You will want to know how long I was in Haven. Everyone does. It is always among the first questions, asked gently, as if the number would be a handle the whole thing could be carried by.
I cannot tell you. I want that understood before I tell you anything else, because everything else I tell you stands on it. A man keeps time as a miller keeps water, with a wheel the current turns. My wheel was broken, and the current came sometimes as a flood and sometimes not at all. I have tried, in the years since, to reckon it from the outside. From the moon, from what witnesses said after, from the accounting of days that other people were kind enough or careless enough to let me see. Call it most of a month. Understand that from the inside there was no such thing as a month. There was no such thing as a day. There were only the bells.
So I will tell this as it kept itself. Do not look to me for the order of things. I was not present for the order of things. I was barely present at all.
Bells.
They rang at no interval I could ever catch hold of, distant and hollow in one breath, then unbearably close, as if the bell hung inside my own chest and someone was striking it with my name. They cut the world into slices, and the slices were not the same size, and they did not lie flat against each other. Time came to me thin and wrong, like light through old glass.
I woke between two bells. Or I did not wake. It may be truer to say that between two bells there began to be a me again, like a room beginning to be a room when a candle is carried in.
Stone walls, sweating cold. Damp air lying against my skin like a poultice nobody had wrung out. High above, a sliver of window let down a blade of light so pale and thin it seemed the light had walked a very long way to find me and worn itself out on the road.
I frowned. I believe I frowned. My face fit me like a borrowed coat, and my limbs were guesses.
A name for the place came up slowly, a drowned thing surfacing.
Haven.
I knew Haven. Every student knows Haven as farmers know the gibbet at the crossroads, a thing you make jokes about with your collar up. The Rookery, we called it, when we were being brave at a safe distance. Where the University keeps the ones the work breaks. I had walked its halls once on an errand I will come to never. I had heard it at night from across the courtyard, as everyone has. And I sat up too fast on a pallet in the cold marrow of it, and my stomach swung like a censer, and the silence between the bells opened underneath me with no bottom to it at all.
That was when I noticed him.
A figure in the far corner, folded down into himself, knees to chest, his frame somehow too long even folded, like a rule bent past its joints. A shift of pale linen gone grey with damp and wear hung off him. His head was down. He was muttering, a slow drip of words that circled and came back, circled and came back, with the terrible patience of water.
I tried to speak and my voice curled up in my throat and died there. My hand went out for a cup of water that existed in some other room, some other life. I swallowed what there was to swallow, and tried again.
"Who—" One word, hauled up hand over hand from a long way down, and it barely troubled the air between us. His muttering never paused.
I listened instead. It took me a while. Everything took me a while. I want you to imagine every act in this chapter performed underwater, and then imagine the water is also you. But the shape of his words came slowly clear. Half-verses. Broken couplets. Lines that leaned on rhyme, the meter stumbling, catching itself, stumbling.
Rhymes. He was rhyming.
Cold walked up my arms on small feet. He was not merely a madman, then. He was something far worse.
He was a poet.
"I was never the first to follow," the mutter unspooled, to no one, in no hurry, "nor the last to call the name."
I pushed myself to my feet. The floor made its arrangements underneath me and I let it.
"Stop," I said. It came out cracked, ancient, a hinge in a house nobody lives in.
The verse went on, soft and ruined, another couplet settling over the stones like dust.
I went toward him. A step, and then another. The room was four paces wide and the crossing of it took a season. And here is what I noticed as I came close, in the order I noticed it, because in Haven the order things arrive in is all the truth you get.
The first thing was his hands. They moved while he muttered. Deft, sure, shaping the air in small precise figures, keeping time, illustrating. Answering. His hands were making answers to questions I had not asked yet.
The second thing I noticed was me. Not him. Me. My own breath fraying, my own pulse going up, some part of me that counted and measured and never slept screaming up out of the deep rooms of myself. The rest of me stood stupid and swaying, reaching out.
My fingers found his shoulder. Cloth worn thin as an old man's memory. He shifted at the touch. His head lolled, rolled, and came up slowly, carefully, with the ruined courtesy of a drunk at a good table.
I saw his face.
