The common room of the Blind Beggar was louder than it had any right to be.
Sim had bought a bottle of something amber and strong the moment we came through the door, bought it with the ceremonial decisiveness of a man discharging a sacred duty. Now he was two cups deep and telling Bast what the whole thing must have looked like. He had not seen it. That did not slow him in the least. The story had flown ahead of us through the streets, carried by the crowd pouring down from the Citadel, growing as stories grow in a city's bloodstream. By the time it reached the Blind Beggar Sim had caught it, skinned it, and made it his own.
"—but then his knee snapped," Sim said, leaning in, eyes bright over the rim of his cup. "They're saying you could hear it clean across the courtyard."
"You could," Bast confirmed, not looking up. He was stitching my forearm with the unhurried attention of a man mending a shirt he was fond of. The needle moved in small clean arcs. If it hurt, the last of the nahlrout saw to it that the hurt arrived like news from another country. "It was lovely."
"Lovely," Sim repeated, half laughing, half appalled, and drank.
Wilem sat across from us with a cup untouched at his elbow. He had not joined the retelling, had not once corrected Sim's geography or physics, which was itself unusual. He was watching me instead, with the careful reading attention he ordinarily kept for documents, the attention of a man studying a page chiefly for what had been left off it.
"Stop fidgeting," Bast murmured, drawing a stitch tight. "You wanted to play at swords beneath the noon sun. Now hold still and let me mend what it cost you."
"It barely cost me anything."
Bast glanced up, amused. "I know. That's what makes it insulting to stitch."
Sim poured another measure and slid it across toward Wil, who let it stand. "They're calling it something, you know," Sim said. "The sword. All down the hill, they're calling it Kaysera. Does it mean anything?"
Bast snipped the thread with his teeth and pressed a folded cloth to my arm. "It means they heard a true thing once, for a moment, at a distance." He held the pressure. "They'll have it wrong by morning. There. You'll live, as if there were ever any doubt."
The nahlrout was thinning by then. I could feel it going, a tide pulling back from the shore, each wave taking a little more of the ground you had been fool enough to think was solid. The bright edge that had carried me through the duel was gone entirely, and in its place a cottony blankness had moved in behind my eyes, a fog that made even simple thoughts a matter of wading. Something was nagging at me through it, something from the court, a shape lying just under the surface of the day, wrong in a way I could feel and not name. I reached for it. It slipped away.
I set it aside and said, "I saw Auri."
The name came out wrong. Not the saying of it. The fit. It did not belong in that room, among thick wood and fire-noise and spilled beer. It belonged to the hush of old clay pipes under a city, to bare feet keeping time on rooftop tiles, to a voice pitched for exactly one listener. In rooms like this one, in cities like this one, she was Princess Ariel. That was rather the whole of the problem.
Sim straightened at once, the story-glow going out of him. "She was there? At the duel?" His voice had tightened two full steps. "Is she all right?"
"Of course," Bast said, turning the bloodied cloth in his hands, unconcerned.
The flat certainty of it dug at me. It dug at me twice. Once because I did not share it, and once because I could not tell where he had it from. I let it lie. There was a queue forming, of things I was letting lie.
"Trenati was with her," I said.
Bast scoffed. But it was not his usual amused disdain. It had a curl of something else in it. "The royal boy takes a tender interest in his wayward sister. How very touching."
Wilem leaned forward. "With her," he said, "or near her?"
I thought back through the nahlrout fog, and the fog, for once, did not matter, because I had looked at that cloister with everything I had. "He wasn't speaking to her. He wasn't even quite facing her. But it wasn't chance. He stood just close enough."
"Just close enough," Wilem repeated slowly, "that anyone looking at her would see him standing there." He tested his next words as he tested planks on a stair. "More jailor than brother."
The door creaked open. A man stepped in out of the evening wearing the livery of a noble house's attendant, and the room's noise dropped around him by half, because Renere's common rooms know livery as fields know weather.
All four of us turned.
