Chapter 75: The Barrow

THE RUINS APPEARED like bones rising from the earth.

We had been twelve days in the Eld. Deer paths and cold camps, a world that grew wilder the deeper we pushed. The farms were long behind us. Even the woodcutter’s trails had petered out, giving way to country no one had ever cleared or claimed.

Then: the ruins.

At first I took them for outcroppings of natural stone, grey and half-buried in the hillsides, furred with moss and the patient green creep that swallows anything men build, given centuries enough. But as we drew closer, as the morning light shifted, I saw what the forest had been trying to hide.

Lines that were too straight, angles too sharp, surfaces too smooth to be the work of water and wind and time.

“Wil,” I said.

He was already looking. “I see it.”

Worked stone. It was nothing like the rough masonry of farmhouses, or the smooth blocks of the University buildings. It was older than either, made by hands that understood stone in ways our builders have forgotten.

I knew this stone.

I hadn’t seen that wall before, but I knew the style of it: the blocks interlocking without mortar, the stone drinking light instead of throwing it back, holding the sun’s warmth all day and breathing it out slowly after dark.

I had seen it before, in the Underthing, in the deep parts where Auri lived. I had pressed my hands against stone like this and felt it hum beneath my palms, and Auri had smiled at me as if I’d finally noticed something obvious.

“This was built by the same people,” I said. “The same shapers.”

Wil didn’t argue. He had never been to the Underthing, but he could feel the age of the thing. There are things so old that even a hard-headed man from the hill country near Ralien can feel them in his teeth.

The scattered ruins were one buried building, mostly. Only the tops of walls and the occasional lintel stuck up above the ground, like the fingers of a buried hand. On one low archway, almost hidden beneath centuries of lichen, were symbols I knew. They weren’t letters. They were something further down than letters, the same marks from the Underthing’s deepest chambers, the ones that made your mind itch if you stared at them too long.

Seals and wards, beside which the sygaldry I’d learned at the University was children’s drawings.

They were fading.

“The seals are weakening,” I said. I traced the blurred edges with my right hand, and even through the deadness where my naming used to be I could feel it, power that had run for thousands of years and was leaking slowly away now. “The scrael. The strange weather. It’s all connected.”

I pressed harder, and my hand went cold, and I pulled back.

Wil looked at the dark beyond the archway. “We should move on. Old places in the Eld are not friendly.”

“Someone has been here,” I said. “Recently.”

In the dirt at the threshold, half sheltered from the rain, were footprints. They were small and bare, set down carefully on the balls of the feet, as though whoever made them feared waking the ground.

“Auri,” I breathed. It could only be her. I wanted it to be her.

“A friend,” I said, when Wil asked. “She lived beneath the University. In the old places. Elodin let her stay because…” I paused. “Because it was the only place she felt safe.”

I knelt. The prints were days old, not weeks. She had walked through this archway and gone down.

“If the seals are weakening and the stone is shifting,” Wil said carefully, “then tunnels that were safe might not be now. Someone who walks by instinct could find her instincts had led her somewhere she never meant to go.”

“Somewhere she couldn’t get back from,” I said. “We’re going down.”

He looked at me, and then at my trembling left hand. Then he unslung his pack, cinched the straps down, and drew his knife.

“You understand this could be a trap.”

“She’s down there. She needs help. I’m going to help her.”

“I’ll go first,” he said. “I have two working hands and full possession of my name. Stay close.”

He stepped into the dark.

I followed.

The barrow descended gradually, smooth stone underfoot, the ceiling high enough to walk upright. Faint warmth in the walls, power still moving through the stone like blood through veins.

We had no proper light. Wil had flint and steel and two stubs of tallow candle, the last of our supplies, and the first would last perhaps an hour. I had nothing I could light. So I walked in Wil’s wake and tried not to think about how far underground we were going, or what I would do if the candle died.

The symbols on the walls were clearer down here, sheltered from the weather. Every curve of them bent in a direction my eye couldn’t follow. They made my eyes water.

“Don’t look at the symbols,” I said.

“Wasn’t planning to. They make my head itch.”

The passage leveled out and opened into a larger chamber, roughly circular, the domed ceiling lost beyond our candlelight. The dust on the floor had been stirred, the same small footprints circling the room, pausing, doubling back.

They led to a doorway on the far side, a sealed door of grey stone with a single symbol cut into it, one I knew: the same mark from beneath the copper plates of the four-plate door.

“Can you open it?” Wil asked.

I pressed my hand against the stone. Warm, warmer than the walls were. Something behind it was awake. But the old namers had sealed those doors with knowledge lost for centuries. “No,” I said.

“Then how did Auri get through?”

I looked at the footprints. They led to the door. They didn’t lead away.

“She didn’t go through,” I said. “She went down.”

Before Wil could answer, a draft moved through the chamber, cool and damp, carrying the smell of deep stone and old water and something sweet underneath it, like moonlight if moonlight had a smell.

