Chapter 72: Wanted

THE FIRE WAS too small for the dark.

Wil had built it in a shallow dip in the ground between two fallen oaks, the kind of fire a hunted man builds: low, smokeless, fed with dry wood that gives heat but not light, and barely enough of that to see by.

There were four of us around that fire, and we sat wrong. We had arranged ourselves in a circle meant for five, and the gap was louder than any of us.

Devi sat with her back against one of the oaks, a knife balanced across her knees, her eyes moving steadily over the dark beyond the firelight.

Wil was feeding the fire one stick at a time, breaking each to the same length and laying them out in an order that served no purpose at all. His hands were perfectly steady. He had not spoken in hours.

Fela sat apart, ten feet away or thereabouts, close enough to feel the fire’s warmth and far enough to be outside the circle of its light. She had drawn Sim’s coat around her shoulders. I had given it to her at the cairn; it had never been mine. She had not taken it off since.

I sat and watched the fire, and the fire watched me back.

It was Wil who set out five cups.

He did it without thinking, hands that have performed a task so many times the body no longer consults the mind. Tin cups, battered, pulled from his pack. One, two, three, four, five, set in a row on a flat stone.

He poured water into the first. The second. The third. The fourth.

His hand reached for the fifth cup and stopped.

He stood there, the water skin tilted, a thin stream catching firelight. Then he set the water skin down. Picked up the fifth cup. Turned it over in his hands, slowly. Set it down again, right side up, in its place in the row.

He poured water into it.

“He’d want a drink,” Wil said. His voice was rough.

Nobody touched the fifth cup.

It sat there all night, full, growing cold.

I should have felt more.

That is the shameful truth of it. Sim was my closest friend, the first person at the University who had looked at a half-feral Edema Ruh boy and seen something worth befriending. He had died twelve miles from Renere in Fela’s arms, and I should have been shattered by it.

But I was already shattered. I had broken myself on Denna, and by the time Sim died there was so little left of me that his death found no solid surface to strike against. Wind through a ruin.

Sim, who had deserved more of my attention in life, was being shortchanged again in death. I had enough left in me to recognize the unfairness of that, and nowhere near enough to fix it.

The fire had burned low to embers when Fela spoke.

“He got cold before anyone,” she said.

I looked up. She was staring at the coals, Sim’s coat pulled tight, her dark hair curtaining her face.

“Every night at Anker’s. Every evening in the courtyard. He’d be the first one to say it was cold. The rest of us comfortable and he’d be rubbing his arms, asking if anyone felt a draft.” She spoke level and careful, each word a piece of glass she was carrying across a room. “I used to tease him about it. Told him his blood was too thin. Too much noble breeding.”

She pulled the coat tighter.

“He’d be cold now,” she said. “He’d have his chair closest to the fire. He’d be complaining about the damp.” Her voice cracked, a hairline fracture through stone. “He’d be here.”

She didn’t cry.

She pressed her face into the collar of his coat and breathed in, and I looked away.

There was a night at the University. Third term, maybe fourth.

Sim and I were in his room in the Mews, supposedly studying for admissions. I was drilling him on chemistry, which he didn’t need, and he was helping me with history, which I did. The candles were guttering. The window was open to the warm night air, and somewhere across the courtyard someone was practicing the lute badly, the same four measures repeated with increasing desperation.

Sim had his feet on his desk and his chair tipped back at an angle that defied several laws of physics. He was reading aloud from Feltemi’s Observations on the Modegan Court, giving the old kings different voices, the queens, the mad dukes. He did it because Simmon could not encounter a story without inhabiting it.

Halfway through a passage about the Fastingsway War, he stopped.

“Kvothe,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Do you know what Feltemi’s epitaph was?”

“No.”

“‘He noticed things.’” Sim set the book on his chest and stared at the ceiling. “That’s all. He spent forty years documenting the political machinations of the most powerful court in the Four Corners, and all anyone put on his stone was: He noticed things.”

“That’s a good epitaph.”

“It’s a perfect epitaph.” He sat up, animated, sudden and total. “Because that’s the whole job, isn’t it? Noticing. Most people walk through the world with their eyes closed. They see what they expect to see. But the ones who matter, the ones who actually change things? They pay attention to the thing everyone else walks past.”

