Chapter 70: What the Wind Carried

DEVI SAVED US. Let me say that plainly, because the stories never mention her, and the songs don’t know her name.

The stories say Kvothe the Kingkiller escaped Renere through cunning and dark magic. That he called down shadows to cover his retreat, or opened a door into the Fae, or simply vanished like the demon he was. The stories are, as always, vastly more interesting than the truth.

The truth is that a woman five feet tall with the temper of a kicked hornet took me by the sleeve and walked me through a hole in a cellar wall while I stared at nothing and tried to remember how to breathe.

The truth is not a song anyone would want to sing.

The passage behind the wine rack was narrow and low-ceilinged, braced with timbers so old they had petrified into something closer to stone than wood. The air was thick with damp earth and stone dust and the faintest trace of something old and metallic.

Devi went first, a sympathy lamp in one hand and a knife in the other. Fela followed, then Simmon, who had to duck to clear the ceiling. Wilem brought up the rear, his broad shoulders brushing both walls, his face set in the grim concentration of a man who dislikes enclosed spaces but dislikes dying more.

I was in the middle, with Sim’s hand on my shoulder to guide me. My eyes were open, but I was still in the great hall, still standing three steps from Denna and watching the light go out of her eyes, still hearing the silence where her song had been.

“Step up,” Sim said. “There’s a rise here.”

I stepped up. My body did what it was told, though no one was telling it, and walked and turned and ducked and stepped.

The passages beneath Renere made a web that Devi had learned by heart over years of quiet lending and quieter listening. She had friends underneath the city, in both senses of it: smugglers who moved goods beneath the river, Amyr sympathizers who kept the old routes open, and a guild of tunnelers who asked no questions so long as you paid them in iron rather than paper.

Once, at a junction, the lamp caught a door I recognized, the entrance to the warren Sovran had led us through, where Skarpi and the last two dozen Amyr had kept their books and their vigil. It stood dark and open, as a house stands open when its people have left in a hurry or not at all. Beside it, the chalk mark the Amyr used for a safe door had been scored through, twice, by a hand that pressed hard. Whether they had fled ahead of the soldiers or lay somewhere beneath the palace’s fallen stone, I never learned. The Amyr are good at not being found. I hoped, that night, it had served them one last time.

“Left here,” she said, pausing at a junction where three passages met. She held the lamp high, reading marks on the wall that were invisible to anyone who didn’t know the code. “The main route to the river gate is this way. But if the soldiers have secured the waterfront—”

“They will have,” Wilem said. “First thing any commander does. Seal the gates, seal the docks, seal the bridges.”

“Then we go under the river.” She pointed down the right-hand passage. “There’s a flood culvert that runs beneath the Ergen Bridge. It comes out in the tanners’ district on the south bank.”

“How far?”

“Half a mile. Maybe more. The footing will be bad.”

“The footing,” Fela said, “is the least of our problems.”

She was looking at me, and so were the others.

I should tell you what I looked like, because the story requires it.

My borrowed finery was ruined. The green velvet coat was torn at the shoulder where Cinder’s agent had grabbed me, and stained dark along the right sleeve where sympathy spent too fast had scored the cloth like lightning scoring sand. My shirt was soaked through with sweat and my hair was dark with it, plastered to my forehead. My hands hung at my sides, steady as anything, like tools someone had set down and walked away from.

My face, I’m told, was the worst of it. Simmon described it later, and his description stayed with me because it was so precise.

“You looked like a house with the lights out,” he said. “Like something that used to have a person in it.”

We moved through the tunnels for what felt like hours. In truth, it was perhaps forty minutes, though time had gone soft and unreliable.

The sounds of the city filtered down through the stone: muffled shouts, the clatter of iron-shod hooves. Once, a low booming from the direction of the palace, and after it a long grinding of something heavy giving way, stone settling onto stone, as a house groans for days after a flood has gone through it.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Simmon said.

“That’s the palace, settling,” Devi said without slowing. “Whatever happened in that hall shook the whole city on its footings, and stone doesn’t forget a thing like that in one night. There’ll be fires where the lamps went over. There may be worse.”

“Worse how?”

She lifted the lamp toward the ceiling, where a crack I had not noticed ran along the old stone like a line of ink. “These tunnels were cut before the Empire, Simmon, and nobody ever asked them to hold through a night like this one.” She checked another wall marking. “Which is why we need to be outside the city walls before sunrise.”

