Chapter 74: Aftermath

THE SAFEHOUSE WAS a wine cellar beneath a merchant’s shop.

Devi had contacts everywhere—of course she did. The merchant owed her money, or secrets, or both. He asked no questions when she appeared at his back door with three battered University students and a red-haired man who couldn’t stop staring at nothing.

We descended into the cool darkness beneath the city.

I sat on a barrel of Vintish red and watched dust motes drift in the light of a single candle.

Denna was dead.

The King was dead.

And somewhere above us, a kingdom was beginning to burn.

“We need to keep moving.” Devi’s voice was brittle with forced calm. “The city gates won’t stay open long. Once word spreads about what happened at the palace—”

“Word has already spread.” Fela was at the cellar’s one small window, watching the street above. “I can see soldiers. They’re going door to door.”

“Looking for us?”

“Looking for him.” She didn’t look at me. Couldn’t look at me. “The red hair. It’s distinctive.”

“Then we cut it. Dye it. Whatever we have to do.”

“It won’t matter.” Simmon was sitting on the floor, his back against a wine rack, his face grey in the candlelight. “They’ll have descriptions from the nobles. Height, build, manner of dress. Half the court saw him fight Cinder. Saw him—”

He stopped.

Saw him kill the King.

No one said it. No one had to.

I should have been planning. Should have been strategizing. Should have been the clever Kvothe who always found a way out, who always had a trick up his sleeve, who always managed to land on his feet no matter how far he fell.

But I couldn’t think.

Every time I tried, I saw Denna’s face. The blood at the corner of her mouth. The love in her eyes as she asked me to do the one thing I could never forgive myself for doing.

And then—worse—I saw the King’s face. The surprise. The confusion. The silent question in his eyes as his heart stopped.

Why?

I hadn’t even been aiming at him. Hadn’t even been thinking about him. He was just… there. In the way. An obstacle I hadn’t noticed until it was too late.

That was the part I couldn’t accept.

Not that I had killed a king.

That I had killed him by accident.

Something shifted inside me—not hope, not forgiveness, but something harder. A resolution. Haliax had told me the truth in that cellar, and the truth was a weight I’d carry until it crushed me or I learned to stand under it. The Maer would be king. They’d hunt me forever. And Denna had chosen her own ending.

I stood.

“We need to move.”

“The city is locked down—”

“Then we go under it. Through the old ways. The paths that existed before Renere was built.” I looked at Devi. “You know about those, don’t you? The spaces between?”

Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know about those?”

“Because I know you. And I know you never do anything without an escape route.” I started toward the cellar’s far wall. “There’s a passage behind one of these racks. Probably sealed with something that looks like mortar but isn’t. Probably opens to a network that runs all the way to the city’s edge.”

She stared at me for a long moment.

Then she laughed—a short, bitter sound.

“Gods damn you, Kvothe. Even now, even after everything, you’re still the cleverest person I’ve ever met.”

“Clever enough to kill a king by accident.” I found the false panel, pressed in the sequence that made it swing open. “Clever enough to destroy everything I loved. Clever enough to break the world and call it saving.”

“That’s not—”

“Let’s go.” I stepped into the darkness of the hidden passage. “We can argue about what I am later. Right now, I just want to get out of this city before they hang me for what I’ve done.”

We traveled through the dark for hours.

The passages beneath Renere were old—older than the palace, older than the kingdom, older than the names men gave to things. They had been carved by shapers in the age before the Creation War, maintained by the Amyr in the centuries that followed, forgotten by everyone who didn’t know what to look for.

Devi knew. Of course she did.

She led us through twists and turns, past sealed doors and flooded chambers, through air that tasted of dust and secrets. The others followed in silence—Simmon still pale from shock, Fela still unable to meet my eyes.

I brought up the rear.

And I thought.

They call me Kingkiller.

Even now, even as I tell this story, that’s what they call me. Kvothe the Kingkiller. The red-haired demon who assassinated Roderic Calanthis at his own daughter’s engagement ball.

The stories say I planned it. Calculated it. That I walked into the palace with murder in my heart and a blade in my hand. That I struck down the King in cold blood, then fled into the night like the monster I was.

None of that is true.

I didn’t go to the ball to kill anyone. I went to stop Cinder. To save Denna. To prevent the Doors of Stone from opening and ending the world.

And I succeeded.

The doors are still closed. The world is still here. The things that waited behind that darkness are still locked away, unable to reach through, unable to destroy everything they touch.

But the King is still dead.

And Denna is still dead.

And I killed them both with the same breath.

