Night lay full over Newarre, and the Waystone Inn sat in silence. It was a silence of three parts.
The widest part of it was an absent quiet, an emptiness assembled out of everything that was not there. A wind would have broken it. It would have come down the road off the hills, set the inn's sign swinging on its hooks, and carried the silence away like dust before a broom. Travelers would have broken it, even a tired handful come late off the road, wearing holes in it with their boots and their complaints. Men eating supper make a small comfortable noise, when they do not expect to be murdered in the night. Music would have broken it best of all. But music was long finished in the Waystone, and the town had learned to stop listening for it. You learn to stop expecting a letter that does not come. Wind and travelers and music were all elsewhere that night, and so the quiet kept. It pooled in the doorways of the town's shuttered houses. It gathered in the ruts of the empty road. It lay over the fields like the first thin snow of the year, which no one welcomes, and no one can refuse.
Beneath the inn, in the cellar cut deep into the hill's old bones, a second silence kept its own council. It was a smaller silence, and it did not rest. In one corner a little forge held the last of its coals, and their dim orange breathing threw more shadow than light across a workbench where tools lay abandoned in the middle of their work. The tongs were still tipped with soot. A copper chisel had begun going green along its edge, the quiet way copper confesses to being left alone. And on a slab of stone nearby, an acid worked with a small and patient hissing, eating its way inward grain by grain, unhurried as a secret being kept. This second silence was a sharp and anxious thing. It was the silence of labor done at night and denied by daylight, of a question asked again and again of something that would not answer. It made the first silence seem honest by comparison.
The third silence was a hidden thing, and a man could have sat in that inn a whole evening without once remarking it. But it was there for anyone patient enough. It was in the walls, in the thick stone that drank sound like dry earth drinking rain. It was in the black iron locks that held fast though no hand had tried them in years. It was in the slow tread of the red-haired man who climbed the stairs with a single candle, and in how he undressed, folding his shirt with more care than any shirt has ever deserved. His hands trembled as he did it. Not badly. Only a little, only always, as a string goes on trembling after its note has died. His hair was red, not chestnut, not auburn, but red as the last coal of the evening, though the candle could make nothing of it now. His eyes were green, the dark green of ivy grown old on a north wall, and they moved restlessly across the room, touching everything, seeing nothing.
Both the inn and the third silence belonged to the red-haired man, and that was as it should be, for his was the largest silence of the three, and the other two sat inside it like cups in a cupboard. It was the silence of a man who has carried the same questions so long that they have worn smooth in his hands and stopped being questions, becoming instead merely the shape of his thinking. It was the silence that keeps company with quiet tears, the kind that come when certainty falters at some late and unwitnessed hour. It was the silence of a man who has forgotten his song. Who does not hum at his work. Who wakes in the night and does not wonder anymore what woke him. It was the silence of a man waiting. For time, for change, for an ending. He had no particular faith that any of the three would come.
And so the Waystone lay still, and the night moved on toward morning.
The silence waited on him.