The flood culvert was exactly as unpleasant as Devi had promised.

A stone channel five feet across, running beneath the Ergen Bridge toward the river. It had rained three days before, and what water was left stood ankle-deep in places and knee-deep in others, the color of old iron and as cold as snowmelt. The smell was extraordinary. It was not sewage, thankfully, but that water had been carrying off a city older than the Empire for a very long time, and it had kept a little of everything.

We waded in single file.

The water hit my legs and I felt none of it, not the cold, not the wet, not my fine leather boots filling up and turning to deadweight, as if my legs belonged to some other man walking beside me. My body knew all of it. My mind did not care. Somewhere in that water my left hand went numb from the fingertips up, and if I thought anything of it, I thought it was the cold.

Sim kept his hand on my shoulder.

We were halfway through the culvert when Fela stopped.

“Listen,” she said.

We listened.

From somewhere above and behind us came boots on stone, the clink of armor, and voices giving orders in the tone soldiers use when conducting a search rather than a battle.

“They’re in the tunnels,” Wilem said.

“They can’t know about these routes,” Devi protested. “My contacts—”

“Your contacts are scared,” Wilem said. “Scared people talk. Especially when soldiers ask questions with swords.”

Devi’s shoulders came up, just slightly. “We move faster. The culvert exits at the tannery quarter. If we can reach it before they reach this junction…”

“And if we can’t?”

“Then Fela and I hold them off while you three get clear.”

“Absolutely not,” Simmon said.

“It’s not a discussion. You can’t fight. Wil’s sympathy needs links we don’t have down here. And Kvothe…” She looked at me. At the empty house with the lights out. “Kvothe isn’t here right now.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Then you’ll die with me, and he’ll die too, because he can’t run on his own and you’re the only one he’ll follow. That’s mathematics, Sim. Not heroism.”

Fela put a hand on his arm. “She’s right. And it won’t come to that. Stone answers to me.” She flexed her hand and the culvert wall groaned and shifted, answering a name she had not spoken aloud. “Get Kvothe out. We’ll follow.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise. Now go.”

“The oak copse past the sixth milestone on the Ralien road,” Devi said. “Wait for us there.”

We split at the culvert’s midpoint. Fela and Devi turned back toward the junction, moving quickly, two women against whatever force was coming. Devi had her sygaldry and her temper, and Fela had the name of stone.

Sim took my arm and pulled me forward. Wilem fell in behind us, breathing slow and even. The sounds of pursuit grew louder, then were cut off abruptly by a noise like thunder as Fela brought a section of tunnel ceiling down behind us.

More came down than she can have meant to. The whole length of the culvert shook, and stone rained into the water behind us, and Sim, who had let go of my arm to look back for her, made a small flat sound, as if he had walked into a door in the dark. A shard of the ceiling had come skipping off the wall and struck him low in the left side, over the ribs that had broken at the oak door.

He kept his feet. A few paces on he caught me up again, one hand pressed briefly against his side. He drew a quick breath through his teeth and gave me a shaky smile when he saw me looking. At the time I took it for the running. I was not thinking clearly enough to wonder why he kept the hand there.

“That’ll hold them,” Wilem said. “For a while.”

“Long enough?”

“It will have to be.”

The culvert opened onto the south bank in the tannery quarter. The tanners had fled, and the streets were deserted, the workshops shuttered, the hanging hides swinging in a wind that smelled of lime and fear.

We came out into a world that had changed while we were underneath it.

The sky above the palace district was the wrong color, a dirty orange that had nothing to do with dawn. Fire had found something to eat up there, where the chandeliers had come down and the lamps had gone over in the crush, and the spires stood up out of the smoke lit from below, as though they hung in the air with nothing holding them up.

“Merciful Tehlu,” Simmon breathed. “The whole city.”

“It’ll burn out,” Wilem said. But he didn’t sound certain.

We moved through the tannery quarter in a stumbling half-run, Sim on one side of me and Wilem on the other, their hands on my arms, keeping me moving. Bells were ringing somewhere in the city, and they were not ringing the hour.

Once, we passed a square where a dozen people had gathered, nobles and servants alike, their finery mud-stained from flight, their faces slack with confusion. A woman in a gown of blue silk sat on the edge of a dry fountain, her shoes gone, her feet bleeding, weeping.

