Chapter 97: The Cut-Flower Sound

I BURNED THE bread on the first day.

And the second day. And the fifth. And the ninth. I burned it so consistently that Bast began to wonder aloud whether burning was the point.

“Perhaps it’s a local tradition,” he said. “Charred bread as a delicacy.”

“It’s incompetence.”

He considered this. “I’ve seen you bind fire at twenty paces. The idea that you can’t manage an oven seems…”

“The oven is not the problem.”

I scraped the ruined loaf into the waste bin and started again: flour, water, salt, yeast. The simplest recipe in the world. The kind of thing any farmwife could do in her sleep.

But I wasn’t Kvothe. And the bread knew it.

There is a particular cruelty in learning to do badly what you once did brilliantly.

I don’t mean the naming, the sympathy, the calling of wind and fire. Those were gone. I’d made my peace with that — or stopped fighting it, which is a different thing.

I mean the small things. Pouring a drink, for example.

It seems like nothing. You pick up a bottle. You tilt it over a glass. But doing it well requires a kind of unconscious grace — a steadiness of hand, a sureness of motion that makes the act invisible. A good bartender pours the way a bird flies: without thought, without effort.

I poured the way a stone falls. Mechanically. Accurately, more or less. But with none of the easy confidence that makes the difference between a man doing his work and a man performing a pantomime of his work.

The cut-flower sound. That’s what I called it, in my private thoughts. The sound a flower makes after it’s been cut. Still beautiful. Still alive, technically. But severed from its roots, existing on borrowed time in a vase of borrowed water.

You can’t hear it, this sound. It isn’t a sound at all. It’s a quality. A condition. The particular resonance of a thing that is slowly, quietly, elegantly dying.

My hands had it now. That quality. That cut-flower sound.

I learned to make stew.

This sounds like a small thing, and it was. But small things are all Kote had, and each one took on a disproportionate weight, the way a single candle becomes important when it’s the only light in a dark room.

The first attempts were edible but uninspired. Thin, underseasoned, with the apologetic quality of food made by someone who understood the principles of cooking but lacked the instinct. Bast ate without complaint, which was generous. The Fae have refined palates, and my early efforts must have offended him on levels I couldn’t appreciate.

I kept trying.

Over weeks, then months, the stew improved. Not through inspiration but through the slow accumulation of small corrections. A little more salt. A longer simmer. The onions cut smaller, the carrots cut larger.

By the sixth month, the stew was good. Not remarkable. But good in the honest, unpretentious way that a warm meal can be good when the night is cold and the day has been long and you need something to remind you that the world contains comfort as well as grief.

Kote’s satisfaction. Small and quiet and entirely appropriate to the life I was living.

Somewhere, very far away, a man named Kvothe had once played a song at the Eolian that made the audience forget to breathe. But that was someone else’s story. This was mine: a pot of stew, slowly improving, in a kitchen that smelled of thyme.

I dropped a glass one evening.

Not dramatically. Not in the middle of anything important. I was carrying it from the shelf to the bar, and my fingers… let go.

The glass hit the stone floor and shattered. The pieces caught the lamplight and threw it back in little shards of amber and gold, and for a moment I thought they were beautiful, and then I didn’t think anything at all.

“Reshi?” Bast was there. Of course he was.

“I’m fine.”

“You dropped a glass.”

“People drop glasses.”

“Not you.” He was beside me, crouching, picking up the larger pieces with his careful, inhuman fingers. “Your hands don’t do that. They never did.”

“They do now.”

He looked up at me. The firelight played across his features, and for a moment the glamour slipped and I could see what was underneath: the sharpness, the strangeness, the face that was too beautiful by a margin that made your stomach tighten.

“It’s getting worse,” he said. “Whatever you did to yourself. The naming. It’s still eroding.”

“Names don’t erode.”

“This one does.” He stood, broken glass cupped in his palm. “You’re less than you were last month. Less than last week. I can feel it. The weight of you, the presence. It’s thinning.”

“Maybe this is who I’m meant to be. Maybe the other thing was the aberration.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not true. And because saying it makes it more true. Names work like that. Words have weight.” He held my gaze. “Every time you tell yourself you’re ordinary, you become a little more ordinary. Every time you act like Kote, Kote becomes a little more real and Kvothe becomes a little more gone.”

“Good,” I said. And I meant it. And I didn’t mean it. Both at once, in the complicated way that only people who are destroying themselves on purpose can mean and not mean something simultaneously.

Bast flinched.

I swept up the rest of the glass and went back to wiping the bar.

Seasons turned. I stopped counting them.

Bast stayed. I never quite understood why. The Fae are not patient by nature. They burn hot and bright and fast, and the slow diminishment of the Waystone should have bored him within a year.

He stayed, and he watched, and he waited.

And in the silences between us, in the long evenings after the last customer had gone and the fire was burning low, I would sometimes feel the ghost of something. A stirring. A vibration in the strings that weren’t there anymore, in the instrument I no longer played, in the music I no longer made.

The cut-flower sound.

And somewhere, in a room no one entered, a chest of dark wood sat humming quietly to itself, holding everything I used to be, waiting with the patience of a thing that knows, absolutely knows, that it has all the time in the world.