Chapter 93: The Penitent King

THE NEWS CAME the way news always comes to places like Newarre: slowly, distorted, wrapped in enough rumor to make the truth unrecognizable.

A tinker brought it. Not one of the good tinkers. A lesser one — a man with a half-loaded cart and a taste for gossip who stopped because his mule had thrown a shoe.

“War’s coming,” he said, settling into a chair. “If it hasn’t come already. The Maer’s declared himself. Crowned and everything. Blue and white banners, new coinage, the whole affair. They’re calling him the Penitent King.”

The mug I was holding did not slip from my fingers. My face did not change. These are the things I want you to know, because they are the things I had practiced.

“The Maer Alveron?” I said.

“King Alveron now. Married the Lackless woman — Lady Meluan. That gives him blood-claim to half the thrones in the Four Corners.”

Meluan Lackless. My aunt. The woman who had looked at me in Severen and seen the family resemblance I’d spent my life trying to ignore. I’d brought them together. Cultivated their affection. And now the king I’d helped create was hunting the Kingkiller.

“He wears a hair shirt under his robes,” the tinker said. “Walks barefoot to the temple every seventh day. The priests love it. The common folk love it.”

“Very clever,” I said. And it was. Alveron had always been clever — not in the flashy way I’d been clever, but in the deep, structural way of a man who builds his position so carefully that by the time anyone notices, he’s already done it.

“There’s more. He’s hunting someone. The Kingkiller. Ten thousand royals, alive. Five thousand dead.”

Ten thousand royals. Enough to turn every bounty hunter, every soldier, every desperate farmer into my enemy.

“Bold price,” I said. “Must want him badly.”

“Wants to make an example. People say the Kingkiller opened a door somewhere that shouldn’t have been opened.” He shivered. “The scrael, you know. More of them every year.”

“People say a lot of things,” I said.

He left. The silence settled back into the common room like water filling a depression in sand.

The Penitent King’s soldiers came through Newarre twice in the first year.

The first time, a sergeant read from a description that must have been copied until the words wore smooth. “Red-haired man, about thirty years. Green eyes. Musical talent.”

“Red hair’s not uncommon in these parts,” I said. “Musical talent, though — you won’t find much of that around here.”

He looked at me. Measured my face against whatever description he carried. I let him look.

There is an art to being unremarkable. The key is not to disguise yourself — disguises invite scrutiny. The key is to be so thoroughly ordinary that the mind slides off you like water off oiled cloth.

“Good cider,” the sergeant said.

They left the next morning.

The second time was harder. A full patrol — twelve soldiers and a sharp-faced commander with analytical eyes.

“Nice place,” she said. “Quiet.”

“It’s a quiet town.”

“We’re looking for a fugitive. A man named Kvothe. Accused of killing King Roderic and approximately two hundred others.”

Two hundred. The number hit me like a blow I couldn’t show. I hadn’t known how many.

“Can’t say I’ve seen anyone matching that,” I said.

She studied me longer than the sergeant had. Long enough that something cold moved through my chest.

“Your hands,” she said. “They’re very still. Most people, when they’re nervous, their hands move.”

“I’m not nervous. Should I be?”

Then Bast came out of the kitchen carrying bread and cheese, his glamour radiating harmless youth. The commander’s attention shifted. The soldiers ate and relaxed.

They left the next day.

After they were gone, I let the tremor in my left hand — the tremor I’d been suppressing for twenty-four hours — shake freely.

“That was close,” Bast said.

“It’s going to get closer.”

The University had closed its doors. This hit harder than the rest. Not because of my own connection — I’d been expelled before Renere. But because the University was the last place where naming was taught, where the old knowledge was preserved.

Kilvin. Elxa Dal. The Archives. All of it, shuttered and silent, another casualty of the war I’d started.

The world I’d broken was trying to reassemble itself.

It was assembling into something worse.