"Apologies for the intrusion." He said it to the space between us, eyes down, a man delivering a package he had no wish to have signed. "Lord Vatis has succumbed to his wounds."
The room went quiet in the wrong way.
"Impossible," I said.
I had seen him carried off that ground with my own bright borrowed eyes. A cut inside the thigh, placed to a hair, nowhere near the great vessel. A ruined knee. A stripe on the cheek from his own blade. Painful, humiliating, season-ending. About as mortal as a broken fiddle. I had chosen those wounds. Choosing them was the entire art of the morning.
Bast shook his head slowly, as though presented with a joke built by someone who did not understand how jokes work. "Ah, yes. A cut leg, a torn knee, and a scratch from his own rapier. Plainly fatal, if you're an idiot." He paused. A slow blink, lizard-calm. Then dull certainty settled into his voice like sediment. "And naturally, it will be your fault."
The attendant had been sent to deliver a message, not to hold a position. He bowed his head quickly and removed himself, and the door swung shut on the street's noise.
Wil's forehead creased. "Either someone was careless with the stitching—"
Sim touched the side of his nose. "—or someone wanted him dead."
Bast drummed his fingers once against the table. "A dead man's story," he said, "is whatever you please."
Here, forgive me, but it must go here, because this is where it happened, I will step out of that room for a moment, because you have been patient, and you have surely heard the name they call my sword. Not Caesura. The other name, the road name, the one that walks into taprooms ahead of me. Kaysera. The poet-killer. You have wondered, perhaps, how a sword comes by a name like that, and whether the poets of the world had best keep clear of me, and I have let the wondering stand because it pays for suppers.
Now you have the accounting entire. One duel. One chosen cut, placed shallow, on a man Bredon had told me was a poet. A terrible one, protected from the knowledge by courtly manners. I let him live, and said so where two hundred people could hear me say it. And before his stitches were a day old, somebody in that white city quietly finished what I had deliberately left undone, and hung the finishing on my blade, where it has swung ever since. Kaysera, the poet-killer. A wrong name for the sword, and a wrong death to its credit, and the poet in question never even heard the verse they made of him. Every word of the legend is false, and it is the truest thing anyone says about Renere.
At the table, in the Blind Beggar, I touched my fresh stitches through my sleeve, and reached into the fog after the lines I could feel lying there wanting connection. The nahlrout's ebb had dulled precisely the part of my mind that leaps, the part that strings distant things together before I have consciously reached for either. So I did it the slow way, hand over hand.
That exchange between Trenati and the steward, at Fascino's gathering. The one Bredon's cane had made sure I marked. Why mark it? What had actually been in it?
I went back through what I had seen, item by item, as Elodin taught against and Brandeur taught for. The glove. The ledger. The nod. And there. A ring on Trenati's hand. Gold, worked, and not his father's crest. I had filed the fact without weighing it, one of a hundred small wrongnesses a court hands you in an evening. Not worn smooth. Not reforged. The firelight had moved on carvings that were... geometry. Locked, folded geometry, line turned into line, cut deep in the gold. A pattern that pulled at me even in memory, as a face pulls when you have seen it somewhere you cannot place.
Ciphers. That was the shelf it lived on. Kilvin had shown me such work once, in the Fishery, by way of warning. Geometric ciphers, the artificer's old trick for hiding an alchemical recipe inside an honest-looking decorative border. Meaning, folded until it looks like ornament. Worn in plain sight by a prince of the realm.
I described it to them, the fold of it, the turns, the framing, tracing it on the tabletop in spilled beer while the fog fought me for every line.
And Sim's hands went still around his cup.
I had seen Sim afraid before. Sim was reliably afraid. It was part of his great charm. His fear ran ahead of trouble like a good dog and was generally right. This was not that. Something moved through his face like ground giving way under a word he had known all his life.
"Tehlu's wrath." Soft. Far too soft, a note played only for himself. "That's Feyda's Mark."
Something snagged in my chest at the name. Familiarity without an address, a hook trailing up out of deep water. Feyda. I turned the name over and the fog gave me nothing back, and the nothing had a shape.
