I was a poor sort of fugitive.
The stories are very clear about how these things should be done. A fugitive moves like smoke. He has a plan, and a knife, and a face like the weather before a storm. I had a torn Haven shift, legs that shook under me like a foal's, and hands that would not stop their small treachery no matter how I willed them. Less than before. I noticed even then that the trembling had eased since the wall, as if speaking one true name had put a little mortar back into me somewhere. Small blessings. I have learned to count them small, and count them anyway.
The walk from the Rookery across the University grounds is not a long one. That night it was the length of a country. The moon hung fat and low, a night shy of full, and it lit the lanes I knew as footlights light a stage. Every path silvered, every shadow sharp and shallow, nowhere for a broken boy in a madhouse shift to be anything but seen. The wind came through the linen as if the linen were a rumor. I went from shadow to shadow with stone dust on my hands, past buildings where I had studied and performed and bled. All of them stood there in the moonlight looking exactly as they had looked when I belonged to them.
I did not think about where my feet were taking me. My feet had it managed.
I have wondered, since, why they chose Sim's stair and not another. Not Wilem's door, not the road, not some bolt-hole a cleverer fugitive would have had prepared. I stopped wondering when I remembered the plum bob. You'll recall it, the drug Ambrose paid to have slipped into my drink, the one that stripped a man's judgment off him like bark and left everything underneath open to the weather. That was the drug whose cure, botched, had cracked me in the first place and set every stone of this story rolling downhill. Through the worst hours of that season it had been Sim who sat with me. Sim, who is afraid of an unkind word, sat all night at the elbow of a boy who had lost the part of him that decides not to do things, and talked him gentle, and did not once let him out of his sight. My mind had forgotten none of that, wherever they had piled its furniture. My feet had not forgotten either.
I climbed his stair to the third floor and stood in front of his door, shivering, small.
The last time I had stood there, I had a lute case in one hand and half of Sim's worldly goods stacked to my chin, and Fela was directing the both of us like a foreman born to it. Sim was lamenting his delicate constitution in three registers while carrying more than either of us. That day had happened to some other boy. I stood in that boy's spot, in the cold, and I knocked twice.
It was a feeble sound. Even my knock had been in Haven.
A pause. Then footsteps, careful ones, crossing floorboards I could not see. The door opened the two inches its chain allowed, and lamplight came through the gap, and Sim's eye appeared in it, wary in a way that Sim's eye had never been wary at me before.
I watched him take the inventory. The shift, torn at the shoulder, hanging on me like a sail on a spar. The stone dust. The hollows I could feel under my own eyes. My hands, doing what my hands did now. I watched him see all of it, and I watched him hesitate.
It was a small hesitation. A heartbeat, maybe two. I want to be fair to him, here at this table, with years between me and that doorway. He had every right to it, and better sense than me has always come with a pause attached. But I will not lie to you either. That heartbeat, standing in the cold in a madhouse shift while my oldest friend at the University decided whether to be afraid of me. That cut deeper than anything the soldiers managed last night, and it has healed about as well.
Then the chain came off, and the door came open, and Sim said, "Kvothe," in a voice that hadn't decided what it was yet. And then he stepped back and pulled the door wide, and decided. "Come in."
Firelight rolled out over me, and the warmth of it was very nearly pain.
His rooms were moving-day made permanent. Books rising in stacks from every surface that would bear weight and several that shouldn't, the bitter almond-and-ash smell of alchemical residue, a half-eaten apple going quietly brown on the desk. Beside it, three open volumes lying face-down, which Fela would have scolded him for, spines being sacred to her. Everything ordinary. Everything warm. For the space of one breath I let myself pretend I was visiting. That I would flop into his chair and he would pour the terrible sweet wine he liked and we would argue about poetry, which is to say I would say things about poetry to make him turn colors.
Then the whole season came down on me at once, like a roof coming down, not plank by plank but all together, with a whump. The dig, the room, the doorway in Imre. Bells. The voices. Nowhere left in the world that was mine. My legs simply stopped pretending, and I went sideways into the doorframe and caught myself on shaking arms.
"Sit." Sim had me by the elbow before I heard him move, steering me at the fire. His voice was steady. His face wasn't. "Sit down before you fall down. You're allowed to do the first one and not the second, those are the rules of the house."
I sank into the chair by the fire and my legs gave up their commission entirely. Sim stayed on his feet. He hovered, hands moving. Picking up a cup, setting it down, half-reaching for the kettle, abandoning it, while his face worked at questions too big for his mouth. He didn't ask them. Simmon, who could no more hide a feeling than a window can, looked at what had washed up in his chair, and asked me nothing at all, and I have loved him for it ever since.
