I reached down from the rooftop, and Devi's small hand gripped mine.
She was not built for climbing, and unlike most people she did not pretend otherwise. She scrambled up the last of the wall graceless and determined, using my arm, the drainpipe, and at one point what I believe was pure spite. Then we crouched together on the roof's edge, catching our breath, looking down into the courtyard.
Moonlight came down through the apple tree's bare branches and laid its pale mapwork over the flagstones. I knew that light. I had climbed down through it a hundred times with bread in my pockets and small treasures wrapped in cloth, quiet as I could manage, into the one place at the University where nothing was ever asked of me. The moss on the stones. The particular flagstone that rocked. The blank north wall, keeping its long secret.
Tonight I was seeing all of it with different eyes, and I did not like the eyes.
"It's smaller than I thought," Devi said.
We lowered ourselves down. Our boots came down among the dead leaves with a crunch that sounded, in that stillness, like the end of the world announced twice. I held my breath and waited. For a shout, a lamp, a watchman's whistle, some voice of the University rising to defend its oldest bones.
Nothing. No one. The courtyard held its silence as it held its moss.
We were alone, and no one in the world knew where we were, and I remember thinking that this was the moment when a wiser man would have felt the weight of the place and stopped. Boots on the flagstones, nothing yet done that couldn't be undone.
Devi knelt and began unpacking her satchel. Jars of the acid compound, each wrapped against its neighbor in wool. Brushes of varying widths, like a painter's kit assembled by a sapper. Folded cloths soaked in neutralizing solution, sharp-smelling through their oilskin. A small trowel.
"Here." I paced the wall's length, checked my bearings twice against the map in my head, and pointed to a stretch of flagstone near the center of the blank wall's foot. "The room's ceiling should run just under this."
Devi pressed her palm flat against the stone, as if taking its pulse. "The acid works," she said. "But it isn't quick. We'll need to be patient."
"How patient?"
"Spans, not days." She unstoppered the first jar, and her smile came back up, sharp in the moonlight. "Patience isn't your strong suit, dear boy. Fortunately for you, I'm an excellent teacher."
She laid the first brushstroke of acid along the flagstone's seam. It went on glistening, innocent as varnish. Then the stone began, very softly, to hiss, and a thin vapor rose off it into the cold air, and the work, the long, whispering, irrevocable work, was begun.
The nights blurred together after that, as nights do when they all hold the same shape.
We found our rhythm inside a span. Every second night, weather permitting, we scaled the wall and dropped into the courtyard. Devi painted the acid, layer on patient layer, working the seams and the softened face of the stone. I prepared the neutralizing cloths, staged them at her elbow like a surgeon's dresser, and carried off the powdered stone we scraped away. It went bagged, and dumped in pinches into a dozen gutters between Mains and the bridge, because a pile of ground flagstone is a confession waiting on a sharp eye.
At first we worked in silence, speaking only when the work required it. Two conspirators being careful. It did not last, because nothing between two people crouched in the dark for hours can stay careful forever, but I will come to that.
The stone fought us. Whatever hands had laid that courtyard had laid it to endure; the flags were worn glass-smooth on their faces and dense as old argument underneath. Some nights the depression deepened by a full finger's width and we went home giddy. Other nights the acid sat on the stone and accomplished nothing anyone could measure, and we left before dawn with aching knees, stinging eyes, and the small chemical burns that were becoming a permanent feature of my fingertips. Little white crescents I learned to explain away in the Fishery as spilled reagent, which had the advantage of being true.
I never saw Auri during those nights.
At first I told myself she was simply keeping her own hours. She often did. Her comings and goings answered to a calendar I had never been shown, tides and phases of her own. By the fourth night I knew better, and had stopped believing myself, and kept telling myself anyway.
The courtyard was hers. Do you understand? Whatever the University's deeds and charters said, that little walled square belonged to Auri, nest to bird. The apple tree was hers, and the moss, and the pooling moonlight. She would have smelled the acid the first night, she who could tell when I'd been near a forge by the smell of my hair. She would have heard the stone hissing under our brushes, felt the wrongness of it through the soles of her bare feet, a wasp walking on the back of the neck. Something was eating a hole in the roof of her world, and the ones doing the eating were a stranger with sharp eyes—and me.