I saw my face.
He smiled first. Of course he did. It is exactly what I would do.
He tilted his head, and cracked his neck, and brought his eyes to bear as a man brings a lamp around in a dark room, and, "Oh," he said, lightly, pleasantly, a host greeting the guest he had been told to expect. As if I had come late to something that had started without me and would finish without me too.
And then, in my own voice, wearing my own smile, he asked me:
"If you were mad, would you even know?"
I have been asked many cruel questions in my life. Most of them were only clever. That one has never entirely stopped being asked.
Time in Haven did not pass. It frayed.
I measured what I could by breaths, and by the pale blade of light that crept across the floor from the high window and died each day against the far wall. The bells rang their crooked hours. Between the bells came the voices, and my pacing, and the poet in his corner keeping his awful gentle time. And somewhere in all of it (before some things, after others, do not ask me to swear to the seams) Elodin came.
Or a thing shaped like Elodin. You see the trouble already. I had a corner of my own by then that laughed in my voice when nothing was funny, and walls that breathed on the exhale only, and I had spoken with three people that season who were not there. A visitor more or less was not remarkable. Haven is generous with visitors. It is only misers with the real ones.
He was lounging against the doorframe, supposing there was a door, supposing there was a frame. His grin came and went like a lamp in wind, too wide, too knowing, and then gone, and then back before it was called for. "Good morning," he said, in a voice with its feet up. "Or good evening. Though I suppose it doesn't much matter to you, does it. That's one of the freedoms."
I closed my eyes and counted. One. Two. It was a thing I did then, my whole strategy for the world. If a thing was still there at two, you negotiated.
"You always did like bending rules," he said, easy, bored, from a place slightly nearer than he had been standing.
I cracked one eye. "You're not real."
That delighted him. And, when had he moved? He was closer now, or the room had rearranged itself around his standing still, which in my experience of Elodin describes most of his movement even outside of madhouses. "Real is a wonderfully flexible word," he said. "In here, it will do almost anything you ask of it. That's the other freedom."
"You shouldn't be here." My throat still ran on rust. "Or I shouldn't. I don't—" and the sentence went out from under me. "I can't remember."
"Ah." He aimed a long finger at me, showman-grand, a conjurer producing the obvious. "There. That's the first stitch to pull, always. For what it's worth, the memory is not gone, it is only filed by a system you don't currently possess." His face went rueful then, and the ruefulness looked real, which frightened me worse than anything in the room had yet. "A shame about the expulsion. I had hopes for you. Genuine ones. I'd stopped having them about students. You were very refreshing."
I frowned, or sent the order down to frown, and something in my borrowed face perhaps obeyed. "Expulsion."
"Mm. Conduct Unbecoming. Consorting. Undermining the fabric, no, the foundations, they said foundations, someone on the horns felt strongly about the masonry theme." He waved a hand, words blurring and overlapping at their edges now, arriving slightly before or behind his mouth, a chorus of himself singing a half-beat off the beat. "Helping yourself to the cookie jar. Putting a hole in a perfectly good courtyard. I confess I stopped attending closely partway through. Polite outrage is a tedious instrument and the Chancellor plays no other. Too performative. Hemme wanted you hanged, if it helps. It seemed to cheer him up enormously, wanting that. First time I've seen him happy in years."
"No." I shook my head, which was a mistake, the room having opinions about sudden movement. "That can't—no."
"Lorren is here too, you know," he said, in the light tone a man uses to mention weather, and looked at his own fingernails. "Two floors down and one wing over. I have never seen a man so shattered. And I have some experience of the shattered, professionally and," the grin flickered, "personally. But speculation is exhausting, don't you find? Everyone at the University is speculating just now. It's the fashion. Whole faculties of speculation."
The words went into me wrong, a stair missed in the dark, a fret buzzing under a true note.
"Shattered," I said.
His head tilted, bird-quick. "As shattered as your prospects," he said, and there was a jagged small smile with it that did not belong on Elodin's face, that has made me wonder in the years since how much of that visit I painted over with my own colors, and which parts. "Honestly, Kvothe. You of all people should pay attention. It's the only thing you were ever any good at that you were also any good for."