The fire ticked. Somewhere below in the building a door closed, an ordinary door, on ordinary hinges, and nobody screamed about it. It had been some time since I had lived in a world like that.
"I made a mess, Sim." My voice came out low and cracked at its edges. I looked at my ruined hands rather than at him. "I've done things."
I meant to go on. The sentence had a great deal of family waiting behind it. Nothing else came, for a long while, and Sim let the quiet sit there between us like a third guest, and did not poke at it.
Teccam wrote that the only way past a wall is over it, and that the second-best time to climb is before you are ready. When I could bear my own silence no longer, I looked up, and I climbed.
I told him all of it. I want that noted, because it was the first time in this story that anyone got all of it, and it was not Denna and it was not Devi and it was not even Wilem. It was Sim, by his fire, with his half-eaten apple browning on the desk. The bargain with Devi that had started as a favor. A spice of life, she'd called it, and I'd repeated the phrase to myself for spans as though calling a debt a spice changed its interest rate. The warnings I had been given and walked past as you walk past beggars, eyes forward. The courtyard, the acid, the hole under the apple tree. The room below and what it held. The compression hand, the pantograph, the neat little rig I had built under Kilvin's own lamps for robbing the Archives of everything but its paper. The night Devi didn't come, and the room in Imre, and what her face did when she saw me in the doorway.
And then Haven. That was the harder climb. It is one thing to confess your crimes. Men do it daily, and some of them enjoy it. It is another thing to sit in a friend's chair and tell him that you cracked. That the fine mind he had watched juggle bindings and Masters and impossibilities for three years had gone down like a bridge in a flood. That you had spent days, or spans, in the Rookery talking to corners. That a man had stood at your door with the only news that mattered and you had let your madness eat it.
"Elodin came," I said. "More than once, I think. He was trying to tell me something, and I couldn't—I wasn't able to hear it as real. It went into the noise with everything else." My thumb found Auri's ring and turned it on my finger, around and around, the cool of the silver and the small bright weight of the amber the realest things in the room. "He was trying to tell me a girl was gone."
"A girl?" Sim said gently.
And here we came to it. The last locked room in my whole honest confession, and the one I would have kept locked past dying, if keeping it locked had not already cost what it cost.
"Do you remember the night on the rooftops," I said, "when Elodin brought Lorren up to argue about my Archives ban? There was a girl who came and sat with us awhile. Small. She bolted before you got a look at her."
He frowned back through the years, and I watched him find it. "Vaguely. Wild hair. She came out of nowhere and Elodin acted like that was normal." His eyes came up. "That's the girl?"
"Her name is Auri."
And then the rest stuck, as it always stuck. Three words about her and my throat closed like a fist. Old habit, deep as tendon. Every time her name had ever begun to rise in company I had swallowed it whole, and my body had learned the shape of the swallowing. It did it now on its own, faithful as a dog doing the only trick it knows at the worst possible time.
Sim waited. He had stopped fidgeting.
"There is more to her than what you saw that night," I said at last. "More than anyone saw. And I should have told you years ago, and the fact that I didn't is why we are sitting here."
I told him. Auri, who I thought had been a student once, before something at the University did to her whatever it does to the ones it breaks, but who had refused Haven as a wild thing refuses a snare. She had gone down instead, and made her own place in the Underthing, in the miles of forgotten rooms and pipeworks under our feet. And she had made it right, in a way I could not explain to him then and will not manage now. How I had met her with my lute and a hunger for one gentle thing in my life. The bread in my pockets. The small treasures wrapped in cloth. Years of nights on the rooftops, the only appointments in my whole gaudy overdrawn life I had never once been late to. Until the acid and the courtyard, until I chose not to know things instead.
"I kept her secret from everyone. You. Wil. I told myself it was for her. That if the Masters ever learned a cracked girl was living under the University they'd send men down after her with lanterns and kind firm voices and drag her up into the light and put her—" my voice did something I let it do "—put her in Haven. She is more afraid of Haven than of dying. I know precisely how sensible that fear is now, having sampled both."
"So you hid her." Sim said it softly, no verdict in it. Verdicts were never Sim's instrument.
"I hid her so well that when she needed help, there was no one in the world who knew to give it." There it was, the thing itself, laid out on the hearthstones between us. I made myself keep my eyes up. "I built a secret to keep her safe, and the secret worked, Sim. It worked right up until the moment it made her disappearance a thing nobody living would notice. You cannot do better work than that. Kilvin would give it full marks."
