Chapter 90: Interlude — What Bast Is

KOTE WAS ASLEEP.

He had told for three hours more after the shutters were barred: the soldiers and the lute of that first year, the chest, the name he gave himself. His voice had thinned slowly to a whisper, and he had just begun on the letters when he stopped in the middle of a sentence and slept.

Kote slept as a candle goes out. One moment the flame was there, flickering behind his eyes, and the next it was gone. He sat behind the bar with his chin on his chest and his hands in his lap, and the cloth he had been folding when the words ran out still lay loosely in one of them.

In three days Chronicler had not seen him sleep. Even at noon, when the squall drove them all to rest, Kote had only closed his eyes, and told him that resting was not the same thing.

Bast watched him from across the room.

He had been watching for a long time. Bast had never learned to count time as mortals did; for him it was a river you stood in, and you noticed it only when the temperature changed.

The temperature had changed.

The fire had burned down to embers and the candles were low, and the inn was wrapped in the silence that comes to old buildings in the late hours, when the wood remembers being a tree and everything in the room goes quietly back to its oldest shape. Outside, the sounds had gradually dropped to a distant scratching, as if whatever was out there were listening too.

Chronicler was awake at his corner table, surrounded by the sprawl of his recording. His hands were still and his pen was dry, and he stared at the pages in front of him like a man who has eaten too much and is only now beginning to regret it.

Bast unfolded from his place on the hearthstone, crossed the room in a few quick, soundless steps, and sat down across from Chronicler, and the chair didn’t creak.

Chronicler looked up, and his eyes were bloodshot. But there was something wary behind the tiredness, the sudden careful alertness of a man who has just realized he is alone in a room with something that is not what it appears to be.

“He’s sleeping,” Bast said softly.

“I can see that,” Chronicler said dryly.

“He won’t wake for hours. The telling takes something out of him.” Bast’s voice was low, pitched carefully for privacy. “He hasn’t slept like that in two years, and tonight the story was very bad.”

Chronicler nodded slowly. “Is there something you want to say?”

Bast tilted his head slightly, and the gesture was almost human, though too quick and too exact, and it put Chronicler in mind of a hawk, or else an owl.

“I want to tell you what I am,” Bast said. “Because you need to understand, if you’re going to write this story properly.”

Chronicler reached for his pen, but Bast’s hand was on his wrist before he’d moved an inch.

The touch was light, but Chronicler’s arm tingled from wrist to shoulder, and for one reeling moment he felt something vast pressing up against the inside of his mind, as if a fire had been shut inside a lantern and the glass were beginning to bow.

“Not tonight,” Bast said. “Tonight is not for the page. Tonight is for you.” He released Chronicler’s wrist gently. “Someday you may write it. But tonight, you listen.”

Chronicler’s hand withdrew, and he folded both hands in his lap, a child told to sit still in temple.

“I’m listening.”

Bast leaned back in his chair. The dying firelight caught his face at a new angle, and for a moment he looked older.

“You think you know what I am,” Bast said. “Fae, a trickster, a tempter, a beautiful boy with pointed ears and a talent for mischief.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Tiny Gods, yes. I am all of those things, in the same way that the ocean is water, which is true and dangerously incomplete. You people are easily confused by the look of things.”

He reached up and touched his own face, tracing his jawline and his cheekbones as if he were handling a mask he had worn so long he had forgotten where it ended and his face began.

“This is a glamour,” he said. “You’ve seen it slip: the ears, the eyes, how I move when I forget to move as humans move.” His fingers paused at his temple. “But you’ve only seen it slip. You haven’t seen it fall.”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“No, manling, you don’t. But you need to.” His hand dropped. “Because you need to understand what has been sitting across from your host all this while, serving drinks and sweeping floors, and what Felurian sent here to guard: the last ember of the brightest fire she ever knew.”

The name landed in the silence. Felurian. Chronicler’s mouth went suddenly dry.

“Felurian asked you to come?”

“She asked me.” Bast’s eyes held Chronicler’s. “Felurian, who takes what she wants and has never lowered herself to requesting a thing she could not simply claim.”

He fell silent, as if the memory still cost him something.

“Yesterday you told me she let him go to please her pride,” Chronicler said.

“Yesterday you hadn’t earned the rest of it. She sent to my court for me, before I renounced it, since she cannot stay long outside her glade, and when I came she knelt and asked me to go to him. She did not ask me to bring him back, only to be there, to watch, to keep the last ember alive.” He shifted in his chair. “But I chose to come. She gave me a reason, and the choice was mine.”

