The road south to Renere wound through low hills gone soft and green with yesterday's rain, and I ached in every place a horse can teach a man he owns.
Two days in the saddle. I shifted my weight for the hundredth time, hunting a position that didn't punish me for a lifetime of preferring my own two feet, and found, for the hundredth time, that Magistrate did not stock one. Beside me Denna rode loose and easy, the reins forgotten in one hand, the whole of her attention bent on the Lockless box where it sat cradled in the crook of her arm. Her lips moved now and then, shaping a word, discarding it, shaping another. My own hands sat useless on the reins, which was as good a portrait of the pair of us as any painter could have managed.
I spent the morning turning the Amyr over, looking for a seam that wasn't there.
For years I had pinned my hopes on them as a child pins hopes on a rich uncle he has never met. Bright-armored champions, terrible and just, who would stand at my shoulder when I finally ran my family's murderers to ground. I had found instead old men in a bad tavern, tending a war on memory, an order content to endure rather than act, to bury rather than strike, whose whole long victory was that things got worse slowly. If the Chandrian were ever to be confronted, the task would not be shared. It would fall to me, alone, with whatever I could carry.
I had known that, truthfully, for a long time. There is a kind of knowing that waits in you like a letter you refuse to open, and someone else's plain voice breaks the seal, and you find you had the whole text by heart. Claude had done me that service, along with the rest. I rode south with the letter open in my lap, and mile by mile it weighed less. That surprised me. It has kept surprising me all my life. Certainty is lighter than hope. You can walk much further under it.
We stopped to water the horses where a creek cut across the road, running quick and cider-colored with the rain. Magistrate drank like he held a personal grudge against the creek and meant to see it punished. I crouched at the bank to wash my hands, and my thoughts went back to their digging, worrying at the morning's disappointment for a seam. I was elbow-deep in that profitless work when Denna's voice pulled me out of it.
"Kvothe."
Something in her tone made me look over at once. She had settled beneath a bankside tree with her knees drawn up, holding the box out at arm's length, tilting it so the low light ran raking across the carvings.
"I've found some things."
I crossed and sat down beside her in the grass, close enough that our shoulders traded warmth.
"Look here." Her fingertips brushed a symbol carved in the top left corner of the lid, a knot so fine it read as texture until you knew to look. "This section, I'm fairly sure, speaks of dual ownership. Two hands. A thing held between, not by." She moved on, tracing a line I could hardly find in the grain even following her finger. "And here it mentions a key. Not. I don't think it means a key of metal. The knot's tied through the word for it, sideways. But key is the bone of it." She studied the next cluster longer, and her lips pressed thin. "And this part is strange. It speaks of a 'lasting male essence.'"
"Male essence," I echoed, with the eyebrow the phrase deserved.
"I did say it was strange." A breath of laughter went through the words. Then the laughter drained, and her voice fell to the register she kept for true things. "Some of these I still can't make out. There's one word I keep circling. It's either 'cage' or 'coop.' The knot's worn. They differ by half a twist. And I confess it bothers me more than it should, because a coop is for keeping something safe and a cage is for keeping something in, and whoever tied this knew the difference." She turned the box a quarter-turn and met my eyes. "But the last part of this ring is clear. By their blood, the ring remains closed."
"The ring?"
"Exactly." Her fingers went on feeling their way along the carvings, reading them through the skin. "It's the largest knot on the lid, and everything else ties back into it. The ring. Closed by blood, kept closed by blood. The grammar could carry either. I was hoping you might know what it means."
I shook my head. And it was not entirely a lie, because I did not know. I only had a coat pocket full of things it rhymed with, a door in a story, a rhyme by a fire, a portrait with my mother's eyes. And rhyme is not knowledge, whatever poets tell you.
"What about this part?" I drew her eye to the last band of carving, a series of flowing patterns near the base, denser than all the rest.
She took my hand.
