Before I tell you this next part, understand. The Fae does not keep still long enough to be remembered properly. Telling it in the past, in the neat done-and-finished grammar of our world, is carrying water in a net. Some of what follows will arrive in the wrong tense. I have stopped apologizing for it. That is simply what the memory does when you open the door. It comes in still happening.
The sky unravels, thread by thread, as though Jax himself were up there plucking it apart for the wire. Stars wheel and drift, and their places are subtly, maddeningly wrong. Not scattered, wrong, as a word is wrong in a forged letter. Two constellations low in the east blink down at me in slow alternation, like animals seeing a man for the first time and conferring about it.
A watching sky. A waiting one.
I lead us through the trees. I say lead. There is no sun to steer by here, no path, no road, no mark of any hand that ever thought to make one. But something is pulling at me, dayward, soft and constant as tide, and I have stopped fighting it. I know this pull. I have felt it once before in my life, and my body kept the feel of it. The body keeps everything it should let go of. Felurian. Her name melts against my lips like honey and warning, and my feet keep arriving ahead of my judgment. I let them, because in all this sliding country her pull is the one fixed thing, and a drowning man does not question the rope.
The air rings thin, like sound drawn off plucked glass. The ground shifts soft between my strides. Twice the slope goes wrong mid-stride (downhill becoming up without ever passing through level) and my stomach files its objection and is overruled.
Sim stumbles along at my side, filling the silence with talk, which is how he fills all silences. His voice comes out stretched, though, pulled thin as taffy, the words arriving a little late and a little long. Wilem walks behind us with his dark eyes on the treeline, moving like a wolf in open country, low-shouldered, economical, insulted by the whole arrangement.
"We are lost," Wilem said.
I almost denied it. I had found my way through Tarbean's crueler alleys blind drunk on cold. I had learned the ten thousand shelves of the Archives well enough to walk them lampless. But those were places built by human hands, and human hands leave patterns a clever man can learn. Streets end. Shelves keep order. Even Tarbean, which hates you, hates you consistently. Here there was nothing to hold. The Fae slid around us like blankets shifting in sleep, and every landmark I fixed on quietly rearranged itself the moment my eyes went somewhere else. Twice I had marked a split tree. Three times it had been behind us.
"Say it," Wilem pressed.
"We're misplaced," I muttered.
"Hm." Wilem shook his head. "Well. We are not found."
I have never managed to win that kind of exchange with a Cealdish man, and I have stopped entering them. But before I could try, a sound comes threading through the trees.
Light as a breath. Quick as a shiver. It is closer to music than to any other thing I know a word for, and it is not music, as your reflection is not your twin. It finds the hollow of my chest as a struck note finds the body of a lute. Not entering, resounding, as if the hollow had been carved to its measure years ago and left waiting. I am not hearing it, or not only. I am remembering it. A melody I have always carried and never once played. A song I did not know was mine until something else began it.
It does not call me forward. This is the part I need you to understand, because it is the part that makes the Fae what it is. A call can be refused. This simply waits, patient as a set table, for me to come.
"What now?" Wilem's voice, sharp, from behind me.
I didn't answer. I stepped toward the song.
"Kvothe." His hand caught my arm, fingers hard through the sleeve. "You don't know what this is."
"We can't keep wandering." I pulled free, gently as I could manage, which was not very. The song hung there between the trees, unhurried, certain of me. "Look around you. Every direction is a guess and every guess moves." I nodded toward the sound. "That is the only thing in this whole sliding country that acts like it knows where it is."
"That is how people die," Wilem said flatly. "In every story my grandmother ever told, that is precisely and exactly how people die."
"Then I'll go alone."
I would like to tell you I said it nobly. I said it like a tired man, with a tremor in his hands and a girl in a carriage somewhere east of everything, past caring about the quality of his decisions, only their speed.
Wilem said nothing. I stepped into the undergrowth, and Sim was beside me before the third branch swung back, eyes wide as a child's at a fire, and grinning anyway, because he was Sim. "You genuinely thought we'd stay behind," he said. "That's the insulting part."