We kept moving.

“Patrol,” Wilem said, pulling us into an alley.

We pressed against the wall. The alley was narrow, barely wide enough for two men abreast, and it smelled of old garbage and older stone. From the street came boots, six men or maybe eight, moving in formation, their armor catching the firelight.

“City watch,” Sim whispered. “The soldiers haven’t crossed the river yet. They’re looking for anyone on the streets after what happened. They’ll arrest first and ask questions later.”

We waited, and the patrol passed, and their lanterns threw swinging circles of ordinary light that looked thin and useless under that orange sky.

We moved again.

The city walls of Renere rose forty feet above the streets, crenellated and patrolled, pierced here and there by gates that were, on any ordinary night, the only way in or out. Tonight, the gates were sealed. We could see the southernmost from three blocks away, iron-bound doors shut tight, watch fires burning on the ramparts.

“There’s no way through,” Sim said. “Not without a fight.”

“Then we go over,” Wilem said.

“Forty feet of smooth stone with armed guards on top?”

“Not the wall. The aqueduct.” He pointed east, where the dark line of the old Aturan aqueduct ran along the outside of the wall, its arches black against the lit smoke. “It connects to the wall near the southeastern tower. A workman’s door. Unguarded in peacetime.”

“This isn’t peacetime.”

“No. But soldiers watch gates and streets. No one watches an aqueduct.” He paused. “My uncles shored the mine-roads at Ralien. They taught me to look at every structure as a potential path.”

“You’ve been thinking about this since the tunnels, haven’t you?”

“Since we entered the city. I like to have an exit.”

The approach took us through a warehouse district, chains broken by Wilem’s quiet force, through grain sacks and out a rear window to an iron ladder bolted to a building that leaned against the wall.

Sim went first, then me, then Wilem. Sim reached down and guided my hands to each rung, because I was climbing as I did everything else that night, mechanically, as if I were being worked from a long way off by someone who could not quite see what he was doing. He hauled me up using only his right arm, his left pressed close against his body.

“Grab here. Step up. Good. Next one.”

At the top, six feet of empty air lay between the rooftop and the stone channel of the aqueduct.

Wilem jumped first, landed, and held out his hands.

“You need to jump, Kvothe.”

Somewhere in the ruin of my mind, a voice that was neither Sim’s nor mine. Denna’s.

Move, you idiot. They didn’t drag you through a sewer to watch you fall off a building.

I jumped.

Wilem caught me. Sim landed badly behind me, on one knee and one hand, and stayed down on the stone longer than a man should who had only jumped six feet, until Wil reached back and hauled him up by his good arm. He allowed himself a single shaky breath and made some joke I no longer remember.

The aqueduct was dry, its water turned into newer channels a long time ago. We walked along inside it, three men in a trough of crumbling masonry, out of sight of the streets below and hidden from the guards on the wall by the lip of the stone.

The city spread out below us. From that height I could see the fires in the palace district, small points of flame scattered through the dark where the night’s panic had found something to burn.

The bells had stopped.

That was worse than the ringing.

We reached the southeastern tower without incident. The way in was a narrow door in the side of the wall, rusted shut, its lock seized with age and neglect. A hundred years ago, workers had used it to service the junction between aqueduct and city water supply. Now it was forgotten, listed on no map, known to no one but historians and the nephews of Cealdish miners.

Wilem put his shoulder to it, carefully at first and then not carefully at all. The hinges screamed. The door moved enough for a thin man to squeeze through, which was all we needed, because none of us were fat and one of us had stopped eating regularly several months ago.

I went through first, propelled by Sim’s guiding hands.

A narrow stairway spiraled down through the thickness of the wall, the steps slick with condensation. At the bottom, a second door opened onto the open fields southeast of Renere, where the road north led back to Severen and the road east led to the Commonwealth and every road led away from the city where I had killed a king and lost everything.

The night air was cold and clean, free of the smoke that hung over the city. The stars were out, sharp and bright. A breeze came up from the south, carrying the smell of grass and earth and distance.

I breathed, a real breath at last, deep enough to feel the cold air reach the bottom of my lungs, deep enough to hurt.

Wilem and Sim stood on either side of me. Behind us, the wall of Renere rose dark against the smoke-stained sky. Before us, the road.

“We need to move,” Wilem said. “Dawn’s three hours off. When the sun comes up, they’ll expand the search beyond the walls.”