Carried on the air, faint as a memory:

Singing.

I stopped and listened.

The voice was high and thin, wavering in and out of hearing. I didn’t know the melody. It was older than any tradition I knew, out of a time before anyone thought to sort music into scales and modes, back when singing was what you did when the world was dark and you were afraid.

“Auri,” I said to the stone, not to Wil. “It’s me. I’m here.”

The singing paused, and the silence after it was a listening silence.

Then it started again, different now, aimed at me. It was a melody that moved through the stone like water through cracks, finding its way patiently toward me.

“She’s showing me the way,” I said. “There are lower levels. Passages where the stone has weakened. That’s how she got down there. The failing magic drew her in.”

“And you want us to follow.”

“I want me to follow. You should stay here.”

“Stop. The answer hasn’t changed.” He held up the candle. “Lead the way.”

We descended further, following the voice of a girl who sang in the dark.

The barrow was larger than anything I had imagined, no tomb at all but a whole warren of chambers carved into the bones of the earth. Stairways spiraled downward as neatly as the inside of a shell, carrying us deeper into stone that grew warmer as we descended.

Auri’s singing guided us, coming up through the stone. The whole barrow was an instrument, ringing faintly with a voice that was small and impossibly beautiful.

I followed it through the dark, and the old magic pressed harder the further we went, heavy as fathoms of stone.

At one turning, the passage narrowed and the stone hummed against my shoulder as I squeezed through. I tried, reflexively, the simplest binding I knew, a pinch of my own heat into the wick of Wil’s spare candle, and the link formed and dissolved like smoke.

Wil held his candle a little higher and walked a little closer.

His candle burned low. We stopped to light his last one, and in the moment between flames, the symbols on the walls glowed. A color that didn’t have a name, somewhere between blue and silver and moonlight on still water. The light vanished the instant the new candle caught, but for that one moment the walls had been alive with it.

“The binding is still running,” I said. “Has been for thousands of years. The seals on the surface are failing, but down here, it’s still doing its job.”

“Holding what?”

“What it was made to contain.”

We continued downward. Ancient makers had set power running for millennia, and I could not light a candle.

The corridor leveled out. The stone was warm to the touch now, as warm as skin.

Then the silence came.

It was not the silence I carried around inside me. This one was older, the silence of a place sealed so long that even the memory of sound had faded out of it. It was so complete you could feel it on your skin, and it seemed almost to have a will.

Into that silence Auri’s singing rose, close now, desperately close.

We turned a corner.

And found her.

The chamber was large, the ceiling rising into darkness, the walls curving in like the inside of an egg. The floor was covered in shallow water, warm and still, the candlelight doubled perfectly on its surface. In the center, on a raised stone platform, sat Auri.

She was singing.

Her legs were crossed, her hands folded in her lap. Her dandelion-pale hair hung around her face like a veil, and her eyes were closed.

She looked the same. She looked completely different.

The small body, the fine bones, the look of a thing that might break if you spoke loudly, all unchanged. But her stillness had been put on her, not chosen. The water lapped at the edge of her platform and stopped, held back by nothing I could see. The symbols on the walls brightened and dimmed slowly, in time with her breathing. She and the barrow were bound.

“Auri,” I said.

She stopped singing. Her eyes opened, and something in me let go.

“Kvothe,” she said. And then, softer, in that careful voice she kept for me: “You came.”

“Of course I came.” I stepped into the water. Warm around my boots, ankle-deep. “Are you all right?”

“I am not hurt.” She unfolded her hands. “But.” She pressed her palm flat against the platform. “I am stuck.”

She could move about the platform as she liked, but when she leaned toward the water her hand stopped at its edge, as though the air there had set hard.

“It woke up.” Her hand went back to the stone, feeling the hum of it, and I felt it too, the old workings shaken awake by what had happened at Renere. By what I’d done.

She looked at me with those wide, moonlight eyes. “Not lost.” Her voice was fragile. “Came.” A pause. “Home.”

Her fingers traced shapes on the stone, the same symbols that covered the walls. She drew them as easily as familiar letters. As easily as her own name.

“Mine,” she said. “Always.”

“I wasn’t always Auri,” she said. “I had another name, before I broke.”

I stood in the warm water, in the candlelight, and I listened.

She told it as she told everything, sideways and in pieces. Half of it didn’t make sense. Some of it I’m still not sure I understand.

She had been born Ariel.

Princess Ariel.

She said it as you’d say the name of someone who had died. I looked at her, really looked, and saw the fine bones. The quiet certainty beneath the brokenness. How the Underthing answered to her.

A Lackless. She said “manor” and touched the stone around us. She said “blood” and touched the wall, and the wall warmed under her fingers.

“Keepers.” Her voice was distant. “The Lackless. Set to watch.”