And behind us both, boots deliberate in the leaf-rot, came Wilem, muttering in Siaru. I caught perhaps one word in five. Most of what I caught was arithmetic. His grandmother's stories, counted off like a bill of lading, item by item, each one ending badly.
The clearing opens all at once, the trees letting go of it.
Firelight, first, a great fire burning a color fire should not be entirely comfortable burning. And moving through its light, the dancers. Shapes not quite human and not quite anything else there is a name for. Their limbs bend in ways that make my eyes ache, and the ache is wanting. You watch an arm turn through an arc no arm of our world owns, and something in you leans after it, wishing. Their faces are smooth as river glass. Their eyes, when the light crosses them, go from silver to green and back, slow and restless, like moonlit water deciding.
For a moment, a long one, they are only beautiful. Dancers wrapped in flame, every gesture seamless, every turn a phrase I almost recognize, the whole of it like overhearing a language you spoke in a dream. Then the light shifts a hand's width, and what is strange in them shows itself without apology. Ribs too narrow, and too many or too few. Lips overfull, flushed as bruised fruit. Cheekbones cut so sharp the skin around them has given up moving. And the smiles. The smiles hold too long and stretch too wide, with nothing behind them changing, as though smiling were a garment, and no one had ever taught them when a garment comes off.
Beautiful and wrong, wrong and beautiful, the two of them braided too tight to pull apart. That is the Fae entire. You may keep the observation free of charge.
"Tehlu's name," Sim breathes beside me.
I cannot answer him. I cannot look away, and, this is the true confession, I am not trying very hard.
A silver-haired figure comes toward us from the fire's edge, bearing cups in long narrow fingers, too many knuckles to a finger, or knuckles in the wrong places. Counting is difficult and feels rude. The voice, when it comes, hums like wind drawn over strings, chord rather than tone.
"No iron. No ugly things." It is not a request. It is the reading of a law so old it has worn down into weather.
My knife was at my feet before I had finished deciding. Laid down carefully, because it was much heavier than a knife. Sim followed, fumbling. Wilem's hand closed over his blade and stayed closed. I watched his knuckles go pale. I watched him look at the ring of firelight, and the shapes in it, and the dark behind it, out of which more eyes shone at exactly the wrong heights. His fingers tightened. Released. Tightened. Every story his grandmother ever told him was having its say, and every one of them was shouting keep the iron, and every one of them had also ended badly for men in exactly this clearing. He crouched at last and set the knife beside mine, straightening the hafts parallel out of pure Cealdish spite, and his throat worked as though he were swallowing against a pulled rope.
The cup pressed into my hands is warm on one side and cold on the other, and no side is the side that was near the fire. What is in it tastes of honey and thunder. I mean that as plainly as I can manage. Sweetness, and underneath the sweetness that pressure the air carries just before close lightning, drunk as a liquid. It pools in my chest and spreads outward along paths I did not know were laid, loosening things I had not known were tight. And some things, I would learn, that had been doing faithful work by staying tight.
Sim drank deep and laughed, a startled boyish crack of a sound, delight surprising itself. His eyes had already gone glassy in the firelight, the particular sheen they took after his third metheglin at the Eolian, arrived here before his second swallow.
Wilem held his cup at his chest and did not drink, and watched the treeline like a man watching the one door he might need.
Then another figure steps out of the press of bodies, and the clearing rearranges itself around her without anyone moving.
Hair like living flame, and I do not mean red, I mean it moved and gave light, and eyes like smoldering amber, and a stillness about her that made the air lean in close to listen. She moved like a drawn blade in a steady hand. Grace, with the promise of a cut folded into every line of it.
"If you want safe passage," she says, "you must dance."
Sim swayed against my shoulder. "Dance?" he said, in the voice of a man asked to pay a toll in a currency he is delighted to discover he carries.
But I was already dancing.
The first steps are mine. I want that on the record, whatever it is finally worth. Measured, deliberate, laid down as I would lay the opening bars of a song whose shape I do not yet know, leaving room, listening forward. A trouper's opening. My mother taught it to me before I could read. When you don't know the tune, begin anyway, and begin beautifully, and the tune will forgive you.
But the music here has its own intentions.