I want to mark that plainly, because at the time I nearly missed it under everything else. She took my hand, without ceremony, as if hands were held in common between us. And guided it over the final line of carvings, pressing my fingertips into the knots one by one, teaching me the words through the skin as her grandmother must once have taught her. Her fingers were warm and sure over my knuckles.
"Never free," she whispered, moving my hand along the cord of it, "for only the—this word I can't solve—of death lies beyond."
The carved words hung between us in the still afternoon. Neither of us spoke. The creek went on with its small bright business, and a soft wind turned the leaves overhead, and my fingertips rested on a sentence four hundred years older than any grief I owned.
"Well," I said at last, managing half a smile. "That sounds cheerful."
Denna gave me a look, but the worry didn't leave her face to make room for it. "That's all I can make of it for now." She set the box down on the grass between us, gently, as you set down a sleeping thing. "If only my grandmother were still here. She'd have read the whole of it by firelight and told me I tie like a fisherman."
I filed that away with the other rare coins, a grandmother, Yllish knots by firelight, a child-Denna somewhere in it, and knew better than to ask for change. "You've done more than enough. There aren't a dozen people in the four corners who could have managed this much."
"You flatter me too much," she said, though the faintest smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. "And you're a fine one to judge translation. Where in the four corners did you ever get dance from? That wasn't even close."
"Like I said. I'm still learning." I stood and offered her up. "Or I was."
We walked back to the horses, and as I worked the tethers loose I glanced over at her. "What do you think it means? All of it. Truly."
The lightness went out of her like a candle pinched between two fingers.
"Honestly?" She looked down at the box in her hands, and her thumb moved once over the great closed ring of the central knot. "I'm not sure I want to find out."
We rode until twilight, then turned off the main road and made camp beside a still pond where a toppled greystone jutted from the shallows, aslant, like the finger of some monument the world had otherwise misplaced. Fallen, it should have troubled me less than a standing circle. It troubled me more, as a sleeping dog troubles you more than a fence. But the grass was soft and the water was clean, and I had learned the tinker's rule too well to argue with where the road put us.
We saw to the horses first, as anyone with sense does before tending to themselves. Denna loosened girths while I rubbed the animals down with handfuls of dry grass, and Magistrate stood still for it. Actually still, for the first time in our acquaintance, grateful that I was finally paying into an account I had only ever drawn on. Denna's mare nipped at her sleeve, insistent, until Denna surrendered the apple she'd been hiding in it since noon.
"Hungry thing," Denna said, scratching behind the mare's ear.
"She knows who's carrying the food."
As I hauled my saddlebag down, something inside gave a familiar clink, and I reached in and drew out the bottle I'd been hauling the length of Vintas. Strawberry wine, bought in Renere in another lifetime, wrapped in my spare shirt like contraband. I turned it in the last of the light.
"I've been saving this," I announced, "for just the right occasion."
Denna looked at the bottle. Then she shook her head and grinned, a grin with a secret's shape to it. "You've been hauling that all this while?"
"What's wrong with strawberry wine?" I drew myself up with my full wounded dignity, which is considerable and has never once worked on her.
"Nothing," she said. "Nothing at all. It's just funny you should say that." And she went to her own saddlebag and brought out a bottle of her own. Thick old glass, amber-dark, the wax on its neck stamped and whole. In the failing light it looked like trapped honey, which is very nearly what it was.
I took it from her and turned it, and read the seal, and my voice came out quieter than I had planned it. "Metheglin. Where did you find this?"
"Anilin." She said the city's name lightly, as she said everything that wasn't light. "I meant to bring it out that night in Renere. The lanterns, the fountain. But then that Lord Vatis—" she flicked her fingers, consigning Vatis and all his works to a category, "—and after, the moment simply never felt right. So it rode with me. Occasions are like that. You carry them until they're true."
"You, Denna," I said, and swept her a bow with the whole troupe in it, "are truly extraordinary."
"And you," she replied, "are far too easily impressed."
