When I came down from the mountains, I went looking for my friends.
I had apologies to make, and I knew it. Slipping away in the night with nothing but a note pegged to a door is not a thing you do to people who matter, and the whole road home I had been assembling the words. Proper ones, plain ones, without varnish. It is a measure of how the mountain had changed me that I planned an apology instead of a performance. It is a measure of how far I had yet to go that I still planned it.
I found Simmon first, in the courtyard near the fountain. He was on his feet the instant he saw me, and his face went through its honest repertoire in the space of three steps. Relief, then excitement, then something else, something with weight behind it that he tried to fold away before it reached me, and didn't, quite. Sim's face has never kept a secret longer than a sneeze.
"You're back." He clasped my arm hard enough to mean it. "Where did you go? No. Never mind. How much do you know?"
"I know admissions started," I said. "Beyond that, nothing. I've been somewhere blissfully free of news."
"Well." Sim took the breath a man takes before lifting something. "Kilvin is Chancellor."
I let that settle. It settled well. Kilvin in the Chancellor's chair was a wall in a high wind. Nothing about it was elegant, and you would want nothing else under weather.
"And Manet," Sim went on, "is Master Rhetorician."
I stopped walking. "Manet."
"Yup." Sim's mouth quirked at whatever my face was doing. "He refused three times. Said he had no interest in politics and less in teaching fools to argue. But Kilvin kept at him. Said the University needed 'a mentor in that chair.'" Sim shrugged. "Fourth asking, Manet said yes. Mostly, I think, so Kilvin would stop darkening his corner of the Fishery."
I tried to picture it and found the picture would not hold still. Manet, the eternal E'lir, wild-haired and comfortable, a student longer than most Masters had held their chairs. Manet, who played corners for ha'pennies and dispensed advice as other men give weather reports, freely and with no great faith you'd heed it. Manet, sitting behind the long horseshoe table in Master's robes.
And yet the longer I held the picture, the less absurd it became. Every one of us who lasted at the University had, at one time or another, been quietly saved by Manet, pointed away from some disaster, tipped toward some door. He had been mentoring the place for thirty years. Kilvin had simply noticed, and made it official, which was Kilvin all over. He looked at the University as he looked at a machine. This part bears load; name it accordingly.
"And Brandeur?" I asked.
Sim's smile went out. "Still here. Still Master Arithmetician. They couldn't prove anything against him under the iron law." He glanced at me sidelong. "But everyone knows. The other Masters won't speak to him. He sits alone at meals. Votes alone. Walks alone." Sim's voice dropped, and being Sim, what came into it was not satisfaction but a kind of troubled pity. "Honestly, I think expulsion would have been kinder."
I said nothing to that. I had spent a mountain learning what my silences were made of, and this one was made of complicated things. The iron law had weighed Brandeur and found nothing it could hold. The University had weighed him too, on older scales, and hung the verdict around his neck where no appeal would ever reach it. There is a justice in that, I suppose. There is also a cruelty, and I have never since been able to convince myself they were different things wearing different coats.
Then Sim pressed something into my hand. A wooden chit, stamped with tomorrow's date. "Second bell," he said.
I looked at it, then at him. "Sim. I can't take your slot."
"It's not mine." His ears had gone red, which with Sim is the tell that ends all bluffing. "I drew for both of us."
"How? The lines—"
He shifted his weight. "I may have reminded someone that my father is the Duke of Dalonir." The red deepened. "And that the Duke's fourth son was requesting a small courtesy. For a friend."
I stood there holding the chit. In all the years I had known him, through every slight he'd swallowed, every door his name could have opened and didn't, I had never once heard Simmon spend that coin. He kept his family's rank like a sword above a door, visibly not in use. And he had drawn it, for the first time, over an admissions queue. For me. Because I had vanished into the mountains like a fool, and he had spent his one unspendable thing to make sure the fool would have a place waiting when he wandered home.
"Sim—"
"Don't." He said it quickly, eyes anywhere but mine. "It's fine. Can we talk about something else?"
So we talked about something else, because that too is a thing friends do. They let you pay them in changed subjects. I pocketed the chit. Around us the courtyard ran with students, chits and coin and complaints, the whole familiar machinery of a new term grinding into motion.
Classes would resume. The University had buried its Chancellor, tried one Master, shunned another, crowned a third, and made a fourth out of Manet. Life, with its usual terrifying efficiency, had moved on.
I came down through the last branches of the apple tree and dropped into the little courtyard, and found Auri hopping from stone to stone.