It folds over itself once, twice, and finds me. It comes up through the ground into the soles of my feet and settles in behind my heartbeat like a second pulse that has decided to keep the books from now on. My body knows this rhythm before my mind can even petition to be consulted. It knows it as my fingers know the frets before I have chosen the chord, an older knowing, resident in the meat. I am not dancing. Let us be truthful, at this late hour, at this quiet table. I am being danced. I am an instrument that some vast patient thing has picked up, and tuned with two turns of its wrist, and begun, idly, wonderfully, to play. And the song is older than anything I have words for, and being played is the sweetest thing that has ever been done to me, and somewhere very far away a small cold voice that lives in the deepest room of me, the room where names come from, says, clearly: this is how they keep you.
The fire turns when I turn. The shadows lean. The pulse is in the hollows of my wrists now, in the base of my throat where breath becomes voice. And voice is next, I can feel the song reaching for my voice, curious what I keep in it—
Then something breaks the rhythm.
Sim stumbles. His feet reach for a beat that has moved on without him, and he staggers sideways. His face, his poor open face, that never hid anything, is the face of a man waking from a warm dream into cold water and finding he does not know which one is his life. I catch his arm before he goes down. He is trembling under my hand like a struck board.
And the catching breaks it for me too. The song lets go of me all at once, as a wave lets go, without malice, without even noticing, there being so much else to hold. And I pull Sim out of the fire's circle, through the turning shapes that do not turn to watch us go, into the cooler dark beneath the trees.
My feet, I noticed, were bare. I have never found out what became of my boots. Somewhere in the Fae, I suppose, there is a pair of boots that were borrowed twice over, and I hope they are dancing.
Sim wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I think I'm dying," he said, with the perfect earnestness of the very drunk, and meant every word.
"You're not dying." I crouched beside him, working to shake off a dizziness that clung to me like cobweb, here a strand, there a strand, never quite done. "You are fae-drunk on two swallows of thunder, and tomorrow, if this place has tomorrows, you are going to feel every one of your sins individually."
Wilem stood a few paces off, arms crossed, cup still full in his hand, on watch. He had appointed himself the night's one sober man silently and past appeal, which was how he appointed himself things.
Sim swayed on his knees, listing in slow arcs like a mast in a lazy wind, eyes glassy and elsewhere. And it was as I steadied him that I caught the flicker at the edge of my sight. A color. Deep orange, half-hid among the black twisting shapes of the trees, warm as a coal in a dark hearth.
An orchard.
The trees stand in rows. Understand what that means, in that country. Nothing in the Fae had stood in rows, nothing had submitted to a line, and here are trees planted in order, tended, kept, their branches hanging low and gnarled and heavy. And the fruit. The fruit gleams like molten copper cooling, each one holding its own small light, and the shapes of them stir something at the very floor of me. A song in a language I have never learned and somehow know, a word on the tip of a tongue I did not know I had. The air under those branches is thick and sweet and it presses close, presses in, like a lullaby on the inside of your chest in the last moments before sleep takes you, gently, gently, with its whole weight.
I was staring. I confess it. The pull of that place had gone into me like a hook into soft wood.
But I had a hook in me already, older and set deeper, dayward, eastward, a girl with a ring's worth of my heart. And two hooks tear against each other, and the pain of that is, I believe, the only reason I looked away in time.
Sim had no second hook.
He was on his feet and moving before I understood what I was seeing. That loose dreaming stride, arms slack, head tipped, a sleepwalker's certainty, the walk of a man being reeled.
"Sim. Don't—"
Too late. His hand went up among the low branches with the simple rightness of a child reaching for its mother, and plucked one of the fruits, and he bit into it before the branch had stopped swaying.
Juice ran down his chin, catching the orchard's copper light like fire-gilt. His eyes drifted shut as he chewed. The whole of him went soft with pleasure, and when he turned to me his face was open and unguarded and happy in a way I had not seen it since. I could not name since when. That was the horror of it. It was not a strange face. It was his own best face, arrived by the wrong road.
"It tastes the same," he murmured, wondering, half to himself. He held the fruit out to me, generous as ever, Sim to the last cell of him. "You should try—"
I slapped it out of his hand.
