Chapter 80: Moonlight and Stone

AURI KNEW THE way.

She knew it as a bird knows south, with none of a guide’s landmarks and turns. The knowledge lived in her feet, in the tilt of her head, in whatever part of her had walked the Underthing’s thousand turnings until they were as familiar as breathing.

We had broken camp before dawn, and I was limping, my forearm still bound. Wil and I had slept badly, or not at all. My left hand had trembled through the night, keeping a slow and steady count of time I no longer wanted to keep.

Auri had not slept that last night on the road. She had sat at the edge of our small fire, her bare feet tucked beneath her, watching the dark between the trees as though she were patiently reading a letter someone had left for her. She had walked beside me all the day before, matching her steps to my limp as though it were a tune she meant to learn, and I think she spent that night quietly deciding how far my leg would carry me and how much farther it would have to. When the sky began to lighten she stood, brushed the frost carefully from her knees, and looked at me.

“Time,” she said simply.

We followed her into the forest. The trees thickened. Birch gave way to oak, oak to something older, trees whose bark was dark and deeply furrowed, whose roots humped out of the earth like the spines of buried animals. The bare branches closed overhead until the dawn light filtered down grey and thin, and the air grew cool and damp and tasted of mushrooms and wet stone.

Auri stopped between two trees, a birch and an oak, their trunks close enough that their bark nearly touched. She cocked her head, listening carefully to something I could not hear, then reached out and laid her fingertips on the air between them.

The air resisted. A faint shimmering hung between the trunks, as if heat were rising off summer cobblestones, though the morning was cold.

“Here,” she said. And stepped between the trees.

And vanished.

“Auri!” I lunged forward. My hand met something that was neither solid nor empty, taut as the skin of a drum under your palm, humming with a note that had not yet been struck.

Her face reappeared between the trunks. Her hair lifted and drifted around her head, slow and weightless, like hair underwater. She reached out both hands, palms up, patient as a mother coaxing a child into a cold stream.

Hold on. Don’t let go.

I took Wil’s hand. His grip was hard and dry, the grip of a man who would rather break his fingers than admit he was afraid.

“If this kills me,” he said, “I want you to know that I’m going to be very angry.”

She pulled us through.

The first thing was cold.

Winter cold has a sharpness to it, a clean edge, and this was nothing like that. This was the cold of a cellar that has never seen sunlight, damp and close and old, pressing against my skin with a weight that had nothing to do with the temperature.

The ground beneath my feet was stone, smooth and worn, the sort you find in river bottoms or at the base of waterfalls. Water had shaped it, patiently, over centuries, and no hand ever had. It was slick underfoot, and my balance shifted without my asking, my body answering a wrongness it could not name.

We stood in a forest. But the word “forest” fit it about as well as the word “music” fits the sound of a cat being stepped on. The trees were silver, silver all the way through, their trunks the color of old coins, their bark smooth and cool when I touched it. They rang when the wind moved through them, a high thin sound, like a wet finger circled around the rim of a glass.

The leaves let the light through, thin as paper, thin as skin. It came from no direction I could name, and where it struck the stone floor it threw shadows that didn’t match the shapes that cast them. A round leaf threw a long, sharp-cornered shadow. A crooked branch threw a shadow that was perfectly straight.

“Don’t look at the shadows,” Auri said quietly. Her voice sounded strange here: flattened, muffled. The air was thicker than it should be, and her words had to push through it.

Wil was staring at his own shadow. It was doing something his body was not. His shadow’s hands were raised, palms out, pressing against something invisible. His shadow’s mouth was open.

“Wilem,” I said. “Look at me.”

He looked. His face had gone grey-white, and for a moment he did not seem to trust the ground under his boots.

“Walk,” I said. “Don’t look down. Don’t look at the shadows. Just walk.”

Auri was already moving ahead, her bare feet sure on the wet stone. She walked it as she walked the rooftops of the University, easily, like someone who has long since made her peace with falling.

The silver forest ended at a bridge.

It was stone, the same worn stone as the floor, arching over a gap in the world that I do not have good words for. It was not darkness, because darkness is something. This was nothing at all, a nothing my eyes refused to settle on, that my mind kept sliding off and sliding back to, like a tongue worrying at a missing tooth.

The bridge was narrow, wide enough for one person, perhaps two if they were friendly about it, and it had no railing. It hummed underfoot when I stepped onto it, a low hum that climbed through the bones of my feet and lodged somewhere behind my breastbone.