We opened the strawberry wine first, passing the bottle between us while I built the fire small and neat and Denna laid out our stores on the grass like a woman setting a table she meant to be remembered. Thick bread from the last town, figs we'd stolen fair and square from a roadside tree, the hard cheese I'd been hoarding, and butter so rich and firm it might as well have been a second cheese with ambitions. The pond gave back the last copper of the sky. Somewhere in the reeds a frog sang the same two notes over and over, patient as a student practicing, and by any honest measure it was already a feast. I have eaten at a king's table since, and I stand by the accounting.
When the wine was gone we broke the wax on the metheglin, and the stars kindled over us in their slow thousands. The fire pressed its heat against my knees while the night leaned its cold against my back, that old fair bargain, and we talked in low voices while the coals burned down to a fist of orange.
"The Vesumbri Islands," I said. The bottle between us stood half-empty by then, and the drink had put a hint of song under my voice. "They say a volcano god still gathers worship there. Fire under the sea, and boats with painted eyes. I have always wanted to see those islands with my own two eyes."
Denna laughed low, turning the bottle slowly in her hands, watching the coal-light move in the honey of it. "Exotic. I've always wanted to hear the singing trees, myself. In the stories you can't tell where the wood ends and the song begins, and I have opinions about that boundary." She considered me over the bottle a moment. "Though unfinished business keeps me close to home, these days."
The lightness left her voice on the last words. Nothing dramatic, only a withdrawal, and things standing exposed that the water had covered.
I watched her, weighing whether to speak or let the silence do its patient work.
Then she coughed.
Not the small dry page-turn from Leventis. This one came up from deep in her chest, rattling loose like something shaken free of a high shelf, and she turned away from me and pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, shoulders drawn tight. And it went on. It went on longer than it should have. The frog stopped. I counted, because counting is what I do instead of praying, and I got to eleven before her breath came back to her.
"Denna."
"It's nothing." Quick and practiced, a door closed by habit before checking who knocked. But her hand had stayed pressed flat against her breastbone, holding something in place, and she would not look at me. Then, because she heard her own door close, she opened it the width of a truth. "That remedy you gave me, it did help, for a while. It truly did." A breath. "But it hurts more than it used to."
"How long?"
"A while." A shaky breath, steadied by main strength. "I saw a physician in Atur. A real one. University-trained, brass plate, the whole theater." She kept her eyes on the pond. "He called it phthisis. A wasting in the lungs. Scarring, he said. He showed me a drawing." Her mouth did something that was not a smile. "He said the scarring only spreads. That it doesn't—" She stopped. Started again, and I could hear what the next words cost, because she paid it in front of me, which she had never done. "He said to settle my accounts while settling them was cheap."
Neither of us spoke. The fire ticked. The stars went on being stars, which is the worst of them.
"No." I leaned forward, and everything in me arrived at once, as it does. "Come back to the University with me. Master Arwyl is the finest healer alive. I have watched that man re-string a lung as I'd re-string a lute. The Medica sees things Atur's physicians read about in letters. If anyone alive can help you, it's him."
Denna turned from the pond and placed her hand against my cheek. Cool palm, warm fingers, the whole night balanced in it.
"You're kind, Kvothe. Truly."
"No." I would not let it be kindness. Kindness is what you call a thing to make it small enough to decline. "I don't care about your patron. Forget him. Forget whatever he expects and whoever expects it. Come with me. Please."
She took her hand back, and looked out over the pond. The still water held the stars, all of them, and for a long time she watched them like something that might rearrange itself into an answer if you were only patient enough. I have looked at many skies the same way. They never have. She knew that better than I did, and watched anyway, and that was Denna entire.
"It isn't that simple," she said. "There are things I've promised. People who expect me in certain places, at certain times."
"I know."
"You don't." No anger in it. Only the flat sound of a truth she was weary of carrying alone, set down for a moment between us so she could shift her grip. "You don't know the half of it, Kvothe."
"Then tell me."