It burst against a root in a spray of copper. Sim's mouth went slack. His brow folded. He looked from his empty hand to my face and back, searching me for something I could not give him, hurt blooming through the haze slow as ink through water.
And behind us, a snap of branches. Then the quiet, deliberate weight of steps that wanted us to hear them.
A figure came out of the trees. Tall. Wrong-tall, the tall of Cob's treeline stories. Silent. And a spear already leveled at my throat, its head a long grey thorn that had never been metal.
Black eyes, depthless, still as well-water at night. Limbs that bent with a slow coiling grace, as though the bones inside ran on some other plan than the shape suggested. It regarded us with those black eyes, and the air around it smelled of crushed green and cold earth, and everything in the orchard leaned toward it like grain to wind.
The Thiani. I did not know the name yet. I would.
The dark gaze went from Sim, to me, and then down, to the burst fruit bleeding its copper into the dirt. A sound began in it before any word. Low, rising up through the ground itself, into the soles of my bare feet, a note of grief and offense so old it had ceased to be either and become law.
"You have touched what was not given."
"Wait—" I raised my open hands, and I had talked my way past gaelets and Masters and murderers in my time, and I am telling you that I opened my mouth in that orchard and there was nothing in it. No coin of mine spent there.
Its mouth split open, wider than mouths, and what poured out was not a voice. Shrill, furious, edged, and it went through the forest like a fire-bell through a paper city. And the forest answered. From every dark quarter, near and far and impossibly overlapping, the calls came back, and every one of them was coming closer.
They herded us back to the clearing at spearpoint. More of them now, a dozen, a score, the count sliding as everything slid there. The revel had stopped. The hum of the gathered Court swelled and shrank around us like a tide with opinions. The ground tilted under my feet in slow waves. The light bent where no light should. My stomach rolled and went on rolling.
"The Talamas Grove has been defiled." The Thiani leader's spear-butt struck the ground, and the crack of it rattled my teeth in their seats. "There must be justice."
The Court hissed. Not like a crowd. Like a kettle coming on, all together, one long rising breath.
And then a voice. Soft. Calm. Absolute. Not loud, never loud. It simply arrived underneath every other sound and took possession of the floor they stood on.
"Bring them forward."
The crowd parted like water.
He stood at the far edge of the clearing, tall and utterly still. Dark skin, dusk-dark, and dark hair falling past his shoulders like a curtain of black silk stirring in a wind that was not blowing. He was beautiful as the far edge of a cliff is beautiful. Everything in the clearing leaned toward him, the firelight included.
"High Lord Remmen." The Thiani's voice sharpened to a thin bright edge, ceremonial. "These humans were caught eating from the sacred grove."
Remmen. The name landed in the pit of my stomach, in the place where stories live and wait. Fragments came up around it unbidden. The Lord of Twilight. The Telwyth Mael. Half-lines of songs my father had sung with the lamps low, the songs you did not ask for twice. His eyes, when they came to rest on us, burned a slow considering violet, and being considered by them was like being read by something that had already finished the book.
Sim made a sound beside me. It labored, and became a word. "We didn't." His voice cracked in the middle. "I didn't."
Remmen's gaze settled on him, patient as dusk.
"...Know," Simmon finished, one syllable arriving alone and far too late, an honest man's lie assembled by a drunk. If I had been sober I would have closed my eyes in despair. Being what I was, I merely watched it happen, watching a cup already leaving the table.
Remmen sighed. A small sound. The sound of something being set down carefully, so as not to be blamed for the breaking. "Your hand," he said, and extended his own.
Sim blinked at him, swaying. "Huh?"
The moment stretched long enough to grow moss. Then, hazily obedient, he held his hand out. That obedience frightened me more than the spears. Nothing in Sim resisted, nothing even thought to.
His fingers were smudged dark in the low light. Deep orange, crushed into the lines of his palm, ground under his nails, the sweet copper flesh of the fruit testifying from every crease. Sim looked down at his own hand with faint surprise, as though it had been off somewhere without him.
The Court's breath went in all together, and came back out as a seethe.