“Which way?”

“East. Toward the Commonwealth border. Devi has contacts in Ralien. If we can reach them…” He looked at me. “Can he walk?”

Sim looked at me. I looked at nothing.

“He can walk,” Sim said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

We walked.

The road curved away from the city, following the line of the river before it bent east. We left it almost immediately and cut across open fields, our feet breaking frost-stiffened grass that crackled underfoot. The cold was sharp and real, and it barely reached me.

Behind us, Renere glowed. The fires in the palace district made a smear of light on the underside of the smoke.

Somewhere under the numbness I already knew what was coming. Alveron, with Meluan at his side, would wear the crown and hunt me to the edges of the map. The name Kingkiller would follow me, though I had not earned it, not as the word meant it. And the doors would crack, slowly and inexorably, because the lock was dead.

Once, an hour out, Sim stopped us under a hedge and said I needed to sit down. I didn’t. I could have walked until I fell and never noticed the falling. But he sat me down on the frozen bank and sat beside me with his arm pressed to his side, breathing slowly through his nose, while Wil stood a little way off and watched the road. After a while Sim said I looked better, and we went on.

I didn’t look back. Sim told me this later. He said I walked with my eyes fixed forward, empty.

He was wrong about one thing. My eyes weren’t empty.

They were full.

Full of a white dress in candlelight. Full of grey eyes asking Why? Full of silence eating everything it came to, the blunt thing I had swung when what was needed was a scalpel.

Full of Denna.

Dawn came without asking permission, the darkness at the horizon thinning to grey, then blue, then the first pale gold of sunlight.

We had been walking for three hours. Renere was a smudge on the horizon behind us, the glow of its fires swallowed by daylight. If you didn’t know what had happened, you might have seen nothing but a city waking to an ordinary day.

Wilem found the copse past the sixth milestone, the one Devi had named. Sim lowered me to the ground at the base of an old oak, propping my back carefully against the trunk, wrapping me in the coat he’d taken from his own shoulders.

“Sleep if you can,” he said quietly.

I couldn’t sleep. But I closed my eyes, because it was easier than seeing, and because my friends needed to believe I was all right, even though we all knew I wasn’t.

I lay beneath the oak and listened. To the wind in the branches above me. To birds insisting the world was still the same world it had been yesterday.

To the silence.

It was different now. Before, the silence had been something I reached for and shaped and aimed. Now it was a hollow place in my chest where something had been torn out and nothing had grown back to fill it.

Sometime in the late morning, Fela and Devi arrived.

I kept my eyes closed, but I heard the rustle of grass, and then Sim making a small glad sound, and then Fela’s voice, low and close.

“You’re holding yourself like an old man.”

“The old ribs,” Sim said lightly. “They never did like the cold. The physicker in Severen said they’d complain for a year.”

I heard it with my eyes shut and did not know it for a lie.

Devi’s voice was hoarse and stripped raw, her words clipped short with exhaustion.

“The tunnel held. We circled back through the drainage system.” A pause. “The city is under martial law. The Maer has claimed regency. They’re saying the King was assassinated by an Edema Ruh sympathist from the University.”

“They’re saying Kvothe’s name?” Sim asked.

“Not yet. But it’s coming. The nobles who saw what happened are talking. Red hair. Green coat. Dark magic in the King’s own palace.” She said it flatly. “It won’t be long.”

When she spoke again her tone was sharper.

“They’re not just hunting him. They’re building a story. The criers aren’t describing what happened. They describe what people need to believe happened: assassination, premeditation, an arcanist placed at the ball like a weapon in a sheath. None of that is what we saw, but it’s what they’re crying in every square.”

“Criers always exaggerate,” Sim said.

“This isn’t exaggeration. It’s architecture. The Maer claimed regency within hours. Hours, Simmon. He had the machinery ready. The officers, the orders, the chain of command, all of it waiting. He just needed a villain to justify the transfer.”

She looked at me then, not unkindly. “And you handed him one, gift-wrapped. Half that ballroom watched you take Alveron aside, and watched his people slip out by the west passage not an hour before the King died. The man who now wears the regency.”

I said nothing. There is nothing to say to arithmetic.

She let that settle.

