Chapter 66: The King’s Table

I HAVE KNOWN many powerful men.

The Maer had power, but wore it like a cloak too heavy for his shoulders. Ambrose had power, and wore it like a brand-new pair of boots, stamping on everything within reach to prove they fit. Alveron’s was the power of patience, Hemme’s the power of petty authority exercised without restraint.

But Roderic Calanthis had a different kind of power entirely. His was the power of a man who had carried the weight of a kingdom for thirty years and had not yet been crushed by it. Not bent. Not broken. Only, perhaps, a little worn.

I noticed this from across the dining hall, the way you notice a well-tuned instrument in a room full of noise. He sat at the head of a table that stretched the full length of the hall, surrounded by the highest nobles of Vintas, and he made it look easy. Effortless. The way a great musician makes a difficult piece look simple.

He was not what I expected.

The Grand Dining Hall was a wonder of its own, separate from the ballroom, connected by a gallery of polished obsidian that reflected the candles like a river of captured stars. Where the ballroom was airy and bright, the dining hall was intimate and warm, its ceiling lower, its walls lined with dark wood paneled in the Aturan fashion, carved with scenes of hunts and harvests and the founding of the Calanthis line.

The table was a single slab of heartwood from the Eld, so old that the grain had darkened to the color of old blood. It seated two hundred. Tonight, every chair was filled.

I was seated near the far end, as befitted someone of no particular rank. My borrowed finery and Stapes’s letter of introduction had secured me an invitation, but nothing more. I was a minor lord from the northern reaches, a name no one recognized, a face no one would remember.

That was the plan.

From where I sat, I could observe the length of the table. The candelabra were wrought silver, each one shaped like a tree with branches spreading to hold thirty candles. Their light fell warm and golden across crystal goblets, white porcelain plates edged in blue, and silver utensils laid out in configurations so precise they might have been arranged by a mathematician.

The food had not yet arrived. Servants moved through the spaces between chairs like ghosts, pouring wine from bottles so old that the labels had faded to whispers. The wine itself was the color of garnets, and it smelled of blackberries and oak and something deeper, something that might have been the memory of summer.

I took a sip and held it in my mouth.

It was, without exaggeration, the finest wine I had ever tasted. Not the sharpest or the sweetest, but the most complete. Every flavor in its place. Nothing missing. Nothing wasted.

I looked up toward the head of the table.

King Roderic was watching me.

He was a tall man. Not broad, the way you imagine kings in stories, but tall and lean, with the rangy build of a man who had ridden horses his whole life and still preferred the saddle to the throne. His hair was grey at the temples and dark everywhere else, cropped close in the military fashion, though he had never been a military man. His face was long, angular, the kind of face that painters loved and sculptors despaired of, all planes and shadows and a jaw sharp enough to cut silk.

His eyes were what held you.

They were the grey of lake water in autumn, clear and deep and patient. They missed nothing. When a servant stumbled slightly while pouring for the Duchess of Meliere, Roderic’s gaze flicked to the man instantly, assessed, dismissed, moved on. When Baron Jakis leaned too close to his daughter, Princess Rosiel, whispering something that made her smile, the King’s eyes tracked the exchange with the precision of a hawk watching mice.

But when those eyes found me, something different happened.

They lingered.

Not with suspicion, exactly. More like curiosity. The expression of a man who has learned to read people the way scholars read books, and who has found a page in a language he doesn’t quite recognize.

I held his gaze for a moment. Then I looked away, because that is what a minor lord from the northern reaches would do when caught staring at his King.

But in that moment, something passed between us. Recognition, perhaps. Not of who I was, but of what I was. A man who didn’t belong. A note that didn’t fit the chord.

Roderic Calanthis filed the observation away and turned to address the woman at his right hand.

The feast began with a consomme of pheasant, clear as amber, served in bowls so thin they seemed to glow. The flavor was extraordinary, layers of depth unfolding on the tongue like a story told in stages. I had eaten well at the Maer’s table, but this was something else. This was food elevated to the level of art.

Around me, the conversation was the kind you find at every noble gathering: alliances discussed in code, insults delivered as compliments, centuries of grudges aired through the polite medium of small talk.