"A thief and a liar," something spat, from everywhere.
"Hang them over the Black Morass," Remmen said, and he was already turning away, and the turning was the worst of it. The sentence had cost him nothing, no more than folding a letter costs you.
By luck, he had not meant by the neck.
We were put into a cage grown of living roots. Grown, not built. I watched the last withes braid themselves and did not enjoy it. An orb no bigger than a wardrobe, and hung out over a swamp whose smell climbed the ropes to meet us. What relief I felt at keeping my throat unbruised did not survive long acquaintance with the accommodations. The cage flexed and creaked when any of us so much as shifted our weight, the whole orb turning slow on its tether. And the air through the root-gaps tasted of rot and standing water and things at their long work below.
Sim groaned from the bottom of the tangle. "My head feels like Kilvin clamped it in a vise."
"Do not eat fruit that glows," Wilem said, to the middle distance, in the tone of a man adding a line to a ledger of grievances that would be read aloud, in full, at some later date.
Sim produced something adjacent to a laugh. Then, quieter, with his eyes closed and his head against the woven roots, he said: "I haven't had persimmons since I was a child."
The cage creaked through its slow turn.
Wilem went still in a new way. "Persimmons," he said.
A nod, eyes still shut. "That's what they are. What they taste like, anyway. My family's estate outside Renere. They grew wild along the cliffs above the river. Whole hillsides of them. In autumn the ground under the trees went orange, and the wasps got drunk, and my brothers used to—" He stopped himself, two words into any sentence containing his family, as he always did, and finished somewhere else: "That's why they named me Persimmon."
The silence that followed had real workmanship in it.
"You're joking," I said.
"Hardly." A sigh from the depths. "Firstborn gets the family name. The spares get named for whatever the estate's known for. My uncles are called Quince and Sorrel, if that gives you the flavor of my people. I prefer Sim."
"I'm sure you do, Persimmon," Wil said, and there was, unmistakably, buried at some depth under the gravel of his voice, a smile.
"You are both," Sim said with dignity, "going to be unbearable about this for the rest of my life."
"Yes," said Wil.
Sim let his head fall back against the roots. The swamp breathed under us, thick and slow, patient as everything in that country was patient. When he spoke again the drink had burned down in him and left something small and true standing in the ashes.
"Are we going to die here?"
"No."
I said it at once, flat, certain, in the voice I keep for lines that must not be questioned. It is a stage voice. Sim knew my stage voices better than any man alive, and he let it stand anyway. And that, a friend agreeing to be lied to because the lie was all you had to hand him, is a kindness I have been paid too many times, and repaid too few.
The cage swayed. Somewhere below, the Black Morass turned over in its sleep.
The air brightened around us, though nothing rose. There is no sun there. I never saw one. The darkness simply grew tired, like a guest who has stayed his welcome, and slunk off to gather itself elsewhere, and what remained called itself morning and was believed.
They cut us down with no warning and less ceremony. The ground met my feet too soon (it had been farther away all night, I had watched it be farther away) and I stumbled on landing, and my stone ring clicked against Auri's silver as I caught myself, and the small sound of it steadied me better than the ground did.
The Court had gathered again. Quieter now. Even the ever-present hum of unseen things had drawn itself thin as a held string.
Remmen sat upon the knotted roots of a tree the size of a modest keep, dark skin against pale bark, violet eyes half-lidded, watching without seeming to watch, which is the only way that things of real power ever watch. He did not fill the space as a king fills a throne. He filled it as a low note fills a room, everywhere at once, and mostly in your chest.
The Thiani leader stepped out of the crowd, from a place where I would have sworn there had been empty air. "They have defiled the Talamas Grove," it announced, and struck its spear-butt down. "There must be justice."
"What," Remmen said, mild as evening, "must be done?"
"They have no place here. One clean stroke." The black eyes passed over the three of us, without hurry, without heat. "The head will do."
Sim made a strangled sound.
"You would kill a man over fruit?"
The words were out of me before wisdom could catch their coat. Soft laughter went through the Court like wind through wheat, genuine delight, which was worse than scorn, until the Thiani's look cut it off at the root.