Court. The word went through Chronicler like cold water. The same young man sat across the table, and everything about him had suddenly changed.

“Your court,” Chronicler said carefully.

“My court.” Bast’s voice was quiet and matter-of-fact. “I am Bastas, son of Remmen, Prince of Twilight and the Telwyth Mael. In the Fae, I am lord of the gloaming places: the borders, the thresholds, the spaces between one thing and another. The dusk and the dawn belong to me.”

He said it simply, without pride, as the wind says I am wind, a plain fact about the world that wanted no arguing with.

Chronicler felt his hands trembling in his lap and stilled them deliberately.

“In my court,” Bast continued, “I have reshaped landscapes with a thought, unraveled the names of things for the pleasure of hearing them come apart.” He looked around the darkened room. “And here, in Newarre, I cannot convince the grocer to sell me fresh bread.”

He looked down at his hands. “The mortal world cannot hold the whole of what I am, so it cuts me down to something that fits: a beautiful boy, a loyal student, a slightly odd young man who is good with a knife and bad with money.”

“But that’s not what you are.”

“No.” Bast looked at him steadily. “It’s what I wear.”

The fire had died completely, and the room was dark now, lit only by the last guttering candle on Chronicler’s table.

There was no flash of light, no crack of thunder. One moment Bast was sitting across from Chronicler with his familiar face composed and human enough, and the next the face was different. Then it was gone altogether.

What sat across from Chronicler was something his mind could not hold. It was bright, though not with any light that fell on the room. It was more real than the room it sat in.

The features were still there, but they were stripped of softness and of careful ordinariness. What remained was the bone beneath, something ancient and wild, terrible as a thunderstorm is terrible, terrible as the deep ocean is when you understand that it could swallow you without noticing.

The eyes were the worst.

There was no white left in them, and no pupil, and nothing that could be called an iris. They had gone blue from lid to lid, a deep unbroken blue with no human part in it anywhere, the blue of deep water where the sun has given up reaching. Chronicler could not find the bottom of them, and somewhere far down in all that blue was something older than thinking and deeper than love.

Chronicler’s chair scraped against the floor. His heart was hammering hard against his ribs, and every instinct he possessed was screaming at him to run.

He didn’t run.

He sat still when everything in him said move, and he looked when everything said look away.

And what he saw, when the first wave of terror had gone out of him, was a being of staggering power and staggering tenderness, sitting in a tavern in the middle of nowhere, watching a broken man sleep.

“This is what I am,” Bast said. His voice had changed, layered now with depths that shouldn’t have been possible. “This is what sits across from my Reshi at breakfast and pretends not to notice that he’s fading. This is what lies awake at night listening to the silence eat him alive.”

The glamour came back in stages. The eyes dimmed and the features softened and turned human again. Whatever had been looking out through them drew slowly back until there was nothing across the table but a young man.

“Why are you showing me this?” Chronicler asked.

“Because you need to understand what is being wasted,” Bast said. “What is being lost.”

Bast leaned forward with his chin in his hands, and the posture was young, almost childish.

“Felurian loved him,” Bast said. “In her way. The Fae love differently, completely, in the moment, without the harness of commitment. When Felurian took Kvothe to her bed, she wasn’t claiming him. She was experiencing him.”

He turned his hand over in the firelight.

“But he stayed in her memory after he left, and he did not fade as her mortal lovers always faded. He stayed bright. She told me she would be walking through her twilight gardens and suddenly think of his hands, his voice, how he looked at her with wonder instead of worship. No one had ever looked at her with wonder. There had been desire, fear, adoration, but wonder was his alone.”

Bast’s eyes had gone distant.

“She said she felt him across the border, a pressure and a shifting, something hollowing him out, taking the fire and the music and the Kvothe out of him and leaving a shell behind.”

He met Chronicler’s eyes and held them.

“She couldn’t go herself. She can step over the border for a night, to a pool in the Eld, but she cannot stay on this side long enough to watch over a man without unraveling. But I can. The Prince of Twilight walks the borders.”