My mind in those days was wet paper. Things written on it warped even as they were set down. I had known about Lorren, hadn't I? Someone had told me. Or I had seen it, moonlight and a swollen eye, red leather in a long careful hand, or dreamed it, or built it out of bells. I pressed the heels of my hands against my temples as if clarity were a matter of pressure.
"I didn't—" My voice came apart at its seams. "I didn't mean—"
"Didn't mean to," he echoed, and all the ease went out of his voice at once, heat leaving a room when a door opens somewhere you can't see. He did not grin again. "Tell me, Re'lar Kvothe. What do we call a man who breaks a thing, and then apologizes to the pieces?"
He turned (I did not see him turn, there was simply a moment after which he had always been turned) and somewhere a door closed with a soft snick, a small domestic sound, a pantry sound, monstrous in that place. Had there been a door before? There has to have been a door.
I sat a long time after, whatever a long time was, with my heart beating in my throat and the walls leaning in to listen, as walls did there. I could almost hear them breathing on the exhale. And from the far corner of the room I could hear myself, still laughing, softly, at nothing, in the place where I kept the laughing one.
Mark this, now. Mark it because I did not. I had asked him no questions, and among all his flickering nonsense there had been things said, charges, wings, floors, that no fragment of my own mind could have known to invent.
I marked none of it. The bells rang, and cut that hour loose from all the others, and it drifted.
The shadows moved. The bells rang, or had already rung, or were about to. The grammar of Haven has no tense for it.
My pacing had worn itself into pure shape by then, a rhythm with no music left in it, a groove without a song. One step. Two. Turn. I had forgotten where the pacing started. I had forgotten where I had started, which is not a figure of speech. I mean there were bells between which I could not have produced my own name, and did not miss it. You do not miss a coat you have forgotten owning. Cold, though. You are always cold without it.
And then, in the quiet under the quiet, the smallest sound. A whisper, folded flat and slid into the crack beneath the door. Light comes under doors. So does winter.
"You sound rather undone," it said.
I stopped. Stood very still.
Words did not come from nowhere. Even in Haven, words belonged to someone. But I had heard my own voice from far corners and other mouths for longer than I could account, and this could be one more splinter of me, sharpened and sent in under the door as a variation. The clever splinters knew that I was cleverest against the front of me. They had learned to arrive at the edges.
Slowly, like a limb coming back from sleep, pins and all, I let my voice uncurl.
"Auri?"
A pause, with consideration in it. Then, as though it were the plainest fact ever set next to another:
"Yes. And you are still you."
I want to tell you what those five words did, and I find I cannot come at it straight even now. Everything in that place, everything in me, had been bent to the one question the poet had asked me on the first day, or the hundredth. Every voice took its turn at the seam of me. And here came a whisper under a door, from a girl the size of a shadow, who had never in her life said a thing she had not first weighed on her own strange golden scales, and she had done my arithmetic for me, and this was the sum, delivered without ceremony because true things do not require any.
You are still you.
My ribs closed on a breath I had not planned.
I set my back against the wall and slid down it and swallowed. "I don't feel like me."
A small sound from the other side of the door. Not quite sadness. Something adjacent to it, something more useful, the sound of someone assessing a broken pot to see what shape of thing it could still hold. "Mmm. Well." A considering pause. "Even if you've misplaced a few pieces, you're still here. That's the important part. You'd be surprised how many people misplace pieces and then throw the rest of themselves away after them, as if that would help anything. It doesn't, you know. It never helps, doing that."
I wanted to laugh. I had forgotten where laughing was kept.
The pause stretched itself out long and comfortable, the first comfortable thing in that whole stone world. And then something whispered along the floor, small and deliberate, slid beneath the door, and came to rest against my foot.
I looked down. A ring. Silver, fine as a whisper of wire, and set in it a pale amber stone that took the thin dead light of that cell and handed it back warmed.
I had not moved. And then it was in my palm, cool and exact, and I had no memory of the crossing, which by then was simply how the world conducted its business with me.
"What is this for?" My voice had gone strange again. I did not know whether I was asking her or the walls, and the walls in that place did answer, sometimes, which is why one learned to be careful with questions.