She was choosing only the ones that had heaved up proud of their neighbors over the years, landing light as a sparrow on each, a half-eaten apple in one hand. She took small bites between hops. When my boots touched the ground she finished the hop she was mid-way through, Auri finished things, and turned, balanced on one bare foot, her face lighting like Foxen coming up.
"Welcome home, Kvothe," she said, prim as a countess, arms drifting out for balance. She tipped her head at the stones. "These ones think too much of themselves."
"So you have to visit each one," I said, and set my pack down with a low thump. "Or they'll get worse."
"Of course." She said it with the mild patience she reserved for the times I stated the obvious. Then she crossed to me with quick light steps, and stopped, and her eyes went to my hand. All the hopping stillness of her went stiller. "What are you wearing?"
I looked down. There was nothing on my hand that any eye in the world could have seen. Any eye but hers.
"Oh," she breathed, leaning close, delighted. "It's still swirling there. Did you catch it?"
I laughed. I couldn't help it, and I didn't try. "Catch it? That's the wrong question altogether."
Auri raised one finger, cross-examining. "But did you ride it?"
"No." I sighed and found a root worth sitting on. The courtyard air was cool, the light going thin and gold above the walls. "But I got closer."
"That's good enough," she said, magnanimous. "You'll be Taborlin the Great before you know it." Then her gaze dropped to my bulging pack, and went sly. "You found other things."
"I did." I reached in and drew out a bundle of rich blue cloth, tied with a thin strip of leather. "This one's for you."
Auri stood back half a step as I unfurled it. A cloak, deep blue, the blue the sky keeps for the hour after sunset. Her eyes went slowly down one sleeve and up the other.
"Oh," she said. And then, with the gravity of a judge ruling on a matter long disputed: "Oh, it's the right color."
"It's been getting cold lately," I said. "And I thought the wind shouldn't steal your warmth. It steals enough."
She let me swing it around her thin shoulders. It settled on her like dusk settling on a garden, and her small hands came up and clasped the edges and moved over the folds, reading it with her fingers first and her eyes after.
"What's it made of?" she asked.
"Goose feathers," I said, "and whispers from summer clouds."
Her laugh rang up into the branches, a chime loosed in the open air. "Goose feathers alone are cruel," she said. "How thoughtful, to soften them with the kindness of clouds."
Then she straightened, and I saw the ritual arrive in her, the same solemnity that comes over a priest. "And what did you bring me?" I asked, taking up my half of it, the old call waiting for its answer.
Auri's grin went sideways and secret. "A book," she said, "full of secrets and whispers." And she drew it from some pocket of herself, the same place everything of hers came from, as though the world kept a shelf just behind her hip.
It was small and weathered. Browned at its edges. Its cover was soft leather, embossed faintly with swirls that my fingertips found before my eyes did, worn shallow as a coin's face, from years of hands that were not mine.
"Secrets it keeps?" I said, turning it in the light.
"Books don't keep secrets." She corrected me gently, as you correct a child who has said something backwards but promising. "They tell them."
I would remember that, later. I would have long occasion to. At the time I only smiled and thanked her, and she was already turning, giving the cloak an experimental spin that belled it out around her ankles.
"It moves nicely," she said, satisfied, and made for her drainage grate. At the mouth of it she paused, half in shadow. "But Foxen will be wondering where I've gone. And the brass in Rubric gets lonely. It's been left all this while with no one to tell it it's bright."
Then she was gone, blue into black, and the courtyard was just a courtyard again. An apple tree, a wall without windows, and a handful of stones that thought too much of themselves.
Admissions the next day went awfully, or excellently. By then, I confess, the two had become difficult to tell apart. My answers were quick, my tuition survivable, and I walked out of the Masters' hall with the term's business settled and my mind already across the river. Because a rumor had found me in the queue, as the important ones always did, and the rumor said Denna was back in Imre.
I could not get out of the bursar's line and across Stonebridge fast enough.
I found her at an outdoor table in the last of the afternoon light, seated across from a prosperous merchant whose rings caught the sun with practiced ease. He was talking. His hands moved in the broad way of men accustomed to being watched while they talk. Denna was dressed simply, her dark hair loose about her shoulders, and she wore the pleasant listening expression I had seen her wear for a hundred such men. Flawless, attentive, and vacant as a rented room.
Her eyes found me before I had even decided how to approach. Something crossed her face too quick to name, though relief is the name I have always given it. She stood while the merchant was still mid-sentence.
"Are you off to dine with kings?" I asked as she reached me.
"Only if they hadn't bored me first," she said, and took my arm, and drew me away down the street.
