Chapter 73: North

WE KEPT TO the deer paths.

I don’t mean the wide-packed hunting trails that nobles ride in autumn. I mean the real ones, narrow threads of pressed earth winding through bracken and bramble, invisible to anyone who hasn’t learned to read bent grass and scuffed bark.

Wil found them. He’d grown up in the hill country near Ralien, where a boy who couldn’t read trackless country was a boy who didn’t eat. He walked at the front of our ragged line and read the land as easily as a scholar reads a page he knows by heart, without seeming to work at it at all.

I walked behind him. Then Fela. Then Devi, who brought up the rear, watching the trees behind us like a woman who trusts no one and sees no reason to start.

Four of us, where once there had been more.

I wore the shaed day and night now, and the others had stopped remarking on it. Wil had thought to take it and Caesura, bundle and all, from Devi’s cellar before she led us down into the tunnels, one of a dozen quiet things he did that kept us alive in the days when I was too broken to keep myself. In the deep green shade of the forest paths it made me nearly invisible, a moving absence that the eye slid over without catching. My lute had stayed at the lodgings, and Ben’s letter in its lining; by then the Regent’s men had the lodgings, and I have never known what they did with either.

The countryside between Renere and the Eld is farmland, mostly. Rolling hills stitched together with low stone walls and hedgerows gone wild with blackthorn. The soil is dark and rich, good for a farmer and terrible for a fugitive. Open ground, few trees, nowhere to disappear. Every rise showed us the road we were avoiding, the Great Stone Road laid across the country like a scar, busy with riders who were not merchants.

We moved through drainage ditches and along creek beds, through stands of birch as thin and pale as bone. The winter air carried woodsmoke from farms we couldn’t see and the last sweetness of apples rotting in untended orchards. Twice we heard hoofbeats and pressed flat into the bracken, faces in the dirt, breathing through our mouths.

The second time, riders passed close enough for the creak of leather and jingle of tack to reach us. Blue and white pennants. The Crown’s colors, and there was a new man wearing them now, one who had made himself out of the dying.

When they passed, Devi rose first, picking bramble thorns from her sleeve as neatly and unhurriedly as a woman picking lock pins. None of us spoke. We had learned that silence was safer than speech, and faster.

Fela waded through each step, deliberate and careful, setting each foot down like a cup filled too full. When a branch snapped underfoot she stopped walking, as though someone had said her name in a dark room. Her hands stayed at her sides, fingers curled, reaching for nothing.

She hadn’t cried since Renere. Hadn’t spoken much either. She moved through the world as you move through a house where someone is sleeping, carefully, so as not to wake whatever waited on the other side of the quiet.

She carried Sim’s coat folded on top of her pack, neither worn nor packed away, riding there in the open air. Twice I saw her hand drift back to press the wool flat when the breeze lifted a corner, as though the coat might get cold.

That evening, Devi built a smokeless fire in a hollow between two hills and said the thing we’d all been thinking.

“We need to split up.”

A bat flickered overhead and was gone.

“Four people are too visible. Too slow. Too easy to track.” She laid the words down carefully, one at a time, counting them out like coins. “Kvothe is the one they want. If we separate, the soldiers follow him. We disappear.”

“I’m not leaving,” Wil said flatly and immediately, as a man states a fact about the weather.

“I’m not asking you to.” Devi met his eyes. “Fela and I go west, back toward the University. If there’s a way to fix what’s happening to him, the oath-breaking and the power loss, it’ll be found there.”

“And if they’re watching the University?” Wil said.

“They will be. But Fela is still enrolled. She has every right to be there. And I—” Devi smiled, and it was a thin, sharp thing, a blade worn down to nothing but edge. “I have resources in Imre that don’t require me to walk through the front gates.”

“We don’t know what we’d be looking for,” Fela said. Her voice was rough with disuse, the first full sentence she’d spoken since morning. “Oath-binding at this level isn’t in Teccam, or Malcaf, or any of the naming primers.”

“No,” Devi agreed. “But whatever of the restricted stacks survived might: the old naming texts, the ones Lorren kept behind three locks and a warding stone. I still have the codex and the folio, too. And Elodin.” She paused. “If anyone understands what happens when a namer breaks an oath sworn on his own name, it would be him.”

Fela folded her hands in her lap and looked at them. Wil said nothing at all, his eyes steady on the flames.

“And the Seven,” Fela said to her hands. “That thing in the cellar said he was one of the locks. If you mean to go after Cinder, somebody had better find out what happens to a lock when the man holding it dies.”

I let that go by as though I had not heard it.

“Devi’s right,” I said.

They all looked at me.

“Two groups are harder to track than one. The soldiers know what they’re hunting, a red-haired man traveling with companions. If you’re not with me, you’re not a target. And if anyone can dig an answer out of the University’s bones, it’s you two.” I looked at Fela. “You studied with Elodin. You know the old naming texts better than anyone outside the Masters.”

