Chapter 75: Flight from Renere

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 a temper like a kicked hornet and a network of contacts that spanned half the Four Corners grabbed me by the collar and dragged 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 inside was thick with the smell of damp earth and mineral dust and the faintest trace of something else, something metallic and ancient that might have been the residue of old namings sunk into the bedrock.

Devi went first, a sympathy lamp in one hand and a knife in the other. Fela followed, then Simmon, who had to duck to avoid scraping his head on 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.

Sim had one hand on my shoulder, guiding me. Not because I couldn’t see. Because I wasn’t seeing. My eyes were open, and light entered them, and my mind registered the shapes of stone walls and wooden braces and the backs of my friends moving ahead of me in the pale glow of the sympathy lamp.

But I wasn’t there.

I was still in the gallery. Still standing ten feet from Denna, watching the light die in her eyes. Still hearing the absence of her heartbeat, the silence where her song had been, the nothing that I had made of her.

Sim’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

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

I stepped up. My body obeyed instructions my mind hadn’t given. Walk. Turn. Duck. Step. The mechanics of locomotion, performed by a machine that no longer had an operator.

The passages beneath Renere formed a network that Devi had mapped over years of clandestine lending and information brokering. She had contacts in the city’s underground, literal and figurative. Smugglers who moved contraband beneath the river. Amyr sympathizers who maintained the ancient routes. A guild of tunnelers who asked no questions as long as you paid in iron rather than paper.

“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 quietly, “is the least of our problems.”

She was looking at me.

They were all looking at me.

I should tell you what I looked like, because the story requires it, and because I need you to understand the shape of the thing that walked out of that palace.

My borrowed finery was ruined. The green velvet coat was torn at the shoulder where Cinder’s agent had grabbed me, and stained with something dark along the right sleeve. Not my blood. Not anyone’s blood, precisely. The residue of magic spent too quickly, a kind of sympathetic discharge that left marks on cloth the way lightning leaves marks on sand.

My shirt was soaked with sweat. My hair, that distinctive red, was dark with it, plastered to my forehead and the back of my neck. My hands were steady, which surprised me. I had expected them to shake. But they hung at my sides like tools that had been set down, waiting for instructions that weren’t coming.

My face, I’m told, was the worst of it. Simmon described it later, when we could talk about such things, 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.”

He was not wrong.

We moved through the tunnels for what felt like hours. In truth, it was perhaps forty minutes, though time had become unreliable in the way it does when your mind is somewhere else and your body is merely following instructions.

The sounds of the city filtered down through the stone above us. Muffled shouts. The clatter of iron-shod hooves on cobblestone. Once, the deep, resonant boom of what could only have been the palace’s main doors being battered in, followed by something structural, something that suggested the magical energy stored in the palace’s foundations was finding new and destructive ways to dissipate.

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

“The wards are collapsing,” Devi said, not slowing her pace. “The binding held power in the stones. Without the seal intact, that power has to go somewhere. It’ll bleed off over the next few hours. Could cause fires. Could cause worse.”

“Worse how?”

“The kind of worse that turns a neighborhood into a crater.” She checked another wall marking. “Which is why we need to be outside the city walls before sunrise.”

“And after that?”

“After that, we run. And we keep running until we’re somewhere that doesn’t want to hang us.”

“Is there such a place?”

She didn’t answer.

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

It was a stone channel perhaps five feet in diameter, running beneath the Ergen Bridge at a slight downward grade toward the river. In dry weather, it would have been merely damp. But it had rained three days ago, and the residual water stood ankle-deep in places, knee-deep in others, the color of old iron and the temperature of snowmelt.

The smell was extraordinary. Not sewage, thankfully. The culvert was a storm drain, not a sewer. But the water carried the accumulated residue of a city that had stood for three thousand years. Mineral deposits. Tannery runoff. The vegetable decay of a market district’s daily refuse. And beneath it all, the same metallic tang I’d noticed in the tunnels, the taste of ancient power seeping through stone.

We waded in single file.

The water hit my legs and I felt nothing. Not the cold. Not the wetness. Not the unpleasant sensation of my fine leather boots filling with icy water and becoming deadweight. My body registered these things. My mind did not care.

Sim kept his hand on my shoulder.