“Single file,” Auri said. She went first. I followed. Wil came last, his heavy boots striking the stone with deliberate, measured steps, each one a reminder to himself that solid ground exists.

I made the mistake of looking down.

The nothing did not look back. That was worse. Looking into a wolf’s eyes is frightening, but there is something between you, some small recognition. The gap beneath the bridge offered nothing at all. It was the flat blankness of a world that did not know I existed and would not mark the day I stopped.

My foot slipped, just slightly, a quarter inch on wet stone. My arms went out for balance, and for one reeling instant the nothing pulled at me, and it did not pull with force. It pulled with logic. You are a small thing, it said. And I am very, very large.

Auri’s hand caught my wrist. Her fingers were cold and thin and stronger than they had any right to be.

“Eyes forward,” she said.

It was a long way across. It was the longest bridge I have ever crossed, and I have crossed bridges over gorges in the Stormwal that would give a mountain goat second thoughts. But the stone held, and Auri’s hand held, and eventually the bridge ended and the ground was ground again.

Behind me, Wil let out a breath he’d been holding since the first step. “I am never,” he said, “doing that again.”

After the bridge, between one step and the next, the silver forest was gone. We were wading through knee-high grass the bruised purple of a twilight sky, warm against my legs as a banked hearth, and overhead there was no sun at all, only a flat pale glow like the inside of a seashell that cast no shadows.

My naming sense stirred, or what was left of it, like a conversation heard through a thick wall, muffled and warped but there beyond any doubt. The between-places were thick with names, old ones, and they pressed against my skin like thunder you feel before you hear it.

Auri walked through the purple grass with her fingers trailing through the warm blades, and watching her I thought of water going back to a river.

“How far?” Wil asked. His voice was steady, but his hand rested on the hilt of a knife he hadn’t drawn.

Auri held up one finger. Not far.

The grass gave way to cold white sand, fine as flour, and the sand to a passage of dark wood curving overhead like the inside of an upturned hull, smelling of old paper and candle wax, a library with no building around it.

And then, quite suddenly, a doorway: no door in it, only an opening in the air, rectangular and wrong, bordered by a light that was not quite light, a brightness that came off the edges of things rather than out of any source. Through it: green. Real green, the green of grass that knew sunlight and rain and the honest dirt of the mortal world.

Auri stopped at the threshold and touched two fingers to the edge of the doorway, testing it carefully, as you test the water in a bath before you get in.

She looked back at me and nodded.

We stepped through.

The world hit me. A shout after silence.

Color and sound and smell all at once, and the flat honest pull of the world dragging straight down instead of at the shifting angles of the between-places. My lungs filled with air that tasted of wet grass and turned earth and the faint, clean sweetness of rain that had fallen hours ago and was still drying in the low places.

Auri stumbled and I caught her. She was lighter than she should have been, and her pulse hammered against my fingers, fast and fluttering.

“Loud,” she whispered, pressing her palms against her temples.

I held her while the world steadied. The colors stopped shivering. The sounds stopped piling on top of one another. The between-places let go of us reluctantly, as sleep lets go on a cold morning.

Wil stood nearby, his boots planted in the grass, his face gone carefully blank while he filed a very large experience under “will think about later.” He looked at his hands and turned them over and checked that they were casting proper shadows. They were. He nodded, satisfied.

“Where are we?” he asked.

We stood at the crest of a low hill.

Below us, a valley opened like a cupped hand, farmland in patches of stubble and old snow, the dark brown of a field some early farmer had already turned in the thaw. Scattered homesteads trailed woodsmoke into the still air. A creek caught the afternoon light and threw it back in pieces. The land had the gentle, unhurried look of country that has been farmed for generations by people who have no interest in being anywhere else.

Near the center of the valley sat a village of a dozen buildings or so. There was a smithy with a stone chimney and a general store with a sagging porch. A few houses clustered close together as houses do when the people in them share wells and gossip. A quarter mile past the last of them, where two dirt roads crossed, stood a building larger than the rest: two stories of grey fieldstone and dark timber with a slate roof. A sign swung over the door in a breeze I could not feel, too far off to read.

An inn.

The valley was quiet with the simple quiet of a place where nothing much happens and the people who live there prefer it that way. Somewhere a dog barked, and the sound carried across the valley and faded slowly and was gone.

