Chapter 98: Letters Never Sent

I BOUGHT THE paper from a tinker.

Good paper. Cream-colored, with a weight and tooth that spoke of a mill that took pride. The kind of paper you’d use for a letter to someone who mattered.

I sat at the desk in my room and dipped the pen and touched it to the surface, and the mark it left was sharp and clean and somehow more real than anything else in the room.

I began with Wil.

Wil,

I’m writing this letter that I won’t send. You’d think after all these years of silence I’d have worked out what to say, but the only words that matter are the ones you can’t find.

So I’ll be blunt. Cealdish.

Thank you.

For the nights at Anker’s when you sat across from me and said nothing and the nothing was exactly what I needed. For the money you lent when my pride should have prevented me from asking. For the way you never once asked me to explain myself, because Cealdish friendship doesn’t require explanations, only loyalty.

You went home after everything fell apart. You married. I imagine she’s practical and sharp and too good for you. I imagine you have children with your jaw and your stubbornness.

You became a merchant. This surprises me not at all. You always understood the difference between what something costs and what it’s worth.

There’s a Cealdish proverb you told me once: “A friend who tells you what you want to hear is a merchant. A friend who tells you what you need to hear is a brother.”

You were my brother, Wil. And I never told you, because I was too proud and too busy to say the simple, obvious things.

I miss you. I’m sorry. Thank you.

Your friend, Kote

Fela,

You lost Sim because of me.

I know the argument against this. I can hear Sim making it: “It wasn’t your fault, Kvothe. I made my own choices.” And he’d be right, the way good people are always right when they refuse to let you carry the blame you deserve.

But he’s not here to make that argument. He’s not here because the path I cut through the world was wide enough to pull the people I loved into its wake.

Sim died because he was brave and believed in me more than I deserved. That’s the truth, no matter how you distribute the blame.

You rebuilt the Archives. Organized what was left. Became a Master. It suits you. You were always stronger than any of us — the strength of stone. Patient and sure. While I was hiding in a country inn, you were doing the actual work of repair. Sorting through ashes. Finding what could be saved.

That is what courage looks like. Not the dramatic kind. The kind that shows up the morning after the catastrophe and starts picking up pieces.

You deserved better than what I gave you. Both of you did.

I’m sorry.

Kote

Devi,

I don’t know why I’m writing to you. We were never friends. We were adversaries who respected each other. Two people who understood the same dangerous things.

You’re still in Atur. You built something there — a network of information and influence that makes your old gaelet business look like a child’s game. This does not surprise me.

You were always the most dangerous person I knew. Not because of what you could do, but because of what you could see. You looked at the world the way a locksmith looks at a door: with the certainty that every mechanism has a weakness.

I owe you, Devi. Not money. Something less definable. You helped me when helping me was dangerous. You showed me that intelligence without ambition is just cleverness, and cleverness without courage is just cowardice with better vocabulary.

You’d hate this letter. Too sentimental. You’d evaluate the emotional content for potential exploitation, then set it on fire.

That’s what I like about you. Always did.

And if you ever hear a rumor about a red-haired innkeeper in a nowhere town, do me the courtesy of forgetting it.

With grudging respect, Kote

Three letters. Three sheets of cream-colored paper.

I laid them side by side on the desk. Wil. Fela. Devi. Three people I had loved, in three different ways, to three different ends.

I picked up the first letter. Reread the opening line. I’m writing this letter that I won’t send.

Put it down.

The honesty in those lines was its own kind of seal. I’d written them as truths, and truths make themselves real.

The letters were not for the people they were addressed to. They were for me. A way of acknowledging the weight I’d been carrying. Not to relieve it. To give it shape. To say: this is what I lost. These are the people I left behind. This is the cost of being Kote.

I folded them. Carefully. Three folds each. Laid them in the empty desk drawer, side by side, the way you lay flowers on a grave.

Then I closed the drawer and went downstairs and picked up the cloth.