Chapter 77: Wanted

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, the kind of broadsheet that smears in the rain. But the words were clear enough, and the woodcut image was close enough to the truth that it made my stomach clench like a fist.

WANTED FOR REGICIDE: the red-haired arcanist known as KVOTHE. Reward of one thousand royals for information leading to capture. By order of the Penitent King.

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. But the hair. That damnable, undeniable copper-red that had marked me since birth, that had made me visible in every crowd, memorable in every tavern, identifiable in every town from here to the Stormwal.

The hair they got right.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The morning after we escaped Renere through the tunnels, we were four: myself, Wilem, Fela, and Devi. Where once there had been five. Simmon was dead, and I will not speak yet of how he died. That part of the story is a wound I’m still learning to touch without flinching, and if I try to tell it now I’ll lose the thread of everything else.

Later. I’ll tell it later.

We had emerged from the passage at the city’s eastern edge, blinking into dawn light that felt obscene in its gentleness. The sky was the pale gold of early autumn. Birds sang in the hedgerows. A farmer’s cart rattled along a distant road, loaded with turnips, as if the world hadn’t just cracked down its center.

“We need to move,” Devi said. She was already walking, her small frame tight with the kind of energy that comes from fear transmuted into purpose. “Every minute we stand here is a minute they’re organizing.”

“Organizing what?” Fela’s voice was hollow. She had been hollow since the ballroom. Since Sim.

“A manhunt.” Devi didn’t look back. “Alveron will have riders out before noon. Messengers to every garrison between here and Atur. By nightfall, every soldier in the Four Corners will know Kvothe’s name and face.”

“They already know my name,” I said.

“Not like this.” She finally turned. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry, fierce with the kind of intelligence that never sleeps. “Before, you were a story. A rumor. The clever boy from the University who could call the wind and play the lute and charm his way out of anything. Now you’re the man who killed the King of Vintas in front of three hundred witnesses.”

The words landed like stones in still water.

“I didn’t---”

“I know you didn’t mean to. That won’t matter to the broadsheets. That won’t matter to the soldiers. That certainly won’t matter to Alveron, who just inherited a kingdom and needs someone to blame for how he got it.”

She was right, of course. Devi was almost always right. It was one of the things I both admired and resented about her.

“North,” Wilem said. It was the first word he’d spoken since we’d left the tunnels. His dark Cealdish face was unreadable, but his eyes kept moving, scanning the treeline, the road, the horizon. Assessing threats. Wil had always been the practical one. “North through the Eld. Away from the roads. Away from the cities.”

“The Eld is dangerous,” Fela said quietly.

“Everything is dangerous now.” Wil adjusted the pack on his shoulder. “But the Eld is large, and we are small. We can disappear there.”

“For how long?”

Nobody answered that.

We walked through the morning, keeping to hedgerows and drainage ditches, skirting farmland, avoiding the Great Stone Road that ran north like a spine 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 the kind of urgency that meant they had orders and a destination.

Blue and white. The Maer’s colors.

No---the King’s colors now.

Alveron had moved quickly. Faster than I’d expected. The succession must have been announced within hours of Roderic’s death, the machinery of governance grinding into motion with the terrible efficiency of a kingdom that has planned for exactly this eventuality. Roderic had no male heirs. Alveron was next in line. And now Alveron was King, and the first act of his reign 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. The fact that I’d been trying to save the world from an ancient evil was not the kind of detail that survived the telling. Stories simplify. They have to. The truth is too complicated for broadsheets and tavern gossip.

And so the story simplified itself: a red-haired arcanist named Kvothe had killed King Roderic. He was dangerous, deranged, possibly a demon. He must be caught. He must be punished. He must be made an example of, so that the world could believe in justice even when justice was the last thing anyone involved deserved.

But here’s the thing about stories: they split.

A river hits a boulder and becomes two rivers, each flowing in a different direction, each carrying different water to different places. The story of the Kingkiller hit the world like water hitting stone, and the world split it in two.