"Kvothe—"
"She's small," I said, because if he was kind to me just then I would have gone to pieces, and there was no time for pieces. "Small and thin, you saw. Pale gold hair, very fine. It floats around her head like a dandelion gone to seed. She moves carefully. Skittish with anyone she doesn't know. She reads people faster than Elodin and trusts them slower than Devi. She won't wear clothing that's been worn by anyone else, won't touch it. And she will not look at Haven. Not at the building. If you're walking with her and it comes into view she turns herself so it isn't there." I heard what I was doing, building her out of true details in a stranger's air, the exact trade I had refused for years, and I kept doing it, because the time for the older loyalty was over. "If someone took her, Sim. If someone put hands on her and made her go somewhere—"
I did not finish. Some sentences you cannot pay the toll on.
Sim was nodding, slow, writing on the inside of his own skull. Then he stood, and took his coat off the peg, and became, before my eyes, the other Simmon, the one people forgot lived in him, the one that came out when a friend was on the table. "You look like one hard word would knock you into next span," he said. "So here's a soft one: sleep. I'll go and see what can be found out by someone harmless." He smiled a little at that, crooked. "It's my great gift, you know. Nobody ever suspects me of anything. It used to sting. Tonight it's an asset."
He paused at the door, hand on the latch, and looked back at me with the firelight moving on his tired earnest face.
"We'll figure this out, Kvothe."
There are men who say that sort of thing because it is what one says. Sim has never once in his life said anything because it was what one says. I held on to that sentence the whole time he was gone, both hands, as I'd held the ring in Haven.
I asked him, I made myself ask, just as he opened the door, whether anything was known of Devi. He didn't turn all the way around. Nothing, he said. No trial posted, no name cried at the iron law's hours, nothing on the horns' docket, nothing anywhere, which for the University was its own kind of answer. Whatever was being done with her was being done quietly, in rooms where dockets don't reach. I nodded, and added her to the ledger I keep of people who are paying interest on my debts, and let him go.
I woke to soft movement and grey light.
For one blank instant I was nowhere. The fire down to embers, unfamiliar rafters, and my whole body one dull argument, and I nearly went for the window before the room assembled itself into Sim's, and the shape by the hearth into Sim. Hours had gone. The window had that pre-dawn pallor to it, the hour when honest men are asleep and the University belongs to bakers and bell-ringers.
Sim sat near the fire's remains, still in his coat. He had not slept. That was written plainly. Dark half-moons under his eyes, hair pushed anyhow. But that was not what worried me. What worried me was his hands. They lay in his lap, folded, motionless.
Sim's hands were never still. In three years I had watched them conduct invisible orchestras, shred bread into archipelagoes, drum, fold, fuss, and fret through every hour we had ever shared. Stillness on Simmon was a borrowed garment, and it hung on him accordingly.
He looked at me for a long moment before he spoke, and that was unlike him too.
"I talked to Elodin," he said, low. "Or—no. That's a lie of grammar. Elodin talked to me. I was going about it carefully, honestly I was, a question here, a question there, all of it three streets away from anything to do with you. And somewhere between the third question and the fourth he was simply there, walking beside me, in step, as if we'd left the Eolian together." A small laugh escaped him with no humor in it at all. "You know how he is."
I knew how he was. I had recently learned considerably more about how he was. Elodin was where he should not be, knowing what he could not know, always. I had taken three years to understand that this was not a Master's eccentricity but a Namer's plain condition, and I had needed a broken wall to teach me.
"He wouldn't speak about you," Sim went on. "Made a point of it. Held up a hand when I so much as leaned toward the subject, like a man declining a dish. But the girl. He made very sure I knew about the girl, Kvothe. He walked with me the length of two streets and everything he said was for her." Sim's voice caught its toe on something. "He said I needed to know. Those words. From Elodin, who I have never once heard say anyone needed anything, except sleep, and once, memorably, a swim."
The fire was nearly out. The room was going cold around us, and neither of us moved toward the wood basket. Some conversations you do not interrupt even to keep warm.
"Know what?" I said, and sat up, every muscle filing its separate grievance.
He hesitated. Simmon, hesitating, with still hands, in the grey hour. I have taken wounds that announced themselves less clearly.
"The University is sending her away," he said. "To Renere."
Of all the things I had braced for, that was not on the list. Haven, I had braced for. Some cell, some cellar. "Renere?" The word came out stupid with distance. Renere was the far side of the map. The Small Kingdoms sit nearer to us than the Vintish court. "That's—why? Why would the University trouble itself to ship one cracked girl across half the map?"