“One foot in front of the other, Kvothe. That’s all. Just keep moving.”

One foot in front of the other.

I could do that.

I had been doing that my whole life.

We were halfway through the culvert when Fela stopped.

“Listen,” she said.

We listened.

From somewhere above and behind us, the sound of organized movement. Boots on stone. The clink of armor. Voices, clipped and professional, giving orders in the tone that soldiers use when they are 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 face went tight. She weighed options with the speed of someone who had spent her life calculating risks and returns.

“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, Simmon. You can’t fight. You’ve never been able to fight. Wilem is strong but he’s not a sympathist. 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.” Her voice was brutal in its clarity. “We don’t all have to die tonight. Two of us can make sure the rest survive. That’s mathematics, Sim. Not heroism.”

Simmon’s jaw clenched. Fela put a hand on his arm.

“She’s right,” Fela said. “And it won’t come to that. I can hold a passage. Stone answers to me.” She flexed her hand, and the rock of the culvert wall groaned softly, shifting, responding to a name spoken without words. “Get Kvothe out. We’ll follow.”

“Promise me.”

Fela looked at him. Her dark eyes were steady. Her hand on his arm was gentle. “I promise. Now go.”

We split at the culvert’s midpoint. Fela and Devi turned back toward the junction, moving quickly, two women against whatever force was coming down the tunnels behind us. Devi had her sygaldry and her fury. Fela had the name of stone and a will that could bend mountains.

I wanted to tell them to be careful. To be safe. To survive this stupid, terrible night that I had caused.

I said nothing.

Sim took my arm and pulled me forward. Wilem fell in behind us, his footsteps heavy in the water, his breathing measured and controlled. The sounds of pursuit grew louder, then were cut off abruptly by a sound like thunder as Fela brought a section of tunnel ceiling down behind us.

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

“Long enough?”

“It will have to be.”

The culvert opened onto the south bank of the river in the tannery quarter, a district of low buildings and foul smells that was, at this hour, blessedly empty. The tanners had fled. Whether from the general panic or from some more specific warning, the streets were deserted, the workshops shuttered, the hanging hides swaying in a wind that smelled of chemicals and fear.

We emerged from the culvert into a world that had changed.

The sky above Renere was wrong. Not dark, not light, but something in between, a sickly amber glow that had nothing to do with dawn and everything to do with the magical energy bleeding from the palace foundations. The spires of the palace were visible above the rooftops, and they were lit from within, a pale fire that flickered and pulsed in patterns that matched the Yllish knots I had seen on Denna’s skin.

The binding was dying. Slowly, messily, the stored power of three millennia was dissipating into the stones and sky of the city, and the effect was like watching a wound bleed.

“Gods,” Simmon breathed. “The whole city.”

“It’ll pass,” Wilem said. But he didn’t sound certain. “The energy has to go somewhere. It’ll bleed off.”

“Before or after it levels the palace district?”

No one answered.

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 upright, keeping me moving.

I was aware of my surroundings in a distant, disconnected way. The cobblestones under my ruined boots. The shuttered windows with fearful eyes peering through the cracks. The sound of bells, somewhere in the city, ringing in a pattern that meant emergency, alarm, the end of something.

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 with the bewildered grief of someone whose world has ended and who doesn’t yet understand why.

I wanted to tell her I understood.

I said nothing.

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, the sound of boots. Six men, maybe eight, moving in formation, their armor catching the amber light from the sky.

“City watch,” Sim whispered. “Not soldiers. Not yet.”

“They’re looking for someone specific?”

“They’re looking for everyone. Anyone on the streets after what happened. They’ll arrest first and ask questions later.”

We waited. The patrol passed. Their lanterns cast swinging circles of ordinary light that seemed inadequate against the unnatural glow in the sky.

When they were gone, we moved again.

The city walls of Renere were ancient, built in an age when walls meant something, when the threat of invasion was real and the defenses of a capital were measured in feet of stone rather than miles of political influence. They rose forty feet above the streets, crenellated, patrolled, pierced at intervals by gates that were, under normal circumstances, the only way in or out.

Tonight, the gates were sealed.

We could see them from a distance of three blocks, the massive iron-bound doors shut tight, the watch fires burning on the ramparts, the silhouettes of soldiers pacing their rounds. The southernmost gate, which Devi had identified as our best option, was no different.

