Chapter 71: The Confrontation

I COULD NOT do what she was asking.

I had done terrible things in my life. I had killed. I had stolen. I had burned and broken and betrayed. But this—standing before the woman I loved, with the power to silence her forever—this was beyond me.

“There has to be another way,” I said.

“There isn’t.” The Yllish knots on Denna’s skin were tightening, pulsing, trying to force the final note from her throat. Blood was running freely from her nose now, her body fighting against her will. “Kvothe, please. I can’t hold it much longer.”

“The door’s already closing. Cinder’s gone. If we just wait—”

“The door isn’t closing.” Her voice cracked. “Look at it.”

I looked.

She was right. The crack in reality wasn’t shrinking. It was holding—stable, fixed, waiting. The darkness beyond it churned with things that had no names, shapes that hurt the mind to comprehend. And I understood: Cinder hadn’t gone through to escape. He’d gone through to hold it open from the other side.

The song had been designed to unlock the door.

Cinder was the one who would keep it open.

And Denna was the bridge between them — the channel through which the power flowed, whether the song was finished or not.

I did what any arcanist would do. I reached for sympathy.

The song was vibration. Sound was vibration. And sympathy was, at its heart, the art of connecting two things and making one obey the laws of the other. I had bound heat to cold, iron to iron, motion to stillness. I had split my mind into three pieces and held six bindings simultaneously while Ben watched with raised eyebrows. This was what I knew. This was what I was.

I seized my Alar — that deep, practiced certainty that was the foundation of every sympathy binding I had ever made — and I split my mind. One piece held the vibrations of the song as I perceived them, the frequencies pouring from Denna’s throat and feeding the crack. The second piece held the concept of stillness — not silence, not absence, but the physical cessation of vibration, the way a hand pressed against a bell stops it from ringing.

I forged the link. Bound the song-vibrations to stillness. Poured my will into the connection like water into a vessel.

For one glorious moment, it worked.

The sound dimmed. Denna gasped as the compulsion on her throat eased. The Yllish knots on her skin flickered, their blazing white dimming to a sullen amber. The crack in reality stopped widening. I could feel the binding holding, taut as a bowstring, my Alar like iron —

Then the song shifted.

Not the way music shifts. The way a river shifts when you try to dam it with your hands. The Yllish writing on Denna’s skin wasn’t producing sound the way a throat produces sound, through air and vibration and the mechanical physics that sympathy could touch. It was producing something deeper. Something that operated beneath the level where sympathy’s laws applied, the way gravity operates beneath the level where you can argue with it.

My binding shattered.

The backlash hit me like a hammer between the eyes. My Alar — that thing I had spent years honing to a razor’s edge, the bedrock certainty on which I had built my entire career as an arcanist — cracked. Not broke. Cracked. The way a bell cracks when you strike it wrong: still whole, still functional, but with a flaw running through it that would never fully mend, that would color every note it ever rang again.

I staggered. Blood burst from my nose, hot and sudden, and for a terrible moment my vision went dark and I couldn’t remember my own name. The song roared back louder than before, the knots on Denna’s skin blazing white again, and the crack in reality lurched wider.

Sympathy couldn’t touch this. This was Yllish magic, old magic, a system that predated the University and all its careful theories by millennia. It operated in a place my training couldn’t reach — above sympathy, beyond sygaldry, in the deep grammar of reality that only naming could address.

And naming had already failed. I had called wind, fire, stone against the crack in the hall before Cinder fled. Each name had broken against the darkness like waves against a cliff.

There was only one thing left. The thing I had been carrying inside me, growing in the silence since my family burned. The thing Elodin had warned me never to speak.

“As long as I’m alive,” Denna said, reading my expression, “the connection exists. The door stays open. The things on the other side can push through.”

“Then we’ll find a way to break the connection—”

“The connection IS me.” Tears mixed with the blood on her face. “He wrote it into my flesh. Made it part of who I am. You can’t break it without breaking me.”

“Denna—”

“Please.” Her hand found mine, gripped tight despite the trembling. “I’m begging you. Don’t make me die slowly. Don’t make me watch as those things come through and destroy everything. Give me this. Give me an ending I can choose.”

I looked at our joined hands.

At the woman who had been my joy and my torment since the first moment I saw her.

At the silence waiting inside me, patient and hungry.

And I knew she was right.

Her hand found mine. Her grip was weak but certain.

“You’d think,” she said, “one of us would have learned how to say goodbye by now.”

I couldn’t speak.

“It’s all right.” She squeezed my hand. “We were never any good at the easy things.”

The crack in reality pulsed. Something on the other side pressed against it — not physical pressure, but metaphysical, the weight of a world trying to bleed into ours.