“Is that what you want on your stone? ‘He noticed things’?”

He thought about it. Genuinely thought about it, with his whole face involved, forehead to chin.

“No,” he said. “I’d want: ‘He was a good friend.’ Five words. No one needs more than five.”

He picked up the book and kept reading, and the bad lute player across the courtyard finally gave up, and the night settled into the quiet rhythm of two friends sharing a room and a task and the comfortable silence of people who did not need to perform for each other.

Wil found the book near midnight.

He was repacking his supplies, the methodical inventory of a careful man, when his hand closed on something he didn’t recognize. He drew it out and held it near the embers, turning it to catch the fading light.

A slim volume. Leather-bound. Worn soft at the corners from years of handling. I knew what it was before Wil opened it, because I had seen Sim carry it in his back pocket since my second term.

Teccam’s Theophany, the small traveler’s edition rather than the heavy scholarly one that sat on library shelves, the sort a man carried because a poem might save his life on a day when bread couldn’t. Sim had dog-eared a dozen pages, his handwriting filling the margins, cramped and eager, arguing with the dead poet, praising him, circling phrases he loved.

Wil turned to the inside cover. His face changed.

He passed the book to me without a word.

In Sim’s hand, in the quick, slanted script I knew as well as my own:

For whoever needs this after I don’t. The poems are better when you read them aloud. Trust me. —S

He had quietly slipped it into Wil’s pack before the ball, before any of it.

Wil closed the book and held it against his chest. Then he wrapped it in a cloth and placed it at the bottom of his pack, where it would be safe.

None of us spoke.

Devi stood. The motion was sudden, economical, the snap of a woman who has allowed herself exactly as much grief as she can afford and is now drawing the account closed. She sheathed the knife, pulled her pack straps snug, and looked at each of us in turn.

“Alveron has had riders out since yesterday,” she said. “Messengers to every garrison between here and Atur. By this time tomorrow, every soldier in the Four Corners will know Kvothe’s name and face.”

“They already know my name,” I said.

“Not like this.” Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. “Before, you were a story. A rumor. The clever boy who could call the wind and charm his way out of anything. Now you’re the man who killed the King of Vintas in front of three hundred witnesses.”

“I didn’t—”

“I know you didn’t mean to. That won’t matter to the broadsheets, and it certainly won’t matter to Alveron.”

“North,” Wilem said. He had not looked up from the fire. “Through the Eld. Away from the roads and the cities. The Eld is large, and we are small.”

“East first,” Devi said. “Ralien. I have people there who owe me more than they’d like, and the Eld will still be there next span.” She said it briskly, as though the thing were already settled, and after a moment Wil shrugged and let it be. “We need to move before dawn. If we reach the river by tomorrow night we can be across before they think to watch the fords.”

It was not heartless. Devi understood that grief will walk beside you every mile whether you sit still or not, so you might as well walk.

I looked at the fifth cup, still full, growing cold beside the dying fire.

“Leave it,” Wil said. He was already on his feet, pack shouldered, face unreadable. “He’s had his drink.”

We left the cup where it sat, and the fire to burn itself out, and we walked steadily into the dark.

THE FIRST POSTER appeared in Tarbean.

I know this because I saw it later, much later, nailed to the door of a chandler’s shop on Dockside. Cheap paper, bad ink, a broadsheet that smeared in the rain. But the words were clear enough, and the woodcut image was close enough to the truth that my stomach clenched.

WANTED FOR REGICIDE: the red-haired arcanist known as KVOTHE. One thousand royals for his capture. Five hundred for information. By order of the Lord Regent Alveron.

They got the hair right. They always get the hair right. Everything else was wrong: the jaw too square, the eyes too close together, the expression one of sneering malice that made me look like a storybook villain.

That came later, the poster and the price on my head.

We walked through the morning, keeping to hedgerows and drainage ditches, skirting farmland, avoiding the Great Stone Road where it cut through the countryside. The road was already busy. We could see riders from our hiding places in the brush, not just merchants and travelers, but soldiers. Groups of three and four, wearing blue and white, moving with urgency.

Blue and white, and none of the Maer’s old green and grey among them.

The Crown’s colors, and the Crown was plainly the Regent’s now.