“The Archives are extensive but not omniscient,” Devi said. “However. He has a point.”

Fela looked between them, then at me. Her eyes were dark and enormous in the firelight, and behind them I could see her weighing two bad choices slowly against each other.

“I’ll go with Devi,” she said. “The oath, and Elodin, and the locks, since nobody else means to ask.”

There was a truth underneath it that Devi hadn’t bothered to say aloud: if we stayed together and the soldiers found us, they would all die for me, and for nothing else.

I would not add their names to the list.

Later, when Fela had rolled herself in her blanket and Wil had gone up the hill to sit the first watch, Devi came around the fire with an oilcloth packet in her hands and sat down quietly beside me.

“Denna’s notes,” she said. “She left them with me the morning of the ball. For after, she said.” She set the packet on my knee and kept her hand firmly on it. “You can have them until first light. Then they go west with me.”

I did not open it. “You knew,” I said. “Before the cord.”

“Three weeks before the fire, she came to my door alone. You’d told her the day before that I’d taught you how to undo what he wrote on her.” Devi’s mouth twisted. “When I read you that cord at my table, I was reading you what I’d already seen on her arm.”

“She told me you only knew the theory.”

“She asked me not to tell you, and I kept her confidence.” She did not look away, and she did not apologize. “You’d have done otherwise.”

Then she told me what she had read on that arm by her stair lamp. Under all his later cutting there was one old command of Cinder’s, still plain to anyone who read Yllish as well as she did: find the woman who keeps the counter-pattern, and end her work. Beside it, pricked in with a pin and soot, was a single crude knot in Denna’s own hand.

“The knot by her wrist,” I said slowly. “The clumsy one.”

“She tied it the night she went to Reta’s door. It held for a breath.” Devi’s fingers had closed hard on the oilcloth. “Her hands. His will. And she was there for it. I said as much to her face in my doorway, and then I taught her anyway, because Reta spent eleven years on that pattern and never once had anyone who fought it from the inside, and finishing it was the only thing I could still do for her. That shadow in the cellar called her knots self-taught. The grammar was mine, and the rest she did alone.”

“She told me it was her hands,” I said. “By a stream, riding south. I tried to take it off her, and she wouldn’t let me.”

“No. She wouldn’t.” Devi looked steadily into the fire. “I never forgave her for Reta. Now I can’t.”

We sat a while without speaking.

“That dawn under the palace,” she said at last, “I asked you for a solution and you sold me a possibility. I knew perfectly well you were lying, and I let you, because I was keeping what she meant to do and you were keeping what it would cost her. Between the two of us we had all of it, and neither of us put it on the table.”

That was not all she told me that night. There was a serving girl at a mirror-door, and a scrap of paper in a brazier, and a lamp that burned under a door in Renere until nearly dawn, and one evening at her own table seven days before the fire, which she gave me as near to word for word as she could manage. I have given you each of those where it belongs.

She stood and brushed briskly at her knees. “First light,” she said, and went back around the fire to her blanket.

I read the notes by what was left of the fire until the sky went grey.

Fela stood in front of me the next morning, pack on her shoulders. The morning light found the new lines around her mouth and something in how she held her shoulders that hadn’t been there a week ago.

“Kvothe,” she said. And stopped. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Then don’t. It’s overrated, talking.”

She almost smiled. “Sim would have laughed at that.”

“Sim laughed at everything. It was his best quality.”

She stepped forward and held on, her arms tight around me, her heart going quickly against my chest. She smelled of woodsmoke and crushed grass and something faintly floral underneath it.

“Don’t die,” she whispered fiercely. “I can’t lose anyone else.”

“I’ll try.”

She pulled back and touched my chest over my heart, her palm pressed flat there. “He’s in there. Under the silence and the grief. Sim believed that. I believe it too.”

She turned to Wil then, and they spoke in low voices I didn’t try to overhear. Wil gripped her shoulder once, hard, and said one more thing I did not hear, and she nodded as though she meant to hold him to it.

Devi took Denna’s notes back from me without a word and buttoned them carefully inside her coat. Then she looked me in the eye and said: “Don’t die, Kvothe. You still owe me.”

“Owe you what?”

“Interest. Four talents, and whatever the standard rate has made of them since. I keep good records.”

She had closed that ledger herself at the Penny and Hart, and we both knew it. She was giving me a reason to come back.

“Devi, I don’t think the standard rate applies when the borrower is fleeing a regicide charge.”

“The standard rate always applies.” She reached up and straightened my collar, a gesture so unexpectedly maternal it closed my throat. Her small hands were steady. Her red-rimmed eyes were not. “Lord and lady, you’re going to survive this. Not because you deserve to. Your track record is equal parts luck and stupidity. But you’re too stubborn to die, and the world isn’t done with you yet.”