I imagined her retreating from it. Down past Mantle, past Wains, into the deep parts of the Underthing she had never shown me, the places whose names I didn't know. She had judged, in her precise and generous way, that I was not yet ready to be trusted with them. Tucked into some far corner with Foxen cupped in her hands, waiting for the violation to end, waiting it out.
I should have gone to find her. I want that written plainly, alongside the rest of my accounting. I should have sat at the grate and played until she came, and explained, or apologized, or at the very least made certain she was safe. It would have cost me one night of digging.
But I couldn't bear the thought of her face. That was the whole of it, under all the reasons I built. I could not bear to stand in front of Auri and watch her look at me while she understood what I was doing to her home. And so I chose, with the fluency I had by then achieved in this particular art, not to know things instead. I decided she was fine. I decided she understood. I decided I would make it all right with her afterward, when it was over, when I had what I needed.
I was good at telling myself things, back then. It was very nearly the only craft I never got caught practicing.
The days blurred too. I sat lectures. I logged my Fishery hours. I ate at Anker's and laughed on cue and gave every appearance of a Re'lar in reasonable standing. And all of it was performed by perhaps a tenth of me, while the rest stood day and night in a moonlit courtyard, calculating. How deep now. How much farther. What the acid was doing in the hours I couldn't watch it. I ate without tasting. I slept in fragments too short to dream in. The world had quietly drained of its colors, and what remained, vivid as the one lit window on a dark street, was the courtyard, the stone, and the door beyond the stone.
If you have ever wanted one thing too much and too long, you know the grayness I mean. If you haven't, I am glad, and I hope you keep your ignorance to the grave.
On the ninth night, footsteps.
Devi was bent over the depression, nearly a foot deep by then, a smooth-sided basin like a giant's thumbprint pressed into the courtyard, feeding acid into the working face with a fine brush. And from above us, on the second-floor walkway of Mains, came the slow knock of boots on stone.
We froze. Wholly. Devi with the brush suspended mid-stroke, a drop of acid gathering at its tip; I with a neutralizing cloth half-unfolded. The footsteps came on, unhurried. They paused, at a window, by the sound, and my chest drew tight as a tuned string while I counted my own heartbeats and made it to eleven.
Then the boots went on. Fainter. Gone.
Devi let her breath out in a long, controlled stream, and set the brush down with a steady hand I envied. "My," she murmured. "That does get the blood moving."
And I smiled, I couldn't help it, at the perfect absurdity of us. Two of the more dangerous minds of the Arcanum's recent vintage, crouched in a derelict courtyard in the middle of the night, up to precisely the sort of thing Tehlu's priests warn you the clever come to, both of us stopped dead as rabbits by the sound of a bored porter stretching his legs.
"We should be more careful," I said.
"We should stop entirely and go back to Imre instead," Devi said pleasantly, and turned back to her work, which was her way of saying she knew, as well as I did, that neither of us was capable of it.
It was during those hours, the long middle hours, when the acid was doing its slow work and there was nothing for our hands but tending and waiting, that I began to know her.
Not the Devi of the front room, the one who bargained with her smile sharpened and every word weighed to the grain. Not Demon Devi of the whispered stories, the gaelet who dealt in blood and debts and could ruin a man three ways before breakfast. The other one. The one who let her guard down brushstroke by brushstroke somewhere after midnight, because a shared crime is a kind of intimacy. The dark of that courtyard was the first room I ever shared with her that had no table between us.
One night, working the softened stone loose with her trowel, she talked about her expulsion.
She skipped the official story entirely, waved it off with the trowel, conduct unbecoming a member of the Arcanum, in a voice that put the words in the mouths of small men. What she told me instead was the truth she kept underneath it, and she told it to the stone, not to me, which is how the realest things get said.
"I was better than them," she said. "Better than my whole year. Better than the Re'lar above me. Better than Elxa Dal, even, and the difference is that Dal knew it." Scrape. "They all knew it. The Masters. They could see what I was becoming, they could chart it term against term, and it frightened them."
"That's why they expelled you? For being too good?"
"For being too good, too hungry, and too unwilling to pretend I was neither." The trowel bit harder than the stone required. "Have you truly not noticed what the University is built on, Kvothe? Hierarchies, all the way down. Master and student. Teacher and taught. Gowned and ungowned. Man and—" the trowel stopped a moment, "—woman. It is a machine for deciding who is permitted to rise, and how fast, and how far. They could not tolerate someone who meant to climb faster than the machine allowed. Least of all a young woman. Least of all one with leverage."