Auri sighed, the small precise sigh she kept for when the world insisted on having explained to it a thing it was already holding in its hand.
"To keep safe," she said.
"To keep me safe?"
"For safe-keeping."
And that was all. Small words, set down gently, in their one right order, as she set down everything. The pressure in my chest eased. It did not leave. Nothing left, in Haven. Things only stood further off. But it eased, and I sat with my back to the wall and turned the ring over and over in my fingers, watching the amber take the light and warm it, and warm it, and warm it.
I could not even trust that. That is the part I need you to understand. She had been there. Or she had not. Already I could hear my own voice off in the corner where the laughing one lived, saying her words back, and it seemed to me it had begun saying them before she did. Near the door, stone shifted and settled, as though something small had only just stepped away, or as though stone settles, which it does.
She had been there. She had not. The ring lay in my palm, cool and particular, arguing its little amber argument.
I have thought about that visit as much as any hour of my life. What it cost her to come up out of her one safe place, across all that open dangerous ordinary ground, into the very shadow of the Rookery's walls, to whisper at a door crack to a broken thing that could not tell her from its own echoes. And what she said when she got there. Not be brave, not I'll help you, none of the coins the sane world pays out so easily and at such a favorable rate to itself. She told me the one true thing, and she left me the one real object, and she named its purpose with perfect exactness, if only I had had the wit to hear it.
For safe-keeping. Not the ring's. I have never once believed, since, that she meant the ring's.
The voices would not stop.
They came over one another like ivy on a ruin, in at every crack, patient as interest. They had my voice, mostly. They had other voices when mine wore thin.
"You lose everything," one murmured, conversationally. "You know that. It's the one constant. Always losing. Always the one left holding the ashes."
Another lilted, singsong, in the meter I had come to dread: "Broken and buried, never to rise, little fox trapped under trembling skies..."
And then, mild as milk, "She won't come again, you know."
It slid in with all the others, down among the ivy, and was almost past me before something in it caught.
A wrong note. Not loud. A fret-buzz, a hair of discord in a song I had heard so many times I no longer listened to it. The voices were mine. I knew their machinery. I built their cruelties myself, in my own shop, and I knew my own work when I heard it.
That one was not my work.
A second went by. Too long. I faltered, and stood in the middle of my worn groove with my head cocked.
Then the bells rang, or the light died, and I shook my head, and let it go, and the tide took it.
The bells had rung again. This I know because everything in what follows had the bruised clarity that came just after bells, when the world had been struck and was still ringing true.
From somewhere beyond the door, a voice cut through, sharp, real, fed up, whip-crack weary.
"Oh, for fuck's sake, Kvothe."
A pause. A gathered breath, the kind a man takes when he is deciding to say the thing plainly because nothing else has worked.
"She's gone."
It came at me again, cracking with frustration at its edges, shoving at the door of me. My lips moved before I had decided anything, the shape of a name, hers, nothing but breath. And then the tide came in and took even that, as it took everything, and my own voices closed over the words and took them under.
"She's gone, Kvothe."
The words warped as they crossed the space between hearing and knowing. That space, in Haven, was an ocean, and things drowned in it daily.
"...a girl in a cage..."
"Chains, fox, chains, she's caught in the trap now..."
"Taken, forgotten, stolen, lost..."
"Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone..."
The voices took his words and ate them and sang them back in their own meter, urgent turned singsong, singsong turned round, a wheel of gone. I pressed my hands over my ears, which has never once worked in the history of hands or ears, the voices being on the inside, where the hands cannot go.
"She's—"
"—gone."
Someone on the far side of the door exhaled, short and sharp, all at once.
"Tehlu's teeth, Kvothe." Hardly more than breath now. All the whip gone out of it. Tired, resigned, defeated. A man setting down a tool that has bent in his hand. I turned my head toward the door, meaning to look, meaning for once to really look. And the walls did their trick, and the light smeared, and I caught nothing but a shadow going, and the cell door clanged. The clang was taken up at once into the bells' country, and became just one more crooked hour striking.
The space he left collapsed in on itself, and the rhythm of ruin resumed, and my false selves came into the silence like gulls behind a plow.