Behind us the merchant sputtered something about the evening, their plans, the reservation. Denna did not so much as slow. "I'm afraid I've just remembered a prior engagement," she called back over her shoulder, sweet and final as a door latching, and then, to me, with a tilt of her chin: "You don't mind being a prior engagement, do you?"
"I've played worse parts."
We spent the evening as we spent our best ones, which is to say extravagantly and to no purpose. We wandered into one eating-house after another, taking a course here and a glass there, judging each establishment with tremendous unearned authority and moving on. She talked between courses with her hands in motion, working through the troubles in her newest song, a verse that sat wrong, a story that turned before it should. I listened, and offered a thought when she asked for one, and mostly I just watched her come alive over the work, because Denna talking about her craft was Denna with every mask set down. I had learned to prize those hours over any others.
We sang her new harmony over the wine, quietly, our heads bent together while the other tables pretended not to listen and failed. Her laughter came bright and often. And still, underneath the brightness, I could feel what always waited there. The quiet. The rooms in her I could not enter. The spaces where I could not follow, whose doors I had learned not to try, because trying was the one thing that could make her vanish faster than any merchant's boredom.
By the time we left the last place, I had spent more of the Maer's coin than I cared to count. I did not count it. Sixty-two talents' worth of tuition, as it turns out, buys a great deal of pocket money, and I had discovered in myself a new and dangerous willingness to let coins slip away like hours.
We walked without destination, and our wandering brought us down along the Omethi where it curves through the city, and there, on an impulse I did not examine because examining it would have been fatal, I hired a boatman.
We drifted downstream in the dark. A pleasure barge passed us going the other way, strung with lanterns, music and laughter spilling off it across the water. I caught sight of Sovoy at the rail, glass in hand, holding forth to someone hidden by the lamps. And Denna's fingers came to my chin and turned my face away, gently.
"Look there instead," she said, and pointed to where the moonlight lay on the river, a long trembling road of silver running away between the banks.
The boatman, who was worth every penny, took us to the slow water under the arch of Stonebridge and let the current hold us there. Above, the great old bridge carried its late footsteps, each one a soft knock on the underside of the world. Down in the arch's shadow, the city's noise came to us rounded and distant, and we might have been the last two people in it.
"Why don't you play me something?" Denna said.
It was not a suggestion. Denna never suggested. She opened doors and stood aside, and you could walk through or not, and both answers cost you something.
I unslung my lute and sat with it a moment, my fingers resting on the strings without pressing. In the old days, by which I mean any day before that one, I would have reached for something safe. A pretty tune, well within my hands, the kind of song that flatters the player and asks nothing of him. I had a hundred of them, polished bright.
I was tired of being safe. The mountain had seen to that.
So instead I reached up to the tuning pegs, and I loosened the highest string, and I slipped it free.
Denna watched me do it and said nothing. That was one of her particular graces. She always knew when a thing should not be asked about yet.
Six strings. I had not played this song in years. I had never truly played it at all, not whole. I had only ever played it with a broken lute, as a broken boy, in a city that was trying to kill me by inches. It belonged to six strings as grief belongs to its year, and to play it on seven would have been a kind of lie. The music rose up out of the lute and into the stone arch, and the arch, older than the song and kinder than the city, took it and gave it back around us.
It was not perfect. How could it be? A song like that is not for perfecting. It had holes in it where a seventh string should have sounded, and holes in it where other things should have sounded too. The holes were the truth of it, a song with its words worn away, the shape of them still showing, like the swirls on Auri's little book.
Denna closed her eyes. She tilted her head slightly, in the exact attitude of someone listening to what lies beneath a thing, and she stayed that way through all of it, to the last chord and past it, while the water spoke quietly against the hull and the final note went out over the river and did not come back.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything. The city hummed somewhere above. The moon-road wavered on the water.
Then she shifted, closer, and settled against me on the narrow bench, and rested her head on my shoulder. She was light against my side, and warm against the night air, and entirely, catastrophically real.
"I always knew you were like this," she said. Softly. Almost to herself.
Like what? The question rose in my throat with its whole life ahead of it. And before I could give it voice, she lifted her head and turned toward the lights of Imre coming on gold along the banks, and the moment closed over the question like water over a dropped coin.
The boatman had begun poling us back upstream, his strokes quiet and unhurried, a man who knew exactly what he had been hired to interrupt and was in no hurry to finish doing it.
I restrung the lute the next morning. The song stayed where I had left it, under the bridge, with the words it didn't have.