“South of the Eld,” Wil said. He had been reading the land as he read the hill ground at home, the barley stubble, the lie of the fields, a squat road-marker below us cut in the southern style, and he said it as flatly as a sum. We were a long way from Renere. A long way from the University. A long way from anywhere Alveron’s soldiers would think to look.

“We’ve covered hundreds of miles,” Wil said. “In a morning.”

I could never have found that road again, as though it had been folded up behind us.

Auri crouched and pressed both palms flat against the grass, gentle and precise, a physicker taking a pulse. She listened a moment, and then her face cleared. She looked up at me and nodded slowly. Yes. Here.

I reached for my naming sense. What was left of it was faint, a candle seen through fog. But it was enough to feel the crossroads below us. The fabric of things had been worn thin down there by centuries of travelers and bargains and all the old belief that gathers where roads meet.

At the crossing, half-buried in last year’s dead weeds, stood a stone, grey and weathered. Even at that distance the hole through its center was plain.

“A waystone,” I said.

Auri closed her eyes and listened. When she opened them she was smiling, a smile I had never seen on her on the rooftops or in the Underthing, private and settled and sure.

“Newarre,” she said softly. “Nowhere.”

I stood on the hill and looked down at the village for a long time.

The afternoon light lay across the valley in long golden bars. The shadows of the scattered trees stretched east, pointing where we would not go. A breeze moved through the grass around us, cool and ordinary, carrying the smell of woodsmoke and the faint iron tang of a smithy at work.

It was the most unremarkable place I had ever seen.

There were no city walls, no river traffic, no great road connecting it to anywhere that mattered. The two dirt paths that crossed at the waystone led to other small places, other quiet villages, other lives lived a long way from kings and wars and the terrible wanting of clever young men.

A farmer was walking along the road below, leading a mule. He did not look up at the three strangers on the hill. Why would he? Nothing interesting ever came from any direction.

Wil stood beside me, looking the valley over. “No garrison,” he said. “No toll gate. No posting board that I can see. The roads are too small for regular patrols.” He paused. “It’s perfect.”

It was. Perfect as a grave, exactly the right size, exactly the right shape, exactly deep enough.

But there was more to it than that: the waystone’s faint hum against what was left of my senses, the color of the light, how the inn sat at the crossroads, patient as a thing that has been waiting a long while and expects to wait longer. The village was ordinary. The place was not. Underneath the dirt roads and the farmland and the barking dog there was a rightness to it, like the click of a key turning in a lock it was made for. That road, too, felt laid down neatly for me, and I took it anyway.

Auri felt it too. She stood with her face tilted up toward the sun and her eyes closed and her arms loose at her sides, as if the light were something she could drink. The between-places had worn her out, and the real world was battering her with its loudness and its hard edges. But she stood there in the afternoon light and she was, for that moment, at peace.

“Waiting,” she said contentedly. She touched the grass gently, barely bending the blades under her fingers.

I looked at the inn, at the grey stone and the dark timber and the sign I still could not read. I thought of the man in the posting-board woodcut, sharp-featured and red-haired and green-eyed and dangerous, and of the man in my reflection, thinner and duller and wearing someone else’s name like an ill-fitting coat.

Denna. Sim. The broken things I was carrying and the broken thing I had become.

“Newarre,” I said. The word felt strange and new in my mouth. “Nowhere.”

I took a breath. The air was clean and raw and smelled of nothing more dangerous than woodsmoke and wet earth.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked down the hill toward the inn.

The grass was matted and wet underfoot and the thin sun was on my back, and I limped badly on the leg Cinder had opened. Behind me the between-places had closed, or had simply stopped showing themselves, a door you only see when you know to look. Ahead of me the village went about its ordinary afternoon, with no idea that the most wanted man in the Four Corners was walking toward it with a trembling hand and a borrowed name and nothing left to lose.

The waystone grew larger as we came down toward it. Grey granite, old as the hill it sat on, its surface worn smooth by all the hands that had reached out to touch it for luck in passing. The hole through its center was dark and round, and from the right angle it was an eye.

I reached out as I passed and touched the stone. It held a little of the thin sun’s warmth, and it was rough despite its weathering. It hummed against my palm, quietly and steadily, a struck bell going on humming long after you have stopped hearing it.

I walked past it, toward the inn, toward the end of everything I had been.

Behind me lay Kvothe.

Ahead of me lay Kote.

I did not look back.