"He's gone," one observed, mildly.
"Gave up on you. As everyone does. It's very reliable, in its way. You could set a wheel by it."
"Perhaps it's kinder," another murmured. "Truly, fox, what would you even do? Claw the walls? Call a name you can't remember? You couldn't hold a binding to warm your own hands. We were there. We remember, even if you've filed it under a system you don't currently—"
"She won't come again, you know."
The words threaded through me on their way to the pile, a stitch among ten thousand stitches.
And they knotted. And held.
Something was wrong with them. Small, at first. A missed stair, a distant wrongness, an itch in a limb I could not locate. My mind moved at its Haven pace, sluggish, underwater, pawing at the stitch without the fingers to work it loose. Those words had been through before. Just now. A bell ago. An ocean ago. The voices repeated everything. Repetition was their whole liturgy. That was not the wrongness.
I pulled at the stitch once more, and then, because I was tired, and because it would have been so much easier, I very nearly let it be.
She won't come again, Kvothe.
It wasn't one of them.
Understand. I knew my voices. A luthier knows his own glue joints. It had not come with the walls' whisper or the poet's lilt. It had not curled out of my own corner-mouth in my own borrowed tones. It had been spoken. Days ago, bells ago, at the beginning of all of this, by something with weight and a shadow and lungs. It had come from a chest, and crossed air, and entered at my ears like honest sound. And nothing in this room had lungs but me.
Elodin.
Elodin had said it. Elodin had stood in this cell, lounging on a doorframe that existed, wearing his real face, saying real things with his real mouth. The expulsion, the hole in the courtyard, Lorren shattered two floors down. And I had counted to two and called him a figment to that face, and he had left through a door that closed with a snick.
And if that visit was real, then so was She's gone, Kvothe.
My pulse kicked in my throat like a thing trying to get out.
I closed my hand on the silver ring, hard, harder, until the fine band and the amber stone printed their shapes into my palm. The small honest ache of it burned a hole in the fog, and I climbed through the hole, hand over hand, toward myself.
Elodin had been here. Twice. The second time he had stood at that door and said she's gone until his voice wore out, and I had let my madness take the words and set them to music.
A girl in a cage. Chains. The voices had not invented that. The voices were scavengers. They cooked what they were brought. Someone had brought them cage. Someone had brought them chains, and taken, and a song. One of my splinters had sung it round and round, a lilting thing it called "The Moon Fae's Plight," and I had never in my life heard that song, and my splinters could not know a single thing that I did not.
Auri.
Taken.
Like ice going under a boot. That is exactly the sensation, the world whole in one instant and in the next a web of white cracks and the cold coming up. So the understanding went through me. I had sat in this room turning her ring in my fingers while the only man who came to tell me stood shouting through the door. I had let him leave. I had let her name fall down among the voices and be eaten.
My gorge rose, sharp and violent. My hands shook against the stone floor, the old tremor and a new one in harness together.
And my mind, which had been so long in the warm dark, tried one last time to go back under. I felt it happen. I watched it happen from a half-step outside, which is a thing madness teaches you that I have never managed to unlearn. It would be easier, the deep part of me said, reasonably, kindly, in the voice it knew I trusted most, which was mine. Easier to be lost. The lost are not responsible. The lost are not to blame. Come back down where it is warm, little fox, there is nothing up there for you but the weight of what you—
No.
The thought held. That was the miracle, if you want one. This story has few enough, so take it. Every other thought that season had warped when I gripped it, gone soft, changed faces. This one held its shape under my whole weight. Auri was taken. It was real, and being real, it had that quality no phantom ever counterfeits, which is that it does not care whether you can bear it.
I clenched my teeth. I pulled breath down into my lungs like a man hauling rope. I set my fingers against the cold stone floor and gripped, as if the world were a thing that could be held onto, and I forced my head up, and I looked at them.
The voices still circled. The splinters, the echoes, the laughing one in his corner, the poet keeping his gentle ruined time. But I was looking at them now, and being looked at, they showed what they were. Not demons. Nothing so grand as demons. Fragments. My own spilled pieces, my own voice in shards, my own ruin, moving in the silence like scavengers, because I had left the whole field of myself for the taking.
