Chapter 78: The Road North

WE KEPT TO the deer paths.

Not the wide-packed hunting trails that nobles ride in autumn. The real deer paths — narrow threads of pressed earth that wind 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 mining country east of Ralien, where a boy who couldn’t find his way through trackless country was a boy who didn’t eat. He walked at the front, reading the land the way Lorren read a codex.

I walked behind him. Then Fela. Then Devi, who brought up the rear with the wary vigilance of someone who trusts no one and sees no reason to start.

Four of us. Where once there had been more.

Fela moved like a woman walking through water. Each step deliberate, carefully controlled, as if any sudden movement might shatter whatever thin wall she’d built between herself and the howling void of Simmon’s absence. I recognized that walk. I had walked that way myself, once, after my parents died.

She didn’t cry. She hadn’t cried since Renere. That worried me more than tears would have. Tears meant the grief was moving through you. This dry-eyed silence meant it was settling in.

I wanted to say something that would ease the weight, the way Sim would have — with clumsy kindness that made even the worst situations survivable. But I couldn’t be Sim. I could barely be Kvothe.

That evening, Devi built a smokeless fire and said the thing we’d all been thinking.

“We need to split up.”

The words fell into the silence like a stone into deep water.

“Four people are too visible. Too slow. Too easy to track.” She chose her words with the care of a woman who makes her living in precise negotiations. “Kvothe is the one they want. The rest of us are accessories. If we separate, the soldiers follow him. We disappear.”

“I’m not leaving,” Wil said.

“I’m not asking you to. Fela and I take a different route. West, through the farmlands, to the University. If there’s a way to fix what’s happening to him — the oath-breaking, the power loss — it’ll be found there.”

“My library is extensive but not omniscient,” Devi said. “However. She has a point.”

Fela looked between them, then at me. “I’ll go with Devi. I can research the oath-binding. The old naming texts. Elodin might know something.”

She was right. They were both right. Splitting up gave all of us the best chance of surviving the next few weeks.

So why did it feel like losing?

Fela stood in front of me, her pack on her shoulders, her face older than it had been a week ago. The beauty was still there, but underlaid now with a gravity that hadn’t existed before.

“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.”

“He made the world lighter.” Her eyes were bright. “Everything was lighter when he was in it.”

“Now we carry the weight he would have carried for us.”

She stepped forward and held on with the desperate strength of someone who has learned that every embrace might be the last. “Don’t die,” she whispered. “I can’t lose anyone else.”

“I’ll try.”

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

Devi walked up to me, looked me in the eye, and said: “Don’t die, Kvothe. You still owe me.”

“Owe you what?”

“Interest. Three talents, six jots, four drabs. Plus accumulated interest at the standard rate.”

“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. “You’re going to survive this. Not because you deserve to — your track record with survival is equal parts luck and stupidity, and both are finite resources. But because you’re too stubborn to die, and the world isn’t done with you yet.”

She dropped her hand. “Find somewhere safe. And when you’ve figured out how to fix whatever the oath is doing to you, come find me. I have resources. The kind of things that were old when the University was young.”

“Thank you, Devi.”

“Don’t thank me. Pay me.”

They walked west, following a sheep trail toward the lowlands. Two figures growing smaller against the grey morning. They didn’t look back.

And then we were two.

We walked north. The farmland gave way to rough pasture, then scrub, then the first ancient oaks that marked the southern border of the Eld.

In a shepherd’s shelter, wringing out our cloaks, Wil asked the question I’d been waiting for.

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

He considered this. Wil always considered questions before answering.

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

“That’s it?”

“That’s everything.” He picked at a splinter in the wall. “In Cealdish, we have a word. Dehalan. It means ‘the debt that is not a debt.’ The obligation you feel toward someone not because they have done something for you, but because of who they are. Because being near them has made you more than you would have been alone.”

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

“Cealdish is an efficient language.” He paused. “You made me brave, Kvothe. Before I met you, I was careful. Cautious. I studied hard, kept my head down, avoided risks. You made me take risks. You made me care about people I would have ignored.”

“I got you into trouble.”

“You got me into life.” He looked at me with an intensity Wil rarely showed. “I was surviving before I met you. Afterward, I was living. There’s a difference.”

He stood. “The rain is letting up. We should move.”

We stepped back into the rain and the mud and the long, grey road north. He walked a little closer to me than before.

Three days later, the Eld swallowed us.

The forest didn’t gradually thicken — it closed around us, like a mouth, like a fist. The canopy was so thick the light turned green and aquatic, filtered through leaves that had been growing since before the Aturan Empire. The trunks were massive — wider than houses, bark grey and deeply furrowed in patterns that looked almost like writing if you stared at them long enough.

I didn’t stare long enough. Some things are better not read.

“We can slow down here,” Wil said. “The soldiers won’t come this deep.”

We found a spot where two ancient oaks had grown together, their roots forming a natural shelter. Wil built a real fire — the canopy would dissipate the smoke. We dried our clothes. We ate hot food for the first time in days.

The heat of it in my stomach was like a hand unclenching something that had been tight since Renere. Not hope. Not yet. But the memory of hope.

And somewhere far away, impossibly far, so distant it might have been imagined — I heard singing.

Faint. High. Beautiful. Mad.

I lay in the darkness and listened until the silence swallowed it. And I wondered, with a fear that went deeper than soldiers or oaths, if I was already too late.