Chapter 83: The Empty Place

THE FIRST WEEK alone, I organized everything twice.

There was no need for it. My hands simply wanted something to hold that wasn’t a sword or a lute or the memory of someone’s throat, and I gave them work, as you hand a fretful child a spoon to bang on things with. Because if I stopped moving, the silence would settle, and if the silence settled, I would have to sit inside it, and if I sat inside it, I would have to feel.

I was not ready to feel.

When Wil’s footsteps had gone away slowly down the road and I could not hear them any more, I stood in the common room of the Waystone Inn and listened to nothing.

The walls were thick grey fieldstone on a greystone foundation, old as the hills. They blocked the wind, the birdsong, the distant lowing of cattle, and in exchange they offered nothing but the sound of my own breathing.

If you have never stood alone in a truly empty building, I cannot put it better than this: the silence pressed against my eardrums as deep water presses against a diver’s chest, and I was the one thing in it that did not belong.

The hearth was cold. For three days we had kept a good fire in it, and I had let it die quietly while I stood behind the bar and listened to him go, and now the ash lay grey and settled in the firebox as though nobody had lit it in years.

For three days I had lived out of my pack like a man stopping one night on his way somewhere else. Now I emptied it onto the bar: two changes of clothes, a razor, and a few things I had carried out of the Eld and did not yet want to look at. It should have felt like more.

My lute, in its battered case, had leaned beside the door since the afternoon we came. Now it went upstairs without being opened. I carried it by the handle with my arm held stiffly out, as if it were a lantern in a room I had no wish to see. I set it on the high shelf in the bedroom, pushed it to the back, and left without looking at it again.

Then I counted the jots onto the bar. Fourteen, which Wil had left under his cup without a word, and all the coin I had. Enough for flour and salt and not much else. I stacked them into a neat column and stared at it longer than any man needs to stare at fourteen jots. Then I scattered them and stacked them again, because the first stack had been too precise, and a man named Kote would not lay out his coins with an arcanist’s hunger for order.

Kvothe arranged things a certain way. Kote would have to learn another.

The inn was in good order already. I arranged it anyway, carefully, because arranging asked no naming of me, no music, no power at all, only hands and the patience to put things where they belonged until every surface had a purpose.

I started with the bottles behind the bar. Wines from Vintas, mostly. A few Aturan reds. Meads, ciders, a dark Cealdish stout that made me think of Wil and then made me stop thinking of Wil. I sorted them by type, by origin, by the amber and gold of their contents. Lined them along the shelf with careful spacing, because I needed things exact as other men need air. They were already in order. I ordered them again.

Then I caught myself: I had arranged them by pitch, which is what a musician does without ever deciding to. I had grouped the bottles so neatly that a finger drawn down the row would have made the glass sing a descending scale.

I rearranged them by height, tallest on the left and shortest on the right, as any innkeeper would. They sat on the shelf like the words of a sentence that was put together properly and said nothing at all. I left them so.

The first night alone, I did not sleep in the bed.

It was the quiet. In the between-places, there had been the hum of names pressing against the fabric of things. In Renere, before the end, there had been the city’s constant murmur, ten thousand lives blending into a sound so steady that it passed for silence.

Here, there was nothing. The bedroom window looked out on empty fields. The road was a pale line in the moonlight, leading nowhere I wanted to go.

I sat on the edge of the bed. My left hand trembled against my thigh. In the dark, with no one to perform for, I let the hand shake.

I went downstairs and built the fire up again in the hearth I had let go cold. Then I sat in a chair with my back to the wall and my face to the door, as the flight from Renere had taught me, and the Eld after it, and all the places where something might come through a door without knocking.

Nothing came. I sat until dawn greyed the windows, then I stood and started a pot of tea and began again.

The days took on a rhythm of their own, as water quietly finds its level.