Alveron had moved as fast as Devi had said he would. Rosiel was not of age, and he was next in line, and the first act of his regency was to hunt me down.

I couldn’t blame him. From his perspective, I was a murderer. An arcanist who had killed the King with dark magic at his own daughter’s engagement ball.

A cart rattled past on the road below, close enough that I could smell the hay and hear the driver cursing his mule. We pressed flat against the hedgerow until it passed.

In the cities, in Renere and Atur, in the courts and counting houses where power lives, I was an assassin, and the soldiers marched with my description in their belt pouches, checking every redhead they encountered.

But in the small places, the villages, the roadside inns where tinkers shared news over warm beer, the story was different.

A man had killed a king, and not just any man: a boy who had come from nothing, who had fought his way into the University on cleverness and desperation, who had challenged the powerful and thumbed his nose cheerfully at every authority that tried to keep him in his place.

In those quiet voices, Kvothe the Kingkiller was not a villain. He was a folk hero.

I learned this from the peddler who came to our fire that evening. When he had finished telling us his own darker version, which I will come to, he mentioned almost as an aside that a farmer’s wife in the next valley had expressed the opinion that “if the King was fool enough to get himself killed by a boy with red hair and a lute, maybe the King deserved what he got.”

The opinion was treasonous, of course, and seditious enough to earn a woman a public flogging in the current climate. But it was spoken anyway, in the privacy of a farmhouse kitchen, in the spaces where official stories can’t reach.

The world was choosing sides, and not all of them were against me.

This should have comforted me, and it didn’t, because the people who saw me as a hero were as wrong as the people who saw me as a villain.

We rested at midday in a barn.

The farm was abandoned, or at least unoccupied. The house was shuttered, the fields fallow. Devi checked for traps and locks with the efficient paranoia of a woman in the lending business. She found nothing more dangerous than mice.

We ate cold food from our packs. Bread, cheese, dried meat that Devi had somehow procured during our escape. I don’t know when she’d had time. But Devi always managed.

Fela sat apart, her back against a hay bale, staring at her hands. She hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t spoken.

That’s when the barn door creaked.

Devi had a binding half-formed before the figure stumbled through. A man, alone, wearing clothes that had been expensive three days ago. One sleeve torn. Boots caked thick with plowland mud.

Ambrose Jakis looked at me from across the barn. Neither of us moved.

I’d never seen him without the armor of wealth and position, the tailored coats and the practiced sneer and the certainty that the world was arranged for his convenience. Take all of that away and what remained was just a man. Younger than he’d seemed. Frightened.

“The roads,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “Soldiers everywhere. They’re arresting anyone connected to the Jakis name. My father—” He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. “My father was in his study when they came. He’s in chains by now. Or dead.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his torn sleeve. “I was trying to reach our holdings before the Regent’s men did. This was the only roof within a mile of the road.”

“The engagement,” Devi said. “Jakis-Calanthis. Your family was tied to the throne.”

“Was.” He laughed, and it was an ugly, broken sound. “The King is dead. The alliance is ash. And every lord who smiled at my father last month is falling over himself to prove he was never a Jakis man.” He looked at me again. “You did this.”

“I did a lot of things.”

“My family is destroyed. Our lands will be seized. Our name—” He couldn’t finish.

“There’s bread,” I said. “If you’re hungry.”

He stared at me with the bewildered look of a man whose rules no longer applied.

He sat in the far corner, as far from us as the walls allowed. He ate the bread. He didn’t speak again.

Sim was gone, and Denna was gone, and we were still here, chewing dried meat in a stranger’s barn, pretending that survival was the same thing as victory.

“We need to talk about what happens next,” Devi said. “We can’t run forever.”

“We can run for a while,” Wil said.

“A while isn’t a plan.”

“Plans require information. We have none.” He chewed methodically. “We don’t know how wide the search is. We don’t know if the Arcanum will protect Kvothe or condemn him.”

“They’ll condemn him,” Devi said. “The Masters will do whatever preserves the University. If that means disavowing their most famous student, they’ll do it without blinking.”

“Kilvin wouldn’t—”

“Kilvin would.” She said it gently, which made it worse. “He’d hate it. He’d rage and curse and break a crucible in his workshop. But he’d do it, because the alternative is the University torn apart by a kingdom looking for someone to punish.”