“And they say Ruh, where they could have said arcanist. That word does its work in the gut of every Vintish farmer who grew up hearing the Ruh are thieves and worse. A king dying in a catastrophe no one can explain is chaos. A Ruh assassin at a ball is a story people can understand, and stories are what keep kingdoms running.”

“Then we need to keep moving.”

“Tonight. We all need rest first.” A pause. “How is he?”

“He’s in there somewhere,” Sim finally said. “I have to believe that.”

“Then believe it lying down,” Devi said, and her voice softened, just slightly. “Get some sleep. I’ll take watch.”

I lay beneath the tree and I did not sleep and I did not think and I did not feel.

Or rather I felt everything at once, so much of it and all together, until it came to the same thing as feeling nothing at all.

In the late afternoon, as the shadows lengthened and the air cooled, I opened my eyes.

Sim was sitting beside me with his back against the same tree, a piece of bread in his hand that he had been eating in slow, methodical bites. He was leaning to the right, his left arm tucked carefully against his ribs, cradling something he would not name. His face was drawn and older than I had ever seen it, the boyish good nature stripped away to show the bedrock underneath.

“Sim,” I said.

It was the first word I’d spoken since the cellar.

He turned to me. His eyes were bright.

“Hey,” he said. “There you are.”

“Here I am.”

“Want some bread? It’s stale, but Devi stole it from a very expensive bakery, so it’s pedigreed stale.”

I almost smiled.

“We need to move tonight,” I said.

“I know.”

“East. Toward the Commonwealth. There are places to hide.”

“I know.”

“Sim.” I looked at him properly then, at his kind face and his tired eyes. “Thank you.”

He nodded, and swallowed, and looked away, because Simmon had always cried easily and he was not about to cry now, not when there was still running to do.

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Ever. To anyone. I have a reputation to maintain.”

“What reputation?”

“Exactly.” He handed me the bread. “Eat. We have a long walk ahead of us, and at the end of it I want a bath hot enough to take the skin off, and a bed with a real pillow in it, and Fela, in roughly that order. Don’t tell her the order.”

I ate. The bread was stale, and tasting that it was stale was a small thing, a crack in the wall of nothing that had stood around me since the great hall.

The sun was setting, and the sky was turning the color of bruises, purple and gold and a deep aching blue. Wilem was checking our supplies. Fela was studying a map she’d drawn from memory. Devi was sharpening a knife she had already sharpened twice.

Simmon was beside me, sharing his bread, ready to walk through another night.

My friends, who had followed me into the fire and were still here on the other side of it.

We left at dusk, five figures crossing an open field in the failing light, heading east toward a border that might as well have been the edge of the world. Behind us, the first stars appeared above the hills where Renere lay hidden.

One foot in front of the other.

Simmon walked at my shoulder, with Wilem and Fela and Devi around us, and we went on into the dark.

We had been walking for perhaps two hours when Sim stumbled.

It was not the stumble of a tired man catching his foot on a root. It was the other kind, where the legs simply stop working.

He went down on one knee. His hand found the ground, and he stayed there.

“Fine,” he said. “Just… give me a minute.”

Something in his voice was wrong. Thin, and not from tiredness. When Fela’s hand moved from his shoulder to his side he twisted away from it with a sound he could not swallow.

I should have seen it earlier: how he had favored his left side climbing the wall, the stop under the hedge that he had laid at my door, the too-careful breathing, all of it plain enough for anyone who was not too lost in his own breaking to look.

“Light,” Devi said. A sympathy lamp flared.

In its pale glow there was less to see than there should have been. Fela opened his shirt. Low on his left side, over the ribs that had broken at the oak door, was a cut no longer than my finger, crusted black, and around it a bruise that had spread through the hours of walking until it covered him from armpit to hip, dark as a plum. Devi picked a sliver of grey stone out of the cut with the point of her knife and held it up to the lamp.

Fela looked at it for a long moment.

“My ceiling,” she said.

“It was a very good ceiling,” Sim said. “It did exactly what you told it.”

“How long?” She could barely shape the words.

“Since the culvert.” He was breathing in short, shallow draws, as you breathe when anything deeper sends lightning through your chest. “It wasn’t bad at first. I thought I could…”

“You’ve been walking for hours. You climbed a wall.” Her voice cracked. “You told me it was the cold, and I believed you.”

“You needed to keep moving.” His eyes found hers. “If I’d said something, you would have stopped. And we couldn’t afford to stop.”