“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 over the wall. Over the aqueduct.” He pointed east, where the dark line of the old Aturan aqueduct ran along the outside of the wall, its arches visible against the sick amber sky. “It connects to the wall near the southeastern tower. The junction is a maintenance access. Unguarded in peacetime.”

“This isn’t peacetime.”

“No. But the soldiers are watching the gates and the streets. No one watches an aqueduct.” He paused. “My father was an engineer. He built bridges in Ceald. He taught me to look at every structure as a potential path.”

Simmon stared at him. “You’ve been thinking about this since the tunnels, haven’t you?”

“I’ve been thinking about this since we entered the city.” His expression was as stolid as ever. “I like to have an exit.”

The approach to the aqueduct took us through a district of warehouses, empty at this hour, their loading docks sealed with chains that Wilem broke with a casual application of force that belied his measured temperament. We climbed through a warehouse full of grain sacks, out a rear window, across a narrow yard, and up an iron ladder bolted to the side of a building that abutted the city wall.

The ladder was rusted. The rungs groaned under our weight. Sim went first, then me, then Wilem. Sim had to reach down and guide my hands to each rung, because I was climbing the way I was doing everything else that night: mechanically, without thought, a body in motion with no one at the helm.

“Grab here. Step up. Good. Next one. Grab. Step.”

Patient. Endlessly patient. The way you are with a child, or a wounded animal, or a friend who has destroyed everything and doesn’t deserve your patience but gets it anyway because that is who Simmon is and has always been.

At the top of the building, the aqueduct was close. A gap of perhaps six feet separated the rooftop from the stone channel of the aqueduct, which ran along the outside of the city wall at roughly the same height.

Wilem jumped first. Landed solidly. Turned and held out his hands.

Sim guided me to the edge.

“You need to jump, Kvothe.”

I looked at the gap. At the darkness below, two stories of empty air between the building and the street. At Wilem’s hands, steady and waiting on the other side.

“Kvothe.”

Somewhere in the ruin of my mind, a voice. Not Sim’s. Not 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. His hands closed on my arms with the grip of a man who does not drop things, and he hauled me onto the aqueduct’s stone channel with a grunt of effort.

Sim jumped behind me. Landed cleanly. Allowed himself a single, shaky breath.

“Right,” he said. “Now where?”

The aqueduct was dry, its water long since diverted to newer infrastructure. We walked in its stone channel, three men in a trough of ancient masonry, invisible from the streets below and hidden from the wall’s guards by the lip of the channel itself.

The city spread below us.

From this height, the damage was visible. The palace district was bright with that sick amber light, and I could see, here and there, points of actual flame where the dissipating magical energy had ignited something combustible. The fires were small, scattered, the kind that would be controlled by morning. But they cast a pall of smoke that mixed with the amber glow and turned the sky above Renere into something from a nightmare.

The bells had stopped.

That was worse than the ringing.

We reached the southeastern tower without incident. The maintenance access Wilem had described 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 the aqueduct and the city’s water supply. Now it was forgotten, listed on no map, known to no one but historians and engineers’ sons from Ceald.

Wilem put his shoulder against it. The hinges screamed. The door moved an inch. Two. Three. 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.

The other side of the door was a narrow stairway that spiraled down through the thickness of the wall. The steps were slick with condensation, the air was cold and close, and at the bottom, a second door opened onto the outside of the city walls.

Onto freedom.

Onto the open fields south of Renere, where the land rolled away in gentle hills toward the distant tree line, where the road south led 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.

We emerged into the night air.

It was cold. Clean. Free of the amber taint that hung over the city. The stars were out, sharp and brilliant, indifferent to the catastrophe below them. A breeze came from the south, carrying the smell of grass and earth and distance.

I breathed.

For the first time in hours, I actually breathed. Not the shallow, automatic respiration that had kept my body functioning while my mind was elsewhere. A real breath. 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 and massive against the amber-stained sky. Before us, the road.

“We need to move,” Wilem said. “Dawn’s not far. When the sun comes up, they’ll expand the search beyond the walls.”

“Which way?” Sim asked.