"You don't understand." Sim looked up at us, and the firstborn-of-Dalonir was in his voice now, the boy raised on succession law and quarterings as I was raised on chord voicings. "Nobody wears that mark. Not in jest. Not in secret, which is what this is. There are two noble houses, I learned this at my father's table, that broke their own crests, melted seals their families had carried for three hundred years, rather than risk being mistaken for it at a distance."
"Feyda Calanthis," I said. It came up out of me through the fog like something hauled from a well, slow and dripping. "First king of Tarvintas. Crowned—no. Declared. Posthumously declared." The facts were there, half-drowned. "The stories say he did not stay dead. A barrow draug. The wizard-king who rose, and wore his crown in the dark under the hills." And even as I recited it, the hook kept pulling. Because I knew this name from somewhere nearer than a history shelf, and I could not find the doorway of the room I had learned it in.
Sim nodded, grim as I had ever seen him. "That's the one. His mark was struck from every noble seal in the world after the barrow wars. It isn't heraldry anymore. It's a death-sign. A promise of ruin, written in the one alphabet every great house still fears."
Bast had gone stern, and Bast stern was like a knife coming out. The room changed temperature. "Human princes are foolish things," he said. "It is nearly their function. But no prince is fool enough to carve a buried name in gold and wear it on his hand. Not unless he means it. Names that are buried are buried for reasons, and the reasons do not expire."
I agreed. And yet my mind kept circling the ring itself, the remembered geometry, and slowly, through the fog, the lines resolved into what they actually were. And I sat up.
"It's been altered."
They looked at me.
"The mark. The geometry's been turned. The framing rotated, two of the folds mirrored. Small changes. Deliberate ones. To anyone who knew Feyda's Mark cold, it reads as almost. As a mistake, a coincidence of ornament. It's a deceit aimed at people who only half remember." I heard what I was saying as I said it. "It's built to be deniable to experts and invisible to everyone else."
"That's not possible," Sim said, but his voice had no floor under it. "Feyda's Mark is—it's history. It was exiled before my father's father was born. Everyone knows—"
He stopped. Because there it was.
Everyone knows. Except. Where had Sim learned it? At his father's table, as a cautionary story about two melted seals. And where had I learned it? I could not say. And I could always say. My memory was the one property I held freehold. Whatever else the plum bob had cracked, I knew the provenance of every fact I owned, down to the smell of the room where I had bought it. I had studied heraldry under three kinds of teacher. I had read succession law until my eyes crossed, hunted ruined bloodlines through the Archives for my own reasons, and I could not recall one text, not one, that gave a full accounting of Feyda's Mark. Not its form. Not its crimes. Not even the decree of its exile.
A story erased carelessly leaves ink all over the margins. I had built half a year of my life, once, on exactly that principle. You can read what was burned by where the scorch-marks are. But there were no scorch-marks here. No stains. No disgraced house held up as warning, no mocking student ballad, no gap in a catalogue with the gap's own shape testifying. Feyda's Mark had been swallowed entire, erased so thoroughly that even the erasure was gone, and what remained was smoother than innocence.
And absence, I had learned in a hidden room under a courtyard, is its own kind of presence, if you can only stand far enough back to see its edges.
My hands tightened on the table.
"Wil. Sim." It came out sharper than I meant. "How many texts in the Archives speak plainly of Feyda's Mark? Not mentions. Accountings."
Wilem did not answer at once. Wilem never answered at once. But this pause had weight moving in it. "I don't know," he said slowly. Then, "Mentions in old succession disputes. Sideways ones. Nothing whole." Another pause, longer. "Nothing recent. Perhaps in the locked stacks, there is something." He said locked stacks and looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said the next thing, because the next thing was a room with grey-snow dust and my bootprints in it.
And my mind, wading, fog-hampered, arrived at last where it had been trying to go all evening.
Ambrose Jakis.