“Do it now,” Denna said. “Before I lose control completely. Before the song finishes itself.”

I reached for the silence.

“STOP!”

The King’s voice shattered my concentration.

Roderic Calanthis had recovered from his confusion. He stood now at the edge of the glowing floor, his guards flanking him, his chain of office catching the hellish light from the crack in reality. His face was a mask of fury and fear and something else—the desperate authority of a man watching his world fall apart.

“I am the King of Vintas! I will not have my kingdom destroyed by—by—” He gestured wildly at Denna, at me, at the darkness bleeding through from another world. “Whatever this is!”

“Your Majesty,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “you need to leave. Now. Take your guards and—”

“I will not be ordered about by some University charlatan!” He strode forward, onto the glowing tiles. His guards hesitated, then followed. “Lord Ferule promised me power. Control. A new order for the Four Corners. And now he’s vanished into—into that—and left me with this chaos!”

“He used you,” I said. “The same way he used everyone. The same way he used her.”

“I am not some pawn to be used and discarded!” Roderic’s voice cracked. “I am the King! The guardian of the realm! My family has protected this kingdom for centuries!”

“Then protect it now. Leave this hall. Let me do what needs to be done.”

“What needs to be done?” He laughed—a sound with no humor in it. “You mean murder this woman? Silence her with sorcery?” He shook his head. “I’ve watched. I’ve listened. You claim to love her, yet you’re prepared to kill her?”

“She’s asking me to.”

“And you’re willing to do it.” Something ugly crossed his face. “What kind of man kills the woman he loves?”

I had no answer for that.

Denna’s hand tightened on mine.

“Kvothe.” Her voice was weaker now. “I can’t… much longer…”

“I know. I know.” I turned back to the King. “Your Majesty, please. For the sake of your kingdom, your people—”

“My people?” He laughed again. “My people are fleeing. My court is in ruins. My alliance with the Jakis family is certainly destroyed, along with my daughter’s engagement and any hope of—” He stopped. Drew a breath. “No. I will not stand aside while you commit murder in my palace.”

He stepped closer.

Between me and Denna.

“If there is to be a sacrifice tonight,” the King said, “it will be by my command. My decision. Not yours.”

“Get out of my way.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me too?” His smile was bitter. “Go ahead. Add regicide to your list of crimes. The world already calls you Kvothe the Bloodless. Why not make it Kvothe the Kingkiller?”

The words hit me like a blow.

But I didn’t have time to process them.

Because at that moment, Denna lost control.

The final note tore itself from her throat.

It wasn’t beautiful anymore—it was a scream, a howl, the sound of a soul being ripped apart by forces it could never have contained. The Yllish knots on her skin blazed white, bright enough to leave afterimages, and the crack in reality began to widen again.

Fast.

Too fast.

The King stumbled backward. His ceremonial sword came up, a useless reflex, and for an instant I saw him clearly—saw past the monarch and the politician and the shrewd man who had survived thirty years on a throne. Beneath all that was a father. A man whose daughter was somewhere in this palace. A man who had spent his whole life protecting things he loved from threats he could measure.

He could not measure this.

“Guards!” he shouted. “Get everyone—”

The darkness from the crack touched him. Not physically. It brushed against him the way a cold draft brushes against bare skin, but what it carried was not cold. It was absence. The absolute, annihilating absence of a place where nothing had ever existed and nothing ever would.

Roderic Calanthis went rigid. The sword fell from his fingers and rang against the glowing tiles, and the sound of it was swallowed before it reached the walls.

I looked at the crack. At the things pressing through.

I looked at Denna. At the knots consuming her.

I looked at the King, frozen between us, his body a barrier against something his courage could not comprehend.

And I understood, with the cold, absolute clarity of a man standing at the bottom of every mistake he has ever made, that there was no third option. No clever trick. No last-minute rescue. The sleeping mind does not lie, and mine was telling me the same truth Denna had been telling me for minutes that felt like hours.

The song was in her blood. The door was in the song. The only way to close the door was to silence the song.

The only way to silence the song was to silence the singer.

I had saved Sim at the four-plate door by being strong enough. By being fast enough. By arriving in time. But this was different. This was not a problem that strength could solve or speed could outrun. This was the kind of problem where every solution was a wound, and the only question was who would bleed.

Denna’s eyes found mine through the blazing light.

Do it.

Not with words. With everything else. With the knowledge that we had always been heading here, to this moment, to this impossible choice, and that she had accepted it before I had, the way she had always been braver than me in the ways that mattered most.

“NO!”

I spoke the Name of Silence.