Underneath the strategy, there was only one thing I could think about. Denna’s face. The moment the silence took her. And the King, standing between us, three steps from me. A man I had stopped seeing.

We left at dusk, while Ambrose was still sleeping, curled on his side in the straw with one arm over his face as though to keep the light off: asleep, or letting us think so. That way he could say truthfully that he had not seen which way we went. A word from him to the first patrol would have bought his family a pardon, and so far as I ever heard, he never bought it. He had known Simmon for years, and in all those hours in the barn he never once asked where he was.

I never saw him again.

That evening, we crossed the river at a shallow ford Wil found by reading the terrain. The water was winter-cold, waist-deep, and we waded across holding our packs above our heads.

On the other side, we dried ourselves in the lee of a stone wall and built a small fire in a hollow where the light wouldn’t carry. Devi ate standing up and went quietly back toward the road to see who was on it.

“He knew,” Fela said suddenly.

I looked at her.

“Sim. He knew he was going to die. Before the ball, he told me, ‘If this goes wrong, remember that I chose to be here. I chose this.’” Her voice broke. “Which is impossible.”

She was quiet a while. When she spoke again her voice had gone flat and level as a laid stone.

“He chose to be there,” she said. “He didn’t get to choose knowing.”

She turned from the fire and looked directly at me, which she had not done since the cairn.

“When we came up out of that library, Devi asked you if you’d found a way, and you told her it was a possibility.” Her hands had closed tightly on the sleeves of Sim’s coat. “At the University I asked you to find out what it cost before anyone paid it. Did you?”

I could have lied to her. It would have been easy, and it was the last easy thing I had left.

“There was a pamphlet,” I said. “Written by someone who had watched it done. Whoever becomes the lock stays awake while it happens, all the way to the end.”

Fela did not move. The fire ticked and settled between us.

“You knew that,” she said, “when Sim said he’d do the loud part.”

“Yes.”

I had no defense to make, and I did not try to make one.

“Now I know,” Fela said quietly, and turned back to the fire.

Then a man walked into our camp.

He came from the road, following the smell of our fire. A peddler by the look of him, not a proper tinker but one of the lesser breed, a man with a mule and a sack of goods. He settled himself on a stone though we had not invited him. My hood was up. The firelight was low. He didn’t look at me twice.

“Gods bless a fire on a night like this. You’ve heard, then? About Renere?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He pulled a flask from his coat and drank. “Terrible thing. The King murdered at his own daughter’s ball. They’re saying it was an arcanist. A Ruh. Infiltrated the ball with magic disguises, walked right past the guards.”

I said nothing.

“Stood right there in front of the throne and spoke a word.” His voice dropped to the hush that voices find when they reach the part of the story they’ve been saving. “One word. And the King dropped dead. Didn’t bleed, didn’t scream, just stopped.” He snapped his fingers. “Dark magic. The darkest there is.”

Fela’s hand found my arm. A warning. I didn’t need it. I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to. The story had closed around my throat.

“And the reason,” the peddler leaned forward. “They say the King had wronged the Edema Ruh. Some tax, some law. So they sent their best. A boy raised from nothing who’d learned the dark arts at the University itself.” He drank from his flask. “Kvothe, his name is. You can hear it, can’t you? The hardness of it.”

The terrible part was that he was not entirely wrong.

The disguises, the planning, the Ruh sending their best were all invention, the scaffolding of a story built to bear weight it was never designed to carry. But beneath it was a truth I could not deny. I had chosen to confront the Chandrian at the King’s own ball. I had reached for a power with no bottom to it, and people had died who should not have died.

The peddler finished his tale and wandered back to the road. He never knew he’d told the Kingkiller his own story.

Later, Devi came back from scouting. Her face was grim.

“It’s everywhere,” she said. “Every town, every crossroads. ‘The Kingkiller,’ they’re calling you. Alveron has offered a thousand royals for your capture. Five hundred for information. He’s mobilized every garrison south of the Eld.”

She sat down, pulling her cloak tight. “There’s something else. Talk of creatures in the wild places. Farmers losing livestock to something that isn’t wolves, isn’t bandits, isn’t anything they have a name for.”