His endless tenure at the University. Six years, seven, by some countings, dragging through his terms at the leisurely pace of a man with no appetite for study and no need of rank. I had always read it as laziness seasoned with spite. Too important to leave, too petty to finish. Manet had told me once, over cards, in the tone he kept for the University's unwritten rules, that it wasn't natural, noble heirs did two years, three at the most, enough polish to carry home. Younger sons might linger, finding their feet. But Ambrose was firstborn. The Jakis lands, the title, the whole inheritance stood waiting for him like a saddled horse. And he stayed. Year over year, term over term, in rooms he despised, among people he held beneath him.
Why does a man like that stay?
No. It was absurd, and I made myself say why. Ambrose was arrogant, cruel, and petty. He spent his malice in small coins, on tavern rumors and torn-up slips. He was not clever in the long way. He was not patient in the deep way.
And yet.
And yet the thing that had been snagging me since Sim first said the name finally broke the surface, whole, cold, and thrashing.
Feyda's Legacy.
I could see the book. I can see it now. Cracked spine, pages gone soft as cloth at the corners, sitting on top of my morning's stack in the Archives, Numbered Names under it, and the Child-Charms. Four books of shadows wearing old names, three years ago, my first great research season. I had been three pages into it. And Ambrose had appeared at my shoulder with a scriv's slip already stamped, laid it on the stack for the pleasure of the moment, and lifted the whole morning out from under me. Priority claim. Logged and stamped. I'll be making use of them in the north reading nook. And he had walked away with my books under his arm, unhurried as a draccus crossing a grove. I had spent the evening inventing revenges and the years since filing it under his pettiness, one grain in that great grey heap.
But the book had been about Feyda.
And tonight a prince of the realm was wearing Feyda's Mark, altered by a careful hand, in gold, at a gathering of men who disliked the crown's new friends.
The locked stacks I could never quite get leave for. The documents that were misshelved, or claimed, or simply gone the season I hunted them. I had assumed, with the perfect self-centered logic of a nineteen-year-old at war, that things vanished ahead of me because a rich boy enjoyed inconveniencing me.
But what if none of it had ever been about me at all?
The silence at our table had stretched long. When I finally spoke I let the words out slowly, one at a time, testing each plank.
"What if Ambrose wasn't at the University for himself?"
Saying it aloud gave it weight, and the weight settled and did not tip. Ambrose Jakis, six years resident in the largest collection of writing in the world, holding priority over whatever he cared to claim, patron-protected, untouchable, bored, and all that while, things had been going quietly missing. Books. Records. Names swallowed under burned ink. I had blamed Lorren's pruning for the deep erasures and Ambrose's spite for the shallow ones, and it had never once occurred to me to wonder whether some of the hands doing the burying were wearing the same rings.
And now he was in Renere, doing it to a person.
That is what I understood, sitting in that loud little taproom with my arm freshly stitched. The shape of the crime was the same. You take a true thing. You strike its name. You dress what remains in a story that fits the mouths around it better than the truth did, and you wait one generation, and the truth is not merely hidden. It was never there. They had done it to Feyda's Mark, whoever they finally were. Ambrose had spent six years doing it to books. And now, in the White Citadel, with attendants and silk and a taught smile, they were doing it to Auri, striking Auri, that exact and hard-won name, and writing Ariel over the sanded place, and in a year the court would swear the girl had never been anything else.
My right hand had begun to shake again. The nahlrout was fully out of me now, and the tremor had come back harder for having been put off. I pressed my palm flat to the table and held it there and thought about Auri, because I could not stop myself.
She hates being looked at. Hates it in her body, as other people hate falling. The first time I ever called her by the name, her name, the one she'd chosen from Elodin's mouth or wherever names came to her from, she flinched. Not at the sound. At the weight of it. At being fixed, even for a moment, even by a friend, even in love. It had taken me a year to learn what kind of silence to leave around her. When to look at the moon instead so that she could exist beside me unobserved, herself, entire. Whole evenings I knew her presence only by the length of a shadow or a change in the air, and learned to count those evenings as visits, and they were.