The lord to my left was a minor Vintish count named Threpe. Not Count Threpe of Imre, but a different man entirely, younger, with a pointed beard and the habit of touching his wine glass before every sentence as though it were a talisman.

“First time at the King’s table?” he asked, noting my expression.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Only to someone who remembers his own first time.” He smiled. “The trick is to stop looking impressed and start looking bored. That’s how you know you’ve truly arrived in Renere.”

“I’m not sure I’ll be here long enough to get bored.”

“No one stays long in Renere, my friend. Either the city swallows you whole, or it spits you out before you’re ripe.” He touched his wine glass. “What brings you to court?”

I gave him my cover story. Minor lord. Northern estates. Considering an investment in the southern trade routes. He nodded along, accepting it without particularly believing it, which was the Vintish way.

“Well,” he said, “you’ve come at an interesting time. The Jakis alliance has everyone on edge. Half the court thinks it’s genius, the other half thinks it’s the beginning of the end.”

“And the King?”

Threpe’s expression shifted. Not quite admiration. Something more complex.

“The King,” he said carefully, “is the only man in this room who sees all the pieces on the board. Whether he likes what he sees is another question entirely.”

The second course was a terrine of river bass and eel, layered with herbs I couldn’t name and garnished with edible flowers that tasted faintly of anise. As the servants laid the plates, I watched the King interact with his table.

He was good at this. Genuinely good. He listened when others spoke, which sounds simple but is, among royalty, a rare and radical act. When the Duchess of Meliere complained about tariffs on Cealdish imports, he didn’t dismiss her. He asked questions. Specific questions that showed he understood not just the politics but the economics, the human cost, the way a tariff on iron affected the blacksmith in a village three hundred miles from the palace.

“The problem,” I heard him say, his voice carrying that particular quality of clear authority that cuts through noise without seeming to raise itself, “is not the tariff. The tariff is a symptom. The problem is that we’ve allowed the Cealdish merchants to control supply while we only control demand. That’s not trade. That’s dependence.”

The Duchess blinked. “Your Majesty, I hadn’t considered—”

“Consider it now. I’d like a proposal by the end of the month. Something that addresses the root, not the branches.” He softened the command with a smile. “Bring it to me personally. I’d value your perspective.”

She flushed with pleasure and nodded. Roderic had just given her a task and a compliment in the same breath. He’d also ensured that whatever proposal she crafted would align with his vision, because she would now spend weeks trying to understand exactly what he’d meant by “root, not branches.”

It was masterful. The kind of governance that doesn’t look like governance at all.

A few minutes later, a servant stumbled. Not badly — he caught himself before the wine pitcher could tip — but enough that the nobleman he was serving turned and hissed something sharp and ugly that I couldn’t hear but could read plainly in the curve of his lips.

Roderic noticed. Of course he noticed. Those grey eyes missed nothing.

He didn’t make a scene. He simply caught the servant’s eye as the young man was retreating, face burning, and gave him a small, deliberate nod. A nod that said: You’re fine. It happens. You are not the thing that man just called you.

The servant straightened. Squared his shoulders. Continued his work.

It was such a small thing. A king acknowledging the humanity of a servant. But I had spent enough time in the courts of powerful men to know how rare it was. The Maer would not have noticed. Ambrose’s father would have agreed with the insult. Hemme would have added one of his own.

Roderic Calanthis saw a person where others saw furniture.

I would remember that later. When it mattered.

Between courses, there was entertainment.

A pair of Yllish tumblers performed feats that defied the constraints of human anatomy, their bodies bending and twisting in ways that made the audience gasp and applaud. A poet from the University recited verses about the beauty of Renere, each stanza more fawning than the last. The King listened to the poem with an expression of polite patience that might, to the untrained eye, have looked like enjoyment.

I saw through it. Roderic was bored. Not by the spectacle, but by the sycophancy. He had heard poems praising Renere his entire life. He wanted something real.

Then the musicians began.

They were a small ensemble, four players positioned in a alcove near the King’s end of the table. Two lutists, a harpist, and a woman playing the Vintish eight-string. They began with something courtly and expected, a piece I recognized as Teccam’s “Variations on a Summer Evening,” arranged for strings. It was competent. Clean. Professional.