“Scrael,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“Spider-like things. Made of something that isn’t quite bone, isn’t quite stone. Fast. Vicious. Nearly impossible to kill unless you know how.” I paused. “I think they come from the other side. From behind the Doors of Stone.”

“But the doors are closed,” Wil said. “You closed them.”

“I slowed them. The doors aren’t a single portal, they’re a boundary. And when I spoke the Name of Silence, I think I damaged the boundary even as I kept it from tearing open completely. Things are leaking through. Small things, for now. Scrael. Perhaps other things I don’t have names for.”

“Will it get worse?”

“Yes.”

“So the world is breaking,” Devi said. “Creatures are coming through. A regent is hunting you.” She ticked the points off on her fingers. “Anything else?”

“I can’t play the lute anymore,” I said.

The silence that followed was worse than the dark.

“My failing fingers,” I continued, holding them up. They trembled in the firelight. “It started in the tunnels. A numbness. A clumsiness. They forgot what they were for.”

“That could be shock,” Fela said.

“I don’t think it’s shock.” I curled my left hand into a fist, or tried to. The fingers closed slowly, unevenly. “I swore an oath to Denna, on my name, my power, and my good left hand. I swore to free her, and I didn’t. I think it’s the oath. I don’t know.”

Devi’s face went pale.

“That’s deep naming,” she said slowly. “Oath-binding on the level of the old namers. I’ve read about it and never once seen it, and I’ve seen a man’s hands shake for a month after a good deal less than you went through.”

“Maybe.” I let my hand fall. “But my sympathy is getting harder. The bindings don’t hold as they used to. And this hand…”

Wil said nothing. I didn’t wonder at it until later.

“We need to find someone who can help,” Devi said. “Elodin—”

“The University is the first place they’ll look for me.”

“Then someone else. A namer. A knower. Someone who understands oath-binding.”

“I don’t think anyone understands oath-binding anymore. That knowledge is older than the University, Devi, from a time when a promise made on your name could reshape what you were.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We keep moving,” I said. “North. Into the Eld. Away from everything. And we hope that whatever is happening to me happens slowly enough for me to do what still needs to be done.”

Wil looked at Devi, and this time she did not argue.

“Which is?”

I thought of Cinder, wounded and fleeing and not dead.

“Finish the story,” I said. “One way or another.”

We slept in shifts that night. Or rather, the others did. I lay awake and stared at the stars and tried not to think about Denna.

I failed. I always failed at not thinking about Denna. Even when she was alive, especially when she was alive, she occupied a part of my mind that no amount of discipline could evict. A constant vibration waiting to become sound.

Now that vibration was silence.

I closed my eyes and saw her face as I carried it from Imre, from the Eolian, from a hundred rooftops and moonlit walks and conversations that danced around the thing we never quite said.

Her smile. It started at the corners of her mouth and worked slowly up to her eyes, quiet and secret, because happiness was something she had to approach carefully.

Her voice when she was only talking. She could take a simple observation about the weather or the moonlight and make it sound like the opening line of a ballad.

Her hands. Quick, clever, always moving. Reaching for mine.

All of it gone, and I had done it. I could blame Cinder, and did, and it took nothing off my share.

In the morning, the world had changed again.

The light was thinner than it should have been. The birdsong was muted. The wind carried a faint scent of metal and char that shouldn’t have been there, this far from any city.

The world was fracturing, though not yet in ways most people would notice. But to someone who had stood at the breaking point, the signs were unmistakable, as if a familiar room had been quietly rearranged in the night.

A fence post split lengthwise, struck by lightning in clear weather. A stream running uphill for a dozen feet before gravity remembered itself. A bird flying the same circle, over and over, caught in a loop of time or space.

“The boundary is weakening,” I said. “Faster than I thought.”

“How long?” Wil asked.

“I don’t know. Months. Maybe less.” I watched the bird complete its circle, begin again. “The Name of Silence closed the breach, but it damaged the frame. The longer it goes, the more things slip through. Scrael now. Bigger things later. And eventually…”

“The door opens.”

“The door opens.”

We broke camp in silence and headed north. Behind us, the bird went patiently on with its endless circle.