"It was no mere fruit." The thrum under its voice deepened. "It was a sacred offering, set apart and sung over. Such theft is blasphemy."
Remmen tilted his head a fraction, and shook it once. Slow. Almost regretful.
"Then cut out this one's tongue," the Thiani said, and its spear swung to point at Sim.
"No."
It came out of me harder than I intended, and much harder than was wise. Flat, ringing, a word with its feet planted. The clearing went very quiet, the quiet of a room where a man everyone had priced as small has just pushed his whole purse to the center.
Remmen's violet eyes came fully open, and turned to me, and I felt the attention of him arrive like a change in the weather.
"No?" A world of courtesy in it, and under the courtesy, the cliff-edge. "And who are you, to decide in the matters of this court?"
And here is where I must be honest with you, because it is the hinge of everything that came after. I did not plan what I said next. I had no standing, no precedent, no clever three-step prepared. The words came up out of me as the name of stone had come up out of the wall of Haven. Whole, and older than me, and already fitted to my mouth, as if I had heard them once in a tale before I could walk and they had been waiting in me ever since, keeping their edge, biding until the one moment shaped like them arrived.
"I am who sets the challenge," I said. "In the old ways."
A stir went through the Court like a struck chord. Murmurs, and under the murmurs a bright flickering interest, hungry and glad. The sound an audience makes when the play, which had been merely good, turns suddenly into the play they came for.
Remmen's lips curved. Faintly. Dusk curving toward dark.
"You would challenge me."
"I would."
And with a gesture no larger than a leaf falling, he summoned his attendants. And the clearing, which had been a court, began arranging itself into something older than courts.
They moved quickly and without instruction. A small table of silverwood, set between us. Cushions of moss that had not been there and had perhaps always been there. And upon the table, a board. And when I saw the board, I heard, faint and clear across whatever distance separates that country from a courtyard in Severen, the sound of an old man laughing at me with real affection.
Tak.
The word lands in me like a stone set down on a board. Around the clearing the murmur of the Fae draws tight as a tuning string.
Remmen's gaze meets mine across the table. He reaches out, unhurried, and places the first stone.
I let my breath settle. I place mine. And something surfaces in my chest, warm and sudden, a memory shaken loose from where it slept. A sun-washed courtyard in Severen, wine going warm and ignored, an old man across the table from me with a wolfish smile and a walking stick and all the time in the world. Patient. Precise. Never once in a hurry, and never once beaten.
Play to be good.
Remmen plays his next piece. There is no hesitation anywhere in him. He plays like a river moving through stone, each piece arriving where it was always going to arrive, so that the game seems less like his choosing and more like a landscape being disclosed. There is a rhythm in it that keeps turning just ahead of me, around a corner I never quite reach. The board opens downward beneath my attention into a depth I cannot find the bottom of. I recognize the vertigo, because I have hung over this exact depth before, across a much smaller table, against a much politer abyss.
I lay my next piece.
Play to be better.
The game deepens. His stones spread in patterns I almost recognize (almost, always almost, the whole country ran on almost) shifting their meaning just as I begin to read them, blinking like the constellations here. I adjust. I fail. I adjust again, looser now, less like a sieging general and more like a man improvising a melody over changes he doesn't know.
And I know this feeling. That is what no one in the clearing could have guessed, and what saved my voice and Sim's tongue and all three of our heads. I had been here before. A whole winter of afternoons, I had sat across a Tak board from a man whose depth I never once sounded, losing, and losing, and losing beautifully, and hating it, and coming back. Even my best games against him had been allowed, I understood that eventually. Permitted, a child allowed to win at wrestling, held always a safe span above the true floor of his game. I hated that too. I never told him so. He knew.
But I learned. Tehlu's mercy on me for where I learned it, and from whom, and what the lessons were later worth to us all. But I learned.
Above all, play a beautiful game.
And here, at last, at the bottom of my need, I understood the instruction. I stopped playing to win. I stopped playing the stones and began to play the board. The whole turning shape of it, playing a song rather than its notes, hearing the phrase that wants to come next rather than forcing the phrase you planned. My fingers find the next stone without being sent. And the next. Something old wakes up in my hands, older than that courtyard, old as firelight and my father's voice. A rhythm deeper than strategy, and the game is strumming through me now like the dance, except that this time, this one time in that whole country, I am the one doing the playing.