The King’s expression changed.

Not to boredom, but to something I recognized instantly, because I had felt it myself a thousand times. It was the expression of a man who loves music. Who understands music. Who can hear the difference between competence and art, between playing the notes and playing the silence between them.

He leaned back slightly in his chair, and the political calculations left his face, and for a moment he was simply a man listening to a melody he loved, the weight of kingship temporarily set aside.

I understood him then, in a way I hadn’t before. In a way that would make what came later so much harder to bear.

The third course arrived and departed. The fourth. Wine flowed. Voices rose. The careful precision of the evening’s beginning softened into something warmer, louder, more honest. Masks slipped. Laughter became genuine. Even the Jakis contingent, seated in a bloc near the center of the table, seemed to relax.

It was during the interlude between the fourth and fifth courses that the King left his seat.

This was unusual enough to cause a ripple of attention through the hall. Kings did not wander during formal dinners. Kings sat. Kings received. Kings held court from the anchor point of their chair.

But Roderic Calanthis stood, nodded to his guards, and began walking the length of the table.

He stopped at every cluster of guests. A word here. A question there. A hand on a shoulder, a quiet joke that made a duchess laugh, a serious aside to a general that made the man straighten and nod. It was a masterclass in the art of making people feel seen.

When he reached the middle of the table, he paused beside Baron Jakis.

The entire room held its breath.

“Baron.” The King’s voice was pleasant. Controlled. “I trust your son Ambrose is recovering well.”

“Admirably, Your Majesty. He sends his deepest regrets at being unable to attend.”

“Does he.” The King’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “How unfortunate. I had hoped to discuss his recent… adventures at the University. I understand he’s become quite the patron of the arts.”

The emphasis on “adventures” was razor-thin. The Baron’s face remained composed, but I saw his fingers tighten around his wine glass.

“Young men will be young men, Your Majesty.”

“Indeed they will. And wise fathers will ensure their young men don’t embarrass the family name beyond repair.” The King patted the Baron’s shoulder with the same casual warmth he’d shown everyone else. “Enjoy the wine, Baron. It’s from your own vineyards, as it happens. Quite good.”

He moved on, leaving Baron Jakis slightly paler than before.

I filed this away. The King was not a fool. He knew what the Jakis family was. He knew what they wanted. And he was playing his own game, one that involved keeping them close enough to watch while never letting them close enough to strike.

A dangerous game. A clever one.

The kind of game that can only be lost once.

He reached my end of the table sometime during the fifth course. A roasted haunch of venison, fragrant with rosemary and juniper, carved at the table by servants with knives so sharp the meat fell away in perfect slices. The aroma was extraordinary, woodsmoke and herbs and the rich, dark scent of game properly aged.

I was watching the musicians when the King appeared beside me.

“You have the look of a man who plays,” he said.

I turned, and there he was. Closer than I’d seen him, separated by nothing more than a few inches of candlelit air. His face was lined in ways that the distance had hidden, creased around the eyes and mouth from decades of smiling and frowning and squinting at documents by lamplight.

He looked tired. Not the exhaustion of a man who needs sleep, but the deeper weariness of one who carries too much and knows he cannot set it down.

“Your Majesty,” I said, half-rising.

He waved me back down. “Sit, sit. I’m being informal. The whole point of walking the table is to pretend, for a few minutes, that I’m just another guest.” His smile was genuine, self-deprecating. “It doesn’t work, of course. But I enjoy the fiction.”

“In that case, I’ll play along.” I settled back and met his eyes. “You were asking about music.”

“I was. You were watching the ensemble with the expression of a critic. Either you play, or you’ve been subjected to enough bad music to know the difference.”

“Both, I think.”

“What instrument?”

“Lute. Among others.”

His eyebrows rose. “A lutenist. Rare, at court. The lute has fallen out of fashion, replaced by that gods-awful Modegan harpsichord that sounds like a cat trapped in a cupboard.” He paused, gauging my reaction, and when I laughed, he grinned. “You’ve heard one, then.”