In the cities---in Renere, in Atur, in the courts and the counting houses and the places where power lives---the story was simple. I was a villain. An assassin. A wild arcanist who had murdered the rightful King of Vintas and must be brought to justice before the fabric of civilization unraveled entirely. The broadsheets printed my face. The criers shouted my name. The soldiers marched with my description in their belt pouches, checking every redhead they encountered, every traveler who matched the right height, the right build, the right age.

But in the small places---in the villages, the farming communities, the roadside inns where tinkers and travelers shared news over warm beer---the story was different. In those places, the story acquired a different shape. A different meaning.

A man had killed a king. Not just any man. An arcanist. A musician. 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 championed the powerless and thumbed his nose at every authority that tried to keep him in his place.

In those small places, in those quiet voices, Kvothe the Kingkiller was not a villain.

He was a folk hero.

I learned this from the tinker that evening, though I didn’t understand it fully until much later. The tinker had mentioned, almost as an aside, that a farmer’s wife he’d met 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. Seditious. The kind of thing that could get you a public flogging or worse, in the current climate. But it was spoken anyway, in the privacy of a farmhouse kitchen, in the intimacy of a marriage, 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. It didn’t. Because the people who saw me as a hero were wrong, just as surely as the people who saw me as a villain. I wasn’t either. I was just a man who had reached for a power too large for the room he was standing in, and who had killed the two people closest to the blast.

We rested at midday in a barn.

The farm was abandoned---or at least unoccupied. The house was shuttered, the fields fallow, the whole place carrying that particular melancholy of a home whose owners have gone elsewhere. Devi checked for traps and locks with the efficient paranoia of someone who has spent years in the lending business, where trust is a commodity measured in collateral. 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. I don’t know how she’d managed it. But Devi always managed.

Fela sat apart from the rest of us, her back against a hay bale, staring at her hands. She hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t spoken. The grief was eating her from the inside, and I recognized the look on her face because I wore it too.

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 twelve hours ago. One sleeve was torn. His boots were mud-caked, the kind of mud you get from walking through plowed fields in the dark. His face—

I knew that face.

Ambrose Jakis looked at me from across the barn. For a long moment, neither of us moved.

He was thinner than I remembered. Or perhaps it was just that I’d never seen him without the armor of wealth and position. Without the tailored coats and the practiced sneer and the absolute 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 in a way I’d never imagined him capable of being 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.”

I should have felt something. Satisfaction, perhaps. Or vindication. Ambrose had tormented me for years. Had tried to have me killed. Had used his family’s money and influence to make my life a misery at every turn.

But looking at him in that barn—muddy, terrified, stripped of everything that had made him dangerous—I felt nothing. Or rather, I felt a recognition so sharp it almost cut. He was a man whose world had ended. I knew exactly what that looked like.

“The engagement,” Devi said flatly. “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.

I should have said something cutting. Something clever and devastating, the kind of thing old Kvothe would have said, the kind of thing that wins the moment and poisons everything after.

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

He stared at me. Something moved behind his eyes—not gratitude, not forgiveness, but a bewildered recognition that the rules he’d lived by no longer applied.

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

We left before dawn. Ambrose was still sleeping, curled on his side in the straw, one arm over his face. He looked like a child.

I never saw him again.

Sim was gone.

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. She kept her voice low, though there was no one for miles. Habit. “Long term. 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 Alveron has contacted the University. We don’t know if the Arcanum will protect Kvothe or condemn him.”

“They’ll condemn him,” Devi said flatly. “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.” Her voice was gentle, which made it worse. “He’d hate it. He’d rage and curse and break something expensive in his workshop. But he’d do it, because the alternative is the University being torn apart by a kingdom looking for someone to punish.”

I listened to them talk about my life as if I weren’t there. It was easier that way. Easier to let the words wash over me like water over stone, eroding nothing, changing nothing.