Remmen's eyes narrow. It is a small thing. In a face like his it is a shout.
A single crease appears at his brow, the first disorder I had seen anywhere in him, and I will carry the sight of it to my grave with my other few trophies.
I place my stone. It settles with a quiet click, the sound of a small door closing.
The fire crackles. The air between us holds still, the whole Court waiting on one card.
"Tak," I say. Softly. You do not shout it. He taught me that too: the word is not a blow, it is a bow. The game thanking itself.
The board rested between us, finished. The crowd's murmur rose around it.
Remmen studied the stones for a long moment. I could not tell you what he was reading there. More than I had put in it, I think. Things of his age read grain, not letters. Then, with the slow certainty of twilight going down to dark, he swept the stones aside with one hand.
"Well played."
I allowed myself one breath. One slow blink. One private moment to believe I would keep my voice.
Because I had understood, somewhere in the middle passage of that game, what the stake had been. No one had named it. In the old ways nothing so crude as naming is required. I had set the challenge. The challenged sets the price. And I had seen it in the pause before his first stone, in how his eyes had rested, briefly, courteously, on my throat. Singers who lose to the Lord of Twilight do not lose their heads. They lose what he liked best about them. I would have walked out of that clearing whole and hale, and never sung another note in my life, and known always exactly what I had gambled and how nearly.
My tongue still curls to think of it. Some prices you remember. Some you remember having almost paid, which is worse, because those you can still imagine both ways.
Remmen rose and turned to the gathered Court, and his voice went out over them like dusk going out over water. "A victor must receive his due."
"My due?" I was still half inside the game. I had asked for safe passage and Sim's tongue and our three heads. I had not asked for a due.
The Court stirred. And this stir was different. Expectant. Ceremonial. The sound of an audience that knows the story and has been waiting all evening for its favorite part.
A figure came forward out of the press of watching Fae.
He was young, and thin, and bright as a candle in restless air, a thing you want to cup your hands around, half to warm them, half to keep it from going out, and entirely mistaken either way. His hair was a riot of inky curls, and where the firelight caught their edges it came away deep blue, the blue of raven feathers, the blue at the bottom of a flame. And his eyes. Bright mercy, his eyes. They burned an impossible blue, blue as noon sky over Ademre, blue as the deepest thought of water. And they locked onto mine and did not look away. Nothing about him looked away. He regarded me with a frank and total attention that no human child has ever paid to anything, weighing me as I had just watched his father weigh a board.
"A child?" I heard myself say.
Remmen smiled, and there was something in the smile I could not price. "Such a small word," he said, "for what he is."
The boy did not flinch under discussion, or preen. He held my eyes, and tilted his head a degree. And I had all at once the strange and vertiginous certainty, I remember it arriving, cold down the back of my neck, that the game just finished had not been the evening's real contest at all. That I had been examined twice tonight. And that this second examiner, this thin blazing boy, had reached his verdict somewhere around my third stone, and the verdict was in his favor, and I was the prize being awarded to him.
"My son. Your ward." Remmen's voice, formal now, ringing quietly off the silverwood and the stones. "The Prince of Twilight."
I looked at Remmen. "Why?"
"You called for the old ways."
"And in what old tale," I said, "does a game of Tak win a man a prince?"
Remmen's violet eyes held mine, steady, ancient, and entirely sure, and he answered me as you answer a child who has asked why the sea is salt.
"In all of them."
And the rightness of it settled into me then, a tuning settling, a story clicking into the shape it was always going to have. The rightness of the old tales, where the beggar is the king and the fool's wager buys the kingdom and the fiddler comes home from the hill with more than he carried up it. I stood in the oldest kind of story there is, and it had been standing around me all night, patient, waiting for me to notice. Stories like that are not places a wise man lingers, because they are true in both directions, and they always, always collect.
I turned back to the boy.
He grinned at me—bright and sharp as moonlight on a blade, in a country that had no moon.