Dawn. A flint-and-steel fire, because the inn had no sympathy lamps and I could not have lit one if it had. Tea, brewed in a copper kettle that Wil and I had already scoured bright between us, and which I scoured again anyway, half a morning, until it threw my face back at me, stretched and wrong.

Then the work. I swept a common room that did not need sweeping, and found a little dust anyway, or made some, and watched it hang in the slanting light like gold motes. I scrubbed floors that Wil and I had scrubbed already, on my knees, with lye soap and cold water, until the skin of my knuckles cracked. Oiled the tables, the chairs, the bar, whether they wanted it or not. Set the kitchen to rights again and counted through the root cellar a second time: potatoes, turnips, a few jars of preserves put up by someone with a steady hand and a generous understanding of sugar.

In the afternoon I would stop, though never because I had finished; an inn is never finished. I stopped because the light changed a little after fourth bell, going gold and low, and in that light the empty chairs stopped looking like furniture and started looking like absences, each one the outline of a person who should have been sitting there.

I would stand behind the bar with a cloth in my hands, and breathe.

I polished it every evening, whether it needed polishing or not, because it was the one thing all day that felt honestly true. An innkeeper polishes his bar. I reasoned that if I did it long enough, then perhaps, eventually, I would be one.

Three weeks in, I walked to Newarre.

The village was a quarter mile from the inn, and smaller than I had judged it from the hill. A smithy, its chimney breathing thin grey smoke. A general store with a porch that sagged on one end, giving the building the resigned look of a man with one short leg. A handful of houses, their gardens neat, their shutters painted in the practical colors of people who have paint left over from more important work.

The general store was run by a broad man with thick hands who had lived his whole life in one place and saw no reason to be impressed by anything that happened in it.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning. I’ve taken over the inn at the crossroads.”

He looked me over as though I were a fence post, judging me soberly for use and not for beauty. “The Waystone. The Cealdish fellow said he was buying it for someone. Never said who.”

“I’m looking to open it again.”

“You an innkeeper, then?”

The question was simple. The answer should have been simple. But I hesitated, because the word was a door, and once I had walked through it I could not walk back. A lie told once is a lie. A lie told every day is a life.

“Yes,” I said. “My name is Kote.”

The name tasted like a stone in my mouth, hard and cold and sitting exactly where something else used to be.

The storekeeper nodded. So did the other man in the shop, who allowed that his name was Graham and that he did the woodwork hereabouts, if ever I wanted a shelf hung straight. He was the man the heirs had paid to keep the place up, the swept dooryard and the oiled hinges. My name meant nothing to either of them: no flash of recognition, no narrowing of the eyes. Just a name. Just a man. Just an innkeeper buying flour.

I bought flour, salt, candles. When I counted out the jots for them, the storekeeper told me there was credit standing on his books against the inn, the rest of Wil’s draft, and I asked him politely to leave it there. Neither of them asked interesting questions after that, and I gave no interesting answers.

Walking back with the parcel under my arm, something settled in my chest, and it felt very like the first tooth of a gear catching at its wheel. The lie had begun to live.

I opened for business on a Theden, because it was the least important day of the span. If the inn failed, it would happen on a day that wouldn’t notice.

Three farmers came. They introduced themselves grudgingly, offering their names like coins they expected to have returned. They ordered cider. We talked about weather.

I listened, and nodded, and wiped the bar, and did not say anything clever.

This was harder than it sounds, because my mind wanted to watch, to take everything quietly apart, to file away the small details. Cob’s accent placed him from the northern Commonwealth. Jake’s boots were army boots, ten years out of fashion. Shep’s hands were a farmer’s hands, his grip on the mug favoring an old injury to his right thumb.

All of this, and I said none of it. I had meant to be an innkeeper who sees nothing, and I learned before the evening was out that there is no such creature. A good innkeeper sees everything and says nothing. The watching was allowed, then, and only the telling was not. So I poured drinks and nodded and made the same small observations about weather that have been made in every taproom since the first barrel was tapped.