I found her on her rooftop once before she heard me come. She had her face turned up to the whole open sky, and she was nobody's anything, just Auri, moon-drenched, sufficient. Then my boot scraped tile, and she folded away into herself so fast and so completely it was like watching a flower close, and she tucked into a gap in the chimneys too small for the world to follow her into.
And now the world had followed her in. Now she stood in fitted gowns under five hundred eyes while attendants starched and pinned and smoothed her, hour upon hour, day upon day, wearing a name chosen by strangers, forbidden every one of her own rooms. I had told her, I had promised her, on a rooftop, with bread between us, that she would always be safe with me. She had weighed the promise for a day, in her way. And then she had trusted it.
I tried drinking. Three sips told me what drink was going to do, and it did it anyway. Beneath the table the tremor picked up the alcohol like a fiddler picking up a jig.
Bast noticed. Bast always noticed. Noticing was what he was instead of most virtues. His eyes went to my hand, then away, smooth, as if he had seen nothing. And a few minutes later, without one word, a clay cup arrived in front of me. Dark tea. Cold. Bitter as anything.
I looked at the cup. I looked at Bast. He said nothing at all. He only lifted an eyebrow, mild as morning, as though the matter were beneath discussion, as though it were already tea I had asked for and he had merely been slow bringing it.
I should have refused it. Let me say that plainly, at this table, where saying things plainly is the whole remaining work of my life. I knew the price of it. I have recited it to you already. And I knew, this is the part that matters, mark it, that the distance between needing it and wanting it had grown thinner that day, and would grow thinner every day I drank, until one morning the two would lie down together and get up wearing each other's clothes, and I would not be able to tell you which one poured the cup.
But my hand would not stop. And my thoughts were wading when they needed to run. And somewhere up the hill, behind white walls, Auri did not have time for me to be anything less than sharp.
I drank.
Within minutes the fog began to lift off the fields of me. The brightness crept back into the edges of things. My hand lay quiet. The ache behind my eyes banked itself down to a hum. Better.
For now. Everything that season was for now.
I leaned forward and looked at Wil and Sim across the table. "We need leverage on Trenati."
"That is not what we need." Wilem's voice was level, and the tension underneath was what held the level up, as piers hold a bridge. His shoulders had set. "You do not understand what you are reaching toward. I am not sure I do. But I know its kind." He turned his cup a quarter-turn on the wood, and did not drink from it. "Men like this, things like this, whichever it is, they shape cities, Kvothe. They silence rivals like a man tuning a string, as maintenance. You do not defeat them. You survive them. If you are careful. If you are lucky. If you are far away." He shook his head once, slow, and when he spoke again it was quieter and worse. "Damn you. Other men run from fire. You have never once in the time I have known you run from fire. You take a bearing on it."
He wasn't wrong. He was almost never wrong. It was the most exhausting thing about him, and the reason I kept him closer than my shadow.
But it did not matter, and I told him so with my silence. There was no right way to do what needed doing, no safe way to tear a locked door off its hinges, and I had made my peace with hinges long ago, in another courtyard, over a basin of acid. I was not looking for equal footing with princes and regents. Equal footing is a duelist's fantasy. I was looking for what I had looked for at the four-plate door, at Haven's wall, at every locked thing that had ever stood between me and someone I loved. The flaw. The soft grain. The place where their iron rules could be made to splinter.
And I was willing to wager everything left in my purse, which was, in every sense, not much, that if we found the right evidence, the right lever of the right length, we could make Prince Trenati hand Auri back rather than see it used.
Auri's time was running out. The betrothal had a date. And so we spent what we had, which was ourselves.
I ought to have spent every hour on the hunt, and most of them I did. But Trenati was not a man who left footprints, or rather, and we would come to understand the distinction slowly, and it cost us, he left them, and they healed. Every trace we lifted led somewhere subtly wrong, like a map drawn from memory by someone who had never been lost. So we divided the city by our natures. Wilem took the official channels, where paper answers to paper. Sim took the streets and stalls and taprooms, where his harmlessness was a passport. And Bast and I took the parts of the work that no one could be permitted to talk about afterward.