They call me Kingkiller like I set out to murder him. Like it was assassination. Like I walked into that ballroom with a plan and a purpose and a cold, calculated desire to end the Calanthis line.

It was worse than that.

It was carelessness.

I was so focused on Denna, so desperate to stop the song, so consumed by the need to save the woman I loved, that I didn’t notice a king standing in my way.

I didn’t see him.

I didn’t hear him.

I just… forgot he existed.

And when I spoke the Name of Silence, when I reached for the power that would stop Denna’s voice forever, I didn’t think about who else might be caught in its path.

That’s what makes me a monster.

Not the killing.

The forgetting.

We emerged from the passages at the edge of the city as dawn was breaking.

The air was cold and clean, free of the dust and darkness of the tunnels. Birds were singing in the trees. Somewhere in the distance, a farmer was driving his cart along a country road.

The world continued.

Despite everything that had happened, the world continued.

“What now?” Simmon asked.

I looked east, toward the University. Toward the place where all of this had started. Toward the life I had lived before I became whatever I was now.

“I can’t go back,” I said. “Not to the University. Not to anywhere. Alveron will be king soon. He’ll have soldiers searching for me in every city, every village, every crossroads in the Four Corners.”

“Then where?”

“Somewhere no one will look. Somewhere I can disappear. Somewhere I can…” I stopped. What was I going to do? Hide forever? Run until my legs gave out? Pretend that none of this had happened?

No.

There was one thing I still had to do.

“Cinder is wounded,” I said. “Trapped on the other side of the door, but not dead. Haliax said so. He’ll find a way back eventually. And when he does…”

“You want to finish what you started.”

“I want to make sure no one else has to pay for my mistakes.” I looked at my friends—the people who had followed me into hell and somehow survived. “You should go. All of you. The University. Atur. Anywhere that isn’t with me.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Devi said. “We didn’t come this far just to—”

“You came this far because you believed in me. Because you thought I could save the world without destroying it.” I met her eyes. “I’ve proven you wrong. The best thing you can do now is get as far from me as possible, before I destroy you too.”

Silence.

Then Simmon stepped forward.

“Do you remember what you told me once? About friendship?”

“Sim—”

“You said that friends don’t leave each other when things get hard. That the whole point of friendship is standing together when standing alone would be easier.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m not leaving, Kvothe. None of us are.”

“You should.”

“Probably.” He smiled—a pale echo of his usual warmth, but real. “But that’s never stopped me before.”

I looked at Fela. At Devi.

They nodded.

“We’ll find somewhere to hide,” Fela said. “Somewhere to regroup. And when you’re ready—when you’ve figured out what comes next—we’ll be there.”

“You don’t owe me that.”

“No,” Devi said. “We don’t. But we’re doing it anyway.” She turned and started walking along the country road. “Now come on. Standing here being noble isn’t going to keep us ahead of the soldiers.”

We walked through the morning and into the afternoon.

The countryside was peaceful—rolling hills, scattered farmhouses, the ancient trees of the Eld looming on the horizon. It was hard to believe that just hours ago, a door to another world had almost swallowed everything. Hard to believe that a king was dead and a woman was gone and the silence that had killed them both still lived inside me.

But it did live inside me.

I could feel it. Waiting. Patient.

The silence that had stopped Denna’s breath. That had stopped the King’s heart. That had sealed the doors and saved the world at the cost of everything I loved.

It was part of me now. Woven into my being like the Yllish knots had been woven into Denna’s skin.

I was no longer just Kvothe.

I was Kvothe who had spoken the Name of Silence.

And that name had a price.

That night, we made camp in a hollow between two hills.

The others slept—exhausted, shattered, finally surrendering to the bone-deep weariness that comes after crisis. But I stayed awake, staring at the stars, thinking about everything that had happened and everything that was still to come.

Denna was gone.

The King was dead.

Cinder was wounded but alive, trapped behind a door that wouldn’t stay closed forever.

And I—

I was still here. Still breathing. Still carrying the weight of everything I’d done wrong.

At some point in the night, I realized I was crying.

Not sobbing—just tears, running down my face, falling onto the grass beneath me. Tears for Denna. For the King. For the boy I had been before the world taught me what I really was.

For the man I would become in the years that followed.

The Kingkiller.

The monster.

The silence.

But that’s a story for another time.

For now, I was just a man sitting in a field, watching the stars, wondering how the world could still be so beautiful when everything inside him had turned to ash.

The others would wake in the morning.

We would keep moving.

Eventually, we would find the place where I would hide—the inn at the edge of things, the Waystone, the end of all my running.

But that was still years away.

For now, there was only the night.

And the silence.

And the slow, terrible process of learning to live with what I had done.