“I’ve heard several. I once sat through a two-hour recital at the Eolian that—” I caught myself. A minor lord from the northern reaches would not have attended performances at the Eolian.

But the King’s expression sharpened with interest rather than suspicion. “The Eolian. You’ve been to the Eolian.”

“Once or twice,” I said carefully.

“I would give quite a lot to visit the Eolian.” His voice was wistful, genuinely so. “I’ve heard recordings, of course. Descriptions. But to hear music in that space, where the acoustics were designed by Illien himself…” He shook his head. “One of the great frustrations of kingship. I can command armies, but I can’t command a free evening in Imre.”

“Perhaps after the ball,” I said. “When things are settled.”

Something flickered across his face. A shadow, there and gone.

“Perhaps,” he said. Then, quietly, as if speaking to himself: “‘The wise man knows the world will keep on turning. The fool believes he holds the sun in place.’”

I recognized the verse. “Teccam. The Theophany.”

His eyes widened slightly. “You know Teccam.”

“I studied at the University.”

“Ah.” He nodded slowly. “That explains the critic’s ear. And the quote. Most people at my court can barely quote Fenton, let alone Teccam.” He leaned against the back of the empty chair beside me, and for a moment the formality dropped entirely. “Tell me something. Since we’re being informal.”

“Your Majesty?”

“The University. Is it as magnificent as they say? The Archives, the Artificery, the naming classes. Is it everything the stories claim?”

There was something boyish in the question. Something eager and unguarded that didn’t belong in the face of a king at his own diplomatic ball. It was the question of a man who had dreamed, perhaps, of a different life. Of learning for its own sake. Of a world where knowledge mattered more than power.

“It is,” I said. “And more. And less. Like everything worth loving, it’s imperfect.”

He considered this. “Like a kingdom.”

“Very much like a kingdom.”

He laughed. A real laugh, warm and surprised, the kind that makes the people around you look up and smile without knowing why.

“I like you,” he said. “Whoever you are. You’re the first person tonight who hasn’t tried to sell me something.” He straightened, and the King settled back over the man like a mask. “What’s your name?”

“Kvothe,” I said, because I was tired of lying, and because he deserved better, and because some part of me wanted him to know. Even if it meant nothing. Even if he forgot it by morning.

“Kvothe.” He tested the word. “An Edema Ruh name, unless I’m mistaken. And I rarely am, about names.” He studied me with those grey lake-water eyes. “You’re no northern lord.”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.” He was quiet for a moment. “I won’t ask what you really are. Every man at my table tonight is pretending to be something, and most of them are worse liars than you.” His hand landed on my shoulder, warm and heavy. “Enjoy the rest of the evening, Kvothe of the Ruh. And if you get the chance to play, I hope I’m close enough to hear.”

He moved on. Down the table. Back to the business of being a king.

I watched him go, and I felt something settle in my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

I liked him.

Tehlu witness, I liked him.

The evening wound on. More courses. More wine. More music. The conversation at my end of the table grew livelier as the wine did its work, and I learned things I hadn’t expected to learn.

Count Threpe told me about the King’s daughter, Princess Rosiel, who was seventeen and brilliant and desperately unhappy about her impending engagement to the Jakis heir. “She wants to study,” Threpe said, his voice low. “Natural philosophy. Alchemy. She has a mind like a razor and they’re going to bury it in a marriage bed.”

“Does the King know?”

“The King knows everything. That’s his curse.” Threpe drank deep. “He loves that girl more than his kingdom. More than his life. But he also knows that the Jakis alliance is the only thing standing between Vintas and civil war. The northern lords are restless. The Cealdish are pressing on the borders. Without Jakis money and Jakis soldiers…” He trailed off.

“He’s sacrificing his daughter.”

“He’s doing what kings do. What fathers do, when they’re also kings.” Threpe’s voice was bitter. “The cruelest part? Rosiel understands. She agreed to it. Told her father she would marry the Jakis boy and smile while she did it, because she loves her kingdom as much as he does.”

I looked down the table. Princess Rosiel was seated beside the young Jakis lord, a slender boy with his father’s sharp features and none of his father’s cunning. She was laughing at something he’d said, her hand resting on his arm, the picture of courtly romance.