We began at the east wall of the Palazzo de Contraier, on a night quiet enough to hear the third bell arrive twice, once from the High City, once echoed off the river. The great house stood shuttered dark, its reputation standing all the watches a guardsman should. Reputation is economical that way. Fascino would have approved. The ivy on that wall grew old and woody, thick enough to hold a man who had learned climbing where I learned it, and it took us up to a balcony I remembered from the gathering. The long gallery, the quiet end, the polished little desk. The shutters were latched. I had been opening worse latches since I was twelve, with colder fingers.
The steward's ledger lay where my memory had shelved it.
I want to be fair to that book. It was beautiful work. Months of entries in a clerk's careful hand, disciplined as sygaldry, and Trenati's name ran through it far too often for a prince supposedly buried in affairs of state. But it was not the frequency that stopped my breath over the lamp. It was the texture.
The early entries had a clerk's kind of specificity. Prince Trenati, 4th of Caitelyn. Arrived ninth bell. Northern tariff arrangements discussed, Lords Vaen and Harrick attending. Departed past midnight. Three bottles Feloran red, billed to the Citadel account. You could smell the room in an entry like that. And then, page by page, season by season, the entries about Trenati thinned. Not stopped. Thinned, like a voice moving away down a corridor. Prince Trenati. Arrived late. Usual company. Then, Prince Trenati. Present. Usual business. Then only, P.T.—present. While all around them, above and below on the very same pages, the clerk's hand stayed rich as ever. Lord Vaen's wine preferences, the Modegan ambassador's exact hour of departure, the cost of candles. The man had not grown lazy. He had grown lazy about one subject, gradually, evenly, over months, as you forget a face you see every day.
I closed the ledger with my skin crawling in a way I had no name for yet.
Bast stood in the middle of the room with his head tipped back, turning slowly, testing the air like a hound on a trail gone cold. "There's no iron here," he said at last. "Your kind reeks of iron. It rides on all of you. Every latch you touch, every coin you carry, every knife you've ever honed. It gets down into your skin, and your skin gets into your rooms." He breathed in once more, long, and when he looked at me his eyes were careful. "This room smells of nobody at all."
We put everything back to the hair and left as we had come, and by the time we let ourselves through the Blind Beggar's back door the sky had begun to grey at its eastern edge.
Wil reported first, that evening, over an untouched supper.
Four days in the court records had shown him, on their face, a perfectly ordinary princely calendar. So, being Wilem, being his father's son, he had cross-set every entry against independent sources, guild books, house registries, harbor rolls. His father had raised him on double-entry bookkeeping as other fathers raise sons on bedtime stories, and a Cealdish man does not leave a number unverified any more than a priest leaves a candle burning.
The glassmakers' guild meeting on the 22nd was the first crack. One merchant swore to Wil that Trenati had attended, described his seat, his questions. Another merchant, seated at the same table that same night, swore just as flatly that the prince had not come. "Neither of them hesitated," Wil said, and pressed his hands flat to our table as though holding a ledger down against wind. "Understand what I am telling you. I showed them the same guild record. The same page. Same date, same meeting. They looked at the same ink, and they saw different things, and each of them was certain."
The gathering at the House of Seven Wells, on the 27th, was worse. That house keeps meticulous attendance. Vanity, but a scholar's kind of vanity, and in its meticulous register, where Trenati's name belonged, there was a blank. Not a scratched line. Not an erasure, which leaves its own testimony. A blank, with the names above and below it snug as bricks.
"The attendant told me the night was full," Wil said. "Every guest accounted for, she said. So I asked after Trenati, and she said, at once, warmly, that she was certain he had been there. So I asked her to show me his name." He paused, and turned his cup a quarter-turn. "She looked at the blank space for a long time, Kvothe. Longer than a person looks at anything. Then she closed the book, and she told me she couldn't help me."
"Couldn't," I asked, "or wouldn't?"