“East. Toward the Commonwealth border. Devi has contacts in Ralien. If we can reach them—”

“If.”

“If.” Wilem’s voice was steady. Unshakeable. The voice of a man whose people had crossed deserts and bridged canyons and survived occupations. “We move fast. Stay off the main roads. Travel at night.” 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.”

“Then let’s go.”

We walked.

The road south curved away from the city, following the contour of the river before bending east toward the border. We left it almost immediately, cutting across open fields, our feet crushing frost-stiffened grass that crackled like paper. The cold was sharp and real and it should have been uncomfortable but I felt it the way you feel weather in a dream, as a fact rather than a sensation.

Behind us, Renere burned.

Not the whole city. Not even most of it. But the palace district was a beacon of amber light, and the fires that had started in the magical discharge were spreading, and from this distance, with the sound of bells starting again faintly, the capital of Vintas looked like a wound in the landscape. A bright, bleeding wound that would scar when it healed and never be quite right again.

I didn’t look back. Sim told me this later. He said I walked with my eyes fixed forward, my gaze empty, my feet moving in the steady, mechanical rhythm of a man who has forgotten how to stop.

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 the sound of silence consuming everything in its path, indiscriminate, unstoppable, the blunt instrument I had wielded when what was needed was a scalpel.

Full of Denna.

Dawn came the way dawn always comes. Gradually, then all at once, the darkness at the horizon thinning to grey, then blue, then the first pale gold of sunlight touching the tops of the hills.

We had been walking for three hours. Renere was a smudge on the horizon behind us, the amber glow faded now, swallowed by the natural light of morning. The fires were invisible at this distance. The bells were silent. If you didn’t know what had happened, you might have looked at that distant skyline and seen nothing but a city waking to an ordinary day.

Wilem found a copse of trees and declared we would rest until nightfall. Sim lowered me to the ground at the base of an old oak, propping my back against the trunk, wrapping me in the coat he’d taken from his own shoulders.

“Sleep if you can,” he said.

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 in the grass beneath the oak tree and I listened.

To the wind in the branches above me. To the birds, who had resumed their morning songs as though nothing had changed, as though the world was still the same world it had been yesterday. To the distant, barely audible sound of Renere’s bells, ringing in patterns I could not read.

To the silence inside me.

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

Denna’s absence.

I had spent years chasing her. Finding her. Losing her. Finding her again. Our story was a song that never resolved, a melody that circled and circled and never found its final note.

Now it had found its final note.

And the note was silence.

Sometime in the late morning, I heard Fela and Devi arrive.

I kept my eyes closed, but I heard the rustle of grass, the low voices, the sound of Sim’s exclamation of relief and the quieter sound of Wilem’s acknowledgment. Devi’s voice was hoarse, stripped raw, and when she spoke, her words came in the clipped cadences of exhaustion.

“The tunnel held. Fela brought down enough stone to block them for hours. We circled back through the drainage system and came out near the river.” 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. Called down dark magic in the King’s own palace.” Her voice was flat. “It won’t be long.”

“Then we need to keep moving.”

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

Sim didn’t answer immediately.

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

“You have to believe a lot of things, Simmon. That’s your gift and your weakness.” Devi’s 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, all at once, so much that the individual sensations merged into a white noise of grief that was indistinguishable from nothing. The way a sound too loud becomes silence. The way a light too bright becomes blindness.

I was Kvothe.

I was Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, Kvothe the clever, Kvothe the musician, Kvothe who always found a way, who always had an answer, who always landed on his feet no matter how far he fell.

I was Kvothe the Kingkiller.

And I was broken.

In the late afternoon, as the shadows lengthened and the air cooled and the birds settled into their evening quiet, I opened my eyes.

Sim was sitting beside me, his back against the same tree, a piece of bread in his hand that he’d been eating in slow, methodical bites. His face was drawn, older than I’d ever seen it, the boyish good nature stripped away to reveal the bedrock beneath. And the bedrock was loyalty. It was love. It was the simple, stubborn refusal to leave a friend behind, no matter how far gone that friend might be.

“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. Almost.

“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. Really looked at him, for the first time in hours. At his kind face and his tired eyes and his steady, unwavering presence beside me. “Thank you.”

He nodded. Swallowed. 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.”

I ate.