"She's someone, Kvothe."
The care he said it with, exactly, a man carrying another man's words in cupped hands, afraid to spill what he didn't understand, I knew they were Elodin's words entire, delivered as received.
"She's someone. That's all he'd give me. Not who. When I pushed, he looked at me—you know that look he has, like you've asked him to explain a color. But whoever she is, the University wants her gone, and wants it quiet. No record, no announcement. If I hadn't gone asking, I don't think a soul outside the Masters would ever have marked it." His jaw set, and his voice with it. "And Ambrose is her escort."
"Ambrose."
The name went into me like a blade, not with pain first, but with cold.
Sim nodded, and now his jaw was tight enough to hurt him. "The Jakis family is withdrawing its collection from the Archives. Books their line has lodged there for generations. Carted home to Renere for, they're calling it, safe-keeping." He said the words with distaste and no idea what they did to me. My hand had already found the ring. "And they're not the only ones. The Surthens are pulling theirs too, and there's talk of others. After everything that's—" He stopped himself, too late and too kind, and looked away.
After everything that's happened. After what I did. He was too good to finish the sentence, so I finished it in the privacy of my own skull, where the voices agreed enthusiastically. The University's one unpurchasable treasure was its trust. The certainty, old as the walls, that a thing given to the Archives was safe until the sun went out. And a red-haired Re'lar had melted a hole in that certainty with a courtyard's worth of acid, and now the great families were reaching in to take their treasures home. The Archives, Lorren's Archives, the heart of everything, centuries of patient gathering, had sprung its first leak in living memory. Because of me. You may stack that stone on the pile with the others. It goes on the same pile as Auri's, and the pile has a shape by now, and I know its silhouette better than my own shadow's.
"There's more," Sim said, quieter. "Someone saw a carriage leaving. Eastern road, day before yesterday, early. A hired man I found, one who'd been loading at the wool market and had no reason in the world to invent it." He cleared his throat, and his voice wavered anyway. "He saw a girl put into it. Small girl, pale hair. She was crying, Kvothe. Struggling. Two men had her by the arms." He looked at the dead fire. "She didn't want to go."
Somewhere outside a shutter banged in the wind, once, twice, and I heard it very clearly. You hear small things when the large thing cannot be looked at yet.
Auri. Who came up out of the Underthing only under moonlight, only for music, only in her own time and her own order, whose whole life was a treaty negotiated inch by inch with a world too loud and too rough. Hands on her arms. A box on wheels, bearing the Jakis seal. Roads and inns and strangers, jolts and shouting, league upon league of everything she had built her deep quiet kingdom to be safe from.
I leaned forward and put my head in my hands, and for a while the room was very patient with me.
"If it's him," I said finally, into my palms. "If he—Sim, of every man alive, if Ambrose has charge of her—" and there the sentence closed its own gates, because past that point lay only the parts of me I had just spent a season stitching back together.
"Which is exactly why you have to hear me." Sim leaned in, and his voice did the thing it almost never did. It went hard, level, older. "You cannot rush at this. Look at the board, Kvothe, as you'd make me look at it. You're expelled. You broke out of Haven. By law that wall makes you a fugitive twice over. And Ambrose knows you. He knows precisely what pulls you off your feet, he has spent three years making a study of it. And now he rides east at a walking pace with the one hook in the world you cannot help but bite. Maybe it's chance. Maybe the Masters chose him for ugly little reasons of their own. But if it's bait, if he's trailing her behind him like a lure, then the worst thing you can do, for her, is exactly the thing you're sitting there wanting to do."
He was right, and knowing it was like following a proof, step by step, no exit, resenting every line of it.
"I'll handle it," I said, more evenly than I had any right to. "I can't sit here, Sim. Everything else, you could argue me out of. Not her."
"I know." And he did. That was the terrible gentle thing about Sim. He always knew. "So promise me the only thing left. Be smart about it. Don't run into his trap with your arms open."
"Smart," I said. The word tasted like ash and old bells. "I'll try."
He nodded, and looked at me, and his hands, I saw, had started up their fidgeting again, turning a loose button, worrying a thread. I was glad beyond sense to see it, and I understood what it meant. He didn't believe me.
I didn't entirely believe myself. On the evidence, we were both being fair.
