me for love. I’m asking you to save me because it’s right. Because whatever I’ve become, whatever I’ve been made to do, I would rather be free and damned than enslaved and innocent.”

“What if breaking the binding doesn’t work? What if I speak your name and nothing changes?”

“Then we’ll both know the truth.” Her eyes were sad. “That some prisons can’t be broken. That some things can’t be undone.” She began to fade, moonlight dissolving into morning. “But at least you’ll have tried. At least you’ll have been brave enough to speak the word.”

I woke with her name on my lips.

Ludis.

And this time, I didn’t stop myself from saying it.

SHE FOUND ME that evening, or I found her. It doesn’t matter which. We’d always had a talent for arriving at the same place without meaning to, like two rivers that share a source.

She was sitting on the stone bench near Stonebridge, the one half-hidden by the old oak whose roots had cracked the paving stones. The sun was low, turning the Omethi into beaten copper. She looked tired — not the ordinary tiredness of too little sleep, but the deeper kind, the tiredness of carrying something heavy for too long without being allowed to set it down.

“I know what he’s done to you,” I said.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t deny it. She just looked at me with those dark eyes and said, “Which part?”

“The writing. The Yllish knots. The bindings on your—” I stopped, because I could see the change in her expression. Not fear. Not anger. Something worse. Resignation.

“Devi told you,” she said flatly.

“Devi taught me how to undo it.”

Denna was quiet for a long moment. The river murmured below us, patient and indifferent.

“You can’t undo it,” she said. “The bindings aren’t just commands, Kvothe. They’re woven into everything. How I think. How I feel. What I’m allowed to remember.”

“That’s exactly why—”

“If you pull a thread from a tapestry, you don’t get the thread and the tapestry. You get a ruined tapestry and a useless piece of string.” She looked down at her hands. “What if the binding is all that’s holding me together?”

“There’s something underneath,” I said. “There’s you.”

She laughed — a small, broken sound. “You don’t know that. You’re not the one who might disappear.”

I sat beside her. Not touching — we didn’t touch, Denna and I, not without the careful negotiation of two people who understood that proximity was a kind of currency. But close enough that I could feel the warmth of her, could smell her hair — willow bark and something that reminded me of autumn.

“I’m going to free you,” I said. “I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what I have to learn, or who I have to fight, or what I have to become. I will break every binding he has written on your skin.”

The words came out with a force I hadn’t intended. Not louder — heavier. As if each one carried weight, the way a stone carries weight before it falls.

“On my name,” I said. “On my power, and my good left hand.”

The air changed. The evening had been still, the kind of warm quiet that settles over the world when the wind decides to rest. But when I spoke those words, something shifted. The leaves in the oak moved without wind. The light on the river flickered. And I felt something tighten in my chest — not painful, but present, like a string drawn taut on a lute that hasn’t yet been struck.

Denna’s eyes widened. She turned to face me, and for a moment I saw something behind her expression — not fear, but recognition. As if she’d heard a sound just below the range of ordinary hearing.

“Don’t,” she said. Her voice was quiet and urgent. “Don’t promise things like that. Not with those words. Words have weight, Kvothe. Even yours.”

“Especially mine,” I said, and I smiled, because I thought I was being clever. I thought I was being romantic — the dashing young arcanist swearing impossible oaths to the woman he loved. I thought the weight I felt was only the gravity of the moment, the intensity of meaning what I said.

“You don’t understand what you’ve just done,” she whispered. She reached out and touched my left hand — the first time she’d touched me unprompted in months. Her fingers were cold. “Promise me something else, then. Promise me you won’t go looking for him. Don’t seek out my patron. However you do this — don’t go after him directly.”

Her eyes held mine, and I could see the fear in them — real fear, not for herself but for me. And because I loved her, and because I was already drunk on the weight of my own recklessness, I said:

“I promise.”

The same three stakes. The same taut string in my chest, drawn tighter. I felt it in my left hand where her fingers rested — a tremor, barely perceptible, like the vibration of a plucked wire fading toward silence.

A binding. Not sympathy, not naming — something older. The kind of oath that writes itself into reality when spoken with true weight. A geas, forged from will and words.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I thought I was being romantic.

Denna pulled her hand away and looked out at the river, and the expression on her face was one I wouldn’t understand until much later — the expression of a woman watching someone she loved step off a cliff, too far away to catch.