Her jaw tightened. And for one moment, I felt it, as you feel a string tighten in the instant before it breaks, that fine trembling that comes up through the air itself, for one moment I thought she would. The whole dark hinterland of her, the patron and the promises and the bruises with rearranged names, all of it stood at the border with its papers in its hand.
The moment passed. The border closed. When she spoke again her voice was steady, and it had made a decision that was not the one I'd begged for, and was more than I had any right to hope.
"For you," she said, so low the wind nearly had it instead of me. "I'll come."
She looked at me then, and what was in her face was not surrender and was not romance. I have stood on high ledges. I know the look of someone stepping off one, having checked the fall, having decided the falling was hers to spend.
The dark settled closer around the coals. We lay side by side on the soft grass with the blanket thrown over the both of us, not touching, with the not-touching that is a held breath, and Denna gazed up at the scattered stars, and when she spoke her words barely carried the space between us.
"I thought you would kiss me that night in Roent's caravan."
Years of wit stood ready. I had lines for such a moment, an armory of them, racked, oiled, catalogued. I should have said something clever, something charming, something worthy of being remembered and repeated.
"I wanted to," I said.
Which was true, and nothing more than true, and not at all what I had planned, and the only right thing I have ever said with a whole heart's warning.
Denna didn't answer for a while. When she finally turned her head toward me, the firelight caught the edge of her lips and nothing else of her, one warm line drawn on the dark.
"You could, you know," she said. "If you wanted."
There was no art in what followed. I want that recorded by a man who has spent his life on art. None. I leaned in and our noses bumped, and I felt her smile against my mouth, felt it arrive, felt it widen, before we found our way together to something that worked. It was graceless, and honest, and it was Denna, and those three things are one thing.
Against my shoulder, later, softly, she said, "I always knew you were like this."
An old sentence, from under a bridge in another life, finally come round to its second half. I had not answered it then. I did not answer it now. Some sentences are not asking.
I won't share more than that. The rest is mine alone. Hers and mine, and she is not here to give her half's permission, so the whole of it stays shut.
But I will tell you this much, because it belongs to the craft of this story and not only to the heart of it. There are moments that refuse to become memories. They will not go into the book. They stay too close for that, too warm, behind the breastbone instead of behind the eyes, and the years that strip everything else somehow cannot reach them. I have lost things you would not believe a man could lose, and keep the losses catalogued, and you have heard me count some of them. That night is not among the losses, because it was never among the memories. The words are mostly gone and the light is entirely gone, and it is still there, present tense, as a singer feels the ring of a note in the bone of his chest long after the hall has emptied and the benches are stacked and the lamps are out.
Somewhere against my heart, in the lining of a coat thrown over us both against the dew, a small square of paper worn soft at its creases had finally, after all its patient miles, been honored. Next time. It had been next time all along.
Afterward we lay tangled together beneath the open sky, and she was perfect. I am aware no one is. I have heard the arguments. The arguments were not there. When she caught me staring, I was struggling to find my breath, and spending what I found of it staring, she propped herself up on one elbow and gave me a look with several volumes in it.
"What?" I asked, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She caught my hand before I could take it back, and held it where it was, against the warm side of her face.
"You just reminded me of a story," she said. "'The Dulator.'"
"I can't say I know that one."
She poked me in the ribs, hard, and did not explain. "I'll tell it to you sometime. When you've earned it." And then, settling back against me, in a voice gone soft at its edges, "My Dulator."
I chuckled into her hair. "I've been called worse."
"Have you, though?" she said, and kissed me before I could answer, which remains the finest argument I have ever lost.
After a time her breathing slowed and deepened. The coals dimmed to a dull rose. She pressed her back against me, fitting herself into the curve of me as a thing fits its case, and I drew the coat closer over her shoulder against the cold coming off the pond.
"Don't let go," she said.
And there was nothing clever in it. No wit, no wordplay, no door left ajar for retreat. Just Denna, at the bottom of all her armor, asking.
And I didn't.