The clothes Sim lent me fit as a friend's clothes do, loose at the waist, tight in the shoulders, wrong everywhere and dearer for it. They were dry, and clean, and smelled of soap and his room's fire and faintly of almonds, and not at all of Haven's damp stone rot. It is a thing you cannot explain to a man who hasn't worn the shift. That smell coming off you was half the madness, and clean cloth against your back is a spell of its own, older than sympathy and more reliable.
I did not go back to Sim's fire when he finally slept. I had never intended to, which is why I had not promised.
He would have argued, or worse, come along, Sim, on the eastern road, out of the only life that fit him, because loyalty was the one subject he had never needed to study. He was a good friend. He was possibly too good a friend. A rope can be too good. It will not break and let you fall alone. It will just come off the cliff with you. His worry was a weight I could not carry where I was going, and his safety was one I refused to spend. I left him a note with three lies in it and my whole heart, and I went out quietly, and down, and into the last of the dark.
One errand remained, and it was a foolish one, and I never considered skipping it.
Anker's. If Ambrose suspected I'd come back, if anyone was watching for the fugitive, my little room above the taproom was the one place in the world they'd watch. I went anyway, by the back ways, the routes I'd worn smooth over three years of curfews and dodged debts. Under the grain chutes behind the bakery, along the wall where the frost made the top stones treacherous, through the alley that always smelled of cabbage regardless of season, as if cabbage were its calling. The moon had swung west but lost none of its candor. The streets lay silver and stark, shadows scarce and sharp-edged, a bad night for the sneaking trades. From below, my window was dark. My skin prickled all the same, waiting for the trap I couldn't see. A watcher in the eaves, a thread across the sill, some patient little piece of clockwork malice. I climbed the stone slow as honey, listened at the casement through ten long breaths, and heard only the inn's old bones settling and Anker's dog dreaming somewhere below.
Inside, the air smelled of candle wax and cold hearth smoke. Exactly as I'd left it. As if the boy who lived here had only stepped down for a drink, and might be back any minute, and would want his things where they were.
No traps sprang. In a way, that was its own small insult. Not even worth a snare.
The lute hung on its peg.
I took it down, and its weight came into my hands as it always came, as no other weight in the world arrives, settling, not landing, and for the first time since the wall of Haven broke I felt the floor of the world hold properly still under me. I ran my fingers once along the seam of the case in the dark. Old habit. The case had crossed the Omethi with me, and slept under my cot for three years. It was, I understood, standing there in the dark of a room I was seeing for the last time, the single object in my life that had been in my life all along. Everything else, every coin, every garment, every friend and enemy and debt, had been acquired locally. The lute was from before. The lute remembered the troupe, insofar as wood remembers, and I have always believed that wood remembers.
If I had been wise, says the man at this table, I would have hung it back on its peg and returned to Sim's fire and let wiser heads make slower plans. I have never been wise when it mattered most. I am not persuaded I would trade the fact away, either, even now, knowing the bill. A man who is wise when it matters most does not end up with much of a story, and a story was about to be nearly all I had.
The rest took a minute, no more. My spare strings. My last clean shirt. The thin remainder of my purse. I will not insult the word fortune by using it. There was copper in it, and sorrow, and one lonely jot that rang against the buckle like a small bell as I swept it in. Denna's note went where it always went, folded, against my heart, its two words worn soft at the crease by now. Next time.
I stood a moment in the middle of the little room with my bag on my shoulder. It was a poor room. It had been drafty in winter and hot in summer and the third stair below it had a creak I'd never once beaten. It was also the only stability I had owned since I was eleven years old. A door with my own latch, a peg for my lute, a window the moon knew where to find. The room felt very quiet, and very small, and already like somewhere I used to live.
I went out the window I had come in by. Whatever teeth the night had, they'd missed their moment.
On the cold slates, under the fat westering moon, I stood a heartbeat with the whole University spread dark around me. Mains and Mews, the Fishery's banked glow, the Archives showing its one grey shoulder above the rooftops, all of it, everything I had bled and begged and burned to be part of since before my voice broke. The goodbye took less time than I had ever imagined it would. That is one more thing no story had warned me of. The great partings are usually over before you arrive at them. Mine had happened somewhere back among the bells, or in a doorway in Imre, or the night I first tipped acid onto a flagstone under an apple tree. This, now, was only the paperwork.
Ambrose had her. Somewhere east on the road in a sealed carriage, small and frightened and certain no one was coming. Because I had spent years making sure no one would even know to come.
I would follow that thread to its end. Through cold, through dark, through whatever the road cared to charge for passage. To Renere itself if I had to, and I already knew I would have to. I settled the lute against my back, and I went down the far side of the roof, and I left behind everything I did not carry.