She said leverage like a knife she'd been cut with and later learned to carry.
I said nothing, but I had noticed. That was the quiet shame of listening to her. I had spent three years performing the careful daily dance of deference and defiance that kept a talented nobody inside those walls. Bowing precisely low enough, shining precisely bright enough, feeling Hemme's eyes on me at every misstep like a debt collector at a wedding. I had noticed the machine from the day it first weighed me. I had simply believed, young, and male, and luckier than I knew, that I could beat it. Devi had believed the same thing, once, with better marks than mine.
"So you left," I said.
"I was thrown out." Her voice went flat and even, which from Devi was rage in its formal dress. "There is a difference, and I'll thank you to keep it. They took everything, Kvothe. My rank. My access. Do you understand what the Archives are to someone like me? They took my whole future as it had been promised to me, and they handed me back my clothes and my notebooks and the door." She looked up at me then, moonlight catching the fine dust on her cheek. "They reduced me to a gaelet working out of a room above a butcher's shop. Clever little Devi, who lends shims to desperate students at wicked rates." Her chin lifted, precise as a duelist's salute. "So understand what this is. I'm not merely trying to get into your Archives, sweet boy. I am taking back the life they stole. With interest. I always charge interest."
The acid hissed softly in the quiet that followed, patient as the both of us.
"What about you?" she said at last, and her voice had changed, lighter on top, careful underneath. "You know my price. I've never once heard yours. Why does the door matter so much?"
I hesitated.
You must understand what was being asked. I had never told anyone the whole of it. Not Wil and Sim, who by then had pieces. Not Denna, who had her own dead and had never pressed me about mine. The truth of Tarbean and the wagon and the blue fire lived in me as the blood lived in that book, traced in careful strokes and sealed over, page after page, under a good black professional gloss.
But it was late, and the moon had gone behind the wall, and I had stone dust on my hands and acid in my lungs and my Alar was cracked and my hands would not stay entirely still anymore. And Devi had just handed me the realest thing she owned. There is an economy in confession as strict as any moneylender's. She had extended terms. I found I could not refuse them.
"The Chandrian," I said quietly. "They killed my family. My whole troupe. I was eleven years old."
The trowel went still.
"Oh, Kvothe." Her voice softened. Only slightly, only by a degree, and I was glad of that. I could not have borne a full measure of tenderness just then. "You were so young." And then, gently, because she was Devi and could no more leave a flawed premise standing than she could forgive a debt: "The Chandrian are a myth."
"They're not." I kept my eyes on the stone. My hands had begun their trembling, and for once I didn't fight to hide it. "I saw them. Haliax, their leader, wrapped in shadow that the firelight couldn't touch. Cinder. The one with black eyes, the one who smiled at me over my parents' bodies and asked if I liked their little song. They're real. They're out there under the same moon as us, right now. And no one will ever believe me, because the stories have spent a thousand years making them into bogeymen for children. And a man who says the bogeyman burned his family is a man people edge away from at the fair."
Devi weighed that for a long moment. I could feel her doing it, the same fine scales she brought to every claim that crossed her table, working over my words, testing the metal of them.
She did not believe me. Not truly. Not that night. I knew it. You learn to read a room's verdict from a stage, before a single hand moves.
But she reached over anyway. She set her small scarred hand on my forearm, above the trembling, and left it there, not long, not with ceremony, just long enough. And something passed between us in that touch that had nothing to do with bargains or ledgers or the door. I could not have named it at the time. I have had years since, and I can name it now. It was this: I cannot follow you all the way to where you live. But I can see the road costs you. That's enough for me to walk it with you.
It is a rarer thing than love, that. I have been given love I hadn't earned more times than I deserve. What Devi gave me in that courtyard, on the ninth night, with her doubt fully intact, I have been given that perhaps four times in my life. I can still feel each one, like coins sewn into a coat.
Neither of us spoke for a while. Then she took her hand back and turned to the stone, and her brush moved with a fresh and businesslike purpose.
"Well then," she said. "I suppose we'd better get through this door."
We worked until the sky in the east went the color of watered milk, and covered the basin with its board and its scatter of dead leaves, and went our separate ways over the wall. And when I finally lay down in my little room at Anker's, sleep took me quick and dreamless for the first time in a span.
The price of that sleep was already accruing, in a dark I hadn't looked into yet.
But we'll come to the price. In this story, we always do.