She dropped her hand. “Find somewhere safe. When you’ve figured out the oath, come find me.”

“Thank you, Devi.”

“Don’t thank me. Pay me.”

They walked west, following a sheep trail down toward the lowlands, two figures growing smaller against the grey morning. Fela was tall and straight-backed with Sim’s coat riding on her pack, and Devi walked small and sharp beside her, already reading the hills ahead.

They didn’t look back.

And then we were two.

Wil adjusted his pack and I adjusted mine, and we moved north without speaking. The path felt wider with only two sets of footsteps on it. Farmland gave way to rough pasture, tussocked grass and scattered hawthorn bent sideways by years of wind. Then the pasture thinned to scrub, gorse and heather and the hard grey soil that farmers give up on when it costs more to work than it gives back.

The sky lowered as we climbed. Hills grew steeper, rockier, trails less certain. By midday the rain came, no storm about it, just a steady soaking that arrived and stayed, patient as a creditor.

We walked through it. Nowhere to shelter, no reason to stop. The rain plastered my hair flat and turned the path to slick mud that grabbed at our boots. The shaed shed water like a duck’s back, but my boots were leather, and leather remembers water as a grudge remembers an insult.

In a shepherd’s shelter, three stone walls and a roof of rotting thatch, we wrung out our cloaks and shared the last of the dried meat. Through the open side I could see the land falling away to the south, the farmland we’d left and the road we’d avoided, the whole settled patchwork of it growing smaller and greyer behind us.

Wil asked the question I’d been waiting for. Or rather, he started to.

“Why are you here?” I said before he could frame it. “Why are you still with me?”

He considered this. Wil always tested words carefully for fit before he committed to them.

“Because you would do the same for me,” he said.

“That’s it?”

“That’s everything.” He picked at a splinter in the wall, working it loose with his thumbnail. “In Siaru, we have a word. Dehalan. The debt that is not a debt. The obligation you feel toward someone for who they are, whatever they have or have not done for you. Because being near them has made you more than you would have been alone.”

“That’s a lot of meaning for one word.”

“Siaru is efficient.” The rain softened outside, settling from a hammering to a hush. “You made me brave, Kvothe. Before I met you, I was careful. Studied hard, kept my head down. I followed every rule because rules were safe and safe was all I wanted.”

“I got you into trouble.”

“You got me into life.” For a breath I could see the banked fire burning behind his careful reserve, coals underneath the ash. “A man can be safe his whole life and never once be alive. I was that man. Then you sat down at my table in the Mess and started an argument about Teccam’s theory of narrative septagy and I understood I’d been holding my breath for nineteen years.”

His mouth moved as though there were more, and then he looked slowly out at the rain. “Sim was alive too,” he said, and for a long while he said nothing else.

I didn’t know what to say. So I did what Sim would have done, and gripped his arm.

He stood. “Rain’s letting up. We should move.”

We stepped back into the mud and the long grey road north. He walked a little closer to me than before. Neither of us mentioned it.

Three days later, the Eld swallowed us.

The forest didn’t thicken gradually. It closed around us. One moment we were walking through scrubland, the next the trees were simply there, sudden and enormous, trunks wider than houses, bark furrowed deep enough to be writing. The canopy swallowed the wind and the light turned green and underwater, the air thick with loam and the slow rot of centuries of fallen leaves. Somewhere above us an owl asked its slow question of the dark.

“We can slow down here,” Wil said, his voice instinctively lower. The forest demanded it. “The soldiers won’t come this deep.”

He was probably right. The Eld has a reputation, and that reputation is not kind. Farmers lose livestock to it. Hunters enter and don’t return. Children are warned away with stories of Sithe and skin dancers and things that have no name in any human language. The soldiers might be brave, but bravery has limits, and those limits tend to coincide with the tree line.

We found a spot where two ancient oaks had grown together, their roots forming a natural shelter, a hollow walled with living wood on three sides and open to a clearing where ferns grew waist-high. Wil built a real fire, since the canopy would scatter the smoke long before it reached the sky. We dried our clothes. We ate hot food for the first time in days.

The heat loosened my shoulders and my hands. I sat with my back against the oak’s trunk and watched the fire without thinking about what it meant or what came next. There was just the warmth of it and my own breathing, and for a few minutes that was nearly enough.

Somewhere far away, impossibly far, so distant it could only be imagination, I heard singing.

It was faint and high and beautiful, and there was something mad in it.

I didn’t know the song, and the words weren’t in any language I’d ever learned. It was only a voice rising from somewhere deep beneath the world, a thing you feel before you hear it.

I lay in the darkness and listened until there was nothing left to hear.