I bared my teeth, and I fought them.
I will not pretend to you that it was a battle, with a shape and a turning point and a clean end, though Tehlu knows I could sing it that way and you would weep. It was not clean. It was work. The meanest, slowest work I have ever put my hands to. I lost my footing. I went down into the warm silence more times than I kept count of, and had to claw back up with nothing but the ring's small ache in my fist and the one thought that held. They crowded close and whispered the last and worst of what they had; one sang his lilting Plight at me; one murmured things about a cage that I will not repeat and have never managed to forget; and the poet in the corner nodded, and muttered, and kept his time, patient as water, patient as ivy.
Piece by piece, I drove them back into myself, where they had come from, where they belonged. Which meant, understand this, that nothing was banished. There was nowhere to banish them to. Every voice went back into the choir. Every splinter came home to the same cracked wood. When the cracks were all that was holding me together, I fought with the cracks.
Even when the dark leaned in with its whole weight, looking for purchase, I would not be unmade.
And at what I will call the end, because every telling must call something the end. Quiet. The muttering dissolved like sugar in rain. The corners emptied of laughter. There was my own breath, ragged. My own body, filthy and shaking. My own name, present and accounted for. And the pale blade of light lying thin across the floor.
It was not much. It was enough. I have since built everything I have, twice, out of not much, and enough.
And in that quiet, in the true silence I had bought back an inch at a time, the first silence in that place that belonged to me, I heard it.
The stone.
I do not know how to give you this part. Words are the wrong tool, which is, I have come to believe, precisely the point of it. The wall of my cell was old stone, quarried stone, stone that had been cut and dressed and stacked and mortared and leaned on and wept against, three hundred years of weight and patience and dark. And worn cold under my two hands, it was saying what it was. It had been saying so all along. Everything says so, all the time; that is the world's one endless sentence; and sanity, blessed sanity, is the art of not hearing it. I had lost the art. I had lost every wall and window of the house of my mind, and I stood in the open for once in my life, in the wind. My hands moved blind on the stone's face, and the saying gathered, and rose, and surfaced.
A name.
"Cyaerbasalien."
I spoke it as a question first, hesitant, a man trying a strange door in a strange hall. Then I spoke it with certainty, because between the first speaking and the second I had stopped being a man trying a door, and become, for one breath, for the only coin of time that matters, a man who knew the stone as the stone knew itself. Its weight, its long dark patience, the mountain it remembered being.
Then I spoke it the third time with the weight of stone, and the wall answered me.
It broke.
It did not explode, whatever the accounts say. I have heard the accounts, and I let them stand, because they pay better than the truth. It let go. Three hundred years of holding still, released all in one grateful going. Mortar to sand, block from block, opening outward and downward like a hand unclenching, with a sound like the world clearing its throat.
Night air rushed in at me and I nearly went down under the plain glory of it. Cold, and moving, and full of leaf-rot and river and woodsmoke, the smell of the ordinary world going carelessly about its dark. The moon stood near full over the rooftops of the University. The same moon, I did not think then but have thought every time since, that watches all cages everywhere, and helps with none of them.
I climbed over the broken stones, out of the Rookery, and stood swaying on the open grass at the edge of the world.
They tell a story about Elodin, you know. Every first-term student hears it inside a span. How the Masters locked the greatest Namer of the age in Haven for his own good, in a special room they built to hold him. And how one day he decided to leave, and left, and the wall was not consulted. I had heard that story at fifteen and thought it wonderful. I had heard it from nearer sources since and thought it terrible. Standing in the wreckage of my own wall with the night on my face, I did not think of it at all. That is the truth. I was mad, and new-mended, and empty as a rung bell. It found me only later, the understanding of whose road I had walked out on. What he had known, all those visits, standing patient at the door of a boy coming apart, saying she's gone to the voices and waiting to see whether the boy would drown, or hear the stone.
I pressed Auri's ring to my lips with fingers that would not stop trembling, and I said it into the moving air, quiet and certain, the only prayer I had left, with all the gods out.
"Wait for me, Auri."