Because underneath the strategy and the planning and the careful calculation of risks, there was only one thing I could think about.

Denna’s face. The moment the silence took her.

The way her eyes had gone wide---not with fear, but with something worse. Recognition. She had known what was happening. Had felt the silence enter her the way a winter wind enters an unshuttered room, filling every corner, stilling every sound.

And the King. Standing behind her, three paces to the left. A man I had barely noticed. A man who had been nothing more than a shape in my peripheral vision, an obstacle between me and the thing I was trying to stop.

The silence hadn’t cared about my intentions. It had moved through the room like a wave, and everyone in its path had been caught. Denna, because she was the target. Roderic, because he was standing in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

Because I was careless.

Because I was desperate.

Because I was Kvothe, and Kvothe always reached for the biggest tool on the shelf, and sometimes the tool was too big for the job, and sometimes the people standing nearby got crushed.

That evening, we moved again.

The light was failing when we crossed the Omethi River at a shallow ford that Wil had found by reading the terrain the way a sailor reads the sea. The water was cold---autumn-cold, the kind that makes your bones ache---and we waded across waist-deep, holding our packs above our heads.

On the other side, we dried ourselves in the lee of a stone wall and I heard the first rumor.

A tinker was camped nearby. We smelled his fire before we saw it---the warm, greasy smell of rabbit on a spit, mingling with woodsmoke and the particular earthy scent of a man who lives on the road. He was old, weather-beaten, the kind of tinker who has been everywhere and remembers everything and will tell you all about it for the price of a meal and a pair of ears.

“I should talk to him,” Devi said. “Tinkers hear things.”

“He’ll see Kvothe’s hair.”

“Kvothe will stay here. With his hood up. Like a sane person.”

She went. Wil went with her, as protection or precaution or both. Fela and I waited in the darkness, listening to the distant murmur of conversation and the nearer sound of water over stones.

“He knew,” Fela said suddenly.

I looked at her.

“Sim. He knew he was going to die. At the ball. He told me, before we went in. He said, ‘If this goes wrong, remember that I chose to be here. I chose this.’ Like he was giving me permission to grieve without guilt.” Her voice broke on the last word. “As if that were possible.”

I didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say. So I sat with her in the dark and we shared the particular silence of two people whose grief is so large it fills every space between words.

After a while, Devi came back. Her face was grim.

“The tinker says it’s everywhere. Every town, every inn, every crossroads. ‘The Kingkiller,’ they’re calling you. Red-haired demon who murdered Roderic at the ball. Some say you did it for money. Some say you did it for revenge. Some say you’re a Chandrian agent.”

“A Chandrian agent.” The irony was so bitter I could taste it.

“There’s more. Alveron---they’re already calling him the Penitent King---has offered a thousand royals for your capture. Five hundred for information. He’s mobilized every garrison south of the Eld.”

“That’s fast.”

“He’s been planning for this.” She sat down, pulling her cloak tight. “Maybe not for you specifically. But for something. The way he moved, the way the soldiers mobilized, the way the broadsheets went out… this wasn’t improvised. Alveron had a succession plan ready. He just needed a reason to use it.”

“And I gave him one.”

“The world gave him one. You were just the instrument.” She paused. “There’s something else. The tinker said there’s been talk of… things. In the wild places. Creatures that shouldn’t exist. 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 remembered the scrael on the road to the Waystone, years later. Years that hadn’t happened yet, from this telling’s perspective. “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… a membrane. A boundary. And when I spoke the Name of Silence to stop Denna’s song, 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.”

The fire crackled. Somewhere in the darkness, an owl called.

“So the world is breaking,” Devi said. “Creatures are coming through. A new king is hunting you. Your powers are failing.” She ticked the points off on her fingers. “Is there anything else I should know about? Any other catastrophes you’re keeping in reserve?”

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

The silence that followed was worse than the owl, worse than the dark, worse than everything.