He was quiet for a while, and when he went on his voice had dropped nearly to nothing. “She said: He is going out. The flame is guttering, and soon it will be gone, and it will be the first time in all my ages that I have felt the dark. Save him. Or if you cannot save him, be with him. Do not let him go out alone.” Bast rubbed his face with one hand. “But the decision to come, to give up my court and everything I was, that was mine. When I told my mother, she said only that a prince who crosses into the iron world comes home a stranger, if he comes home at all, and that she would keep no chair warm for a stranger. I kissed her hands and went. Felurian showed me the need, and I chose the answer.”

“I came,” he said. “I found the inn. I found the man. And I found…”

He stopped, and started again.

“He was already half-gone. The red hair was dull and the green eyes were flat, and the hands that had played music and shaped wind and held Felurian herself were wiping a bar, over and over, the same motion with the same cloth on the same wood.”

“And I thought…” His voice cracked, and there was nothing of Fae theater in it. “I thought: I am the Prince of Twilight. I have power that would make the mortal world tremble. I can fix this.”

He looked down at his hands.

“And it hasn’t been enough.” His voice was barely audible. “Two years. Two years of being cheerful, of being patient, of…”

He stopped and pressed his palms against his eyes.

“You’re not…” Chronicler began, and found he did not know how to finish it.

“I am the most powerful being within a hundred miles,” Bast said. “And I cannot convince one man to open a box he built, or to try with the hand he has left. I don’t know what I am anymore. Neither prince nor servant nor the thing she sent me to be.” He glanced at Kote’s sleeping form. “Just someone who stays.”

Across the room, Kote stirred.

He was still asleep, only shifting, the small movement of a body too long in one position.

Bast watched the movement, and his whole body leaned toward the bar, involuntarily, with the desperate certainty of a thing that knows it will die without what it is reaching for.

“Why do you stay?” Chronicler asked quietly.

Bast watched Kote breathe, the sleeping face, the still hands, the man who had once been everything and was now, as Bast saw it, nothing, and by his own choice.

“Because she asked me to,” Bast said. “Because the Fae do not break promises. But those are the reasons I came, and they aren’t the reasons I stay.”

“What are the reasons you stay?”

Bast turned to face him, and behind the expression and the glamour and the mask, Chronicler saw something simply, recognizably real.

“He taught me,” Bast said. “Nothing you’d expect, and nothing with a name.”

He glanced at the sleeping figure behind the bar.

“In the Fae, I once grew a tree that would stand forever. It was magnificent, and it meant nothing. Reshi’s bar is crooked and scarred and someday it will rot, and every time he wipes it, that matters more than my tree ever could.” He shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t understand that before him. That the weight is the point. That things matter because they break.”

“He doesn’t know he teaches anything anymore. But every day I watch him carry his grief and his silence, and I see a man who has lost everything and still gets up in the morning and goes on living. He does not want to get up. He chooses to, and that small, stubborn choice to keep going is the bravest thing I have ever seen.”

His voice broke on the last word.

“So I stay. And someday he will remember. He will reach for the lute. He will speak a name. He will open a door. And I will be here.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Bast smiled, the saddest smile Chronicler had ever seen, and somehow also the most certain.

“Then I will be here for that too.”

The candle died, and the room fell into darkness.

Moonlight seeped through the cracks between the barred shutters, not much of it, but enough to paint the room in shades of grey and silver.

Bast was still sitting across from him. His eyes gleamed faintly in the darkness.

“You said I shouldn’t write this down,” Chronicler said.

“Not tonight.”

“But someday?”

“Someday.”

He stood, and the chair didn’t scrape. He knelt at the fire and built a new flame out of the ashes of the old one with the practiced motions of long habit. The kindling caught, and the room filled slowly with warmth and light.

Bast crossed to the bar. He took the blanket from the shelf beneath the counter and draped it over Kote’s shoulders with a tenderness that made Chronicler look away. The blanket was old and worn thin, washed so many times it had gone soft as skin. Bast tucked it snugly around him and gently smoothed a fold that didn’t need smoothing.

Kote didn’t wake.

“Goodnight, Reshi,” Bast said. “Dream of music.”

At the corner table Chronicler had quietly laid his head down on his folded arms beside the pages, and by the time Bast turned from the bar he was asleep.

Bast walked to his place by the hearth and folded himself down onto the floor, curled up, something wild that has chosen, against all instinct, to rest near a fire built by human hands.

In the Waystone Inn, a little before midnight, the Prince of Twilight closed his eyes. And for a little while, in the warmth and the dark and the company of two sleeping mortals, he let himself be small.

Let himself be nothing.

Let himself be enough.