But I could see her eyes. They were her father’s eyes. Grey and deep and patient. And behind the laughter, behind the performance, they held the same weariness.

She was seventeen years old, and she already looked tired.

During the sixth course, a commotion rippled through the far end of the hall.

Lord Ferule had arrived.

I had been expecting him, of course. Waiting for him. But the reality of Cinder’s entrance still hit me like a fist in the stomach. He moved through the room like a cold wind, the nobles parting before him without seeming to realize they were moving. His silver-grey coat was immaculate. His pale hair caught the candlelight and threw it back like frost on glass.

He went directly to the King.

They spoke. I couldn’t hear the words, but I watched the exchange with the intensity of a man watching a snake approach a sleeping child. Roderic’s expression was guarded but courteous. He nodded at something Ferule said. Gestured to an empty seat near the head of the table.

Cinder sat.

And the temperature in the room dropped by a degree that no one acknowledged but everyone felt.

I watched them interact through the rest of the meal. Roderic was careful with Ferule, I noticed. Not deferential, but watchful. The way a man is watchful around a large dog that hasn’t bitten anyone yet but might.

He doesn’t trust him, I realized. He knows something is wrong.

But he needs him. Whatever Cinder had offered, whatever leverage he’d built over the past year, it was enough to keep the King at his table despite the instinct that screamed otherwise.

That was Cinder’s gift. Not brute force. Not even magic, precisely. But the ability to make himself necessary. To fill a gap that no one else could fill. To become the solution to a problem you didn’t know you had until he pointed it out.

I had seen it before. In Denna’s patron. In Master Ash. In the shadow that had followed her for years, offering protection and demanding obedience.

The same technique. The same trap. Different prey.

The meal was ending. Servants cleared the last plates, and the guests began to rise, preparing to move to the ballroom for the dancing that would continue until dawn. The transition was a practiced ritual, a flow of silk and velvet from one room to the next, the conversations carrying over without interruption.

I lingered.

At the head of the table, King Roderic stood and spoke quietly to his steward, a man with the bearing of a retired soldier and the expression of someone who had seen too much to be surprised by anything. The steward nodded, glanced in my direction, and moved away.

Then the King did something unexpected.

He raised his wine glass.

The room fell silent. Not because he commanded it, but because when Roderic Calanthis lifted his glass, the weight of his authority demanded attention the way gravity demands that things fall.

“Friends,” he said. “Allies. Honored guests. We gather tonight on the eve of something new. An alliance that will shape the future of Vintas for generations to come.”

He paused. His eyes swept the room.

“I am not a man given to grand speeches. I leave those to the poets, who do them better.” A gentle laugh rippled through the crowd. “But I will say this. A kingdom is not its borders. It is not its armies, its trade routes, its treasury. A kingdom is its people. Every farmer tilling his field. Every merchant on the road. Every child born in a village too small to name.”

His voice carried without effort. It was the voice of a man who had learned to fill a room by filling it with meaning rather than volume.

“Tonight, I ask you to remember them. The ones who aren’t here. The ones who will never see this hall, who will never taste this wine, who will never know the names we call ourselves by. Remember that everything we do here, we do for them.”

He raised his glass higher.

“To Vintas. And to the people who make it worth protecting.”

The room echoed the toast. Crystal rang against crystal. The sound was beautiful, a hundred chiming voices that merged into a single sustained note, like a bell struck in a cathedral.

I raised my glass with the rest.

I followed the crowd into the ballroom. The transition was seamless, one room’s warmth flowing into another’s brilliance, the music swelling as we crossed the threshold.

Behind me, the servants were already clearing the King’s table. Folding the linen. Extinguishing the candles. Sweeping away the crumbs and the wine stains and every trace of the evening’s beauty.

I looked back once.

The table was a dark slab of heartwood in an emptying room, the candelabra stripped of their flames, the chairs pushed back at careless angles. In a few minutes it would be bare. In a few hours it would be set again, ready for the next meal, the next gathering of powerful men and women who believed they controlled the world.

But the chair at the head of the table would be empty.