"Neither." Wil's jaw worked. "That is what I am trying to say. There was no fear in it, no threat. It was like, you know how a man walks into a room and stands there, because the errand has gone out of his head? The reason had gone out of her. She closed the book as you close a door on an empty room."
We were a few rounds in before Sim came back, and Sim came back pink.
He had taken the markets and the docks, the places where folk with no stake in anything might have crossed a prince's path, and at the harbor he had found a sailor who swore Trenati had personally overseen an ivory shipment. Clear as day, the man said. Wore that dark blue brocade coat of his, same as always. Sim, who was better at this work than any of us had guessed, had pressed gently. Same as always? Same coat last time too, the sailor agreed. And when was last time? The man had scratched his jaw and looked out at the water. Couldn't say. Felt recent. Then, helpful. The prince usually stopped in at the Brewer's Rest, on his way back up to the Citadel.
So Sim had gone to the Brewer's Rest. The innkeeper's wife and one of the barmaids had been clearing after the midday meal, and Sim had asked his gentle usual questions. Had Prince Trenati been through lately? The innkeeper's wife shook her head, not that she could recall. Business had been slow all month.
And the barmaid, still stacking plates, had said, "That's not right, is it? He was in just two span back. Don't you remember, that was when Garret was off settling accounts in Tarbean, and you looked half dead from running the place alone."
And the innkeeper's wife had smiled, Sim did the smile for us, and it was a good smile, easy and fond, and waved her hand and said, "Oh, it's all such a blur when Garret's away. I couldn't place a single face from that whole span if you paid me."
The barmaid had gone down cellar for something then, though not before giving Sim a look he declined to describe. And before he could make his escape, the innkeeper's wife had laid her hand on his hip and wondered aloud whether he planned to stay a night or two. She had rooms upstairs, and it might be worth his inspecting a few, to see which suited him.
Sim was studying his own hands by this point in the telling, scarlet to the ears.
"She reminded me of Fela," he said quietly, which was not where any of us had thought the sentence was going, and stopped the smiles on our faces. "The hair. The way she smelled. And that's, look. What I mean is, I was paying attention. Close attention. And I would swear before the iron law that she wasn't lying about Trenati. There was no seam in her, nothing held back. I think the memory of him standing in her taproom is simply gone. Gone like a pulled tooth, and she's run her tongue over the gap so many times she's stopped feeling the gap. She wasn't hiding anything. She was rearranging what was left inside her to make it all feel natural. People do it with grief all the time. I've just never seen it done to someone."
No one said anything for a while after that. The fire ticked. Out in the street a cart went by, its driver singing, and the small ordinary sound of it seemed to come from very far away.
The nahlrout was fading in me again, I could feel the ache assembling itself behind my temples, patient, taking its seat early for the evening performance. I turned to the window, where Bast had been standing this last half hour watching the street through the open shutter, his face slatted in shadow.
"You're quiet," I said.
Bast rolled a silver coin across the backs of his fingers, watching the lamplight run along its ridges. Somewhere in the past days he had stopped smirking, and I had not marked the day it happened, and that frightened me now.
"Nothing to say?"
The coin walked over his knuckles, turned, walked back. "I don't like cities that learn how to hold their tongue," he said finally.
Wilem glanced at me, then at him. "What does that mean?"
Bast caught the coin flat in his palm and closed his hand on it, and looked at the three of us, young men in a taproom, with our ledgers and our witnesses and our clever mortal methods, as you look at children who have been describing, brightly, over supper, the pretty lights they followed into the fen.
"It means," he said, "that even a place can be taught to forget."
The words sat down at the table with us and did not leave.
"You knew this the whole time," Wilem said. It was not quite an accusation. It was a scriv, hating an uncited source.
Bast shook his head slowly. "No. But I suspected. And now—" he opened his hand and looked at the coin as though checking it was still itself, "—now I do not want to know."
Sim's cup stopped halfway to his mouth. "If you don't want to know," he said carefully, "should we be worried?"
And the easy grin came back up over Bast's face like a shutter over a window with something moving behind it.
"Simmon," he said. "I have always assumed you should be."