She tried to explain. The Lackless estates were built on junction points, places where the ancient architecture surfaced. The bloodline was selected to resonate with the old magic. She told me this in fragments, and she moved on before I could ask.

As near as I could piece it together afterward, she came of a cousin’s branch of Meluan’s line, a house that still called its daughters of the blood princesses by a courtesy older than the Vintish crown, which made her my cousin at some remove and no kin of the Calanthis at all.

She had been fourteen. An older aunt had brought her down to a vault beneath the family estate. She said “tradition” and “the old ways” and then something I couldn’t follow about doors and keys and blood that remembers.

She had touched a stone. Grey as morning. It had touched back.

Every name of every thing, all at once. Every door thrown open simultaneously. A fourteen-year-old brain that wasn’t ready.

“Too much,” she whispered. She held her hands apart, then brought them together. A cup too small for the water.

She had shattered.

They sent her young to the University, to be mended and kept out of sight, and in her first terms she broke again and went below. Elodin found her there, and sat with her, and let her stay, and told no one.

Ariel’s eyes found mine. She touched her chest, then mine.

“Lady left,” she said. She touched my face. Traced a line from my eyes to my jaw. “Music found her.”

Netalia Lackless. I had known since Severen: the box had opened for my blood, and her letter had named me. But seeing Auri trace my mother’s face in mine, here in the warm dark, made it real as knowing never had.

“You knew,” I said. “You always knew.”

She nodded. She’d known the moment she saw me, that first night on the roof. She’d felt the blood.

The pieces tried to rearrange themselves. Every strange gift, every cryptic warning in her sideways voice. The key. The bone ring. The candle. For one cold moment I thought I saw what she had really been, a guardian quietly readying a boy for a war he did not know he was in, and I thought of Cinder bent over Denna’s skin with his knife, and my stomach turned over. Then I let the thought go. Cinder had written on Denna. Auri had given me things, and let me choose what to do with them.

And the Underthing. I had always taken it for a hideaway, and it was one, and it was also something like a watchtower: Auri living above the deepest foundations of the University, feeling the seals with her blood, a spider reading a tremor in its web, the only one who could feel it from inside the stone, day and night. Whether Elodin had let her stay out of kindness or for that, or for both, I have never had the chance to ask him.

Princess Ariel, broken open by a power too large for her body to contain, who had lived for years in the dark and still given every room of it a name, and made her soap, and set each thing she owned exactly where it belonged.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She pulled her knees up, made herself small. I could see it in her eyes: the fear that if I knew what she was, I’d see the princess instead of Auri.

“I see you,” I said. “Auri. I’ve always seen you.”

Her eyes searched mine. Then her shoulders softened, just slightly.

I sat on the edge of her platform with my feet in the warm water. Everything she’d told me mattered, but only one thing mattered just then.

She was trapped.

What I had done at Renere had rippled out through all of it and reached the Underthing. The passages had shifted and the sealed doors had stirred. Auri, tied to the old stone by blood and breaking, had been pulled down through tunnels that shifted themselves around her, through doors that opened and closed with the mindless purpose of a machine set running after a long sleep.

She had come out here, and the barrow had known her and closed around her.

“What was here?” I asked quietly. “Originally. What was this barrow built to hold?”

“A king,” she said. “Sleeping.”

A sleeping barrow king.

“And the king is still here?”

She closed her eyes. “Dreaming,” she whispered. “Fitful.” His dreams bleeding into the stone, the stone bleeding into her.

“Can you get out?”

She shook her head. Not won’t. Can’t. The binding thought she was part of itself, a cornerstone, and it held her as a wall holds any one of its stones, patiently, and without any intention of letting go.

“You’re not a cornerstone. You’re a person.”

Her eyes were clear. More lucid than I’d ever seen them. “Both,” she said.

“I’m not leaving you here. I’ve lost too many people.”

She touched my left hand. The broken one. “Going sideways,” she said, barely a breath.

“I know.”

“And you still came?”

“For you.”

She was quiet for a long time. The water lapped. The symbols pulsed. Then Auri reached out and took my left hand. She held it gently, as if the world were made of soap bubbles and her job was to carry them without popping.

“Between us,” she said. “Enough pieces. One whole person.”

“You’re a person already,” I said. “You were before I ever came down here.”

She tipped her head and considered it, as though it were a stone not yet quite square in its place, and let it stand.

She reached behind her, into the shadows of the platform, and produced something small and dark and heavy.

A key.

Iron, old and ornate, its bow shaped like a leaf, its bit cut with teeth that matched no modern lock. The same key she had given me in the Underthing, and taken back into her keeping the night I left. “Found its way down,” she said. “Came back.”

I touched the key. It was warm, the first correct note in a melody that had been playing wrong for weeks.

“Below,” she said, and closed her hand.

“A key,” I said. “Taborlin the Great had a key.”

“Yes.” She smiled. And a coin. And a candle. But not yet.

“Show me,” I said.

She did.