Chapter 82: The Waystone

THE INN WAS waiting.

I knew it as soon as I saw it, as you know a song by its first note.

The Waystone Inn sat at the crossroads of two dirt paths, built of old grey stone and dark timber, two stories tall, with a slate roof that had weathered a century of storms and showed it. Above the door hung a sign: a grey stone with a hole through its center, painted in fading silver.

The windows were dark and the door was closed, but the place wasn’t abandoned. Someone had kept the front dooryard swept, the gutters clear, the hinges oiled. A few weeds had pushed up between the dooryard stones, stubborn things that refused to accept they weren’t welcome.

I pushed the door open.

The smell hit first.

Old wood and older stone, and a patient dust over everything, and the ghost of smoke from a hearth that hadn’t burned in months.

The common room was larger than it needed to be for a village like Newarre. Tables in patient rows, chairs pushed back. The bar stretched along the far wall, dark wood that no dust could quite dull.

Behind the bar there was a mirror, old and spotted with age, its silver backing showing through in patches. I caught my reflection in it, a man too thin and too worn, his red hair gone dull and his eyes gone dim, the face that people had once called beautiful only tired now.

I looked like an innkeeper.

Auri had come in behind me, her bare feet silent on the floorboards. She stood in the doorway, framed by the daylight outside, and she looked at the inn as she looked at everything, and smiled.

“It’s just an inn,” Wil said flatly, entering behind her. He looked around with the practical eye of a man raised in his father’s wool trade. “A good one. Well-built. But just an inn.”

Auri moved into the room, trailing her fingers along the bar. Where she touched it the wood seemed to brighten, as if it were glad of her.

I walked behind the bar and ran my hand along the wood, smooth with years of care, the grain worn to a glow that time had not managed to rub away.

I picked up the cloth that had been left folded beside the taps, white and clean and waiting.

I began to polish the bar.

“You’re staying,” Wil said. He wasn’t asking.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. A long time.” I looked up at him. “Maybe forever.”

“Kvothe.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Wil’s face didn’t change, as though he had been expecting that answer for some while and had made his peace with it.

“Kote, then,” he said. “Still a terrible name.”

“Still mine.” I laid the cloth down. “I’m an innkeeper.”

“You’re the most famous fugitive in the Four Corners.”

“I was. Kote is no one.” I laid my hands flat on the bar. “I need to stop being Kvothe. The oath is only part of it. There’s five thousand royals on a head that needs to disappear.”

“So you’ll hide.”

“I’ll stop.” I came around the bar. “Hiding means you’re waiting to be found. I’m putting down the name.”

“Five thousand royals,” Wil said. “That’s not a hunt. That’s a crusade.”

“All the more reason.”

“The soldiers will still come.”

“They’ll find an innkeeper. A quiet man in a quiet village who has never done anything more remarkable than bake a decent loaf of bread.” I spread my hands, one steady, one trembling. “Do I look like the Kingkiller?”

He looked, and then he really looked.

“No,” he admitted finally.

“Let the oath have him. What’s left can be Kote, and Kote is nobody worth hunting.”

Auri was upstairs.

I found her in the largest bedroom, cross-legged on the bare mattress with her eyes closed, listening.

After a long while she opened her eyes and nodded. Safe.

“Kote,” I said.

“Kote,” she repeated, but her mouth shaped it differently, carefully, as a namer says a name, small and still forming.

“You could stay,” I said. “There are more rooms here than I will ever fill.”

She shook her head slowly. The Underthing was broken, she told me, a little at a time and in her own way: something had shaken the stone down there, and the quiet had gone out of it, and nothing was where it belonged any more. She was going home to set it right, room by room. There was a box down there she had been given to keep, and she meant to keep it.

She stood, crossed to me, and took both my hands, the steady and the trembling, and held them.

“Lonely,” she said quietly, and it was a warning.

“I know.”

She squeezed my hands, and her eyes said the rest: don’t pretend. Don’t build the mask so thick you forget the face underneath.

“I promise,” I said.

She tilted her head. On what?

The question stopped me. My name was gone and my power was gone with it. What could I promise on?

“On the silence,” I said. “It’s the only thing I have left that’s truly mine.”

She considered this seriously and nodded. “Not blood,” she said. “Just keeping.”

She kissed my cheek, quick and barely there.

Then she let go of my hands and walked toward the door.

“Auri.”

She stopped and turned.

