Chapter 85: Cinder Wounded

HE CAME ON the third night.

We had made camp in a hollow between two granite ridges. Wil had built a fire — small, efficient, Cealdish in its practicality — and Auri had found water from a spring that she said was clean because its name was honest.

I was sitting with my back against stone, Caesura across my knees, when the temperature dropped.

Not gradually. All at once. The kind of sudden, biting cold that has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with something old and wrong moving through the world.

The fire flinched. The flames drew back, contracted, as if they were afraid.

“He’s here,” Auri whispered.

“Cinder.” I stood. Lifted Caesura. “Get behind me. Both of you.”

He came out of the dark like a piece of the dark deciding to take shape.

But he was not what I remembered.

The Cinder I had faced at my parents’ camp was a being of absolute, terrible beauty. This Cinder was diminished. His skin had lost its luminous quality — merely white now, drained. His eyes flickered like a candle in wind. He moved with a hitch in his left leg, and his shadow was thin. Pale. Barely there.

“You’ve been busy.” He stopped at the edge of the firelight, and the flames guttered but did not die. Once, his presence alone would have smothered any fire within a hundred yards. “Rescuing princesses from barrow depths. Playing the hero.”

“You look terrible,” I said.

Up close, the damage was worse. There were fractures in the thing that held him together — the name that had sustained him for three millennia was fraying. The Name of Silence had done this. My silence. The power I had spoken at Renere.

It had wounded Cinder in a place that doesn’t heal.

He raised his hand. His fingers were translucent. The edges uncertain, wavering, like a reflection in water that hasn’t settled.

“You unmade part of me,” he said. “Three thousand years of accumulated power, and one boy with a borrowed silence tears a hole in it.”

“I’m not a boy anymore.”

“No. You’re something worse. A broken namer carrying a weapon you don’t understand.” His voice sharpened. “Now I’m dying. The damage is spreading. In a month, maybe two, I’ll simply stop.”

“Good.”

The word came out flat and final. Because I meant it. Because this was the creature who had stood in my parents’ camp and smiled while they burned.

“Ah.” His smile returned, and for a moment I saw the old Cinder. The predator’s delight in pain. “There he is. The Kvothe who kills.”

He drew his sword.

Long, dark, forged from something not quite metal. The blade absorbed light, and along its edge, patterns crawled like living symbols.

I lifted Caesura. The Adem sword felt different now — lighter, more present. As if the blade understood what was coming.

“Wil,” I said. “Take Auri. Go.”

“I’m not —”

“He needs to do this alone,” Auri said quietly.

Their footsteps retreated into the dark. And then it was just the two of us.

He attacked first. Fast. Faster than something that damaged should have been able to move. The dark blade came in low — I stepped back, blocked. The impact traveled up my arms like a wave of cold.

He pressed. Two more strikes — high, spinning low, high again. Each one carrying centuries of combat behind it. I parried, retreated, felt my left hand weakening with each impact.

I switched to a one-handed grip. Right hand only. Lost the balance immediately, the way a musician feels the loss of an octave. But my right hand still answered when I called.

Cinder saw the shift. “Your hand. The oath is taking it. Denna’s final gift.”

I didn’t answer. Didn’t have breath to spare. His strikes were coming faster, driven by desperation. Dying things are dangerous — they have nothing to conserve, nothing to hold back for a tomorrow that isn’t coming.

I caught his blade on Caesura’s edge. Turned it. Found an opening and thrust.

Caesura’s tip caught his left arm. The blood that came out was nearly black. Cold — I could feel the chill from three feet away, could see frost forming on the grass where the drops fell.

“Interesting,” he said, looking at the wound. “That actually hurt.”

Even diminished, Cinder was a better fighter than I would ever be. But with each strike, each clash of metal against his dark blade, Caesura resonated. A frequency I felt in my teeth, in my bones, in the parts of me the silence hadn’t eaten yet. The sword was singing — not with ears, but in the place where naming happened.

And the song was a caesura. A break. An ending. The poet-killer, doing what it was made to do.

I pressed forward. Not with skill — I didn’t have enough. Not with power — the oath had taken too much. I pressed with the only thing I had left: the stubborn will of a boy who had survived Tarbean. I fought badly. Made mistakes. Took cuts — one across my ribs, another along my forearm, a third that opened my left shoulder.

But I kept fighting. And Caesura kept singing. And Cinder began to slow.

The end came simply.

He overextended — a thrust that carried too much desperation. I sidestepped, barely, and brought Caesura around in a two-handed arc, forcing my left hand to hold through sheer bloody-minded refusal to let go.

The blade caught him across the chest. Not deep. But Caesura sang as it cut, and the note was clear and final — the name of ending, the silence that falls when the music stops.

Cinder staggered. Looked down at the wound. At the place where Caesura’s edge had cut not just flesh but something deeper — the binding that had sustained him since before the world remembered what it had lost.

“Oh,” he said. Just that. The sound a candle makes when the last bit of wick drowns.

He dropped his sword. It hit the ground and dissolved into fragments that scattered like leaves in a wind that wasn’t blowing.

His knees buckled. His eyes — those black, bottomless eyes I had hated since I was twelve years old — found mine.

“Your parents,” he said. “They were brave. At the end. They sang. Your father played, and your mother sang, and the music was so beautiful that I almost stopped.”

Tears on my face. Hot against the cold air.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because Haliax commanded. And in three thousand years, I never found the strength to disobey.” His lips pulled back. “That’s the real curse. Not the immortality. The obedience. The inability to choose.”

He was dissolving. The way frost dissolves when the sun touches it. His edges went first.

“You freed me,” he said. “Whatever name that sword carries — it cuts the binding.”

I brought Caesura down. Not in anger. Not in vengeance. In mercy.

The blade passed through what remained, and the note it sang was beautiful. A caesura. The silence between one line and the next.

Cinder came apart, like a word forgotten in the middle of a sentence. And the grass where he had knelt was empty.

I stood there for a long time.

My parents were still dead. The world was still broken. And I was still a fugitive, still losing pieces of myself to a broken oath that didn’t care about justice or vengeance.

But Cinder was gone. And that was something. Even if it felt like nothing.

That was something.