The bread was stale. It was, as Devi had promised, from a very expensive bakery, and even stale it had a depth of flavor that spoke of good flour and patient fermentation and a baker who understood that bread, like all things worth making, required time and care and attention to become what it was meant to be.

I ate, and I tasted it, and the tasting was a small thing, a tiny thing, a crack in the wall of nothing that had surrounded me since the gallery.

Not healing. Not recovery. Just a crack. Just enough to let a sliver of the world back in.

The sun was setting. The sky above us was turning the color of bruises, purple and gold and deep, aching blue. To the west, Renere was invisible behind the hills, hidden by distance and geography and the simple mercy of the horizon.

Wilem was checking our supplies. Fela was studying a map she’d drawn from memory. Devi was sharpening a knife with the focused intensity of a woman who needs something to do with her hands or she’ll start screaming.

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

My friends.

The ones who had followed me into the fire and were still here on the other side. Scorched. Exhausted. Afraid. But here.

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. Before us, the road stretched into darkness, and we walked into it the way you walk into any unknown thing.

One foot in front of the other.

We were fugitives. Refugees. The wreckage of a plan that had succeeded in all the ways that didn’t matter and failed in all the ways that did.

I had saved the world and killed a king and lost the woman I loved and cracked the foundations of a seal that had held for three millennia. I was the most wanted man in Vintas, possibly in the Four Corners. My name would become a curse. My story would become a warning. My legacy would be blood and silence and the death of everything I touched.

But I was walking.

One foot in front of the other.

And beside me, Simmon. Wilem. Fela. Devi. Not walking behind me. Not following. Walking with me. Shoulder to shoulder. Step for step.

Into the dark.

Into whatever came next.

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

Not the stumble of a tired man catching his foot on a root in the dark. The wrong kind. The kind where the legs simply stop working, where the body’s obedience to the mind lapses because the body has been running on fumes and the fumes have finally run out.

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

“Sim?” Fela was beside him in an instant, her hand on his shoulder. “Are you---”

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

But his voice was wrong. Thin in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue. When Fela’s hand moved from his shoulder to his side, he flinched---a sharp, involuntary jerk that told the truth his words were trying to hide.

I should have seen it earlier. The way he’d favored his left side climbing the wall. The strange stiffness in his movements. The too-careful breathing. Signs I’d been too lost in my own breaking to notice.

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

In its pale glow, we saw what Sim had been concealing since the tunnel. The left side of his shirt was black with blood. Not fresh blood---this had been flowing for hours, soaking through the fabric, running down his hip, pooling in his boot. When Fela pulled the shirt aside, the wound beneath was a ragged gash across his ribs, deep enough to show the white gleam of bone. The tunnel collapse. When Fela had brought the ceiling down to block pursuit, a shard of stone had caught him. A piece of the world he’d been trying to save had torn him open.

“Sim.” Fela’s voice was very small. “How long?”

“Since the tunnel.” He was breathing in short, shallow draws, the way 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. You---” Her voice cracked. “You sat with Kvothe and shared your bread and you didn’t say anything.”

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

“We can stop now. Devi, tell him---medical supplies, sympathy---there must be something---”

Devi knelt beside him. Her hands moved with clinical efficiency, examining the wound, checking his pulse, the color of his skin. Her face didn’t change. But I saw her eyes. And I saw the answer in them before she spoke.

“The bleeding is internal,” she said. “The rib fragment has shifted. It’s---” She stopped. Drew a breath. Started again, and her voice was steady because Devi’s voice was always steady. “There’s nothing I can do in a field with a sympathy lamp and good intentions. He needs a full medica. A physicker. Days of treatment.”

“Then we find one.”

“Fela.” Devi’s hand found hers. “We’re twelve miles from Renere. Every physicker within a day’s ride is in that city, behind walls controlled by people who want us dead. The nearest free town is---”

“I don’t care. We carry him. We---”

“Fela.” Sim’s voice. Quiet. Certain. Carrying the same authority I’d heard in the corridor beneath the Archives, when he’d told us to go and he’d hold the door. “Stop.”

She stopped.

He reached for her hand. His fingers were cold---not the ice-cold of the University, not yet, but heading there. The chill of a body that is losing the argument with the dark.