They left around ninth bell, and the silence rushed back in like water filling a hole. It was not so heavy a silence as before. The chairs stood pushed back at careless angles, and a ring of moisture marked the bar where Shep had set down his mug.

I wiped the ring clean and washed the mugs, but I did it slowly, taking quiet pleasure in the proof that someone had been here.

I learned to be Kote slowly, one grain at a time, as stone wears smooth.

There were moments when the old self surfaced. The wind would shift and for half a breath I would feel something stir faintly in the sleeping part of my mind, the ghost of something I had once known by name, and then it would be gone. My left hand would reach for a chord on an instrument that wasn’t there, and the fingers would close on empty air, and I would make a fist of it and wait patiently for it to pass.

The silence helped, though it was nothing like the weapon I had wielded in Renere. It lay over the place like a blanket, thick and muffling and almost kind, the silence that comes when everything has been said and the one who said it is content, or resigned, or simply too tired to speak further.

I wore it as I had once worn my shaed, close against the skin and invisible to anyone not looking hard for it.

About a month after I came, I woke to a cold weight on the pillow beside my head. I knew whose gift it had been before my hand closed on it, and I knew it had come back to me quietly, on small bare feet in the night while I slept. I put it where my hand could find it without my looking, as if it were any ordinary thing, and I did not look at it.

He came on a day when the rain couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

It had been misting since dawn, rain that did not so much fall as simply appear, gathering quietly on every surface. The air itself was sweating. The common room was empty because even Cob and Jake, who would drink through a hurricane, drew the line at walking a quarter mile in mud that went over the ankle.

The door opened, and the young man who walked in was wet through, his fine clothes soaked. Fae clothes, though the cut mimicked mortal fashion closely enough to pass a casual glance. Water dripped from him in a rhythm too regular to be natural, each drop falling neatly in time, as though even the rain on him obeyed some music of his own.

He was beautiful, sharp-featured and smooth-skinned, with eyes the color of deep water at twilight. Too dark and too bright at once, and far too much for a room this size, for a village this small, for the quiet grey my life had become.

I knew what he was before he spoke. You don’t spend time in the Fae without learning to recognize its children.

“Interesting place,” he said, looking around with an appraising eye. “Very ordinary. Remarkably ordinary, in fact. It must have taken effort.”

“Can I help you?”

“Oh, I hope so.” He settled onto a barstool with the boneless grace of a cat claiming a sunbeam. “Red hair, green eyes, hands that used to play music that could bring the dead to weeping. You’re Kvothe.”

“My name is Kote.”

“Your name is whatever you choose to call yourself. That doesn’t change what you are.” He leaned forward. “I’m Bast. And I’ve come a long way to find you.”

I should have sent him away. A Fae in Newarre was a danger I could not afford, a loose thread that, if pulled, might unravel the careful blankness I had spent weeks weaving.

Instead, I poured him cider and watched him wrap too-long fingers around the mug. He drank with absolute attention, each sip a sentence in a language he was still translating.

He had seen me once before, he said, from the edge of a wood on a road in Vintas, with a dark-haired girl beside me who had smiled at him easily, as if strangers at the edge of the trees were an ordinary thing. I did not ask what he had been doing on that road, and for a long while afterward I forgot he had told me.

He told me Felurian had mentioned me: a mortal man who had spoken a Name that should not be spoken, and had broken something inside himself in the speaking.

“I’m not dying,” I said.

“No?” He looked at me with the Fae sight that sees through glamour. “Your hands, Reshi.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’m practicing.” His eyes had not left them. “What’s wrong with your left hand?”

He could see what I had learned to hide: the stiffness, the tremor, how I kept the hand below the bar when customers were in the room and let the fingers curl slowly inward when I was not watching.

“It’s the silence,” he said, with the easy certainty of the Fae. “Eating you from the edges in.”

“You’re very well-informed for someone so young.”

“I’m more than a century old.”