“My failing fingers,” I continued, holding them up. They trembled in the firelight, moving like they belonged to a marionette with tangled strings. “It started in the tunnels. A numbness. A clumsiness. Like they forgot what they were for.”

“That could be shock,” Fela said. “Injury. Your body reacting to---”

“It’s not shock.” I curled my left hand into a fist, or tried to. The fingers closed slowly, unevenly, like a flower blooming in reverse. “I swore an oath to Denna. On my name, my power, and my good left hand. I broke that oath. And now it’s breaking me back.”

Devi’s face went pale.

“That’s deep naming,” she said. “Oath-binding on the level of the old namers. If you swore on your literal name and power…”

“Then breaking the oath is literal too. Yes.” I let my weakened grip fall to my side. “I can feel it happening. Slowly. My name is… slipping. Like a word you know but can’t quite remember. My sympathy is getting harder. The bindings don’t hold the way they should. And this hand…”

“We need to find someone who can help. Elodin. One of the other Masters---”

“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. Not anymore. That knowledge is old, Devi. Older than the University. Older than the Arcanum. It’s from a time when names meant something more than sounds, when a promise made on your name could literally reshape what you were.”

“Then what do we do?”

I looked at the fire. At the shadows dancing on the faces of my friends. At the darkness pressing in from every side.

“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.”

“Which is?”

I thought of Cinder. Wounded, fleeing, but not dead. Never dead. He would come back. They always come back.

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

We slept in shifts that night. Or rather, the others slept in shifts. 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. She lived there the way music lives in a lute: not as a thing stored inside, but as a potential, a readiness, a constant vibration waiting to become sound.

Now that vibration was silence.

I closed my eyes and saw her face. Not the face from the ballroom---blood at her lips, love and terror in her eyes, the Yllish knots writhing on her skin like living things. Not that face. The other one. The one I carried from Imre, from the Eolian, from a hundred rooftops and moonlit walks and conversations that danced around the thing we never quite said to each other.

Her smile. The way it started at the corners of her mouth and worked its way up to her eyes, slow and secret, as if happiness were something she had to approach carefully for fear of scaring it away.

Her voice. Not singing---just talking. The way she could make ordinary words sound like music, could take a simple observation about the weather or the food or the quality of the moonlight and make it sound like the opening line of a ballad.

Her hands. Quick, clever, always moving. Braiding her hair. Adjusting a ribbon. Reaching for mine.

Gone.

All of it, gone.

And I had done it. Me. Not Cinder. Not the Chandrian. Not fate or destiny or the cruel machinery of the world. Just me, reaching for a power too large for the room I was standing in.

Me.

I had spoken the Name of Silence, and Denna’s heart had stopped.

I had killed the woman I loved.

And no amount of running, no distance between myself and Renere, no number of miles or days or years would ever change that fact.

In the morning, the world had changed again.

Or rather, I noticed what had already changed. The light was different---not dimmer exactly, but thinner. As if the sunlight had been diluted with something that wasn’t quite shadow. 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. Not in ways that most people would notice---not yet. But to someone who had stood at the breaking point, who had heard the sound reality makes when it starts to tear, the signs were unmistakable.

A fence post that had been whole the night before, now split lengthwise as if struck by lightning in clear weather.

A stream that ran the wrong direction for its terrain, uphill for a dozen feet before gravity remembered itself.

A bird that flew in circles, the same circle, over and over, as if caught in a loop of time or space or something in between.

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

“How long do we have?” Wil asked.

“I don’t know. Months. Maybe less.” I watched the bird. It completed its circle, began again. “The Name of Silence sealed the door, 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 continued its endless circle, trapped in a world that was slowly forgetting its own rules.

And somewhere, in every town and village and crossroads we would pass through in the days ahead, my name was spreading like a fire through dry grass.

Kingkiller. Kingkiller. Kingkiller.

It wasn’t the name I’d chosen.

But then, the best names never are.