Devi laid her palm on his belly, above the bruise, and pressed very gently, and he cried out once and bit the sound off. Under her hand the belly was hard and swollen. She took the hand away and did not look at any of us.

“It’s bleeding inside him,” she said. “The rib has gone again, and whatever it tore under there has been bleeding into him since the culvert.”

“So we stop it,” I said.

I knelt and laid my hand against his side. It was my left hand, and it was numb, and I could not tell through it whether he was warm or cold. I reached for a binding anyway, the heat of his side drawn down into the frozen ground beneath him, as you would pack snow against a bruise to slow whatever is bleeding under it. The link formed and slid apart in my mind like a knot tied in wet string. I tied it again, more slowly. It slid again.

“Kvothe.” Devi’s voice was very quiet. “It isn’t where you can reach, with that or with a knife.” She was already cutting her shawl into strips, and she bound his ribs as tightly as he could bear, and for a little while his breathing came easier, and I let myself believe that it meant something.

“Then we take him back,” Fela said. “Renere is full of physickers.”

“Twelve miles, on those ribs?” Wil said. “We would kill him on the road.”

“And the gates are shut,” Devi said, “and every watchman in that city has his description by now, and yours, and mine. The nearest village physicker would hand us to the watch before he’d washed his hands.”

“I don’t care. We carry him. We—”

“Fela.” Sim’s voice, quiet and certain, with the same authority I’d heard in the corridor beneath the Archives. “Stop.”

She stopped.

He reached for her hand. His fingers were cold, going toward the ice-cold of the University, though they were not there yet.

“The moonlight thing,” he said. “I was right. It does change things.”

Fela made a sound, something between a breath and a breaking.

“Every minute,” Sim said. “It was worth every minute.”

Fela pulled him close and held his head against her chest, and her body shook with the effort of not screaming.

“Every minute,” she whispered.

My hand had found his shoulder, and under my palm the warmth was going out of him and the breathing was slowing.

“Kvothe,” he said. His eyes found mine. They were the same eyes that had looked at me across a lecture hall in my first term, bright with mischief and unearned trust. “Don’t blame yourself for this. I chose. The door, the wall, every step of it.” His hand found mine and squeezed, barely enough to feel. “Used and spent aren’t the same thing. I spent myself.”

He smiled. The same smile.

“Not a bad way to go,” he said. “All things considered.”

His eyes drifted from mine, past Wil, and found Fela. Whatever was left in him gathered there.

“Fela,” he said. Barely a breath.

His eyes closed.

And then, in a field twelve miles from Renere, under a sky full of stars and the moonlight he’d always loved, Simmon stopped.

Fela screamed.

I will not try to set down what that sounded like. It scattered birds out of the trees a quarter-mile distant, and that is all I am willing to say about it.

Wilem caught her when she fell and held her and said nothing. His hands shook. His eyes were dry.

Devi stood apart, arms crossed, the sympathy lamp in her hand flickering once, twice, three times.

And I.

I knelt in the grass beside the body of the best person I had ever known, and I said his name.

“Sim.”

Quietly.

“Sim.”

He didn’t answer. The moonlight fell on his face, silver and gentle, and his face wore the look it always had when he’d just worked out a difficult problem.

We buried him before dawn.

We had no tools, no time, no luxury of ritual. Fela knelt and put both hands flat on the frozen ground, as I had seen her lay them on the Archives’ stone, and waited, as though it might open for her. It would not answer. After a while Wil took her hands off the ground, one and then the other, and went to gather fieldstones. We laid Sim in a hollow of the field where the ground dipped, and over him Wilem built a cairn, stacking the stones with the care of a man building something that must endure.

Fela sang a fragment of a Modegan melody I didn’t know, an old one her mother had taught her. It came out raw and cracked and beautiful.

Devi said nothing. She stood with her arms crossed and her lamp dimmed and her face a mask, and when Fela’s song ended, she turned and walked to the road and waited.

I took Sim’s coat from my own shoulders and put it around Fela’s, and I said goodbye.

Just the word, spoken into the grey light between the stars and the sunrise.

“Goodbye.”

Then I stood. Wil put something around my shoulders that was lighter than any cloak had a right to be, and it was a mile down the road before I knew it for the shaed.

Dawn found us walking east, in a world that didn’t know us yet.

For one more morning, we were four people walking east.

Just four, carrying five.