“Like I said.”

He laughed, too loudly for the empty room. It filled the corners and bounced off the fieldstone walls, and the Waystone sounded like a place where people came and went and lived.

“Let me stay,” he said. “I’ll work. In exchange, you teach me what you know about the silence. About naming. About the forces reshaping the world.” He paused. The playfulness dropped away, and what remained was young and old at the same time, frightened and fierce in equal measure. “The doors between… they’re not what they were. Something’s fading. My world is growing thin, and no one can tell me why.”

I looked at him for a long time. He held my gaze without blinking, as the Fae do.

“Room at the end of the hall,” I said. “Linens in the closet. Breakfast at dawn.”

His grin was so bright the room actually lightened. The Fae leak glamour when their emotions run strong, and for a moment the common room might have been a painting of itself, done kindly: the wood richer, the firelight warmer, the dust catching the light like gold. Then he pulled himself together and the room was ordinary again.

“Breakfast at dawn,” he repeated. “What time is dawn, exactly? It moves around so much in the mortal world.”

“That,” I said, “is something you’ll need to learn.”

He called me Reshi. I stopped asking him not to.

Partly because the asking took an energy I did not have. Partly because the word, spoken in his lilting accent, sat on me like a name of its own. A third name. Kvothe was a door I had closed behind me, and Kote was a room I had walked into and could not find my way out of, but Reshi was neither. It fit the narrow space between who I was and who I pretended to be.

He tried to provoke me. Questions about naming, about the wind. “Can you still feel it?” he’d ask. “The wind’s name?”

“No,” I said, which was a lie. Some days I could still hear it, faintly, like talk through a wall.

“Not even a whisper?”

“No.”

He noticed how I had arranged the bottles, by pitch, though I had shuffled them twice to hide it, and twice the old order had crept quietly back, as a river creeps into its old channel after a flood. “You’re still thinking like an arcanist, Reshi. It’s in your bones.”

“Don’t try to find him in here. The man you’re looking for is gone.”

He looked at me with those too-dark eyes, and there was something in them I had seen before in Simmon, and in Fela. He was looking for a coiled spring where there was only a broken one.

“I’ll wait,” he said placidly.

“You’ll wait a long time.”

“I’m Fae. Time is the one thing I have in abundance.”

Months passed. The autumn deepened and the leaves turned and fell and the first frost came, painting the windows with patterns that my sleeping mind tried to read before I caught myself and looked away. The Waystone found a new rhythm, Bast’s noise and my quiet, his hope and my emptiness circling each other like dancers who hadn’t found the music.

Some mornings I would reach for the wind without thinking. My hand would rise, my chest would open, the old channels in my sleeping mind would stir, and then the reaching would hit the place where Kvothe had been and find Kote instead, and the hand would drop, and I would go back to polishing the bar. Other mornings my fingers would find a chord on the edge of a table, pressing carefully at positions that belonged to no instrument I owned, the muscle memory of a man who had played ten thousand hours and would not admit the playing was done.

Once, that first full winter, I woke with a melody in my throat. Four notes, rising, that dissolved the instant I was awake enough to hear them. I lay in bed and chased the ghost of the melody for an hour, and it was the most alive I had felt in months, and I hated it.

He stayed. Through the empty months and silent nights, he stayed. He cleaned and cooked and served drinks with a grin that charmed the farm girls and irritated the farm boys, and he waited with the tireless patience of a creature who counts his years in some other coin entirely. In those early months, on evenings when the room was empty, I taught him sympathetic strings with two pins and a length of thread on the bar, and watched his hands do easily what mine no longer could.

He waited for Kvothe.

I stood behind my bar, rested my hands flat on the wood, and felt the silence settling around us both, soft and familiar and almost warm.

Bast had quietly changed the sort of emptiness the Waystone held: it had stopped being the emptiness of a room with no one in it and become the emptiness of a room with someone waiting in the doorway.