“The moonlight thing,” he said.

Fela made a sound. Something between breath and breaking.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t you dare---”

“Listen. The moonlight thing. I was right.” He squeezed her hand. His eyes were bright in the sympathy lamp’s glow, fever-bright and clear and full of the impossible gentleness that had defined him from the first day I’d known him. “Remember the argument? About whether moonlight has its own quality, separate from reflected sunlight? Whether it changes things it touches?”

“Sim, please---”

“I was right. It does change things. I know because…” He coughed. A wet, terrible sound. “Because every important thing that happened between us happened in moonlight. The first time you kissed me. The night on the roof when you said my name and it sounded different than anyone else had ever said it. The night you told me you loved me.”

Tears ran down Fela’s face. She didn’t wipe them away.

“Moonlight changes things,” Sim said. “It changed me. You changed me.” He was looking at her the way he’d always looked at her---like she was a theorem he’d spent his life proving, and the proof was more beautiful than the conjecture. “And it was always worth it. All of it. Every minute.”

Fela pulled him close. Held his head against her chest. Her body shook with the effort of not screaming, of holding the grief in, of being strong enough for both of them in this last darkened field.

“Every minute,” she whispered.

I was kneeling beside them. I don’t remember moving. But I was there, and my hand was on Sim’s shoulder, and beneath my palm I could feel the fading of him---the warmth leaving, the breathing slowing, the relentless subtraction of everything that made him Sim.

“Kvothe,” he said. His eyes found mine. They were the same eyes that had looked at me from across a lecture hall in our first term, bright with mischief and unearned trust. “You’ll fix it. The doors. The seals. All of it. You’re the only one who can.”

“Sim, don’t---”

“And don’t…” Another cough. Weaker. “Don’t blame yourself for this. I chose. At the University. On the wall. Every step of it. I chose.” His hand found mine and squeezed, and the squeeze was barely there, barely enough to feel. “That’s the difference. Between being used and being spent. I spent myself. On things that mattered. On people who mattered.”

He smiled.

It was the same smile. The gentle, self-deprecating, impossibly kind smile that had disarmed every argument, defused every tension, made every dark room a little brighter simply by existing.

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

His eyes closed.

His breathing slowed.

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.

It was not a human sound. It was a Namer’s scream---the deep name of grief given voice, the fundamental truth of loss made audible. The sound cracked the frozen ground beneath her. It scattered birds from trees a quarter-mile distant. It carried into the sky and became part of the darkness, part of the wind, part of the world’s permanent sadness.

Wilem caught her when she fell. Held her. Said nothing, because there was nothing to say, because the Cealdish tradition of stone-faced grief was the only thing keeping him upright and even that was cracking at the edges. His hands shook. His jaw was locked. His eyes were dry but the dryness was a kind of violence, a refusal that cost him something I couldn’t measure.

Devi stood apart. Her arms were crossed. Her face was unreadable. But the sympathy lamp in her hand flickered---once, twice, three times---and I knew enough about sympathy to know that the lamp was reacting to her emotional state, to the break in concentration that a perfectly steady woman would never willingly show.

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. The way you say a word that contains the whole of something precious.

“Sim.”

He didn’t answer. He would never answer again. The moonlight fell on his face, silver and gentle, and his expression was the one he wore when he’d solved a difficult problem---a small, satisfied smile.

He’d been right about the moonlight.

We buried him before dawn.

Not deep. We had no tools, no time, no luxury of ritual. Just a shallow grave in a field of wild grass, marked with a cairn of fieldstones that Wilem stacked with mechanical precision, each one placed with the care of a man building something that must endure.

Fela sang. A fragment of a melody I didn’t recognize---something in Aturan, something old, something her mother had taught her. Her voice was 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 said goodbye.

Not the grand farewell of a storyteller. Not the eloquent tribute of a man who knows the right words for every occasion. Just one word, spoken into the grey light between the stars and the sunrise.

“Goodbye.”

Then I stood up and walked to the road where Devi was waiting.

Dawn found us twelve miles east of Renere, in a world that didn’t know us yet.

It would, soon enough.

But for one more morning, as the sun rose and the birds sang and the road unfolded before us like a story waiting to be told, we were four people walking east.

Just four.

Carrying the weight of five.