“Thank you. For the soap and the keys and the candles and all the strange, beautiful things you gave me when I didn’t deserve them.”

Just then she was the old Auri again, the girl from the rooftops.

“Goodbye, Kote.”

“Goodbye, Auri.”

She paused at the door and touched the frame. Then, very quietly: “Golden.” She pressed her hand to her heart. “Remember.”

I went down with her and filled her hands from the kitchen, a heel of bread and a jar of preserves from the cellar, and asked her to come back when things were right again. She nodded once, carefully, which with Auri was not a promise and was not nothing either.

Then she walked out the door into the afternoon light.

And I let her go.

Wil had gone out to walk round the place and look hard at the roof, and I stood alone in the empty inn.

The silence here was the silence of a place that had been full once and was waiting to be full again, a chair pulled out from the table.

I walked through the common room, touching things: the tables, scarred and honest; the cold hearth, its stones blackened with the memory of a thousand fires; the bottles behind the bar, dusty and patient, each of them a promise that someone would come and drink and sit and talk and be alive in this room.

I stood behind the bar. The cloth was still in my hand.

I folded it. Set it down. Picked it up again.

There was nothing else to do.

Wil stayed three days.

On the first morning he walked into the village alone. He came back at midday with mud to his knees and hung his coat carefully on the peg by the door as if it had always hung there.

“It’s bought,” he said. “From the dead owner’s heirs, through the storekeeper, with a draft on my family’s house in Ralien. I gave him no name for you. It’s yours.”

When I tried to speak of paying it back he said dehalan, very firmly, as though that settled the ledger, and he would not hear another word until I had said mine aloud, once, to his satisfaction.

After that we worked through the rest of those three days, turning the Waystone from a dead house into a working one, and he threw himself into it so he wouldn’t have to think about everything we’d lost. We scrubbed floors and went through the cellar, which was better stocked than it had any right to be. We mended a broken shutter, oiled the hinges on every door, set up the kitchen and the taproom.

We didn’t talk about Sim. We didn’t talk about the oath, or the breaking, or the future.

On the third evening, we sat at the bar, me behind it, Wil in front of it, a bottle of Vintish red between us that we’d found in the cellar.

“I have to go,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’ll head to Ralien. My father will want a word with me about a draft.” He took a drink. “I’ll send word when I can.”

“Don’t. It’s too dangerous.”

“Keh. I’ll decide what’s too dangerous for me.” He said it as he had said dehalan, and it was exactly as open to argument. “You’re my friend. A different name doesn’t change that.”

“Kote.”

“Kote.” He said it with the gravity of a man who understood that words are currency, and should be spent accordingly. “Kote, who runs an inn. Kote, who has never heard of the Kingkiller.”

“That’s the idea.”

“It’s a terrible idea.” He emptied his cup. “But all your ideas are terrible. And they always work.”

He heard it as soon as it was out of his mouth, and looked down into the empty cup for a while.

“Mostly,” he said.

I poured him another drink. We sat in the silence of the empty inn.

“Tell me something,” Wil said.

“What?”

“Was it worth it? The University, the Chandrian, the naming, the war, the killing, the losing. All of it.”

I thought about it, really thought, because Wil deserved that much.

“No,” I said. “Not for revenge, or peace, or watching Cinder come apart into nothing. That wasn’t worth a fraction of what it cost.”

“Then what?”

“The people.” I looked at my hands on the bar, one steady, one trembling. “Sim. Fela. Devi. You. Denna, for however long I had her. Auri. Elodin.” I met Wil’s eyes. “The people were worth it. Even the ones who are gone.”

Wil nodded, once.

“Then hold onto that,” he said. “When the silence gets heavy.”

“Promise?”

“On the silence.”

He drained his cup and set it on the bar with a small final click.

“Goodbye, Kote.”

“Goodbye, Wil.”

He shouldered his pack and walked to the door.

He paused at the threshold.

“Sim would have wanted music,” he said, without turning.

“I know.”

“He would have wanted you to play something ridiculous and sentimental.”

“I know.”

“But you can’t play anymore.”

“No.”

Then Wil did something I’d never seen him do.

He hummed.

A few bars of “Tinker Tanner,” off-key and off-rhythm. But he hummed it, and he hummed it for Sim.

Then he stopped, and walked out the door.

I stood behind the bar, and the silence settled.

I picked up the cloth. White. Clean.

And I began to polish.